Note to Disengagement Opponents: Settlers Not Being Taken To Death Camps
I consider myself a member of the Israeli center-right (although I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that those who also so identify are increasingly loath to have me). I believe that much of Western diplomacy is marred by a strong undercurrent of latent and not-so-latent anti-Semitism. I believe that deep-seated Arab Jew-hating makes talk of a new Middle East so much utopian babble. And I believe in a strong, Jewish state to protect Jews from persecution all over the world - a state that can only be kept strong and Jewish by separating that state from the Palestinians.
I understand and respect many of those who oppose disengagement. Most of them are good people and their hearts genuinely go out to Israeli settlers who are going to be taken from their homes. And many of them are justifiably concerned about the loss of Israeli strategic depth that will be incurred by a loss of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (to say nothing of the moral cost that will be suffered). But many of these genuine people seem nonetheless to be laboring under a delusion, an apparent delusion which the normally circumspect folks at IsraPundit have seem to have also fallen under:
[A letter written] 60 years ago by a Jewish woman in Poland to her family in Palestine, a woman who knew she and her children were about to be sent to a concentration camp for extermination by the Nazis... is chillingly similar to the planned 'evacuation' of Jews which is about to take place in Israel today. The big difference is that this expulsion is not being done by a Hitler...it is being done by the Prime Minister of the State of Israel, Ariel Sharon!!!
It seems not unreasonable to point out that, among other salient differences between the Holocaust and the disengagement, Arik Sharon is genuinely trying to save Jews while Hitler was trying to exterminate them. For starters.
I understand and respect many of those who oppose disengagement. Most of them are good people and their hearts genuinely go out to Israeli settlers who are going to be taken from their homes. And many of them are justifiably concerned about the loss of Israeli strategic depth that will be incurred by a loss of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (to say nothing of the moral cost that will be suffered). But many of these genuine people seem nonetheless to be laboring under a delusion, an apparent delusion which the normally circumspect folks at IsraPundit have seem to have also fallen under:
[A letter written] 60 years ago by a Jewish woman in Poland to her family in Palestine, a woman who knew she and her children were about to be sent to a concentration camp for extermination by the Nazis... is chillingly similar to the planned 'evacuation' of Jews which is about to take place in Israel today. The big difference is that this expulsion is not being done by a Hitler...it is being done by the Prime Minister of the State of Israel, Ariel Sharon!!!
It seems not unreasonable to point out that, among other salient differences between the Holocaust and the disengagement, Arik Sharon is genuinely trying to save Jews while Hitler was trying to exterminate them. For starters.





