Terrorism can only be controlled by occupation

Hamas continues to fire rockets at Sderot. The situation is intolerable. Chief of Staff Lt. -Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi had a brain wave. He recently said,

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“It is not possible to defeat a terrorist organization without having control on the ground,” “The results in the West Bank in the past two years have been impressive, because of our control on the ground level.” “We will eventually need to have control , operations-wise and intelligence-wise…We will not be able to win only by air strikes and ground fire,”

Sharon rejected this conventional wisdom and sold us a lot of crap leading up to the disengagement. I am now reading a pamphlet How the High Court of Justice Allowed the Creation of Hamistan in the Gaza Strip. published by The Legal Forum for the Land of Israel. They will soon have an English version. This forum was created by Nachi Eyal in the lead up to disengagement. Its purpose was to take legal action in the form of a Petition to the High Court to prevent the Plan from being approved. The Petition was rejected by a vote of 2:1. Since then the Forum has attracted 200 lawyers to volunteer their time to protect rightwing causes and their supporters. They have focused on the right because every other NGO like Peace Now fight for the left. This pamphlet recounts the paucity of evidence lead in support of the Disengagement Plan. It is a damning indictment of the HC for turning a blind eye to the deficiencies in the governments defense of the Plan. The Government was never really pressed to substantiate their claim that “it will create a better security, political, economic and demographic reality”. I will be reporting more on the activities of this Forum. Ashkenazi’s statement above reminds me of my article The “Occupation” is the solution, not the Problem in which I quoted Yoram Ettinger who wrote to me “When you’re inside Gaza, you enhance intelligence, deterrence and operability, and therefore you can manage with fewer personnel. When you’re out of Gaza, you regress on all these accounts; hence you need to offset the damage by increased personnel/budget”. and I wrote, To suggest that to give up control of Gaza or the West Bank would result in the deployment of fewer troops is a lie. Furthermore Israel has learned over the decades that it is cheaper to control the land around highways then to forego control and use armored convoys to travel the highways. Like it or not control saves lives and money. A stitch in time saves nine. Reality is simply ignored in favour of an “end the occupation” ideology. Similarly I pointed out that the government kept saying we would save a lot of money but there was no study in support of such claim. The GoI and the Media lied then and they are lying now.