Michael Freund - Time for a Gaza Apology
For all its extensive, wall-to-wall coverage of the situation in the South over the past month, there is one key issue that the country’s leadership and media have studiously and carefully avoided mentioning of late. Despite finding time to examine a wide range of subjects, from the intricacies of intra-Hamas politics to the technical differences between Kassam and Grad rockets, pundits and politicians alike have proven incapable of acknowledging the underlying cause behind the present disarray.
Indeed, if you listened carefully, and followed the news in recent weeks, you may have noticed that hardly anything was said about the colossal strategic blunder which enabled Hamas to strike terror in the streets of Ashkelon and Beersheba.
Yes, you guessed correctly. To paraphrase Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, “It was the disengagement, stupid!” Of course, this hardly comes as a surprise. After all, it would require something of our politicians and their guard dogs in the press which they seem constitutionally incapable of doing: admitting they were wrong.
Yet that is precisely what they were when they supported the Sharon government’s misguided August 2005 retreat: dead wrong, and profoundly so.