beginning of the end of current Israel. Israel plans to begin removing some 9,000 settlers from their homes, starting next week. All 21 Israeli settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank are marked for dismantling.
Netanyahu, seen as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s biggest political rival within the Likud Party, submitted a letter of resignation during the weekly Cabinet meeting Sunday, August 7, reportedly said the Finance Ministry spokesman, Eli Yosef. The resignation was to take effect within 48 hours, news reports said.
It came shortly after a columnist warned in the influential Washington Times newspaper that the Israeli withdrawal would ensure that "Israel is slowly disappearing."
"Once Israel’s retreat is finished, the Palestinian-Arab side may digest its latest prey like a giant boa constrictor swallowing a large mouse," said Call Thomas, a nationally syndicated columnist. "But after swallowing, it will want more. Look for another intifada and then look for the [US] State Department and the rest of the administration to again pressure Israel to "do more.""
"UNFAIR" BUSINESS
Thomas stressed that "no responsible business owner would give something to his customers without receiving something in return, or he would not long remain" in business. "Why should all the giving and none of the receiving be required of Israel?, he wondered. "Have we forgotten what produced the Israeli "occupation" of the Gaza Strip? In May 1967, the armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria gathered on Israel’s borders in another attempt to eradicate Israel."
Thomas said that just as "the West failed 60 years ago to save millions of Jews from the murderous Third Reich. Now it will have new blood on its hands that history will not, and should not, allow it ever to wipe clean."
Other opponents of the pullout in Israel have been trying to undermine the plan, holding mass protests and reportedly smuggled sympathizers into the condemned settlements and calling on soldiers to disobey orders to evacuate them.
SHARON CONTINUES PLAN
Yet Prime Minister Sharon has suggested he will continue with the plan saying the withdrawal of the Gaza Strip is the best guarantee for peace to Israel as the move is supported by the country’s strongest ally, the United States. He sees the biggest danger for the future of Israel not from a withdrawal but from violence among Israeli citizens.
"Terror between civilians is the most dangerous thing for the future of Israel and its democratic stability," said Sharon, a reference to the Israeli Arabs who were believed to be killed by the young Jewish man.
"This terror incident is a deliberate attempt to harm the relations between the citizens of Israel," he said.
ISRAEL AT STAKE
The prime minister also suggested that the existence of the State of Israel was at stake. "Terror between civilians is the most dangerous thing for the future of Israel and its democratic stability," said Sharon, a reference to the four people who were killed in an Arab neighborhood of Israel last week by an angry Jewish settler.
Christians have been divided over the withdrawal from Gaza, with some scholars claiming that the Bible shows a future Israel will have different borders and a larger area.
However one of the most vocal influential evangelical Christians, American television preacher Pat Robertson, said last year in Jerusalem that "only God should decide if Israel should relinquish control of the lands it captured in the 1967 war, including the Gaza Strip, West Bank and East Jerusalem."
In an apparent reference to Sharon’s plan to pull out of Gaza, he warned that "God says, ‘I’m going to judge those who carve up the West Bank and Gaza Strip.’" "It’s my land and keep your hands off it.’" (With BosNewsLife News Center and reports from Israel and the United States).
