At the League

I have a guest post up at the League of Ordinary Gentleman, a response to ED Kain's most recent on two-state. I'll include an excerpt below, but please head their way and read the whole thing. While you're there, look around. More than anyone else, the League has come to fill in a gap that Culture 11 left behind, and they have always been particularly kind to myself and this little blogging enterprise.

Excerpt:

The PA under Fatah lasted in Gaza a little less than two years before it was overthrown by Hamas, after its refusal to recognize the results of the Palestinian election. Their head of Gaza security, Mohammed Dahlan, was supposed to be an unstoppable strong-man. He fled to Egypt before fighting had really even begun, where I believe he remains.

This was the moment that ultimately discredited the Israeli left in the eyes of its constituency. Even though Kadima is a centrist party, withdrawal (”disengagement” as it’s called here) has always been understood politically as a left-wing agenda item, just as the Iraq war will be owned by Republicans despite its continuation under a Democratic president. The collapse of Gaza is seen as the ultimate proof that leaving Palestinians to their own devices will produce nothing but violence and unrest on Israel’s border. It has come to represent a repudiation of some of the left’s most basic assumptions about the way forward for Israelis and Palestinians.

Eldar maintains that Sharon saw all of this coming. That, contrary to popular perception, Sharon was not an enemy of the settler movement, but its greatest friend. He read the writing on the wall: the settlement project could not continue unimpeded in both Gaza and the West Bank — not even the Israeli polity would allow such a thing. So Sharon gave up the smaller territory to save the larger; he made use of history to vindicate a policy that otherwise appeared terminally flawed under even the barest scrutiny.

The fact that Gaza is not the West Bank matters about as much to Israelis as whether or not Sharon really did act knowingly — which is to say it doesn’t matter to them in the least. They have their object lesson. If anyone reading doubts this, allow me to refer you to Israel’s most recent election, where Labor — the left-wing party that founded the country, and supplied most of its prime ministers — came in a distant forth, a death-knell far more decisive than anything the Republicans have pulled off in the US this cycle.