Three years after the Expulsion

By Shlomi Whitbrod    July 28, 2005

This "science fiction" does not advocate the scenario here presented.

Three years ago, on August 15, 2005, the government of PM Ariel Sharon began to implement its "Disengagement" plan to expel the Jews of Gaza and northern Samaria from their homes, destroy their homes and businesses, level their communities and hand over the land to the Palestinian Authority.

Eventually the government succeeded in implementing the Expulsion and Destruction and Transfer of the communities to the Palestinian Authority. The horrific, heartrending scenes of children and grandparents being pulled from their homes, the beatings and tear-gassing of unarmed protesters by masked and helmeted troopers with truncheons, the "accidental" gunning down of protesters and screams of bereaved and devastated families -- these scenes are burned in the memories of all who lived through those days.

But the violence and strife of those terrible days paled in comparison to what was to follow. True to intelligence estimates, the Arabs in the West Bank saw the Gaza and Samaria withdrawals as previews of coming attractions and heated up the area with sniping attacks on motorists, infiltrations of settlements, and kidnappings and murders of soldiers and citizens. Rockets and mortars began to fall on Israeli cities previously immune to air attacks, like Afula, Hadera, Kfar Saba and Raanana.

In Gaza, the Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as expected, made strong showings in the parliamentary elections and dictated an agenda of continuing attacks against Israel, mostly by rockets and mortars with improved ranges and larger, more lethal payloads. Sderot residents soon left their city and the southern coastal city of Ashkelon came under regular fire. When rockets began to land in Jerusalem, the seat of government was moved to the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Aviv. Then longer-range Kassam missiles started hitting Tel Aviv.

As the situation continued to deteriorate, the government lost all control of internal security and all confidence of its citizens. Resistance of the Jewish population and refusal of soldiers to obey illegal and immoral orders spread like wildfire. More and more citizens "disappeared" in the middle of the night, to be locked away with no need for a trial. Soldiers increasingly deserted their units, or refused to obey orders to crack down on protesters. The government announced plans to surrender all "isolated settlements," Jewish Hebron, and East Jerusalem.

The breaking point came with the mega-terror attacks of 2006. An El Al plane was shot down by a hand-held missile launcher imported through the Palestinian's unchecked airport in Gaza and carried over their "free passage" land route to the West Bank. Hundreds were killed in that attack, but thousands more were killed in the ensuing chemical attacks, delivered by suicide bombers and rockets. A suitcase-borne "dirty radiation abomb" was barely averted in early 2007.

The First Jewish Uprising occurred in the Spring of 2007 when the Zionist "loyalists", led by IDF officers and soldiers who had been imprisoned by the Sharon Regime for "refusing orders" and insubordination and even treason -- surrounded and broke into government buildings in Jerusalem and took over radio and television stations. The Knesset was over-run, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet was forced to flee or resign in disgrace, and a Provisional Government, led by senior former military officers, took control of the country, vowing to restore law and order, to mete out punishment to the "traitors" and "kapos" who brought about the end of democracy and sought to persecute Jewish practice in Israel. Some Regime leaders were lynched, shamefully, while others managed to escape the country to European capitals.

The Jewish Leadership of the Israeli Revolution came to be called the Orange Wave. There was scattered resistance to these dramatic moves, of course, from scholars and bureaucrats, but the ruling junta would have none of it. Protesters were treated in the same manner as disengagement protesters: arrested without charges and detained for months without a hearing. Some were beaten. Others were publicly humiliated, and sent -- as Orange protesters had been sent in 2005 to socialist kibbutzim for re-education -- to religious seminaries for refresher courses in Jewish values.

The leaders of Israel in the Spring of 2007 were almost exclusively represented by those courageous men and women who had actively opposed the Sharon regime, especially those who, following their consciences, had paid the price with active resistance and prison time. Anyone who did not "stand up and be counted" in the Orange Resistance of 2005 was viewed with suspicion.

When the Sanhedrin replaced the Knesset as the ruling body of Israel, the initial decisions were harsh. Israeli leaders who survived the fall of the Sharon regime were put on trial, and the death penalty was not spared for the most prominent politicians, bureaucrats, army and police officers who led the 2005 persecutions. The same legal shortcuts and abuses used against the Orange protesters were turn on the "Blue and White" leaders. Religious leaders and Yesha council members who collaborated with the Sharon Regime were not forgiven.

The same principle of "an eye for an eye" was applied to the Arabs. The precedent of legally transferring whole communities from their homes -- applied in 2005 to the Jews -- was applied to the hostile Israeli Arab and "Palestinian" populations, who had risen up again in unprecedent violence after the Expulsions. Terrorists, their families, and their supporters were driven out of their homes during the ensuing hostilities with neighboring Arab states, expelled to Jordan, Lebanon and the Sinai Desert.

Arguments about the immorality of these expulsions was undercut by the former Regime's previous approval and implementation, with worldwide support, of massive Jewish expulsions and the bloody worldwide upsurge in seemingly unstoppable Islamic terrorism. Israelis finally reached the conclusion that they needed to disengage, completely, from the Arabs and form Jihadist Islam. The only practical solution was reconquering and resettling all of Gaza, Judea and Samaria -- this time without the violent resistance of a hostile Arab population.

The Arab States threatened, Europeans and Americans sanctioned, but the Western World continued to have its acute problems with Islamic Terrorism, including periodic mega-attacks as well as the first uses of unconventional WMD agents in the cities of the Continent and the United States. Thirty years after Entebbe, there arose many throughout the increasingly alarmed non-Islamic world who suddenly spoke out in admiration for the new Israeli government for once again taking bold, creative, and fearless actions in response to surging Islamic terrorism.

The lightning war of June 2007, in which Egypt, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia planned a surprise unconventional attack on Israel, only to be pre-empted by strategic airstrikes by the IAF against Aswan, Bushehr, Damascus, Mecca, and takeovers of the Saudi oil fields, sent a message to the world that the deterrent power of Israeli might was once again to be directed against mortal enemies, not against brothers and sisters, grandparents and children.

Now, with the economy picking up, social wounds healing, and domestic terrorism virtually eliminated, the Jewish State of Israel is beginning once again to function and even thrive. An influx of immigrants from Western nations, fleeing anti-Semitism and Islamization, injected new blood and creativity in the economy. There was a land rush to settle and develop the former locations of Arabs who had fled or been expelled, just as Arabs with international funding had rushed to take over formerly Jewish communities in 2005.

There was talk everywhere and architectural sketches abounding as to how best to build on Jerusalem's Temple Mount a new Jewish tabernacle on the ruins of the Moslem mosques, which collapsed so suddenly and mysteriously in the recent earthquake. During the following Sukkot, much as happened following the Six Day War forty years before, pilgrims from around the world streamed to the sacred city, which had become, with the sudden departure of all the Islamic terror elements, the most peaceful center of spiritual learning and artistic expression on Earth.

Even erstwhile enemies and lukewarm friends were gaining a newfound respect and appreciation for the plucky little country which had, despite a period of great pain and confusion, sorted out its internal problems, returned to itself and, in a joyous "Rishrush Renaissance" had ushered in a new era of tolerance for diversity and pride in the national heritage, with a new generosity to share that precious, some dared to say messianic, legacy with the world.

Three years after the Jewish Expulsion of 2005, the Mega-Terror of 2006, and the Orange Wave revolution of 2007, the Jewish People cautiously can look in the mirror and say that it had survived, barely, another cataclysm and repelled another attempt -- this one initiated by an internal foreign-controlled corrupt clique installed and paid by foreign masters -- to exterminate the small nation of the Jews, starting from within.

In the terror-weary and spiritually battered world of 2008, a sobered but internally strengthened Israel shows signs of returning to itself, seeking to reconstruct a new form of Jewish State, balancing religious principles with democratic practices, trying to put together the pieces of a nation so torn asunder in the preceding years of traumatic civil strife and bloody mega-terror wars, and looking to be once again indivisible, a free people in our own land.

The Hope of Two Thousand Years was not yet lost.

Shlomi Whitbrod is an author, dreamer and lover of the Land and People of Israel.