But not to missiles or mortars being shot over it, as happens regularly.
So, Israeli settlers hunkering down in their settlements inside Gaza stop Palestinian mortar and rocket attacks against Israel.....
How?
If anything, the settlers provide easier and closer targets for such attacks.
Fallujah was pacified only after it was cordoned off and the majority of civilians left.
Then, it became an very target-rich environment for U.S. forces who did not have to worry about the safety of civilians.
With the Israeli settlers behind the Israeli Wall, any Palestinian rocket or mortar attack can be met with overwhelming Israeli air power without having to worry about the Israeli settlers that are currently playing the role of "Human Shields" for the Palestinians.
Look at a map and then get back to me.
"With the Israeli settlers behind the Israeli Wall, any Palestinian rocket or mortar attack can be met with overwhelming Israeli air power without having to worry about the Israeli settlers that are currently playing the role of "Human Shields" for the Palestinians."
This part of the strategic equation has not changed by removing Jews from Gaza. That Israel has not attacked Gaza by air has nothing to do with the intermingling of populations. There are no Jews acting as "human shields." An air attack was as feasible before as it will be after evacuation of Jews from Gaza.
In Jenin in Operation Defensive Shield, IDF went door to door to seek out terrorists rather than strike overhead and kill large numbers of civilians even though at any point they could have used air power. Even with this extraordinary care which put Israeli soldiers at risk, even though soldiers died in boobytraps and ambushes, Israel held to this policy. But that did not stop the world from declaring a fake massacre and condemning Israel in all the media.
The problem of air strikes are humanitarian concerns and PR concerns. Your analogy to Fallujah is apt. You see it as a great sucess. I don't. The success would have been far greater if the US had not allowed any and all to exit prior to going in. How many terrorists do you think left to recoup and fight another day? But again not allowing "civilians" to exit was considered "unnaceptable," and this after declining to deal with Fallujah in April 2004 when we should have done so to save our troops and innocent Iraqis.
Your other points about marshalling resources and defensible borders are good ones. But only if PM Sharon follows through and takes a hard line against world and US pressures to retreat further. Strategically the West Bank is a whole different matter than Gaza.
At this point the question is - what's next?
.................
Blue, White, and Orange
As Israel begins its great showdown over the Jewish retreat from Gaza and the West Bank, let us pause to say that this newspaper believes in a large Israel. These columns have come over the years to value the principles that the Zionist prophet Vladimir Jabotinsky stood for when he called for Jewish sovereignty on both sides of the Jordan. If this were a just world, the ones in retreat would be the ones who have rejected peace, the Palestinian Arabs.
The real world, however, is not always just, and even those with a just cause cannot always have all that is justly theirs - or have it when they want it. This is where the craft of statesmanship comes in: how and where to draw the lines, how and when to make one's stand, when to fight, when to negotiate, when to retreat. And one of the things that Ariel Sharon surely knows as he contemplates the century and more since Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress is that it is a century peopled with Jewish giants.
And every one of them made compromises. To read Herzl's diaries is to read of a statesman's inner struggles that were almost psychiatric in their intensity, as the founder of political Zionism wrestled over tactics and strategies in quest of the dream of the redemption of the Jews in a Jewish state in the land of Israel. And we are neither frightened nor discouraged by the apocalyptic rhetoric coming out the contending factions within the Jewish state.
On the contrary, we are rather encouraged by it. The Orange camp, full of idealists whom we admire, is ensuring something extremely important. This retreat should not be permitted to be made easily, even if a Jewish democracy has decided, as it has, that it needs to be made. It is not certain that the lines to which Israel is withdrawing - or as Mr. Sharon might put it, the lines that Israel is straightening - will become permanent, but they might. The stakes are, therefore, incredibly large.
'snip'
http://www.nysun.com/article/18499