Look to Yitzhak Shamir for Israel's Future

Recent events in the Middle East have made it painfully obvious that Israel's withdrawal from Gaza last year and its dismantling of its communities there was yet another catastrophic mistake.

Here we are, not even a year after the abandonment of Gaza, and all hell has broken loose. Israeli troops are making incursions back into Gaza to stop the rain of rockets being fired by terrorists at Israeli cities, and Hezbollah has joined the party with rockets raining down from Lebanon, killing citizens in northern Israel.

It does not take a military genius to discern a pattern. Every time Israel makes land concessions Arab groups read it not as a desire to make peace but as weakness and a sign of the impending collapse of the Zionist enterprise, and they dig in for the kill.

They say that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect a different result. By this standard, a cynic might say that the Israeli political class is stark raving mad.

Not that I or anyone else has a right to judge or blame the courageous leaders of the Jewish state, who are so desperate for even a modicum of peace that they will compromise the nation's security in order to achieve it.

Indeed, any country that has been subjected to the unmitigated hostility of an inhuman and implacable enemy for six decades would likewise go nuts, and Israel's leaders are merely trying their best to try to solve a problem that, let's face it, is insoluble.

THIS IS WHERE Israel has consistently got it wrong. With the exception of Yitzhak Shamir, every Israeli leader since Menachem Begin, who began the wholesale abandonment of strategically valuable territory, has been asking what Israel can do to try and bring peace.