Palestinians shoot selves in feet

From "Netanyahu Seen Tying UN Gaza Report To West Bank Withdrawals," from the New York Jewish Week.

“ . . .a senior Israeli official said Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has . . “been telling European leaders that he wants to withdraw from areas of the West Bank, but that he has to be sure Israel will be able to defend itself,” said the official. “He said that if Israel left an area and Hamas or Islamic Jihad came in and launched rockets at Israel from there, there would be a problem if Israel could not defend itself.

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“To avoid that, he said he preferred not to give up territory,” the official said.

Alpher pointed out that this same scenario has happened in both southern Lebanon and Gaza. Israeli troops that were in both areas to ensure peace left only to find Palestinian terrorist groups move in and begin firing rockets into Israeli civilian populations.

“If the international community in its collective judicial wisdom punishes us for defending ourselves from cross-border attacks from land we withdrew from ... we have to be careful not to put ourselves in this position again,” said Alpher, who is also co-editor of the Israeli-Palestinian Web site BitterLemons.com. “If our hands are tied as far as responding militarily, then this is a consideration against withdrawal that we didn’t have before,” he noted.

Before the UN Human Rights Council endorsed the Goldstone report in Geneva last Friday, Alpher said, Israel had always believed that “in the worst-case scenario if we withdrew and they attacked, we would respond. Now we have to ask ourselves if we are free to respond ...”

It would be the height of irony if the State of Israel used the Goldstone Report as a justification for refusing to make any more territorial concessions. And frankly, it would serve the Palestinian terrorists and their supporters in the United Nations right.