The right's losing lessons

[Violet_Crumble]

By Bradley Burston

It should have been over long ago. No disengagement, no Sharon. It was the war the settlers couldn't lose - and did. When Sharon dropped the first hints of his plan, the Jews of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, poised to quash the initiative and depose its author, had everything going for them. Not just brilliant, disciplined organization and full coffers from foreign donors and the budgets of a rainbow of government ministries; for the first time, settlers enjoyed genuine public sympathy as well. Palestinian atrocities in Israeli towns had erased the emotional Green Line that had long separated settler from city dweller. For the worst of reasons, Israelis felt a new kinship with the settlers.

This time, it seemed, only one man stood between them and the Greater Israel that suicide terrorists had inadvertently reincarnated. Nothing but an aged prime minister whose weaknesses the right knew by heart, a politician rendered even more vulnerable by graft allegations and open mutiny in his own party.

How could Sharon succeed? For decades he had been the outcast the left loved to hate, and the right hated to love. Now, with the right feeling betrayed and the left feeling nothing, Sharon had become the prime minister the right lived to loathe, and the left could not bring itself to forgive, much less support.

No Israelis ever knew better than the settlers how to win a political struggle. If they were to lose the battle of the disengagement, they would have to learn how to do so from others.

In the end, it now appears, it was the left - the modern masters of alienating and repelling the Israeli public - that taught the right to lose. The proof is in the lessons learned.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/606123.html

[eyl]

1. I think

he's overstating the possibility of stopping the disengagment early on. But as too the rest, he's spot on - something both sides of the political specrum should take to heart.