Forty years on, thoughts on the Sinai withdrawal's dangerous legacy - by Michael Freund

So when we look back on the peace treaty with Egypt, we need to do so with our eyes wide open, cognizant of the fact that since relations between states can be ephemeral, territory is not something Israel should ever consider abandoning.

Michael Freund..
Pundicity/Jerusalem Post..
22 March '19..
Link: http://www.michaelfreund.org/22492/sinai-withdrawal-dangerous-legacy  

If you open Google Earth and search for "Yamit, Sinai," the globe on your screen will slowly spin its way to the Middle East before zooming in on a small area in the northern Sinai Peninsula, just west of Gaza (though it comes up as "Yammit").

There, amid the sand dunes, one can still see the bare and bulldozed ground where the town of Yamit, a thriving Jewish community of 2,500 people, once stood, until it was uprooted and destroyed in 1982 as part of the peace treaty with Egypt.

The contours of various structures are still visible, paying silent testimony to the traumatic removal of Jews from their homes that was carried out by a Jewish government.

As Israel marks 40 years since the signing of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty on the White House Lawn, it is worth recalling the expulsion that was wrought in its wake, as more than a dozen Jewish communities in Sinai, numbering a total of 7,000 people, were compelled to disband and depart.

While forgoing Sinai might have brought us four decades of a cold peace with Egypt, it also elicited a heavy price from the Jewish state, one that continues to haunt us until the present day.

After a century in which the values of Zionism and settling the land had prevailed, Israel suddenly took a sharp U-turn, conferring legitimacy on the illegitimate idea that peace must necessarily entail withdrawal and retreat.

In the miraculous victory of the 1967 war, the Jewish people were granted a Divine gift. Over the course of just six days, we were reunited with the Temple Mount, the hills of Samaria and the streets of Hebron.

And in reclaiming Sinai, where our ancestors wandered for decades after the Exodus from Egypt, Israel was blessed with priceless strategic depth, along with military installations, oil fields, and an untamed desert waiting to be developed.

But just 12 years later, acting as though it was in a rush to unload the peninsula, the Jewish state gave in to Egyptian demands and turned over the Sinai's 61,000 sq.km. (23,550 sq.mi.) to foreign control.

In one fell swoop, Israel had given away more than 90% of the territory it had liberated during the 1967 Six Day War.

SIMPLY PUT, the withdrawal from Sinai laid the groundwork for later expulsions, heralding decades of further Israeli territorial concessions.

Freund - Yamit: The Original Sin Of Expulsion

Michael Freund..
Pundicity/The Jewish Press..
18 April '12..

This month marks a heartrending anniversary, one with ruinous consequences that continue to plague the Jewish state.

It was thirty years ago, in April 1982, that uniformed soldiers pledged to defend Israel and its citizens were given the order to uproot and destroy the Jewish community of Yamit in northern Sinai.

The move came in the wake of the peace treaty with Egypt, when Menachem Begin agreed to a complete withdrawal from all 23,000 square miles of Sinai, which necessitated the forced evacuation of over 7,000 Israelis, including those in Yamit.

Years of toil and sweat, of pioneering spirit and determination, were mercilessly swept away by bulldozers, and by April 25, 1982, Yamit was no more.

Freund: Three decades of retreat

Michael Freund
Fundamentally Freund/JPost
25 April '11

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=217834

The steady march of capitulation that began in Yamit and continued on through the Oslo process has brought this nation to the brink of disaster.

This weekend marked a profoundly painful anniversary in the history of the modern State of Israel, one whose agonizing consequences continue to haunt the Jewish state.

It was on April 23, 1982, that IDF soldiers descended on the Jewish community of Yamit in northern Sinai not to defend it, but to uproot and destroy it.

As part of the peace treaty with Egypt, then-prime minister Menachem Begin agreed to withdraw from all of the Sinai, which necessitated the forced evacuation of more than 7,000 Israelis who had made the desert bloom.

Over 2,500 of them resided in Yamit, which came to symbolize the resistance to the government’s plan.

Defense minister Ariel Sharon was tasked with overseeing the operation, which was carried out with brutal efficiency.

Indeed, the excruciating scenes of Jewish soldiers dragging Jews from their homes, carting off families’ belongings, and extinguishing communal life in the area, were indelibly stamped into the nation’s consciousness.

A dozen other Sinai communities were uprooted as well, and most of them were razed to the ground.

After a century of Zionism and pioneering settlement of the land, Israel was dramatically turning its back on some of its key core principles, all for the sake of a dubious peace with a dictatorial neighbor.

With its 61,000 sq. km, the Sinai consisted of more than 90 percent of the territory that Israel had liberated during the Six Day Way.

Home to more than a hundred military installations and oil fields valued in the tens of billions of dollars, the peninsula provided Israel with strategic depth and new frontiers.

But all that was torn asunder by the withdrawal from Yamit. And while it may have brought us 30 years of a cold peace with Egypt, conceding the Sinai will likely prove to have been a colossal blunder of strategic proportions.

Consider recent events in the region, which underline the perils inherent in turning territory over to our neighbors.

Remembering Gush Katif

Prolific commemoration enterprise prevents us from forgetting Gaza pullout

Hagai Segal
08.01.09,
Ynet/Israel Opinion

As if we have a shortage of national days of morning in the month of Av around here, the second Sharon government contributed a few more to our national psyche.

Of all the months of the year, it chose to raze the Gush Katif communities precisely in Av. The original date scheduled for the beginning of the onslaught was the Ninth of Av itself, because our determined and sensitive leaders failed to notice that August 15, 2005 coincides with the day both our Temples were destroyed.

Religious media outlets raised a hue and cry and the operation was postponed by a day. Perhaps someone whispered to Sharon that religious IDF officers fast that day too and it would be difficult for them to evacuate settlers on an empty stomach.

Were the new national memorial days etched on the nation’s proverbial heart? Apparently they were. The Gush Katif wounds reopen every summer time and again. The refugees are interviewed on television, most newspapers write about them, a new law calling for the establishment of a commemoration center had been legislated, and a Gush Katif museum was inaugurated in Jerusalem last year already.

In the past four years, at least 15 books about the disengagement were published. Independent producers made 10 documentaries. Seven of them were aired on television.

What did we gain from it?

When we evacuated Yamit in the framework of the peace treaty with Egypt, we only dedicated two documentaries to it. In the 27 years that have passed since then, only seven books about the evacuation were published; all of them sold just a few copies.

The general public did not wish to read, while the evacuated residents preferred to forget. Most Israeli citizens today barely know that the Yamit region and Sinai were once home to 17 prospering Hebrew communities.

Yet they remember Gush Katif. The prolific commemoration enterprise thwarts the schemes of forgetfulness and enables us to engage in a thorough historic examination of the very act: Why did we need all this great sorrow? What did we gain from it, aside from Qassam rockets, Grad missiles, Operation Cast Lead, and Gilad Shalit’s captivity?
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