A road map to Gaza: Robert Zelnick's 'Israel's Unilateralism' lays out the background of current events

The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT) - "Israel's Unilateralism: Beyond Gaza" by Robert Zelnick; Hoover Institution Press ($15)

Back in 1936, Aldous Huxley borrowed "eyeless in Gaza," a phrase from Milton's "Samson Agonistes," for the title of perhaps his best novel. That story revolves around a Huxleyan stand-in, Anthony Beavis, whose pacifism doesn't keep him from being lured into the bloodshed of the Mexican Revolution.

Add that cultural echo to the line's original association with Samson, blinded by the Philistines and dragged off to death at their stronghold in Gaza _ while creating a lot of building-collapse death around him as well. Such a one-two punch makes it hard to hear the word Gaza and think of anything but a dead end, a hopeless cul-de-sac for any who regard force as an answer to problems.

With the real-world Mediterranean strip of that name plummeting into further misery after Israel's decision to smite its fierce enemy Hamas, it's nonetheless important to resist, at least provisionally, the cultural myth that no good ever comes of entering Gaza. A clear history led to where things stand now, and breaking news reports are not the best place to get it.

Easily the clearest book available for background narrative and analytic cogency is Robert Zelnick's "Israel's Unilateralism" (2006), now available in paperback. Zelnick, 68, the former ABC News correspondent who currently teaches at Boston University, has been back in the news himself thanks to "Frost/Nixon," the new film about the famous TV interviews in which Zelnick acted as a chief researcher for David Frost.

"Israel's Unilateralism" draws on a different part of the veteran journalist's past _ his longstanding interest in Israel that led him to investigate the exact causes and process of its 2006 pullout from Gaza, a severe policy about-face by then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

Maybe you didn't know that Israel used to run the place _ unhappily _ before turning it over lock, stock, barrel and greenhouses to the Palestinians. All the more reason to read this book.

In ancient times, Hebrews, Philistines and Arabs variously ruled Gaza. Egypt took control in 1949, then Israel occupied it after the 1967 war. About 146 square miles, Gaza grew, as Zelnick explains, into a kind of permanent refugee camp for many Arabs who fled Israel. Even when Israel offered to give Gaza back to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in their 1981 peace treaty, Zelnick notes, Sadat declined to "reinherit it." By 2005, it contained 1.3 million Arabs and only 8,000 Jews, the latter living in 21 difficult-to-protect settlements.

Gaza represented, in extremis, the demographic problem Israel faces _ the likelihood that in the absence of disengagement from Arabs, too many of them, entitled to vote as citizens of a democratic state, would before long end the Jewish character of Israel. "To preserve both the Jewish and democratic character of the Israeli state," Zelnick writes, "a withdrawal was needed." Eventually, he says, logic dictated that "the combination of tearing down settlements far from the borders of pre-1967 Israel and building a security fence around the country's new perimeter would come to define the permanent borders of Israel."

Thus developed the new policy of Israeli "unilateralism." Particularly in the wake of Hamas' terrorism, commitment to the destruction of Israel, and seizing of power in Gaza, Israel would act on its own to create facts on the ground to its advantage. The wrenching withdrawal from Gaza that Zelnick describes at the book's outset formed the worst of it.

Zelnick takes an almost purely narrative approach in this book, touching all bases one would expect in giving a picture of how even rightist Israelis moved to contraction from expansion. He reports on Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Sharon, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Palestinian negotiator Hanan Ashwari, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and other key players. He explains the politics and challenged legality of Israel's security fence, the intricacies of the Karmi crossing between Israel and Gaza, the rise of Israel's new Kadima party, and more. While, he writes, settlers and their allies "accepted their fate with little more than passive resistance," he shows how tough the decisions proved to be.

Zelnick manages to include the January 2006 legislative victory that began Hamas' ascent to complete power in Gaza, solidified by force against Fatah and the Palestinian Authority, but his book ends before the worst recent deterioration of Hamas-Israel relations. Still, it's hard, on the basis of this book, to imagine that Zelnick, Olmert or President Bush was surprised by the events of the last few weeks.

Late in the book, Zelnick quotes Bush at a White House news conference after Hamas' electoral victory: "I don't see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate destruction of a country as part of your platform. And I know you can't be a partner in peace if ... your party has an armed wing."

Zelnick's own conclusion is that, in all dealings with Hamas, Israel must take the group at its word: "Its very charter commits the organization to Israel's destruction and the creation of a single Islamic state with nothing but dead Jews commemorating the former state of Israel. It explicitly endorses the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, blames Jews for both world wars, and celebrates the day when, in a final climactic battle, the Muslims will slaughter the Jews."

That being the case, it's plain that both Israel and Hamas have at least found their partner in war.

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