Talking point: Israel's Gaza withdrawal

I've noticed an interesting trend: the longer the post I write, the less comments I get on it. If I write something short, I get several comments. If I do research and write a lengthy post referencing other sources, I get no comments at all.

So, I think I'll try something new on this one. Let's see if we can get some good discussion going before I publish the post.

Next week is going to be a very interesting week in the Middle East: it is the start of Israel's scheduled withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. To give a bit of background, Israel has occupied the Gaza strip since the 1967 war, and has built a number of settlements in Gaza. Many Israeli settlers were born in the settlements and have known nothing else, and many Gaza Palestinians were born under Israeli occupation and have known nothing else.

Here are some articles with decidedly different perspectives on the withdrawal:

MSNBC: Gasa Surfers will be forced to find new waves
al-Jazeera: Gazans cautious, but eager for pullout
Haaretz: pretty much the whole main page of their site
Jerusalem Post: 150,000 protest pullout in Tel Aviv

(Interesting note: the al-Jazeera article was written by Laila el-Haddad, the blogger in Gaza whose blog, Raising Yousuf, is in my blog roll.)


I have some strong thoughts on this topic, and will be writing a post on this over the next day or two. In the meantime, let's try to get some discussion going. What do you all think?