E-Mail This Article to a Friend Gaza gambit A calculated gamble in the right direction

For the next three weeks, the Gaza Strip will dominate world news. This stubby finger of land cradled by the Mediterranean and bordered by Egypt and Israel is home today to approximately 1.4 million Palestinians and more than 5000 Jewish settlers, making it one of the most densely populated places on earth. It was wrested from Egypt back in the dim days of 1967, when Israel fought one of its several wars of survival against combined Arab armies whose publicly stated goal was to destroy Israel and drive all Jews into the sea.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s removal of Jewish settlers and, later, Israeli forces from the area is a historic first: it is a unilateral move, and it comes as a result of no negotiation. Thus, there are no new promises of peace from the larger Arab world or the dangerously factionalized triumvirate of organizations that vie to represent the Palestinians: the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. That’s all the more remarkable given that the latter two, at the very least, remain committed to Israel’s complete destruction.

Although still hotly contested within Israel, Sharon’s plan for "disengagement" is conceived in the spirit of enlightened self-interest. The idea is that by ceding control of the smaller and self-contained Gaza Strip, Israel will be free to concentrate on guarding itself from suicide bombers and other attacks emanating from the larger and more dangerous West Bank. And, perhaps most important, by eliminating Gaza, Israel can remain a Jewish state demographically. In essence, Sharon is trying to kill a number of birds with one stone: making Israel slightly more secure while severely reducing the Arab population within its borders, and implicitly challenging Palestinian officialdom to get its house in order and administer its internal affairs in a civilized and reasonable manner — something it’s never been able to do.

Sharon’s move put the Palestinian Authority (PA) on the spot, and — in very real way — posed a challenge to the outfit, which for years has been drained of relevance by the cynical and egotistical manipulation of its late leader, Chairman Yasser Arafat. The PA is coordinating its too-often unreliable police efforts with Israeli security forces, but it is not publicly cooperating in the pullout. That is an important distinction. And it is one spawned, in part, by the fear that the PA will lose further momentum to its more radical rival Hamas.

Disengagement from Gaza is a painful gamble, but it’s a reasonable one. It is an incremental gesture, not a grand one — except, of course, to those Israelis forced out of their homes by their own government under direction of the man who sent them to Gaza in the first place. And it is open to much debate and interpretation. But this much seems clear: Sharon has assumed a marked spot in the world of public opinion in the hopes of demonstrating to many skeptical yet hopeful Israelis that with this bold unilateral move, Israel’s greater good and security will be served. Whether a still-hostile Palestinian establishment can use this as an opportunity to restart the peace process President Clinton orchestrated and Arafat squandered is still very much in doubt.

But if the dangerous tensions of the Middle East wrought by the Palestinians’ second intifada and Bush’s destabilization of Iraq don’t grow any worse — as they easily can — then this contained gesture might turn out to have been a step in the right direction.

Critics on all sides rightly point out that disengagement does not address the larger and far more complex questions imposed by the Israeli West Bank settlements. And they are correct. But movement in the right direction should be applauded — even if with caution or a dose of skepticism.

Phoenix writer David Bernstein has crunched the numbers and come to a startling conclusion: Boston has the worst homicide squad in the nation — not enough arrests, not enough convictions, and too many convictions overturned. The bottom line is inescapable: murders that go unsolved spawn more murders. It’s a conclusion that even the Menino administration, with it’s penchant for feel-good rhetoric that casts the city as problem-free, should find alarming.

That this is bad news for the city is an understatement. And it is an outrageous condition to inflict on the residents of black and Hispanic neighborhoods, where the majority of these murders take place.

Bernstein’s story, which can be read here, speaks for itself. But most alarming of all the facts he presents may be the Boston Police Department’s failure — born, perhaps, of ignorance — to adopt commonsense practices in use by other departments across the nation to cope with murder.

The only good news is that this is an election year. Mayoral challenger Maura Hennigan and the host of candidates for city council can use this dismal state of affairs as an opportunity to press the usually unreceptive mayor for reform and relief.

To do so means, of course, locking horns with the police union — something few candidates for office traditionally have the guts to do. Time and time again, the police union has shown itself to be more interested in feathering its own nest than in improving the safety and well-being of the city.

It’s time that the city, the mayor, the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, and politicians of every stripe wake up and reform a police department that is failing to protect the lives of city residents.

What do you think? Send an e-mail to letters[a]phx.com.

GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER