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Is it done, 20~ settlements later, bunch of wacko's thrown out, dozens injured and a few score religious girl's 'modesty' hurt, Israel has exited all of Gaza strip and north West Bank.

Time will tell if this is the right decision or not, but at this moment, its finnaly quiet.

Ultimately I think it will be meaningless save for silencing some criticism.

Well they can't say Israeli hasn't given up anything. Now I'm gonna sit back and wait for the next demand to roll in from the other side.

I read in an article about a year back that Sharon never really wanted the Gaza Strip, but does want the West Bank. Assuming the article is correct, this makes it a clever move on his part, giving up a troublesome region that he doesn't want to strengthen his hand with the regions he does want to integrate into Israel.

As side note, if I recall correctly, the article was in The Atlantic, which recently ran an article on Arafat where they guess he stole about 43% of the Palestinian Authority's budget and was a disaster for Palestinians.

And for the record, I am with frigid. Some people aren't going to be satisfied as long as there is a single Jew in the Middle East.

You know, when I brought up Arafat's corruption at a lecture on Israeli-Palestinian relations last semester, the (Palestinian) lecturers questioned whether such had ever occurred. I knew that Forbes had estimated his worth in the billions (and said as much), but 43% of the budget? Daaaaaaaaaaaaaamn.

It didn't all go to him, although he had control over the purse strings. It got siphoned into other organizations, bought illegal guns, paid for the educations of his cronies kids, etcetera. It was Palestinian Authority money, but he used it as a giant slush fund.

Oh yes, the poor condition of the Palestinian cities was all Israel's evil doing! I'm going to get a copy of that article, find that lecturer, and shove it in his face.

And its not like The Atlantic is rabidly pro-Israel. It has published a lot of articles that were very critical of Israel over the years.

Well there's more than enough to be critical of in that area of the world all around. No one is really behaving or has behaved in a manner I would be totally proud of and that includes the US for the record.