Gaza

There seems to some confusion over this website's position on the Gaza Disengagement. To be clear:

1. The Disengagement is not a peace agreement. It is a strategic redrawing of Israel's border.
2. The government has the right to make such decisions, to rely on its military and diplomatic experts and on its intelligence gathering agencies.
3. Rabbis are not experts in the military, diplomatic or intelligence fields.
4. Jewish law allows a government to cede land. The vast majority of major poskim (rabbinic legal experts who decide intricate matters of Jewish law) agree on this.
5. Most military, diplomatic and intelligence experts wanted Israel to dismantle or destroy Gaza's synagogues before the Israeli withdrawal was complete.
6. Rabbis – who again are not experts in these fields – moved to forbid this, eventually appealing to Israel's secular courts to get a ruling to uphold their understanding of Jewish law.
7. Palestinians acted as they have for many years, burning, defacing and destroying those remaining Gaza synagogues.
8. Many have argued that the rabbis intent was political, not religious – Palestinians burning synagogues strengthens the rabbis' political base.
9. Rabbis disingenuously point to the synagogue burnings to prove we have no peace agreement, and to prove wrong the government's decision to disengage. But the Disengagement was not a peace agreement and was never marketed as one.
10. The Palestinians' actions are barbaric and inexcusable.
11. As a direct consequence of the rabbis refusal to allow Israel to dismantle the Gaza synagogues, right wing  Jewish terrorism directed at mosques is now a real possibility. This would be a dangerous development that could easily push Israel into war.
12. Rabbis who encourage sedition (Mordechai Eliyahu, Avraham Kahane Shapira, etc.), those who incite violence against Arabs (Shmuel Eliyahu, etc.) or those who posit that non-Jews do not posses Divine souls and are somehow comparable to cattle (Yitzchak Ginsburgh, etc.) must be held accountable for their words. If their followers commit violent acts, the rabbis who taught them to hate must also be brought before the bar.
13. The inability of many rabbinicly inspired opponents of Disengagement to function within democratic society is a frightening foretaste of what may come to pass if Israel ever becomes a (pre-messiah) religious state, and is a powerful argument for separation of synagogue and state.