Oh the dilemmas of occupation

An enlightened commentary from the New York Times on Israel's Gaza withdrawal:

...for those, like Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who created and nurtured the settlements, the move to dismantle them is something very different. It is an admission not of error but of failure. Their cherished goal - the resettlement of the full biblical land of Israel by contemporary Jews - is not to be. The reason: not enough of them came.

What an astonishingly racist little aside! And what of the indigenous inhabitants of Gaza, the Palestinians? Israel's Consul General in New York has this to say about them, at least implicitly...

We have had to come to terms with certain unanticipated realities.

The remainder of the article pins the problem squarely on logistics - the inability to draft enough Jews to live in Israel and the Occupied Territories, and "that the Palestinian population has grown far more rapidly." - and the Palestinians' armed resistence to the colonisation of their lands (although, of course, those aren't the words used by the NYT report).