Monday will mark the third anniversary of the forcible expulsion of the Jews of Gaza and northern Samaria from their homes. Those expulsions were followed weeks later by the withdrawal of IDF personnel from the Gaza Strip.

Unlike the Rabin-Peres government's decision to embark on the Oslo peace process with the PLO in 1993, Ariel Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza did not take years to be discredited. It took moments.

As the last IDF personnel left Gaza, the Palestinians began torching the synagogues Israel abandoned. Within minutes of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza's border with Egypt, the Palestinians blew up the border wall. They immediately began transferring unprecedented quantities of heavy weaponry into Gaza - a practice that has continued to this day.

Another important distinction between the Oslo policy and the withdrawal policy is that at least Oslo asked the Palestinians to give Israel something in exchange for the land, money, arms and political legitimacy Israel lavished on them. As events would show, Israel asked the Palestinians for too little. But at least Israel asked them for something. The withdrawal policy, in contrast, demanded nothing from the Palestinians. It was simply an unconditional surrender of land. As a result, Hamas -- the terror group which has distinguished itself from Fatah by refusing to even pay lip service to peace -- was the chief beneficiary of Israel's retreat.

The first harbingers of Hamas's ascendance to power came the day after Israel completed its withdrawal. Tens of thousands of armed Hamas terrorists, clad in spanking new uniforms, goose-stepped through the streets of Gaza in their victory parade. The then-ruling Fatah government's own parade was dingy and poorly attended in comparison.

Hamas's pageantry was followed with the jihadist group's decisive electoral victory over Fatah in January 2006. This led to the further weakening of Fatah in March 2007 with the signing of the Mecca accord that rendered Fatah a junior member of Hamas's ruling coalition. The Mecca accord also signaled a shift in the Arab world's sympathies from Fatah to Hamas. That agreement then paved the way for Hamas's violent ouster of Fatah forces from Gaza in June 2007 and its rising challenge to Fatah's leadership in Judea and Samaria.

It should be pointed out that Hamas's victory over Fatah was not a victory of extremists over moderates in any real sense of the terms. Both Hamas and Fatah share the aim of destroying Israel. This was made clear most recently in the lead-up to the Annapolis conference last November. As US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the coming of peace, Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas refused to recognize Israel's right to exist.

Moreover, there is little to distinguish between the groups' embrace of terrorism as a means of achieving their aim of destroying Israel. Fatah forces have carried out more attacks against Israel than Hamas has.

Hamas's refusal to even pretend that it is willing to live at peace with Israel is what distinguishes it from Fatah. And the Palestinians' embrace of Hamas after Israel withdrew from Gaza demonstrated that the withdrawal increased the popularity of the prospect of continuous war against Israel among the Palestinians.

Hamas's rise to power has changed the nature of the Palestinian conflict with Israel in a fundamental way. It is not simply that Hamas has abandoned the rhetoric of Arab nationalism for the rhetoric of Islamic jihad and so changed the nature of the Palestinian war from a limited struggle to an unlimited war for Islamic domination.

Unlike Fatah, which was beholden to several Islamic countries at once, Hamas is a wholly-owned Iranian proxy. Consequently Gaza, like Lebanon, has become an Iranian colony. And as Hamas's star rises in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and within the Israeli Arab community, Iran's influence over events in those quarters rises. This was made clear this week with the revelation that Khaled Kashkoush, an Israeli Arab from Kalansuwa, last month became the latest Israeli Arab arrested for spying for Hizbullah.

GIVEN THE absolute, obvious failure of the Gaza withdrawal, what is most distressing about the initiative is that three years on, Israeli society has managed not to discuss why it failed or to learn the lessons stemming from its failure. There has been no chastening of the political leaders involved. No heads have rolled. There has been no official inquiry into how decisions regarding the withdrawal were made. Indeed, many of the plan's chief proponents have prospered.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert succeeded Sharon to power due in large part to his support for the plan. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni built her entire political career on her role as one of the architects of the expulsion of Israeli civilians from their homes. And today she is the frontrunner to succeed Olmert as head of Kadima and replace him as prime minister until the next elections are held. Her chief opponent, Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, was defense minister during the operation and an active participant in implementing the ill-conceived initiative.

In contrast, those who opposed the withdrawal remain in the opposition. They are never recognized for their attempts to divert their country from this disastrous course. Indeed, they continue to be castigated as somehow extremist for the fact that they oppose basing Israel's national strategies on capitulation and faith in other people's willingness to defend us.

There are three main reasons that there has never been an accounting for the failure of the withdrawal from Gaza. The first reason is luck. Sharon got "lucky." He was felled by a debilitating stroke and slipped into a coma before the dimensions of the failure of his most significant policy became widely understood.

Since Sharon pushed the withdrawal plan through against the wishes of his government colleagues, his voters and his party by turning the plan into a popularity contest that pit himself against his opponents, once he was gone, there was no way to hold him to account. And his incapacitation itself made discussing the failure of the withdrawal somehow unseemly. After all, it was said, the poor man can no longer defend himself, how dare you add insult to injury by noting that his most significant action while in power imperiled the country? In this manner, not only Sharon, but all his supporters in his government, were immunized from criticism and the need to account for their strategic imbecility.

Israel is presented with a similar situation today with Olmert. Like Sharon, Olmert has not had to face the voters to account for his failures in the Second Lebanon War; for his refusal to act against Hamas's Iranian-backed regime in Gaza; or for his apparent willingness to expand on those failures by seeking to withdraw from Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and so enable Iranian proxies to surround Israel on all sides. Continued...