As Israel begins its great showdown over the Jewish retreat from Gaza and the West Bank, let us pause to say that this newspaper believes in a large Israel. These columns have come over the years to value the principles that the Zionist prophet Vladimir Jabotinsky stood for when he called for Jewish sovereignty on both sides of the Jordan. If this were a just world, the ones in retreat would be the ones who have rejected peace, the Palestinian Arabs.

The real world, however, is not always just, and even those with a just cause cannot always have all that is justly theirs – or have it when they want it. This is where the craft of statesmanship comes in: how and where to draw the lines, how and when to make one’s stand, when to fight, when to negotiate, when to retreat. And one of the things that Ariel Sharon surely knows as he contemplates the century and more since Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress is that it is a century peopled with Jewish giants.

And every one of them made compromises. To read Herzl’s diaries is to read of a statesman’s inner struggles that were almost psychiatric in their intensity, as the founder of political Zionism wrestled over tactics and strategies in quest of the dream of the redemption of the Jews in a Jewish state in the land of Israel. And we are neither frightened nor discouraged by the apocalyptic rhetoric coming out the contending factions within the Jewish state.

On the contrary, we are rather encouraged by it. The Orange camp, full of idealists whom we admire, is ensuring something extremely important. This retreat should not be permitted to be made easily, even if a Jewish democracy has decided, as it has, that it needs to be made. It is not certain that the lines to which Israel is withdrawing – or as Mr. Sharon might put it, the lines that Israel is straightening – will become permanent, but they might. The stakes are, therefore, incredibly large.

And it is not the first time there has been violent confrontation – if that is what we are going to have — among the Jews themselves. On the wall of the editorial room of this newspaper hangs a painting of the shelling of the Altalena, the war surplus ship that carried refugees and arms to Israel, running, on behalf of the right-wing faction, the British blockade in the face of Ben-Gurion’s call for such vessels to keep their distance. When, under orders from Ben-Gurion, the Altalena came under shelling by a unit commanded by a young Yitzhak Rabin, there was aboard a young hero named Menachem Begin.

Begin wouldn’t get off the vessel, even when it caught fire with explosives still in its hold. To save his life, his own men had to force him off his own ship and into the Mediterranean. Many were the compromises. There are those of us who feel that for all Begin’s great decisions, from the attack on the Osirak A-bomb-making reactor, to the decisions for which he won the Nobel Prize, to the invasion of Lebanon, the greatest was his decision, after the sinking of the Altalena, to abjure the temptation of civil war, bow to a Jewish democracy, and consign himself to a life in the opposition.

For years after that, Ben-Gurion refused to call Begin by his own name. Ben-Gurion wouldn’t even recognize him by name in the Knesset, referring only to “the member sitting next to so-and-so.” The passions, the bitterness have always been very high. Those who will be dressed in Orange next week are part of a long and honorable tradition. But so is Prime Minister Sharon. He knows that the architects of Israel, of which he is one, offered compromise at every turn, and that it was the Jews who ended up with a state and the rejectionists who remained stateless.

This newspaper cares nothing – less than nothing – for the opinion of the Europeans and anti-Semites. In the post-World War II history of continental Europe, there has not been a single act of statesmanship in respect of the Jewish struggle, with the possible exception of Adenauer’s bow to Nahum Goldmann on the question of German reparations, and the protests from Israelis that greeted Israel’s decision to accept were every bit as fraught as what we’re seeing today. At this moment, those we find ourselves thinking of are the Israelis who are unfolding this drama in blue, white, and orange. They are reaching for a dream that has endured for millennia, and we have no doubt they will find the right way through this crisis, while the rest of the world will react to their daring.