“It cannot be Gaza only,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the New York Times last week, meaning that the Gaza disengagement will “have” to be just the first of further withdrawals.

What’s wrong with Rice’s statement? To answer that question, imagine a U.S. leader announcing: “Britain will have to deal more effectively with domestic terrorism.” Or: “France will have to contribute troops to the war effort in Iraq.” Those are both things America would want; but in the normal practice, democracies respect—at least publicly—each other’s autonomy and don’t dictate policies to each other.

What if, for instance, there are elections in Israel in the near future. One candidate says the Gaza withdrawal has only intensified Palestinian radicalism and created grave security problems, and any further withdrawals would be suicidally dangerous. The other candidate says the results of the withdrawal are mixed, and the only thing that can encourage Palestinian moderation is further withdrawals. The first candidate wins by a large margin. Should the United States then (1) respect the results or (2) start fiercely pressuring Israel to cede more land anyway?

It could well be objected, of course, that such questions are naïve. The difference between Israel and other U.S. democratic allies like Britain or Japan is that Israel is much smaller, more starkly dependent on America, and has nowhere else to turn in its geopolitical isolation. In the real world, one can’t expect incomparably more powerful America to be concerned about niceties like Israeli democracy and autonomy when larger matters are at stake.

That has, indeed, been the approach—just in the more recent history, from Bush père/Baker’s “invitation” to a reluctant Yitzhak Shamir to attend the Madrid Conference, which got the ball rolling for Oslo, to Clinton’s sending U.S. spin doctors to help Ehud Barak win the 1999 Israeli election, to Bush fils’ crafting of the Road Map and foisting it on a less than enthused Ariel Sharon.

For that matter, in the Oslo era the security-minded Israeli voter hasn’t exactly been pampered by his own government either; the more blatant examples include the corrupt Oslo II vote in September 1995, decided by the bribing of two turncoat Knesset members with cabinet posts and Mitsubishis, and Sharon’s inversion of his 2003 campaign promises about unilateral withdrawals.

It is, again, perhaps hopelessly naïve to mention that this contempt continues in an era when America has made democracy promotion the central plank of its foreign policy, proclaiming that the only way to ultimately stem the jihadist tide is to bring freedom to Arab and other Muslim dictatorships. It would be sentimental to ask that the “sole democracy in the Middle East” be allowed to decide its own security policies based on its voters’ judgments.

If we descend, then, from the lofty plane of principle, the only other thing that could—seemingly—induce some humility is the record of the Israeli accommodationist policy over the past dozen years. It hasn’t, after all, been a bang-up success. To say it has: sunk Israel into death, mayhem, and continuous warfare and the Palestinians into poverty, dictatorship, and genocidal depravity; created the paradigm of the suicide bomber that now plagues the whole world; turned the Holy Land into a safe base of operations for the PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizbullah, and (most recently) Al Qaeda; induced Israel into an ignominious “disengagement” and total destruction of settlements after four straight years of shelling to which it found no military answer—is only to get started.

Indeed, given that record, and putting aside the prattle about democracy and the like, it seems hard to understand why—even before the Gaza disengagement is complete, let alone tested—America not only declares, in concert with the EU and the UN,  that further withdrawals are an imperative but demands that Israel (as noted by Evelyn Gordon in an important Jerusalem Post op-ed):

* cede full control of the Gaza-Egyptian border

* create a “safe passage” (read: weapons conduit) between Gaza and the West Bank

* end its security inspections of goods passing between Gaza and Israel

* increase the number of Gazans (including potential terrorists) allowed to work in Israel

* allow the Palestinian Authority to acquire large quantities of additional arms

It makes one suspect that, verbiage about the “sole democratic ally” aside, the wheels of geopolitics are again rolling over little Israel. One of these days they’re going to crush it for good.