Posts tagged as “Recent Columns”

Palestinians cry “From the river to the sea,” while Israelis seize and settle the land from the sea to the river. The Times of Israel reports that an Israeli cabinet minister and his father, a rabbi, suggest the option of nuking Gaza and eradicating Palestinians, unavoidably evoking the Final Solution and the Holocaust.

The massacre at Kibbutz Be’eri, where 130 Israelis were slaughtered by Hamas on October 7th, recalls the documented 1948 massacre at Deir Yassin, where Jewish guerrillas executed over 100 Palestinian men, women and children.

Hamas and Hezbollah seem tragic descendants of last century’s Jewish guerillas, the Urgun and Lehi.

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Palestinians enjoying peace and tranquility in their own homeland from the river to the Green Line is the best way to defang the terrorist movements. How many families living in genuine peace will offer their children to be suicide bombers? To be terrorists? To live in tunnels in Gaza or caves in Southern Lebanon? Peace is the greatest threat to terrorists. It is time to carry out the threat.

After Hamas's heinous attack on Israel, President Biden - wisely - has been talking about peace in the Mideast, even as hostilities rage in Gaza, the West Bank and at the Israel-Lebanese border. Without a peace settlement, these hostilities are open-ended, as they have been for decades. Yet, Biden has resurrected the old idea of a Palestinian state under the Palestinian Authority. That plan is a dead letter. Instead, we should try an entirely new approach, a permanent international protectorate on the West Bank.

The protectorate would be established and governed by a multinational coalition which would take control of the West Bank and demilitarize it completely, replacing Israeli Defense Forces with international peacekeeping troops.

The Palestinian state is a casualty of two realities. First, Israel could never accept a fully sovereign Palestinian state on the West Bank high above Israel which is but six miles wide at its narrowest point. That would be an unacceptable existential risk for the Jewish state.

Nor would the Palestinians accept the emasculated version of a state contemplated in failed negotiations to date, a small demilitarized entity with IDF troops stationed on all its borders. That would be little different from the current status quo. Peace negotiations over the years have bogged down in fatally complex detail in attempts to square the circle of these irreconcilable positions.