Land For Nothing

“War is deceit”, said prophet Mohammed, the founder of Islam. Deceit means signing a 10-year peace treaty with the Koreish, only to violate it a year afterwards. Deceit also means disguising the Jihad, the religious goal of ridding the Land of Israel of its Jews, as a nationalistic, anti-colonial struggle for self-determination. It has worked well, for many are those on the Left who fully believe that narrative.

The cries of the Palestinians, “We have no homeland! We have the right to a plot of land for our nation just like all others have!”, have been given more than a fair hearing. The Left has taken them to be absolutely sincere, and chastised those “thieving Jews”, rulers of a vast empire occupying an area of over 22,000 square kilometers, for constantly quashing the indigenous people’s legitimate desire.

Is it so? Is it correct? How can we know?

We can test. And it actually has been put to the test, costing quite a bit of blood, but delivering a strong verdict.

In August 2005 the Jews evacuated Gaza. Evacuated totally—not just the soldiers, but the entirety of the civilian population. Gaza is now completely judenrein—clean of Jews.

OK, Palestinians, here you are: a homeland. Not all you had demanded, true, but it’s a start, a good start for realizing your dream. After all, we Zionists started realizing our dream and building a culture even before the British left the place. If we can, so can you.

Expectations apart and reality apart: in reality, the Palestinians robbed and looted and destroyed. Valuable greenhouses, from which we Zionists would have made a paradise on earth, the Palestinians chose to demolish. And from the areas evacuated by the Jews, the Palestinians opted, instead of building their homeland and a new life and culture, to fire Kassam rockets at civilian populations within borders internationally recognized to belong to Israel.

Well? What are we Jews to understand? We don’t want to come out of this class with a dunce cap. What are our Palestinian teachers saying to us?

They’re saying that their whole nationalistic, anti-colonialistic shticknarrative was nothing but a ruse, and that lands gained from the Jews will be used only to fire at lands not yet gained from the Jews, to force the Jews to give those up too, until there is no more land for the Jews to give up. Peace until the last Jew.

This, and not the abduction of three soldiers, is the background for the Israeli offensive in Lebanon (and Gaza). Yes, the abduction of the soldiers was the straw that broke the camel’s back; but had rockets not been fired at us from areas we had evacuated for the sake of peace, our reaction to the abductions would never have been so severe.

Israel is in its full rights. The onus of proof of peaceful intention is on the enemy alone. So far, Hamas and Hizbullah seem intent not only to spurn that challenge, but to drop all the masks (which Arafish had astutely worn) at that. Kol da-aved Rahmana, letav aved—“Everything G-d does, He does for good”.