Though the lack of security and ideological bankruptcy play their part in emigration, arguably the single most important behind the Jews’ leaving Israel is the economy. Jews made every country of their residence prosperous – and prospered there. Jewish socialists achieved the opposite, they bankrupted both the communist Russia and Israel.

Israel’s military expenses do not explain the failed economy. The IDF costs the state about 10% of the GDP, which is high but not critical. The indirect costs amount to another 10-12% of the GDP. Those include lost GDP from conscripting the youth and reservists, pensions and medical care for casualties, and the cost of land taken by the army bases. There is also an issue of structural distortions in the economy: for example, the army and some ineffective military support companies attract many of the brightest minds which could be better employed elsewhere. There are also incontrollable costs of running Mossad, and large part of the police budget is also military in nature. It is safe to assume that 25-30% of Israeli GDP applies to military sphere. Although this figure is large, it doesn’t explain the two to five times’ personal income difference between Israel and America.

The touted costs of aliyah are questionable. Israel got considerable foreign aid to that end, and new immigrants quickly joined the work force, paying back to the state with taxes and GDP growth.

Israel’s welfare expenses aren’t that high. The controversial subsidies to religious Jews are altogether pale compared to the amount of private donations to them and the government’s subsidies to Arabs.

In an export-oriented economy such as the Israel’s domestic supply and demand are irrelevant. American software developers which outsource much job to Israel have a demand for any realistic number of employees so long as they ask for somewhat lower wages and benefits than their US counterparts. Israelis are much more efficient than, say, Indians, and don’t need to peg their wage requirements to Bangalore. Why, then, the Israelis who work for American corporations receive so low wages? Because the traditional level of wages in Israel, depressed by the decades of socialist rule, is quite low.

Israel needs to break away from her socialist legacy, and develop a free market economy which would make it unfeasible for Jews to emigrate. A few measures are obvious.

The government’s regulatory powers and agencies need not be reformed, but abolished altogether. It is better that Israel goes through a short “Wild West” stage than continues fighting the bureaucracy indefinitely. Insurance companies and liability bonds should take the place of preemptive regulation. Anyone should be able to open a business without any permits as long as he purchases liability insurance.

In order to end the spiraling real estate prices, zoning must be abolished. Anyone should be able to build on his land whatever he wishes. That would legalize the massive Arab illegal construction, but Arabs are not prosecuted for it, anyway.

All the state enterprises except perhaps the military should be privatized. Monopoly and licensing have to be abolished. Trade unions must be recognized for whatever they are: illegal cartels, prosecuted, and dismantled. Nepotism in the few remaining state enterprises should be made a criminal offense.

Banking and corporate law should be streamlined along the Swiss model to make Israeli jurisdiction internationally competitive. Israel can withdraw from unnecessarily tough money-laundering pacts: we have no problem with Columbia’s drug kings or Russian corrupt oligarchs.

Military expenses must reduced by relying on nuclear deterrent. Female conscription should be abolished. Males should be conscripted for six months except in those army branches which require extensive training. Even those branches should try the most condensed courses and conduct training on weekends instead of draining the economy of hyper-productive young Jews.

The compound tax rate, which includes customs duties, should be capped at 30%, and gradually decreased to 15%. Currently, the government adjusts the tax rate to provide for all its desired expenses; on the contrary, the tax rate should be fixed, and the government has to decide which of the programs to abandon.

Welfare should be reduced to the biblical minimum: society provides food for those who positively cannot provide for themselves. The poor can also be offered campus housing and basic medicine. Needy cannot be choosy. Many Jewish charity organizations would add to the state’s basic welfare, but Arabs would be left to their own. Jewish state won’t take care of them except for the very basic aid; recently expired food would do.

All schools and universities should be privatized. First of all, that would reduce the spell of ultra-left Ministry of Education. The government should only set basic rules of education, such as learning math even in yeshivas, and let the schools set their own schedules and parents choose the appropriate schools. The current curriculum is wasteful, students waste their time in schools, most courses lack the real-life relevance. Instead of paying taxes which finance the school system, parents should get long-term tuition loans – here is the trick – repayable by their children. That way, parents would not hesitate to bring up more children, and the children will eventually pay for their own education. In the legal doctrine, parents are entitled to make decisions on their children’s behalf; taking out a tuition loan is just such a decision. The Jewish state now spends tremendously on educating the Arabs who constitute a third of Israel’s young; with tuition loans, that would no longer be the case.

Israel, on one hand, needs to increase family subsidies, but on the other hand, doesn’t want to subsidize Arab families. The solution is tax subsidies: perpetual income tax reductions for working parents. Most Arabs officially lack substantial employment and won’t be able to claim subsidies.

Social security should almost cease. Every person is responsible for saving for his own retirement. If he didn’t, the government can provide him with the minimum charity (food, campus shelter, basic medical aid). Israel can also enforce the biblical commandment that obligates children to provide for their parents. In such a scenario, Jews would love to bear more children, who will be their retirement security.

The peace treaty with the Palestinians doesn’t seem close, unless the Bush-Rice duo orchestrates a major political assault on Israeli government. Even so, Palestinian state exists de facto: with president, parliament, and even many countries’ embassies. Does anyone protest the media calling Abbas Palestinian president?

Olmert negotiates the borders of Israel which include the settlement blocs. He is anxious to avoid the Gush Katif-type evacuation trouble. As long as the settlements remain inside Israel, most settlers won’t protest giving up Judea and Samaria.

The government might leave the faraway and militant places like Kfar Tapuah alone, not evicting the settlers. They will be allowed to remain there just as any Israeli stay abroad, and left to the Palestinians to harass, intercept en route, and make their life untenable.

Nothing would change when the government signs peace accords with Palestinians. As long as most settlers are not evicted, the status quo won’t be changed. Almost no Jews venture into Schem or Ramallah, anyway. The West Bank Palestinians won’t start shelling Tel Aviv a la Shderot, as they know that would provoke massive retaliation; Jews hesitate attacking Iran but would have no qualms about invading a weak Palestinian state.

Bringing massive numbers of Jews into the territories to stem the evacuation is not an option. Once the border is demarcated and legalized, it would be plainly illegal for them to cross the state border, and few takers would appear. Crossing the state border beyond the official checkpoint is not merely an act of politically inspired civil disobedience but a clear-cut crime.

Moreover, the “front line” of the possible government action in Judea and Samaria is long. Jewish conservative activists failed defending Gush Katif, where the confrontation line was minuscule. The army can also wait out the protestors: tens of thousands of people cannot hold vigils for more than a few days, as they need to work for living. The army, on the contrary, can stay there for months, waiting for the human wave to dissolve.

Israel can be as well located in Uganda. The beaches of Tel Aviv are a part of the Promised Land, but so are Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon. The seashore was settled by Philistines, then heavily gentilized, controlled by the Romans. Jews have very little historical connection with the seashore. On the contrary, the very area Israel abandons to the Palestinian state – Judea and Samaria – is the core Jewish land. Hebron was King David’s seat of power, Schem conquered by Jacob; the ancient Jewish state was located specifically in the area that Jews are giving away now. Ignore the uninhabitable Negev Desert, Galilee and the Little Triangle near Lod settled by Arabs, and Israel is reduced to a tiny beach strip 14 by 80 miles; even there, Arabs constitute 34% among the young. Jewish population shrinks to the Tel Aviv – Netanya strip of the beach and the Haifa enclave.

But haredi’s influence increases with their numbers, especially as they are a uniquely coherent and zealous group. As conscription becomes increasingly unfashionable among atheist Israelis, haredi might become the major force in the army. As secular Jews emigrate, haredi will become a majority or at least the largest voting bloc.
Jews lean to the right as they see that every peaceful measure fails with Arabs from Palestine to Iran, and Arab enemies grow stronger.

Even if Olmert gives up Judea, another leader can take it back.

The Final Solution wasn’t a German invention, but a collaborative effort by the Christian world.

Christian Russia thought about some kind of Final Solution in the nineteenth century. Russian government was receptive to Zionist leaders because they offered to rid Russia of Jews. Russian government prompted waves of pogroms. In the early twentieth century in Ukraine, government forces annihilated the Jews in the numbers only superseded in Holocaust.

Then came Stalin. He was deeply anti-Semitic but allowed Jews into the most visible – and hated – positions in communist hierarchy. Stalin committed a strategic disaster by partitioning Poland with Germany: absence of that buffer state in June 1941 allowed Germans to extinguish the Russian army in a matter of days. The only reason for partitioning Poland was to pass Jewish towns into the German hands. Indeed, Germany and Russia carved Poland specifically the way that major Jewish population centers fell to Germans. Russians supported the Nazi Germany until the very day it launched the offensive against the Soviet Union; Germany thrived on Russian iron, grain, and many other products.

The Russian government knew about the Germans’ annihilating the Jews in the conquered Soviet Union from the day one, from the burning of Jews in Byalostok, but didn’t warn the Jews to flee for their lives – which they still had enough time to do, even on foot. Ukrainian, Latvian, Estonian, Lithuanian, Russian, and Byelorussian populations assisted the Germans into hunting down, rounding, and massacring Jews. Most European Christian nations showed similar zeal in helping the Germans to finish Jews off. Evidently on Stalin’s orders, the Soviet Army avoided bombing death camps during the massive bombing raids into the German-occupied Eastern Europe. Primo Levi testifies to daily bombings of “work” camps around Auschwitz, but not a bomb touched the death camp itself.

Immediately after the WWII, when some Jews appeared to be saved, Russians envisaged a new solution: the Jewish state. Stalin’s support for establishing Israel is only intelligible as a means of annihilating the Jews. Stalin didn’t mean Israel as a socialist beachhead in the Middle East: despite the fact the many Israeli Jews were socialists, their leadership deeply resented anti-Semitic Russia, and except the fringe communists, few Jews supported closer ties with the Stalinist state. Stalin had much better bet with post-colonialist Muslim countries: Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. It would be absurd for Russia to support Israel against the wishes of Arabs who possessed both human and territorial mass. The pattern of Russian arms sales to Israel in the War of Independence confirms that Stalin meant Israel as a deathtrap for Jews: Russia only supplied Israel (through Czechoslovakia) outdated light weapons, primitive artillery, and some useless trophy aircraft with no spare parts (defending Tel Aviv in March 1948, 3 out of 4 Messerschmitt-109 aircraft was downed in the first raid). That was enough to prolong the war with Arabs and make it bitter, but hardly enough to win it.

Had the Soviet Union wished Jewish victory, it could have supplied tanks, artillery, and aircraft (Stalin opposed the shipment of meager sixty Spitfire jets through Yugoslavia), or simply send a message to Arab capitals that the hugely respected USSR stands behind the Jewish state. Czechoslovakia also supplied advanced weapons to Arabs (e.g., 8,000 automatic rifles, 200 machine guns, etc in a single shipment to Syria; the Lino affair). Many Soviet Jews (notably Dragunsky, later the official leader of Soviet anti-Semites) volunteered to fight for Israel but were not allowed to go. Overall, Soviet support for Israel was almost non-existent compared to the massive aid extended to Spanish communists fighting Franco, to Angola, and many other insurrections. When Israel survived, Russia began a major anti-Semitic campaign which culminated in the 1953 witch hunt against Jews and wholesale deportation of Jews to the coldest place in Siberia – the very place Germans earmarked for starving the Jews before proceeding to eliminate us in the death camps. Stalin died just days before the scheduled deportation.

Britain prompted the most notorious Arab massacres of Jews: in Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias the British pointedly withdrew their police forces. Jews were massively persecuted, murdered, and extradited to Germans in French- and British-influenced Muslim countries: Iraq, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Morocco. The British refused safe haven in Palestine to the Jews fleeing the Holocaust. Earlier, the British offered Jews to settle in Uganda; likewise, Germans thought of resettling Jews in Mozambique and Russians – in Siberia. (Uganda, a country with no Jews, evolved viciously anti-Semitic; the Entebbe affair took place there.) Later, Britain provided the PLO with safe haven in its protectorate of Kuwait.

Jewish American establishment, an assimilated bunch of court Jews who prosper by selling the souls of their compatriots, pretended to doubt the scale of the German massacre of Jews. They lied. Every Pole around Maidanec or Auschwitz knew what was going on there: they saw the trainloads of Jews entering the death camps and empty trains coming out. Post-war interviews with the Poles confirm their unequivocal knowledge about the massacre. No doubt, that information, among other reports, was passed to Jewish “leaders.” At least from the early 1944, they knew about the extermination of Hungarian Jewry: the Germans made their plans very clear to Zionists who refused so little as to supply trucks, coffee beans, and money to Germans in exchange for the entire Hungarian Jewry. But at least the Jewish barons could claim ignorance.

The US Administration had the benefit of vast intelligence, and certainly knew about the ongoing extermination of Jews, if only from regular Enigma intercepts of German communications which included the exact numbers of massacred Jews. The US refused so little as bombing the death camps. Before the WWII, when the extent of German institutional anti-Semitism was clear, and British and American newspapers ran articles about the immense suffering of Jews, the US refused entry visas to fleeing Jews and deliberately made a comedy out of the Evian conference which meant to find the Jews foreign asylum.

The Americans, British, and Russians maintained radio broadcasts for German-occupied countries, but not a single time any of them mentioned the ongoing extermination of Jews. That silence allowed Germans to keep shipping trainloads of unsuspecting Jews to Auschwitz as late as in autumn of 1944. Had they knew their fate from the authoritative radio, they could flee for their lives, fight for their deaths, or commit suicide for their dignity.

The UN partition plan of 1947 was no boon to Jews, but meant to complete the Final Solution. The Jewish state was broken into three isolated enclaves, interspersed with Arab territory. The three “Jewish” enclaves contained 40% Arab population. Thus the UN Security Council’s Christian members assured the attack on Israel both from without and from within. The Jews were to be annihilated.

Nothing has changed since the Holocaust. In 1967, as the Arab armies were massing at Israel’s borders, as the IDF was digging thousands of graves open for Jewish bodies, as common Israelis thought in the terms of Holocaust – what did the world do? Nothing. Nasser and the Syrians were explicit about their intentions to annihilate all Jews rather than merely dismantle a Zionist state. The world screamed at Israel in disappointment when she preempted and survived.

In 1973, as the Egyptian army was seemingly poised to enter Tel Aviv in a matter of days, the American Jewish leaders did not lead mass rallies demanding the US intervention: America, after all, fought on behalf of Koreans, Vietnamese, and Kuwaitis. European Jewish leaders did not chain themselves to presidential palaces in their respective capitals to demand the right of overfly for Israeli resupply aircraft: Europe closed its skies to the military supplies desperately procured by the fledging Jewish state. When the world, including Jewish assimilationist organizations, beats its collective chest, “Never again!”, remember that “again” has already happened.

It is incorrect to say that the world learned nothing from Holocaust. It learned a tremendously important thing: murdering millions of Jews is socially acceptable. A handful of Germans were hanged, but most ex-Nazis led respectable lives, worked in government offices. Just years after the Holocaust, Germany opened its embassy in Israel and was welcomed in the community of nations. To talk about the Holocaust to a German is now indecent, as it may offend his sensitive soul. So the nations learned, it is okay to kill Jews.

In 1947, the US originally voted for establishing the Jewish state. When fighting between Arabs and Jews subsequently flared up, the US withdrew its UN vote in favor of Israel, leaving the Jewish state one on one with Arab militias. To add, the US banned American Jews from going to Israel to fight, and embargoed arms shipments to Palestine. That didn’t affect the Arabs who received arms supplies through other ports, notably in Egypt, and from Iraq and Syria. In effect, the arms embargo targeted Israel. The US voted for the UNSC resolution condemning Soviet arms shipments to Israel.

The US reiterated its policy of annihilating Israel in 1956. After Israel, besieged by fedayeen attacks for eight years, cleansed Sinai from the Egyptian militia, the US intervened, ordered Israel to halt, offered military aid to Egypt, and threatened direct intervention on Egypt’s behalf. Eisenhower pressed Israel to withdraw from the Sinai, promising the US would always intervene to keep the Tiran Straits open. He lied; in 1967 America not only refused intervention on Israel’s behalf, but prepared operational plans for landing the US Navy in the Sinai to defend Egypt against the Jewish army. Before the Six-Day War, the US foreign policy was geared toward buying Egypt time to launch an offensive against Israel. The US-led UN withdrew its peacekeeping troops from the Sinai immediately upon Nasser’s demand.

In 1973, the US intervened only to counter the Soviet influence in the Middle East which grew exponentially with Egypt’s early victories and Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in defense of Egypt. The US aid to Israel came too late to be used in the war. European Christian countries – NATO members - refused the US planes the right of overflight, preventing military supplies from reaching the Jewish state.

The US provides massive aid to the PLO, which is nominally intended for the terrorist Palestinian Authority. America sells advanced weapons to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, fakes nuclear disarmament of North Korea, and uses Israel as a pawn to placate Arabs with the suicidal peace process.

Bush is touted as the US president most favorable to Israel. Roosevelt, too, was very friendly to Jews – yet did nothing to stop the Holocaust. Truman was very favorable to Jews, yet had almost killed the newborn Israel through arms embargo. Decades later, Jews were surprised to discover anti-Semitic remarks in Truman’s diary.

The current peace process is a historically standard Christian policy against the Jews. Locked into a fourteen-mile-wide state, besieged by the US-armed Arabs from without, watched by the fifth column of 34% Arab population from within, the Jewish state is meant by the Quartet to become the Final Solution.

The crisis of Israeli education is due to libertarianism. The teachers’ low pay certainly drives some of the best cadres away from education, but that is not the major problem: the best teachers rarely find high-paid jobs in the commercial sector, anyway. Rather, universal disrespect to teachers is the problem. Children are taught to disrespect teachers: ignore them when they enter the class, call them by name instead of title, and generally behave familiarly toward the teachers. Parents join the subversion of teachers’ prestige: they criticize teachers with their children present, defend children in disputes with teachers, and even demand sanctions against school principals.

Corruption adds to the problem: the Ministry of Education changes textbooks almost every year to provide publishers with windfall profits, but teachers don’t have enough time to familiarize themselves with new books. Ever changing political course also substantially changes the subject. Socialist nihilism allows inducting the teachers with mere three years of professional courses instead of university degree; such teachers usually lack erudition.

The solution to Israeli education problem requires several steps. First, return to the world’s best education, proved by twenty-three centuries of unparalleled success: Jewish religious education from the age of three or five, including reading, massive memorizing, and various types of analysis. Second, divest from at least half of the teachers and bring the best teachers from India, Russia, and other low-wage countries. Three, reduce the school time to reasonable; twelve-year general education is absurd. Four, increase the teachers pay by 30-35% to the society’s average. Five, mandate the show of respect to teachers.

Israeli rulers are racists. They agree to the Palestinian state because they don’t want Arabs from the territories to inundate Israel, dismantling its Jewish identity. The inevitability of the Arab demographic threat to Jewish state, however, is a scapegoat.

For one, Israel is not a state of Jews even now. Arabs already constitute 34% among her youngsters, and there are 19% of Slavs with ephemeral connection to Judaism. Other non-Jews constitute 6% of Israeli population. Additionally, there are huge swarms of Arab residents of Israel who won’t move voluntarily to the pauperized Palestinian state when it is created, and Israel lacks the political will to revoke their residence permits and expel them. Even after a Palestinian state is created, Jews would hardly constitute a third of the young Israeli population. Arab international family reunions would drive the percentage of Jews still lower. This cannot be emphasized enough: Jews are already a minority in Israel.

Israel is not a Jewish state. If, incredibly, the government would come up with some scheme of creating a Jewish majority in Israel: say, by purging birth records of Israeli Slavs, Israel would remain an un-Jewish state. A state which doesn’t honor Sabbath or other basic tenets of Jewish religion, which abandons the Temple Mount to Muslims, cannot be meaningfully called Jewish.

The Allies at Potsdam Conference explicitly sanctioned “orderly population transfers” of ethnic Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia after WWII for a total of about 12 million. The Treaty of Lausanne provided for Greeks and Turks expelling each other’s minorities a little earlier. The world did not care when Arab countries pushed out their Jews. The world accepted the Jews running out the Palestinians in 1948, and generally supports the Jews in refusing them back in. The world is sensible, and would tolerate expulsion of Arabs from Judea and Israel. The one thing the world hate, are calls for compassion, especially from TV screens. So whatever Israel does about the Arabs has to be done swiftly and irreversibly; no refugee camps.

The Arab problem is not really so big. Israeli government prevents the West Bank Arabs from emigrating. Instead, teach them useful employment, and they would move out. Young Palestinians, educated as doctors or engineers, will move to other Arab countries in search of a better pay. A simple measure of distributing free condoms would considerably reduce the Arab birth rate. Boycotting Arab labor in Israel would push able males to emigrate, and their families will later join them. At least, crack on the illegal labor market; forced to pay Israeli taxes, economically inefficient Arabs would emigrate. Reining in the theft-based Palestinian economy would cripple the Arab industries dependent on stealing electrical power, building materials, and other goods from Israel.

The number of Arabs in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza is grossly overstated. Mortality is officially almost non-existent in Palestinian communities: Arabs receive the UN and EU subsidies for their long-dead relatives. For the same reason, the reported infant mortality in refugee camps and Palestinian towns is unusually low, much lower than in the similar places in the Third World. There are many documented cases of fake births, when Palestinian women borrow babies from each other to register more children and receive more subsidies. Many Arabs are counted twice: as Israeli Arab residents and inhabitants of the West Bank, sometimes thrice when a part of their family lives in Gaza. Arabs who moved from one West Bank town to another are often counted in both places. Illegal emigration from the West Bank and Gaza to Arab countries is not accounted for. Realistic estimates put the Arab population of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza at 1.5 to 2.5 million. Close to 60% in Judea and Samaria is virtually empty, settled by mere 1% of the total Arab population. Basic enforcement of Israel’s laws on Arabs, such as making them pay taxes, serve in the army, and razing their massive illegal construction would make Israel unattractive to Arabs. Property buyouts at fair value would also induce some Arabs to leave Israel for cheaper neighboring countries. After Israel pushes some Palestinians out by economic policies, induces others to emigrate through compensations, the number left to be expelled won’t be huge.

Israel will be in existential danger regardless of the policies concerning her Arabs and the Palestinian state. A Jewish state among the sea of Muslims can never be safe, especially considering the Islamic prohibition of non-Muslim statehood in the Middle East. In any major conflict, Palestinians will be a fifth column because they are normal people and would like to have back the land they consider theirs. There is no reason for Jews to refrain from expelling the Palestinian Arabs.

The Arabs believe we took their land. No amount of propaganda would change the fact that their dunes have become our gardens. “Their” is more important than “dunes.” On the contrary, Israeli education, available to Arabs, emphasize the nobility of nationalism, perseverance, and national liberation struggle on Jewish example; Arabs readily apply the example to themselves. There is not a single example in history where conquerors (and to Arabs, Jews took over their land) lived peacefully with the conquered. The victims were always eliminated to insignificance. Otherwise, acting in the very human (“inhumane”) manner, the victims revolt. They don’t believe in conqueror’s benevolence but read it as moral or physical weakness, and see it as an opportunity to prevail.

Peace negotiations lead to peace only when the argument is not essential for the warring parties; both France and Germany would love to annex Alsace-Lorraine, but can also live without it. When the argument is over the essential territory, the soul of the nation, it is not amenable to negotiations. The only way to live in peace is eliminating the threat. This truth is simple, but not nice, and so many imagine that somehow the history has stopped in our time, and all which was true before is false now, and wolves lie with lambs, and nations negotiate the core issues. That mindset is apocalyptic; our days are hardly the last days, and the human mentality does not change. If anything, the wars become bloodier.

Media coverage show us the enemy faces, and we see the enemy as individuals rather than the mass. Individuals arose compassion while masses – fear. Seeing your enemy, unwarlike as he is on TV, makes you unwilling to fight him. Imagine Allies’ media reporting live from fire-bombed Tokyo and Dresden, showing burned children. That would naturally have an impact on American public. The extensive media coverage of Arabs similarly turned them from enemies into “people like us.” Few understand that enemies are indeed like us, and their goals are like ours – and that is exactly the reason we fight, because both of us critically want the same tiny piece of land. Each of us wants to be a master of his life rather than depend on the possibly benevolent rule of aliens.

Assimilated Jews know a single line from the Torah: “You shall love the alien.” Many even imagine it runs as in Christianity, “Love your enemy.” But there is Exodus 23:31: “And I will give the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall expel them.” The aliens whom we shall love are those who accepted basic tenets of Judaism. They are either full converts or God-fearers, but in any case we are mandated to love them because they are loyal and strive to be good citizens of Jewish state. Nothing can be farther from Israeli Arabs who identify with Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians – not with Jews or Israelis.

The Torah is practical. We cannot come to an agreement with sworn enemies, or live peacefully with those who consider themselves rightful inhabitants (and therefore sovereigns) of the land. There is no peace process, but there is a process that brings peace: namely, cleansing the land of our enemies.

Giving the Palestinians all areas they want won’t bring peace. Palestinians control all those areas now. Except during the riots, Israeli police don’t show up in the Arab-occupied areas. Even Arab villages inside Israel are off-limits to police and court officers: the police enter the Arab places like Lod in armored vehicles only; that’s in Israel, not the West Bank. Palestinian state would be a permanent offense to the Arabs: did they fight all those years for a tiny, nonviable statelet? So the Palestinians will press with more demands: free trade with Israel (flooding our markets with their tax-free produce), migrant labor, access to Gaza (contiguous Palestinian state means discontinuous Jewish one). Palestinians will unite with their brethren in Jordan, who form a majority there and will take over that country in democratic fashion after the inevitable failure of Jordanian monarchy – after all, monarchy fails everywhere. The West Bank will annex Jordan rather than vice versa. Refugees returning from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Gaza would turn the Palestinian state into a state of criminal anarchy: those people have no useful skills for four generations, no place to live, and no desire to work; imagine resettling Harlem inhabitants into Manhattan.

Israeli left has no compassion to Arabs. The West Bank is given away only because Israel doesn’t want to assimilate another three million Arabs. But Arabs in Israel bred from 150,000 to 1.5 million in sixty years. They are already 34% among Israel’s young. Israeli Arabs contribute to violence against Jews statistically much more than Gazans or West Bankers. Israeli troops find it easier to conduct operations in Gaza than in the Arab villages of Galilee. Separation barrier can stem the flow of terrorists from Gaza, but attackers from Arab communities in Israel reach Jewish areas unimpeded.

Israeli left doesn’t like the Arabs; it hates Jews – or, rather, Jewishness. Inundating Israel with Arabs is the left’s way of finishing Judaism off. The leftists resist feeling themselves second-rate Jews, Jews without Jewishness, and so do away with it. Zionism is a no-brainer; Judaism requires decades of studies. Any crook can become Zionist politician; they stand no chance to become a prominent Torah scholar. Abandoning Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, Gaza, Galilee to Arabs is not meant to establish peace or justice – these are the last things the leftists are concerned about. The concessions mean ending the left’s ideological humiliation – ending the Jewish state in the process. At some point, the leftists will change their course. Like King Herod, they will realize usefulness of religion for their statehood needs, and will embrace Judaism. By that time, it may be too late.

Religious matters are black and white. God either told us to take and keep Jerusalem, or he didn’t. Jews, therefore, must either hold on to Jerusalem no matter what, or give it away as the hilly town is not worth the trouble. Negotiating Jerusalem is exactly like negotiating Jewish religion with Palestinians. The religion is either true or not, there is no ground for discussion.

Sovereignty is a fiction. East Jerusalem is to all practical purposes an Arab territory now. Israel’s sovereignty only gives Jews the honorary right of subsidizing the Arabs there. Jewish conservative activists make a great fuss about taking another acre for “illegal outposts,” but their efforts are irrelevant: even if Israeli government annexes all the Jewish-squatted land, Arabs would still control Judea and Samaria demographically. Arabs fully control East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, Lod, Akko, most places in Galilee. Jews are increasingly left with the Negev desert (also roamed by Bedouin) and a beach strip. The peace process solves nothing, but only institutionalizes Israeli defeat.

Israeli conservatives act like ostriches: Olmert soothes their conscience by promising to relegate the Jerusalem issue to the last stage in peace talks with Palestinians. It’s not even important that Olmert lies and, as Palestinians never fail to announce, negotiate Jerusalem now.

Leaving the core issues for the last stage in negotiations is fundamentally wrong. Would you discuss a delivery time for the furniture set if you don’t agree with the seller on price? In our situation, the seller doesn’t even want to sell.

Leaving the core issues for the later assures that Israel would give way on them, as the entire pressure now dispersed over several subjects will be concentrated on the issue of Jerusalem. The story would go thus: “Okay, we have agreed with Palestinians on just everything else, the peace is so close. Should we refuse peace because of the Arab-populated Jerusalem areas which we the Jews cannot live in, anyway?” Once all other issues are settling, partitioning of Jerusalem will be passed automatically. Neurotic Jews can rebel and refuse such peace, sublimating into the issue of Jerusalem all the distrust they feel to their government, but if counting on that, then what the peace process is for?

Israeli policy of piecemeal concessions is devastating. Jews give away their bargaining chips one by one, lose bargaining power, and have the international pressure on the “leftover” issues increase. Back in 1972, Israel rebuffed Sadat’s peace offer (whether realistic or not) of comprehensive peace with Arabs in return for Sinai; the Palestinians were ignored. Four decades later, Israel will find herself without the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank – but still not at peace with Arabs. Almost every Muslim leader have already declared that even ceding the West Bank and Jerusalem to Palestinians would not lead to immediate peace with Arab countries. And even where Israel has peace, there is no normalization: common Egyptians and Jordanians hate Israel now just as before we signed the peace treaties. Iraq and Kuwait, two countries under the US foot, flatly refused peace with Israel. Iran cannot be expected to sign peace with the Zionist entity even if Palestinians get a state. Saudi Arabia is the last country Israel wants to be at peace with, as the flow of Saudi oil money into Israel, already considerable, will skyrocket as Saudis buy out the Holy Land. Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon cares not a bit about the Palestinians and would not embrace Zionists even if Arafat is re-buried on the Temple Mount, as he might be if the Palestinians get Jerusalem. Peace with Syria would spell a military fiasco for Israel, as Syria will upgrade its arsenals under the protection of peace agreement like Egypt does – to strike later with vengeance.

Negotiations over Jerusalem with Fatah are puzzling. British hunted down Jewish terrorist groups Etzel and Lehi instead of negotiating with them. Fatah members continue attacking Jews, Fatah pays salaries to Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades with the money dutifully transferred by Israel, and in especially odd occurrence, a bodyguard of Ahmed Qurei, a top Palestinian negotiator, was killed in a firefight with IDF.

The peace process is fraud. Israel is not at war with Palestinians – or if we are, then bomb them out of existence rather than supplying them water and electricity. Palestinian threat to Israel is laughable: just ban the Arab migrant workers, and suicide terrorism, already happening just once a year, would almost cease. At any rate, Arab terrorism claimed many times less Jewish lives than ordinary car accidents. Ending Kassam and Katyusha rocket fire is also a no-brainer – not with the absurdly expensive Iron Dome system, but with the common police measure of invading Gaza once a year or so, killing a couple of thousand Palestinian guerrillas, damaging their infrastructure to the Bronze Age level, and enjoying calm for another few months. Banning the UNRWA and other aid sources from Gaza and the West Bank would be a much greater service to peace than ceding the Arabs Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa together: Palestinians should care about employment rather than live on foreign aid and use the ample idle time for radical activities. Paupers in search of food won’t have time for terrorism.

People hate weak enemies, and so Jews despise Hamas and refuse negotiating with it. But note the two crucial things: Hamas doesn’t attack Jewish targets abroad or proclaim Palestinian statehood.

Hamas can easily achieve publicity and political advantage by attacking the Israeli soft targets: Jews, Jewish businesses, and community centers abroad. Protecting them all is impossible. Faced with persistent attacks, American Jews would pressure Israeli to accept whatever concessions Hamas demands.

Surely Hamas has plenty of means for low-level terrorist attacks against Jews in many countries, but especially in Western Europe and Latin America. Surely Hamas understands that Israeli won’t summarily retaliate against Palestinians. Hamas leaders are mostly hardened operatives unlike the Fatah hoodlums, and most of them don’t fear targeted assassination. It is clear from the February rocket attacks on Sderot that Hamas guerrillas refused scaling down their offensive to avoid targeted assassinations Israel threatens them with.

Israeli intelligence capabilities abroad are limited in comparison to the free pass Shabak enjoys in the West Bank. Hamas would find foreign attacks on Jews much easier than the operations in Israel.

The relations between Israel and Hamas imply a high degree of cooperation. Shabak now intercepts 99% of terrorist attacks. Even accounting for the immense Israeli intelligence network in the territories, it is incredible that the Palestinians can carry out just one suicide bombing per year. Not so many terrorists participate in the planning, and discovering a mole after a few failed operations should not be a problem. Evidently, Hamas and other terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah, willingly limit their operations to the level acceptable both to Israel and their supporters.

Nothing precludes Hamas from proclaiming Palestinian statehood in Gaza. The recent breach of border with Egypt demonstrates that Hamas is willing to risk alienating its major sponsor. Even though Hamas depends on Egypt for all its logistics, it still initiated a major crisis and presented the Egyptians as Israeli collaborators who blockade Gaza. Hamas won’t care about Muslim opposition to Palestinian statehood (Muslim governments depend on the burning Palestinian issue to sublimate the energies of their own radicals, and don’t want a Palestinian state). Someone like Haniyeh or Mashaal would love to go into the annals of Palestinian history as the founder of their state before Israel assassinates him; still, they do not proclaim independence.

Hamas offered Israel long-term truce. Any Muslim who says differently is a liar: Islam positively forbids non-Islamic state in this land, and Muslims may recognize the conquerors only temporarily. Hamas, therefore, offers as much as it can under the Islamic law. Hamas is an honest and, in its own way, decent Islamic organization unlike the Fatah thugs.

Hamas was the first Palestinian organization which tried to enforce order in Gaza, and could succeed – but independent and Fatah-supported militias refused to submit, and Hamas shrunk from civil war in Gaza. Stuck between Israeli sanctions, local militants, and discontent population, Hamas cannot do any better.

Hamas refrained from attacking Israel for long time. The attacks attributed to Hamas are actually perpetrated by Izz ad Din Kassam Brigades loosely connected to Hamas. There is no way Hamas can give an order to Kassam Brigades to stop shelling Israel. Their relations are cooperative rather than hierarchical. The militants have no part in the diplomatic process and naturally resist to be left out of the game; so they enter the game with rockets. The cycle of violence around Gaza is self-perpetuating: minor violence from Gaza, sanctions and reprisals from Israel, more attacks, more sanctions – until it’s hard for everyone to stop.

Israel has no alternative to negotiating with Hamas. Fatah is a bubble. It always was a bubble, a one-man’s operation. Hamas can easily replace assassinated leaders, but Fatah cannot. Short of Abbas, Barghouti, and a handful others Fatah has no popular figures. Palestinians support Hamas as an organization, but Abbas – as an individual leader. Fatah amply demonstrated that it cannot enforce security in the West Bank even with Israel’s help. For some odd reason Israel punishes Gaza (where Hamas tries to end the attacks), but rewards the West Bank (where Fatah payrolls the terrorists).

It is a big question whether Israel needs peace with Palestinian Arabs. But if she does, then we must be talking to Hamas.

Jews believe in the peace for various reasons. Some Jews are plainly self-hating, and just want a trouble for the Jewish state. Others are too tired of war, and just want to close their eyes to see the ivory tower of peace and happy relations between Jews, Egyptians, Iranians and whoever else. Some are primitive rationalists – look at the numbers of Jews in the utopian movements such as the communist one – and believe that every human problem, however immensely complex, can be reduced to a formula, discussed, and settled. Some politicians are crooks who use peace process to fool the masses into electing them. Some, notably the security establishment officials, see clearly that military methods fail to solve the problem, and opt for peace settlement. They just don’t realize that even in mathematics, and surely in social relations, some problems are inherently unsolvable. Or it may be the other way around: the leftist Israeli establishment appoints the brainwashed ultra-leftists for security positions, and naturally they support the hollow peace.

So instead of seeking an immediate solution, which ought to be wrong, Jews must accept the reality of intermittent low-level conflict which would drag on for the foreseeable future. We really don’t know what would happen in a few decades. Improvements in nuclear power generation can devaluate oil, causing immense poverty and hunger in overpopulated Arab countries. Such a scenario would increase the number of desperate terrorists but diminish the threat by impoverished regular Arab armies.

Arabs might get nuclear weapons, and surely leak them to terrorists who might or might not detonate them in Israel. That threat would only increase if peace agreements are signed, as Israel will find it diplomatically hard to preempt against friendly Arabs’ nuclear facilities.

Arabs might breed in Israel to the third of voters, join coalition with Jewish ultra-left and non-Jewish parties, and vote Jewish state out of existence, thus solving the problem of coexistence with Arabs. Or Jews might drive the hostile elements out of Israel.

There are so many unknown variables in the peace process that trying to predict it amounts to nonsense. Some things, however, are easy to understand. The Arabs don’t need peace with Israel: both peace and its absence are fine with them. They don’t need Israel’s assistance and don’t fear her attacks. Peace treaty won’t change the Arab behavior: they will continue supporting anti-Israeli terrorists if only to drain their countries of radicals and won’t entrust Israel to be a vizier of Muslim funds (economic cooperation). The only substantial economic feature that would come out of Israeli-Arab peace is heavy investment by Muslims in the politically sensitive Israeli real estate, the process which is well underway now and only waiting to be legalized.

Arabs, being completely indifferent to the peace process, offer Israel no concessions: Judea and Samaria must be abandoned, Jerusalem divided, and the refugees – compensated, with some of them allowed returning to Israel. That’s not really a peace plan, but an odd demand for capitulation of a victorious power to the defeated aggressors.

Israel, on the contrary, gives way continuously and receives nothing in return. Arabs did not reciprocate the evacuation of Jewish settlements from Gaza, a major step which divided Jewish nation and left a scar for decades. Rather, Arabs intensified their attacks on Israel. Superficially, that applies to Palestinian militants only, but they enjoy support of every major Muslim state: Syria (weapons), Iran (money and training), Egypt (logistics), and Saudi Arabia (money and diplomatic support).

Back in 1972, Sadat offered Israel peace with all Arabs in return for the Sinai and the Golan Heights, with no heed paid to the Palestinian state. Recently, Saudis offered Israel peace with all Arabs in return for Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. Now Israel negotiates with the Palestinians minute details of transferring them Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem without expecting reciprocal peace with Arabs countries. The terms become progressively worse.

But the real peace problem, it’s not without, it’s within Israel. Israeli Arabs form a third of Israel’s young and absolute majority in several regions. The Jewish state now abandons religiously, historically, and strategically important lands to the Palestinian state so as not to be swarmed by two million Arabs living there. Reduced to the nine-mile-wide beachside state, Israel will be swarmed by her own Arabs – who accept no peace process. It is an official policy of the PLO – indeed, a democratic maxim – that the Palestinians will breed to majority in Israel and then vote to unify it with the West Bank Palestine. Moderates among Palestinians proclaim they have no problem with Jews living in the resulting Arab state.

Time solves the insolvable problems. Communism vanished from the book of time, leftist terrorism of 1970s ran to the end, and Islamic terrorism won’t be eternal. Radical ideas do not last long as burning societies fall back into tranquility. The current levels of Palestinian terrorism are artificial, entirely propped by Beilin-Peres policies which brought the defeated PLO from Tunisia to the West Bank, enthroned it, subsidized heavily, and promoted internationally as a peace partner. So a shabby cat felt itself a lion. Palestinians support fighting Israel for two reasons: hope and hopelessness. A hope to prevail, and daily hopelessness of their lives. Both can be solved, by the overwhelming force and emigration, respectively. The Muslim Brotherhood, PLO, Hamas, in turn became political organizations; other guerrillas will follow the same road. Palestinians will always remain hostile to Israel, as Jews took over what the Palestinians think is their land. Such hostility would translate into low-level sabotage, but not a meaningful war.

The peace process lacks a historical precedent. Never did hostile states negotiated peace for decades under fire. Peace never came through negotiations, but only through one side’s defeat. America negotiated with Vietnam for decades, but Vietnam was not at war with America; North Vietnam was at war with the South – and utterly defeated it. So the peace process failed in Vietnam, like elsewhere. Peace process is a leftist fallacy, a primitive rationalist approach to immensely complex problems which in fact can be exhausted, but never solved.

Exhausting the Palestinian problem is easy, and Israel did it with success: behead the national organizations, expel their leaders, everyone of the slightest stance in Palestinian society. No great numbers are involved: ousting a few thousand top members of Fatah, Hamas, and other popular organizations would do. When Israel kept systematically expelling PLO associates in 1960-80s, everything was quiet on our Western Front. Even though the PLO tried ruling Palestine through its Department of Popular Organizations which oversaw everything down to students unions, it was nothing compared to the electrifying fact of Arafat’s presence in the West Bank.
Beilin-Peres clique brought Arafat from Tunisia to the West Bank, literally let the jinn of terrorism out of the bottle. They meant good, they meant Arafat to be their peace puppet. So they were wrong. As usual, societies pay in blood for leftists’ crumbling projects.

The majority of the Netherlands’ population was good to Jews during Holocaust. But the problem is, the Dutch were also good toward their minority who collaborated with Germans. The minority hunted us, and so 75% of Jews were murdered. The majority of Israelis are decent Jews who wish their country well. But unless they stand up to the vicious leftist minority, too few Jews would survive in Israel.