I do object to returning the territories, but not on religious or ideological grounds. Those grounds are important to me, but I know they are less significant for many other Jews. Returning the territories solves nothing. The Palestinians will fight for Jerusalem, for refugees, for reparations—and eventually for the evacuation of Jews from Israel, and why not? If Israel doesn’t blow up a bus in Ramallah for a bus in Tel Aviv, what precludes the Arabs from employing a cheap and efficient strategy of terrorism that, moreover, boosts their national pride?

Yes, Israel will be a garrison state, and there are no other options. No one knows how long Israel can survive like that, but the eternal Rome has also failed. The goal is to make the current life comfortable, and for that the garrison should rid itself of the enemy within, from Israeli Arabs. Religion is the only reason for Jews to stay in Canaan. Regardless of the inherent anti-Semitism, the Jews are safer in Arizona than in the Negev. Silly as that may sound to modern people, the Jews stay in Canaan because even the atheists among us somewhat believe that we were commanded to take over this land. There is simply no other reason. The Jewish state will continue for as long as divine will will have it. Would it be a century? A two? I don’t know. What is certain, however, is that the Jewish-Arab democracy will kill the Jewish state in thirty years, after the Arabs currently in the 0-9-year age group will dominate Israeli demography - and the Knesset.

Surely, not in the Nazi sense of obsessive hostility to an ethnic group, yet we do.

America has problems only with Islamic fundamentalists, nationalists, and radicals—fringe elements. Most Muslims admire the United States, even if with envy.

Israel has a very different problem with Muslims: a rational dispute over land. With all Muslims. The existence of more than a meager, essentially dhimmi Jewish state in land Muslims consider theirs is a permanent insult to all of them, an actionable insult for many. We don’t have an Arab Problem. We do have a serious problem with Arabs.

Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians is totally different from America’s problems with terrorists. Israel helps America a bit by absorbing some of the hatred and hurts by giving Muslims another pretext for anti-American sentiment.

America’s problems with Islamic terrorists are cultural. Islamists are jealous and, being unable to rise themselves, want to bring America down. Israeli-Muslim conflict, on other hand, is rational. Arabs consider Palestine their land. The Jews came and took it from them. Muslims have no agenda of exterminating the world Jewry, but only driving it out from the Islamic world. America can solve its problems with Muslims by cultural expansion rather than isolationism, and convert Muslims to the Western culture like it converted the Russians. Ideological expansion will not work for Israel; a conflict over rational ends has to be solved by rational means. If Israel wants to take the land other people consider theirs, she must be prepared to use unrestricted force against them.

Superficially there are many types of Judaism and Christianity, often overlapping. For example, there are professedly religious Jews who defy Sabbath and the Christians who observe it. Reformist Judaism follows much of the practices of protestant Christianity. The issue of Jesus’ resurrection is practically insignificant. Suppose for a moment that Jews accepted the resurrection as a historical fact. What next? How does that change our life? Shall we abandon the commandments? No. Jesus told the crowd to do as the Pharisees teach, and that included the Oral Law codified in Talmud. Shall we follow an arbitrary apostolic set of rules? But James only commanded to abstain from blood; he told nothing about murder or stealing. Shall we assume those are not prohibited in Christianity? Shall the rule of positive reciprocity direct us? But how? Good Christians killed good Jews out of love for the fellow Christians. Love everyone is too vague to be practiced. Israel does not live with the Basic Law only, nor does America with the Bill of Rights. People need more detailed instructions. In Judaism, those are the commandments. Small communities of early Christians could abandon the law; their members were close and could love each other, even though Paul’s letters picture discontent communities. After Christianity has expanded, its legists arbitrarily reintroduced some commandments. Christians reject at least one of the Ten Commandments, the Sabbath, but accept the second-tier commandments such as prohibitions on usury and homosexuality.

The real difference between the two religions is practicality. Judaism is practical while Christianity - idealistic. Social teaching of Judaism is based on negative reciprocity, Do not do unto your neighbor what is hateful to you. Christianity enhanced that rule just a bit, and made it impractical. Positive reciprocity, Treat your neighbor as yourself, especially when neighbor means everyone, is unworkable. We cannot feed everyone before sitting down at our meal, nor could we help everyone in dire need before buying non-essential goods for ourselves. Idealism sounds great, but it is not. People who cannot practice rules abandon them. They need to rationalize the failure. The rule of positive reciprocity cannot be imagined wrong, and so they find wrong with it’s the rule’s objects. People not loved become demonized: look, even good Christians are unable to love them. Hatred to aliens is another side of the universal love. Christians cannot love the Jews who reject their teaching; many, therefore, hate the Jews.

Christian idealism caused the Jews many problems. Leftist political idealism of love and good faith settlement with enemies does likewise.

Israel’s struggle against the Palestinians is no struggle at all. Would you say the U.S. struggles with, say, Haiti? No. Quarrels stem only from indecisiveness. We normally mean by struggle a contest between comparable forces. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we have a blind Israeli government that has lost sight of its objectives. They seek neither a Jewish state nor security. Listen to them—all they want is peace, and by peace they mean quiet, a comfy situation acceptable to their foreign sponsors. Who cares that quiet now is a prerequisite for a bloodbath in a decade or two when the non-viable Palestinian state, saturated with international welfare programs and bereft of business opportunities, chooses the only option to preserve its self-esteem—war with Israel? Who cares that accepting the terrorists’ demands now shows them how to deal with Israel in the future? Suicide bombings, an ultimately economical means of war, got the Palestinians a state. Great! Why stop the bombings? Demand the partition of Jerusalem, get the Temple Mount, force Israel to re-admit the third-generation descendants of the 1948 refugees, and exact reparations! The Middle East has never been a safe place. Our only options: short, brutal wars with relatively long peaces between them, or incessant clashes that destroy Israeli morale and economy.

Meir Kahane long argued (and I concur) for divesting from America. Three to five billion dollars in aid is not critical to Israel. If we rejected U.S. aid, we could insist on no subsidies to Arabs, either—and foreign money is critical to them. We could even call for an embargo on arms sales to the Middle East. Israel produces reasonable weapons; the point is not to accumulate more but to stop Arabs from acquiring modern weapons. U.S. aid ties our hands politically and militarily. Since 1948 and, especially, 1956 America has imposed unprofitable armistices on Israel. The Middle East today would be very different had we marched into Cairo or carpet-bombed Tehran. Now instead you have the Islamic Brotherhood definitely coming to power in nuclear Egypt, and nuclear mullahs are not far behind. Last, but perhaps first, is national pride. We shouldn’t depend on aid, absolutely not. We depended on Egypt, and Assyria, and Rome, and Persia before, and lost. Protectors have limited interest in their vassals and turn on them often: consider how very pro-Israel France became very pro-Arab in two decades.

It all comes down to: why be Jewish? If we want a gemütlich, ethnically blind democracy, what are we doing in Canaan? Let’s settle near Boston. I love the place. If, however, we honestly say that the whole point of being Jewish is separation (or isolation, as Rav Kahane translated it), things look different. Israel should not cling to foreign sponsors. She should not accept Arabs in the Knesset; this is a Jewish state with Jewish culture and Jewish laws. Those who want sharia can go to the fifty-two or so Muslim states, and those who want democracy—elsewhere. They are not wrong or bad; Israel is just not the place for them.