"I don't care about Arafat. Mind you, Arafat has some terrible people around him, like [Tanzim leader Marwan] Barghouti," Hosni Mubarak told Newsweek in 2001. Israel mulls releasing Barghouti and already released scores of Tanzim fighters.
Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967 in response to much lesser Arab terrorism than happens now when Israel relinquishes the territories.
Israel evicted 600,000 Arabs – 30% of Israel’s population - in 1948, but accepts 1.4 million Arabs now when they constitute 34% among the Israeli young.

Israel will continue as a political swinger unless her politicians decide on some basic questions.
Would the Jews accept an Arab majority in Israel? If not, why? Because a Jewish state must be Jewish? Then how Jewish is a state with 34% Arabs and 19% Slavs? How Jewish is the politics of Israel where Rabin and Barak came to power on Arab votes?
How can Jews deal with the Arab demographical problem in Israel? Arabs won’t leave the prosperous Israel voluntarily. They won’t accept Lieberman’s idea of attaching the Galilee Arab enclaves to the Palestinian state. Are the Jews prepared to evict Arabs from Israel to keep our state Jewish? If yes, why not do it now while the Arabs keep breeding? If no, why Israel?
Why establish the Jewish state in Palestine rather than Uganda? Because of the biblical importance? Then how can the Jews give Arabs Judea and cling instead to the beach area of no biblical importance?

If we are prepared to defend a Jewish state in our core lands against the wishes of Westerners and Muslims alike, then driving all Arabs across the Jordan River is our only choice.

American $20 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the sheikhdoms represent a meeting point between corporate greed of military-industrial complex and yet mistaken approach to the Iranian nuclear crisis. Faced with a similar crisis in Cuba, Kennedy started mobilization of the US army even at risk of confronting the Soviets. Bush, already entangled in Iraq and Afghanistan debacles, seeks palliative measures. His newest idea is bankrupting Iran through the arms race. He therefore offers top-of-the-line weapons to Iran’s neighbors. Iran, however, doesn’t fear Saudis or Egyptians. Egypt has no quarrel with Iran whatsoever, and Saudis – Iran knows that – are impotent cowards unable to fight a sandbag, let alone the Shiite empire. American weapons sales reassure Saudis and Egypt, remind them once again that America for some odd reason stands behind them, and they need not fear Iran. But not fearing Iran, they would not oppose its nuclear program. Nor did they oppose it, anyway. Saudis and Egyptians publicly upheld Iran’s right to nuclear technology. Egypt took the Iranian crisis for an opportunity to reinvigorate its own nuclear program and Saudi Arabia reportedly follows the suit. The military power will increase Saudi Arabia’s credentials of Islamist flagship.
America and Russia collectively arm every single enemy of Israel who was silenced with a kickback of $600 million increase in the US military aid. Wait, we don’t need that aid which amounts to 16% of Israel’s defense budget. Rather, we expect our friends not to arm our sworn enemies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt and refrain from spiraling the arms race in our backyard.

Israel cannot sustain arms race with Muslims because dictatorships can funnel larger chunks of their budget into defense spending than a welfare democracy. So far, Israel spends a larger part of her GDP on defense than her enemies, but collectively they spend much more than Israel. Much of Israel’s defense budget is wasted on conscripts while Saudis spend mostly on weapons. Iran and Syria buy relatively cheap Russian weapons and procure considerable stocks while spending less than Israel in the dollar terms. Saudi Arabia financed Pakistani nuclear program, and now receives the nuclear technology feedback. Pakistan reportedly keeps a number of nuclear warheads in Saudi Arabia. After Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Saudi Arabia go nuclear, Israel’s nuclear deterrent will deter no more. Israel will hope for conventional wars where all sides refrain from using nuclear weapons first, but Muslims are irrational. Devoid of the nuclear edge and unable to keep up the arms race, Israel will succumb to Muslim demands. Arabs won’t immediately push the Jews into the sea but rather use them as bargaining chips in dealings with America. Muslim tolerance to a nominally Jewish state is a currency on par with dollar. Unable and unwilling to persevere as a Jewish state, Israel will continue as Middle Eastern democracy, a sort of Mali. Leftists will convince the population that it is okay to abandon Jerusalem to Arabs and forget about Judea. Arabs will have no problem tolerating dhimmi Jews on the Palestinian beach strip and in the Negev desert. Under the cover of ethnic-blind democracy, Israel will allow free migration of Arabs, and Jews will become a minority living in ghettos.

South Africans dealt with their leftists before starting to deal with the Blacks. Israel didn’t eliminate Jewish leftists and will return to dhimmitude rather than instituting soft apartheid on the current South African model.

Totalitarian states rarely lack legal systems. More often, they employ ad hoc law, bending rules to suit the fleeting needs of the rulers. Ad hoc laws break societies, for they make society’s functioning unpredictable. Imagine if a stone sometimes falls to the ground and other times floats in the air, sometimes bread is given free and other times a sky-high price is charged, electrocuting kills some times and heals at others. Law-abiding societies sentence criminals even if they admire or respect them. Robin Hood and Bonnie and Clyde were duly hunted down even though the populations admired them.

Consider the case of Palestinian terrorists whom Israel releases from her jails. Are the inmates enemy fighters, criminals, or victims of Israeli injustice? Israel rejects the last possibility and indeed most of the Palestinian inmates were sentenced for murder, complicity or attempted murder. Foreign relations do not influence criminals’ fate. The only possible legal reason for a prisoners’ release is treating them as enemy fighters.

If the Arab inmates are fighters, then they automatically become war criminals who deliberately targeted civilians. International case law stipulates executing them rather than keeping them in jail or releasing them. No country released convicted war criminals simply upon signing peace with its former enemy, let alone as a gesture of goodwill in preparation for peace talks. The criterion of releasing Palestinian terrorists – “without blood on their hands” – is legally absurd. Failure to commit a crime through arrest is not an extenuating circumstance.

The few Arab inmates who targeted Israeli troops rather than civilians are not war criminals, but prisoners of war. They, however, are not detained as enemy fighters, but sentenced by Israeli courts. Criminal courts have no jurisdiction over POWs – as indeed the Supreme Court recognized when it allowed the government to release Arab prisoners for “political reasons” without judicial consent. If Arab inmates are POWs, then Israeli courts grossly overstepped their jurisdiction by sentencing them, and Israel acted unreasonably by detaining POWs often for decades. Also, jail conditions are way harsher than the international conventions stipulate for POWs.

If the released Arabs are enemy fighters, then Israel is fully at war with the Fatah to which they belong. Absent of a formal cease-fire, Israel must bomb the Fatah-land instead of subsidizing it with tax transfers.

The Israeli government and the leftist Supreme Court blatantly violate the law by releasing Arab terrorists because the ruling establishment does not fear the public or media control, and has positioned itself above the law. As if there is any law in Israel.

The IDF’s lamentations about a shortage of funds and recruits highlight the gross mismanagement in the Israeli army. Originally a lean, daring, highly professional army, today’s IDF combines the worst traits of the American and the Russian militaries: it demands expensive cannons and cheap cannon fodder. Politicized, bureaucratized, and addicted to hyper-expensive, untested American military toys, the IDF seeks to overcome institutional disadvantages with mass and money.

The 1982 and to a larger extent the 2006 Lebanon war marked a shift in the balance of will. Up until then, the Arabs fought grudgingly and the Jews – vehemently. Now the Arabs are ideologically charged while peace propaganda and constant concessions to the Arab enemy have made the Jews reluctant to fight. Still, the conscription figures are remarkably good: the number of outright refuseniks is negligible and only 7% skip the army for medical reasons, many of them legitimately. The society’s morale is so low that 4% of the conscription-age youth are convicted criminals, but there is no problem of draft dodging in Israel.

Most students of religious schools refuse to serve in the IDF. Though anti-Zionist propaganda by ultra-Orthodox rabbis play a major role in their refusal, the IDF alienates religious students by requiring them to serve in mixed secular-religious units. Mixed units do not allow for a religious way of life. The IDF can easily bring yeshiva students into the army by creating strictly religious units without a hint of secularization; that would alleviate the rabbis’ major objection to conscription. Instead, the IDF introduces secular peacenik brainwashing detestable to the normal, let alone to religious, Jews. Add the un-Jewish atmosphere of intimidation of young draftees by their ostensible comrades from rough neighborhoods, and it is a wonder why so few Jews refuse induction.

The IDF spends the available human resources inefficiently. Girls are rarely given meaningful support jobs, let alone combat roles. Arabs can be conscripted for secondary support roles and construction work; let them prove their loyalty to the Jewish state. Reservists receive next to no training during their periodic muster. The available troops waste time in camps instead of using the readily available training grounds in Gaza.

It is impossible to devise an intensive training program 1.5-3 years long. The IDF removes young Jews from studies and productive work, but fails to fill their schedule. The cost of the army draft to Israeli society is incalculable. The draft robs the Israeli economy of people in their most creative age and impedes their propensity for university studies. The IDF has to decrease the infantry draft period to six months at most; an intensive half-year training is more than enough to acquire the necessary skills. Yeshiva students will easier accept a short draft than a years-long service which takes them away from studies.

Snobbish procurement officials prefer US-made gadgets to Israeli weapons. Israel canceled many promising developments and competitive production lines in favor of the American imports. For a mere $2 billion a year in subsidies, Israel re-oriented her military procurement toward America. Worse still, Israel adopted the US model of waging wars: namely, technical abundance. Since WWI, America has conducted its wars with a massive advantage in material supply; Germany, Japan, or Vietnam could not compete with the supply chain of the American military-industrial complex. Israel uncritically accepted the model of ultra-rich America. Though the exact figures of Israel’s military expenditures are unknown, they can be safely estimated at two to three times the official figure of $17 billion if accounting for GDP losses from conscription and other indirect costs. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz similarly estimated the US costs of the Iraqi war at least three times higher than direct budgetary expenditures. For a trillion dollars, every insurgent in Iraq would commit suicide and spare America the war effort. Jews also spend their military budget meaninglessly.

The Navy is great for boosting the egos of the General Staff, but lacks practical application in Israeli wars. Large tank corps were great thirty years ago, but advances in anti-tank rockets have made them too vulnerable, even allowing for the excellent Trophy active defense system. Top-of-the-line US planes in the IAF service lack viable opponents; cheaper Russian or Israeli Kfir planes would do the job as well. In the new wars, enemies will not attack Israel with immense infantry forces because they would fear amassing such forces at the border with Israel. Rather, they will launch hundreds of missiles on Israel simultaneously.

Israel won all her major wars through smartness and advantage in mobile warfare, but there is only so much mobility can do against numbers. The numerically superior Russians defeated the strategically brilliant Germans in WWII. The Arabs vastly outnumber Israel in terms of infantry and armaments. When Islamists come to power in Pakistan, they will further equalize the Arab-Israeli balance of power by providing the Arabs with a nuclear shield. Israel cannot hope to win wars forever, but has to switch to deterring the Arabs. The only credible deterrent is nuclear, and it has nothing to do with conscription.

America lost many lives on Iwo Jima, but ultimately the war with Japan was decided by nuclear weapons. Israel has no option to prevent large wars with Arabs other than announcing the defensive strategy of total nuclear destruction.

The Temple: To rebuild or not to rebuild? The arguments pro are political; the arguments contra – religious.

The book of Leviticus details many doubtful rites for the Temple observance. It was impossible for all Jews to gather in the Temple thrice annually for the major festivals: the journey was too long. Visiting the Temple to slaughter every animal was similarly impractical. Women days after childbirth or unusually strong menstruation could not undertake an arduous trip to the Temple to bring sacrifices. The priests could not slaughter thousands, theoretically even hundreds of thousands of animals during festivals.

Josephus quotes Hecataeus on the original size of the Second Temple as 150 by 50 meters. That size could not accommodate more than a few thousand people during festivals. The shortage of space can be explained in many ways, particularly by the people entering the Temple for a short time only and generally staying outside it, but the size clearly doesn’t provide for the movement of hundreds of thousands of worshippers with sacrificial animals. The Mishna, written within a living memory of the Second Temple, conjectures about the rites and Sanhedrin procedures rather than stating them matter-of-factly.

The major attribute of the Temple’s holiness, the Ark, was absent already from the Second Temple, making it largely devoid of sanctity. The Temple was repeatedly desecrated, the priests were as corrupt then as the rabbinical leaders now, and it is overall hard to expect the Divine Presence to descend into the Holy of Holies. I can’t imagine God being attracted to a golden menorah donated by the Ukrainian magnate Rabinovich. An element of holiness was lost. Or was it? The Bible depicts Jews as prone to paganism then as to atheism now, ancient rulers as evil as Shimon Peres, and prophets as rare as decent rabbis today. The laws of Torah retain their applicability precisely because modern people remain morally similar to their ancestors. Herod the Great of pagan views hardly imagined the Temple as a divine abode, but invested huge efforts into embellishing it. The Diaspora Jews did not bring the Temple sacrifices, but duly remitted a half-shekel or more for the Temple upkeep.

The Temple is a political institution. It asserts the Jewish character of the state, limits the authority of secular rulers, and unifies the Jewish nation. It is not really significant for our purposes whether the Divine Presence would reveal itself to the modern high priest: it is enough that the high priest exists. Israel leans to the left because there is no visible right; most rabbis are no more religious than the average MKs. The Temple, sacrifices, and hereditary priesthood will create enormous pressure for the right end of the Israeli political spectrum, fully offsetting the Kadima - Peace Now – Avodah – Histadrut influence. The Temple will stake the land for the Jews: it’s hard to talk of Arab civil rights when the smoke of sacrifices rises to heaven. Construction of the Temple will necessitate a major nationalist breakthrough: razing the Islamic structures on the Temple Mount. It’s hard to seek peace with Arabs by giving them Judea or the Golan Heights after you just razed the Aqsa.

The Temple will rally the Jews. The lawgiver installed the system of sacrifices to answer the deepest human urge for a clear-cut absolution of guilt. Sacrifices signified an individual’s return to moral purity: repent, restitute, bring sacrifices – and stop worrying about the past transgressions. Don’t be sorry for the sheep: we’ll eat them instead of cows. Sacrifices will reassure the Jews that absolute moral purity exists and is feasible to strive for.

The Temple will provide the sense of Jewish continuity, the connection with ancient roots which the beaches of Tel Aviv utterly lack. The Diaspora Jews will formally unite with Israelis by sending annual contributions to the Temple. The world will see the Jews again as an odd religious crowd rather than secular colonizers of Palestine.

Israel needs a political party with a single goal: rebuilding the Temple. The other goals can be inferred from that one. Let the Supreme Court try to ban the party or the MK ostracize it.

Forget about religion. Rebuild the Temple.

The Ninth of Av mourning is an apotheosis of Jewish hypocrisy. Jews, victorious in six wars against the Arabs, keep praying at the Wailing Wall. Actually, not. It is the Arabs who pray nearby while the victorious Jews wail at the wall. Jews even welcome tourists to see how assiduously the Jews wail. Tourists are banned from Mecca and the insides of the Vatican, are severely restricted from Al Aqsa, but the Jews bring busloads of tourists to watch the Jews wailing.

The Western Wall is a Jewish hall of shame. A shame for the last forty years when we failed to tear down that wall. Jerusalem is ours. The Temple Mount is ours. Jews don’t have to wail at the remains anymore. The forty years were enough to build the real thing, the Temple.

We have won. Get used to it. Israeli victories might not usher in the messianic era, but so long as Jews possess Jerusalem, we should rejoice rather than weep.

The Jews keep praying, "Next year – in Jerusalem!" instead of taking the next flight to Israel. We’re the happiest Jews for the last two thousand years because we securely possess our country, but blind Jewish leaders want to share it with our Arab enemies. We conquered the Temple Mount – the place, you choose it, of immeasurable sanctity or immeasurable national importance – and still wail at the remnants below.

The Israeli government bans Jews from praying at the Temple Mount lest the Arabs be offended. The government missed that we have already offended the Arabs by establishing the Jewish state in their midst and by winning every war they started. Arabs fought us over statehood and over borders; okay, let them fight us over the Temple Mount. In fact, they won’t. Muslims worldwide did not riot when the Jews took over Jerusalem. The Muslims expected the victorious Jews to assert their religious and nationalist jurisdiction over the most important place in the world, and shook their heads in disbelief when Moshe Dayan returned to them the Temple Mount.

Assimilated Israeli leaders resent posing as barbaric religious Jews before their Gentile friends. The Third Temple would embarrass the likes of Olmert: it’s hard to talk peace and modernity in Washington when back in your capital a high priest in golden breastplate burns sheep in the sin offering.

Rabbinical leaders, too, don’t want the Temple. For all the superficial rites they observe, they are atheists. They pushed God from real life into a transcendent realm. Their God is concerned with driving on Sabbath rather than the Temple or the Land of Israel. The rabbis fear government, not God – and concur with the political establishment about Arab control of the Temple Mount, disengagement from Judea, and the Arab presence in Israel. The rabbis ban Jews from the Temple Mount for the fear of desecrating the Holy of Holies’ remains while the Arabs build lavatories there. Just like Pompeius, the high priest of the Third Temple will see the Holy of Holies as an empty room.

If you don’t rebuild the Temple when every possibility to do so exists, stop hypocritically mourning its earlier destruction.

A recent scandal over the Education Ministry approving a textbook for Israeli Arabs which mentions the War of Independence as a catastrophe, highlights the problem of fairness. The textbook, as the Education Minister claimed correctly, fairly presents both the Jewish and the Arab sides of the event. The leftist minister failed to understand a critical thing: we Jews don’t want fairness. Two friends contesting a beautiful girl both of them love dearly – do they think of fairness? Fairness is a concession. People concede to contenders in some matters, expecting reciprocity in other matters. But sometimes, no reciprocity is in sight. A man won’t step back from contesting his darling’s heart because other contenders lack reciprocal offers for him. Fairness is a statistical matter; unique things are above the concept of fairness.

The United States, the most free country on earth, practices eminent domain. The government evicts owners from their real estate property without sufficient compensation (if it were sufficient, they would sell rather than being evicted). Almost every state was formed by displacing the original inhabitants of the land, often by killing them off or forcibly assimilating them.

The Jews, too, need to carve a state for themselves. Not because it is fair: fairness is inapplicable to statehood. Not because the Jews deserve a state: no one does – ask the Basques. Not because Palestinian Arabs lack tribal characteristics: nation or not, they miss their grandparents’ villages and olive trees. The Jews need a state because they want to live in a state.

Masses of citizens slowly kill their states by disregarding civil responsibilities; most don’t even vote. States are formed not by majorities, but by a relatively few zealots who hold the land, independence, and living without strangers as the ultimate values not subject to concessions. Enough Jews desperately want a state of our own, and the Jews won such a state in six wars and scores of conflicts.

Jewish occupation of the land settled by Muslims is not fair to Muslims. Nor is it green. Fairness has as little to do with statehood as color. For all its political correctness, America retains the common sense to avoid indoctrinating its children with the Red Indian side of the story. People in peacetime, especially children, cannot easily grasp the wartime concepts of genocide, rape, and robbery. It would take years for children to understand – and most will never understand – the subtle philosophical basis of morality as intra-group phenomenon, inapplicable – and never applied – in foreign relations. People abandon morality to further their most cherished aims: Juliet broke her parents’ hearts by faking suicide that would bring her to Romeo. All means are good to further national goals, and statehood is the primary national goal.

How bizarre is it to reject fairness? But where did you see fairness recently? Some people are born rich while others live dirt poor. Some are geniuses while most possess mediocre minds. Some are prom queens while others are ugly sheep. Was life fair to the Red Indians? To the Chechens? The Basques? Jews? Arabs?

The world runs a giant affirmative action program for Palestinian Arabs at the Jews’ expense.

In the liberal, effete world murder becomes increasingly unfashionable. People afraid of violence refuse to launch it against enemies. Personal fear leads to a policy of timidity. Cowardice is rationalized by liberalism and non-violence. In the public perception, soldiers descend from being the guardians of freedom to becoming the bottom of society. Like janitors, they deal with necessary but despicable things – and are despised. Politicians pay respect to the military-industrial complex and lavish praises on the army but detest the individual soldiers as oppressors and murderers. Children of political bosses often avoid military service not because of its dangers – they are usually allocated safe positions – but because they detest the lowly job of killing enemies. Ostensibly smart people deal with enemies, do business with them, and sign peace accords. It’s the stupid people who fight. Thus the government doesn’t value soldiers’ lives but readily sacrifices them to score well with the media. The more soldiers die in urban fights with guerrillas, the more humane the government is considered.

It would be all too human to fight the humane government.

There is a saying mistakenly attributed to Churchill: “If you're not Liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not Conservative when you're 35, you have no brain." Israel's traditional Left – not the Peace Now defeatist bunch, but tough kibbutzniks ready to fight and kill for their country – was never liberal in the current sense of embracing one’s enemies. When the pioneers’ children became academics and started asking themselves the questions beginning "Why not?" – the traditional Left started drifting to defeatism. "Why not live with Arabs in the Jewish state?" "Why not give Egypt Sinai?" "Why not allow a Palestinian state in Judea?" "Why not partition Jerusalem?" There is no answer to these question; they are a matter of axioms. Do parallel lines cross in infinity? Does the Land of Israel belong to the Jews?

Socialists – like the Israeli pioneers – were never pacifist. Socialist regimes proved more militant and murderous than their conservative opponents. The Israeli MAPAI left-wing party drove 600,000 Arabs out of Israel and staunchly refused to let them back in. International friendship is alien to the socialist system of values: the USSR was at odds with every capitalist-leaning country, and Israel’s leftist governments crushed the Palestinians without reservations.

If the Israeli Left is so right, why is it nevertheless left? The defining trait of leftism is rationalism: castles in the air can be designed and therefore can be built. Educated European Jews detested the backward religious crowd. The Left’s attitude wasn’t about religion: still in the early 1980s, there was little traffic on Saturdays and nearly no pork consumption in Israel. A well-known feature of the opening hours of Yom Kippur War was empty streets – the society dominated by the Left still adhered to major Jewish rules. Secular Jews sense the religious’ absence of political goals – from a rejection of Zionism to a lukewarm attitude towards the Third Temple – and plain backwardness. People who insist on dressing in centuries-old fashion and observe myriad superstitious rites are hardly a beacon for the nation. Secular Jews, accordingly, proceeded to design and build an ideal society where wolves lay with sheep and Jews dine with Arabs. One thing more pleasant than peace is designing a peaceful society.

The left Jews are perfectly nationalist. “Our state” is a meaningful concept for them. Their utopian state is Jewish although including pet-like Arabs. Jewish left-wingers give Arabs democratic rights so long as Arabs are too few to influence elections. Here lies the problem. In the mid-1980s, Arabs became sufficiently many to influence Israeli elections. The left-wingers subsequently had three choices: to admit themselves as hypocrites who did not really mean to give Arabs democratic rights in a Jewish state, to counter the increase of Arab population, or to put their principles where their mouth is and accept a democratic rather than a Jewish state. The leftists embraced the last two options. They brought half a million Slavs untainted by Jewish blood and a still larger number of Jews untainted by Zionist idea; that relieved the Arab voting pressure temporarily until Barak won the Labor primaries in 2007 on Arab votes. Many left Jews abandoned the concept of a Jewish state and accepted a Middle Eastern democracy where the Arabs influence politics and legislation.

The shift wasn’t painful. If the Jews have no religious goal of governing the Land of Israel, it makes sense to divide jurisdiction with Arabs. If the Jews evaluate their claim to the Land of Israel skeptically, then the Arab claim to the same territory should be entertained. It is only reasonable to split a thing you don’t want desperately with another contender. If you don’t want it desperately enough to kill the contender…

The leftists evaluate the situation: okay, we would love to have a large Jewish state but the land is already settled. Okay, we would love to live in specifically this land, but the landmarks of the biblical saga are not of paramount importance for us. Okay, we would love to live in a state without Arabs but they are already here. The left Jews draw superficially reasonable conclusions: split the contested land, abandon the hot places of antiquated religious importance, and accept Arabs in Israel. None of that works. Jews accept splitting the land, but many Arabs don’t; they want their Palestinian homeland (or Muslim land) back in its entirety. They will fight Israel no matter the concessions. Whatever concessions Israel offers them won’t be enough; Arabs will reciprocate Israeli forced goodwill with force, not goodwill. The more land Israel gives away, the more she emboldens the Arabs. The smaller is Israel’s land plot, the more effort Arabs will invest in that last push to free their land. The good-willing leftists ignore an odd fact: goodwill doesn’t lead to peace. Ask the suffering Lao people.

Nor could the secular Jews give Arabs all the holy places. After giving the Muslims Hebron and the Temple Mount, Israelis discovered what was clear all along: the list of holy places is flexible. Arabs defend every illegally constructed mosque (hundreds in Israel, including huge ones such as in Lod) similarly to Haram ash-Sharif. Every point of confrontation with Jews, however trivial, turns into a religious dispute. Secular careless Jews give way; principled Arabs don’t.

Arabs make good co-workers and mostly decent employees. The Jewish state offered them income opportunities that Arafat threatened to destroy. But what happens when Arab armies push into Israel and the income waves farewell? The Arabs don’t love the Jews, possess no loyalty to a Jewish state, and once the incentives for loyalty are gone, they will stub the Jews. To live with a people having such attitudes is uncomfortable, but left-wingers comfort themselves with the opinion that Arabs are loyal to a strong Israel. Forget for a moment that scores of Israeli Arabs abet Palestinian terrorists and the crowds in the Arab villages in Galilee cheered Hezbollah’s rockets flying at Haifa. Arabs understand the Jews want their loyalty and are ready to pay for it. Arabs keep raising the price tag for their loyalty. They demand the Jews turn a blind eye to illegal construction, criminal syndicates, non-payment for water and electricity, and a black market economy. Through affirmative action, especially in the courts, Israeli Arabs evolved from pets into the masters of Jews.

The leftist Jews want a state without Arabs, but - lacking religious justification or strong nationalism - resent making the Arabs suffer. The leftists hope that Arabs will somehow leave Israel voluntarily. Leftists, however, shied away from Rehavam Ze’evi, who argued for the most voluntary transfer: paying the Arabs to leave. The Left would love the Arabs to leave, but talking about the transfer is racist, right-wing, indecent. The Jews became blind, ethnic-blind. In their enlightened fantasies, leftist Jews imagine a state formed without violence done to the aborigines, a Jewish state which doesn’t displace the Arabs, a state where indigenous Arabs accept Jewish refugees as the dominant group.

Arabs constitute 34% of the Israeli population in the youngest age group. Israeli advocates ingeniously explain how a democratic ethnic-blind state can call itself Jewish, but Arabs don’t buy such explanations. They demand abrogation of formal attributes of inequality: Jewish state, “Jewish soul” in the national anthem, and Jewish star on the national flag. They demand ministerial portfolios including, eventually, a place in the security cabinet which discusses fighting their Arab brethren.

Lincoln remarked, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” Smart leftist Jews cannot fool all the Arabs all the time. The Jewish state is not ethnic-blind. The Jew-only General Staff is not the product of a democracy. A fairy tale of a Jewish state with herds of happy and submissive Arabs won’t work out. Meanwhile, the Jews believed their own lies about happy co-existence in a bi-national state, and tolerate the Arabs.

The Arabs loved Greek culture and knew about democracy. When, however, they wanted a Muslim state, they made Jews dhimmi rather than democratic partners. Rambam noted that what is triune cannot be one; when Jews are distinct and Arabs are distinct, there is no Israeli nation.

A Jewish state cannot afford Arab residents.

Shelling of Sderot highlights an interesting problem nation-states try to forget: absence of large-scale security. Historically, border areas are a trouble zone. Peace agreements were rare; nations mostly coexisted on ad hoc basis, uneasily. Border skirmishes were common. On positive side, borders in constant flux reflected the real-time balance of power. Neighboring states fought the conflicts on small scale, mostly in border areas. Peace agreements changed that situation. Parties adhering to peace promise refrained from exploiting their current military advantages. Discontent and power disparity grew. When the wars finally erupted, they tend to be total. Peace treaties, like other barriers to natural course of events, suppressed many minor problems until they become one big problem. Total wars replaced continuous skirmishes.

Nation-states hate to admit that peace treaties do not bring peace. States are built on the promise of safety for their citizens. City-states amalgamated into nation-states to be more secure – but ended up facing total wars which brew beyond the walls of peace treaties. Modern states heralded the end of the era when every clan stands for itself and every man walks the street armed. States promised security in return for taxes. Sderot shows that promise is false.

Europe licks wounds after the two world wars and the US is more attractive to Mexican laborers than Mexican guerrillas, but most of the world borders are not safe. Border between Iraq and Turkey, Iraq and Iran, Egypt and Sudan, Syria and Lebanon, Abu Dhabi and Oman, Israel and Gaza are transparent to people and weapons. No wonder, Israeli border is also transparent to rockets.
Border areas were always lawless. Rome established pax Romana throughout the civilized world, but Cicero notes that rare person ventured in Roman suburbs for the fear of being killed, robbed. The countries the West arrogantly calls “failed states” are a historical norm. It was unusual for a central power to establish itself in border areas. Mighty Soviet Union exercised next to no control over its Asian and Far East border zones, and America cannot secure its borders with Mexico and Canada. Most states cannot rein in their fringe groups and guerrillas; those who can are a totalitarian aberration and don’t exist for long, since they invariably suppress political opposition alongside guerrillas. Whether Israel reaches peace agreement with Palestinians or not, some of them will continue terrorism. Israeli government presents peace treaty as panacea forgetting that Israel recently sustained terror attacks even from Egypt, a country at peace with Israel and with strong security apparatus.

Carpet-bombing Palestine would solve the problem of terrorism only temporarily. The 1948 war inflicted on Arabs no less suffering than wide-area bombing, but the Palestinians soon returned to terrorism.

Smart states settled border areas with retired legionnaires or militant pioneers; stupid Israel settled them with welfare recipients. Instead of dismantling the settlements, Israel should line up her borders with colonies and give the Jews there a carte blanche for countering Arab terrorists – with punishing raids, if needed.

Israel only needs to arm the settlers and turn a blind eye to their actions.