Rabbis, when they were real rabbis, maintained that Jews must kill all the inhabitants of the Promised Land during the invasion. Joshua bin Nun allegedly sent three letters to the Canaanite nations before the invasion: Whoever wants to leave, leave; whoever wants to make a treaty of tribute and servitude, make the treaty; whoever wants to fight, fight.

How come? On the face of it, the Torah promises to evict the natives rather than exterminate them. Moreover, it is God who will do the expelling (Exodus 23:27). The last misconception is simple: wherever the Torah speaks of God doing something, it means him working through human agents. Only on a handful of occasions did God resort to outright miracles, and every time they were very short. Thus, God expelling the natives means that he will empower the Jews to do his bidding. That is like the events of 1948: God made Stalin supply us with weapons, but the Jews had to pull the triggers themselves.

The promise of eviction touches on the fundamental question of free will. At every junction, the choice can only be made once; there is no Replay option. God gave the natives the relatively easy choice of moving out, but it was up to them to accept or reject it. Just as in 1948, the natives had to vacate their villages in good order so that Jews could take them over. They couldn’t even take their idols with them, as Jews are commanded to destroy those traces of foreign worship (v.24). Is that just? Definitely. Not in your common sense of human morality, but in the ultimate sense: whatever God has pronounced is just. Genocide, thus, can also be just.

At the time of Deuteronomy, just as they did 3,000 years later, the natives exercised their free will: they said, No. Pharaoh responded similarly to God’s demand to release the Jews; God took away his free will by hardening his heart, so that the pharaoh could suffer the punishment for his prior offenses. The Canaanite nations, on the on the other hand, exercised their free will unhindered, and the time has come for them to suffer the consequences.

“Only from the towns of the nations which Lord your God gives you for inheritance, you shall leave none alive. But you shall cease, cease them” (Deut20:16-17). The commandment can be interpreted in a minimally bloodthirsty manner: evicting the natives leaves none of them alive in our towns and ceases their existence in the land God promised to us. Such a relatively peaceful interpretation, however, flies in the face of the context.

Jewish law distinguishes between two kinds of war: obligatory and voluntary. The obligatory war is fought to conquer the Promised Land and defend it from any enemy, even one who offers a land-for-peace deal (like the Amonites) or merely demands straw and hay. The voluntary war is fought for expansion of the boundaries of the Promised Land. The earlier verses deal with a voluntary war: much of the population, notably newlyweds and cowards, are exempted from military service. Now the Torah spells out the consequences of the enemy’s freedom of choice clearly. He can accept the Jewish offer of peace or fight. The peace deal that normal Jews offered to our enemies would have sent your Temple rabbi running for the Criminal Court in Hague: the surrendering inhabitants had to accept “tribute and servitude.” They could, however, continue pagan worship because these things happened away from the Promised Land; contrary to the liberal tikkun olam nonsense, Jews did not intend to serve as a beacon to nations who could persist in their pagan filth. The Exodus 20:24 commandment to extirpate foreign worship only applies to the Promised Land, not to the entire territory conquered by Jews.

The enemy can also reject the rather illiberal Jewish peace initiative. Upon respecting his freedom of choice, Jews are commanded to slay all adult males and take women and children captive (Deut20:14). Here lies a concept of immense importance: they are not enemies spared out of humanitarian concern, but as a harmless trophy. The defeated enemy’s women and children suddenly became rootless and can be safely assimilated into the Jewish nation. As Moses, the humblest of all people, told Jewish soldiers, “But leave alive for yourself all female children who did not know a man.” (Num31:18) Enemy women and children can be left alive only insofar as they can be distributed among the conquerors, albeit on relatively humane terms of treatment.

Obligatory wars are fought on divine command to purify the land; those wars are critical to Israeli nationhood and religious objectives. Obligatory war has to be harsher on Israel’s enemies than a voluntary war. If all the adult males are killed in voluntary wars, then that is all the more reason for them to be killed—rather than merely evicted—in obligatory wars. Once they have refused the divine command to flee before the Jews, they lose the benefit of the divine offer which allowed them to stay alive. God is merciful to his creatures: the natives are killed so that they don’t compound their sin of opposing God and his people.

Many rabbis take refuge in the list of nations to be exterminated: the Torah lists seven of them, none of which exists today, though some Palestinians claim descent from the Canaanites. Palestinian Arabs, who refused to vacate the divinely established Jewish state, need not be exterminated according to this logic. As a human being educated in atheistic morality, I would be greatly relieved had it really been so. Unfortunately, the list of nations is clearly illustrative. In those days, nations did not exist. People thought on the level of kingdoms, towns, and clans. It is extremely unlikely that any town’s population considered themselves, for example, Canaanites. Deut20:16 is clear: “From the towns of those people which God your Lord gives you for inheritance, leave none alive.” If we constrain this verse to the long-gone nations, then we have to assume that today God gave us no land at all. Indeed, we’re commanded throughout the Torah to take the land of “those nations”—six or seven of them. If the nations don’t exist, Jews have no religious right to take over the land. Nevertheless, the Torah commands us to return from Exile and take over this land (Deut30:5). Thus, the list of particular nations is expendable; Jews must take the towns in the Promised Land from whatever nations happen to have settled them at the time. And when we take the towns, the exterminatory commandment of Deut20:16 kicks in.

Machiavelli agrees: exterminating the natives is the only way for a conqueror to establish himself in the land. If he does not follow the cruel logic of conquest, the natives would become “thorns in his side,” which the Palestinian population has indeed become to Israel.

The Palestinians exercised their freedom of choice in 1948 when they fought the Jewish state. There is no room, accordingly, for the peace process. And in case you think that the Torah is out of sync with modern realities, ask the Native Indians who were exterminated by good Christians arriving from Europe.

Two delusions plague the minds of Jews, even those generally knowledgeable of the Torah: that the commandment to cleanse the Promised Land of its natives applies to the seven ancient nations only, and that they only have to be expelled. The truth is, the commandment tells us to cleanse away any natives, and once they have raised their weapons against Jews they must be exterminated. Many people may not like that, but that is Judaism, like it or not, and everything on the matter can be learned from the opening chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy.

On the surface, Exodus 34:11 says that God will do all the dirty work, “Lo, I’m expelling [the six Canaanite nations] from before you.” Well, the Torah is more religious than us: it attributes all actions to God, whether performed by him directly or through human agents. So Deuteronomy 1:8 clarifies, “Look, I gave you this land, come and conquer it.” God did his part on the grand scale, by spiritually allocating this land to Jews, but we must act in the physical realm.

Jews have no choice in the matter: they must obey the divine command. In the scouts’ episode, Jews refused to enter the Promised Land, fearing the associated fighting. It is a matter of conjecture whether they were punished by staying forty years in Sinai, or allowed to live comfortable lives in Sinai according to their wishes. Whether as punishment or rehabilitation after slavery, they were barred from the Promised Land. God did not differentiate between good and bad Jews: Moses, too, was barred from entering Canaan, and died shortly before the invasion. The shepherd shares his flock’s fate. The concept is of great importance: Jews are chosen and have no right to refuse. In the short term, they can exercise free will and suffer for that, but the next generation will follow the divine orders. Executing the divine will later rather than sooner only increases hardships: after forty years of wanderings in Sinai, Jews became affluent (Deut2:7), and therefore less suitable to warfare than their parents.

Zeal matters. Not only in the account of Pinchas, whose descendants received an eternal blessing of peace for his murder of a high-society interfaith family, but closer to our discussion, too. In Deut2:19, God explicitly bans Jews from taking over the land of Amonites, the descendants of Lot. Nevertheless, Jews eventually ran it over and annexed it to the State of God. Centuries later, the Amonites asked for their land back in return for peace. Not a fan of land-for-peace deals, Judge Yiphtah refused to abandon the “towns of our God,” went to war, and with divine help won. Thousands of years before Stephen Decatur, God viewed the Jews as “my people, right or wrong.” In sticking to the right, Jews need not fear being carried away by their zeal.

Jews must act preemptively, unprovoked, even against peaceful natives. Deut2:24, “Look, I gave Sihon, the king of Heshbon the Amorite, and his land into your hand—start the conquest. And launch a military campaign against him.” The land was unquestionably Sihon’s; God confirmed it to be his land. The Amorites may not have been righteous, but they were right in the civil sense. In the Jewish war to conquer the Promised Land civil matters are unimportant. European settlers in America, too, ignored civil rights when they dispossessed and eliminated the Native Indians. Most states were formed in such a fashion. The Jews must start a war: the Torah has no qualms that they are offenders of peace.

The lesson is tremendous: in the quest for the Promised Land, Jews must disregard every civic notion: breach peace, evict the rightful owners of the land, and kill them. Perhaps the times have changed, and what was normal for the ancients is hateful today? Wrong. Not only does the continuation of the Torah, given thousands years ago, presume that its object, a society, remains the same, but murder was always murder. We need not dwell on Greek tragedies extolling virtues similar to the modern leftist press. Consider Numbers 31:15, in which Moses, “the humblest of all men,” fumes at the Jewish militia returning from a campaign against the Midians, “Did you leave females alive?” The Jews were perfectly able to recognize the killing of prisoners, especially women and children, as murder, so they left them alive—but Moshe overrode them. Acting on the divine authority (v.2), he instructed Jews, including the Levitical priests, to murder male children and widowed women (v.17).

The Rabbis taught: when someone extols the divine mercy expressed in the commandment to avoid killing the bird while taking eggs from its nest, we shut him up. If he extols the commandments as merciful, what would he do when faced with a horribly cruel, exterminatory commandment? All commandments are of absolute authority, all are closed to questioning, and all are above human morality.

Back to Sihon. Moses had no trouble relying on the divine commission (v.26). He entreated Sihon to give the Jews the right of peaceful passage, which the Jews needed in order to attack unsuspecting Heshbonites. Not being stupid, Sihon refused, giving Moses the excuse he needed to attack him. God approved of Moses’ artful plan, for he “hardened the heart of Sihon,” making him refuse Moses’ fake offer of peace (v.30).

And here the exile option ends. After Sihon went to battle with the invading Jews (v.32), Moses relates proudly, they exterminated men, women, and children in all of his towns, leaving not a single human being alive (v.34). Lest we think that that was an exception, the Torah continues with a similar account of King Og of Bashan (3:6). Here, God uses the genocide in Heshbon as a proper example: “Do unto him like you have done to Sihon.” (3:2)

Needless to say, Jews robbed their enemies (3:7), which is why the occasional IDF investigations of marauders are so ridiculous—Jewish soldiers are religiously entitled to the booty, it is not up to us to decide.

A big question is, why did God harden the hearts of the natives so that they opposed us and we had to exterminate rather than expel them? Probably for the same reason he hardened Pharaoh’s heart: to punish him for previous transgressions. The difference between exile and extermination reveals the straightforward divine logic of “my people, right or wrong”: after a nation takes up arms against his people, it loses the divine entitlement to life. Moses recognized that logic when exhorting Yehoshua bin Nun: “You see what Lord your God did to those two kings… Lord your God, he fights the battle for you” (3:21-22). Atheist Jews might find respite in the fact that they are not alone: Krishna said similar things to Arjuna before the battle in which Arjuna had to kill a multitude of his relatives; so much for pacifist Hinduism.

In the same verse, the Torah bridges the gap between past and present, “The same things God will do to all kingdoms where you come.”

The situation started to change with the Nazis’ rise to power. Arguably, it might have changed anyway, as the Jews matured and became moderate. Be that as it may, in real history the change began with the Nazis.

In repressions against Jews in Germany, Zionists saw a great opportunity to further their emigration to Palestine. Importantly for the fledgling Jewish Agency, the new immigrants were generally affluent, which also sat well with the British occupiers. German Jews were normally able to amass the minimal amount required to qualify them for “capitalist” visas. Assimilationist Jews who wished to stay in the Diaspora screamed treason. Rabbi Stephen Wise tried to organize a worldwide boycott of Nazi Germany, but the Zionists frustrated his plans: they felt they had to use the opportunity to bring many more Jews to the Land of Israel, rather than protect them in the Exile. The argument was cynical but true. Zionists also pointed out that Wise’s boycott would greatly endanger German Jews, as indeed happened. For Wise, too, the boycott was largely a political thing. Later events showed how little that American rabbinical leader cared about Jews; he lashed out against Hillel Kook and refused to put any pressure on the US Administration to bomb the death camps. In all probability, Wise’s boycott attempt was one of Roosevelt’s ploys against Germany.

Zhabotinsky’s Revisionist Movement was torn between the desire to increase the flow of Jews to Palestine and the traditional right-wing goal of protecting them in the Exile. Zhabotinsky, a witness to Ukrainian and Byelorussian pogroms at the turn of the twentieth century, could not abandon the German Jews. The Nazis tolerated Betar training camps because their ultimate goal was ridding Germany of Jews. In the end, Zhabotinsky nominally divested from German Betar to avoid endangering it in his own boycott activities.

For mainstream Zionists, the year 1933 started a windfall of haavara, an exchange in which Germany allowed its Jews to leave for Palestine with large amounts of money and possessions. Short of foreign exchange, the Germans devised a solution acceptable to the Zionists: the departing German Jews would pay for local goods with deutschmarks; the goods would be then exported to Palestine, where Zionist enterprises would sell them and pay the arriving immigrants. The solution was a win-win one: Germany rid itself of some Jews, and the Jewish Agency received about a 35 percent profit on the transactions. Unbeknownst to German Jews at that time, they also profited handsomely—by having their lives saved. Still, only about a tenth of German Jews moved to Palestine.

They were unlike those who had come before. The religious Jewish immigrants were not hugely productive but highly charged ideologically. Zionist immigrants were not religious but hugely productive. German Jews (yekkes) were neither. Like most of the 1990s Russian aliyah, the yekkes were fleeing domestic troubles rather than ascending to the Land of Israel. The assimilated mob hardly even associated itself with Jews, and not at all with Zionists. Many expected to return to Germany after the Nazis’ rule was over. In the haavara scheme, Zionists played with the devil and lost: German Jewish immigrants amalgamated into a powerful anti-Zionist force. They spoke German, scorned the redneck Palestinian Jewish culture, ignored religion, and snobbishly viewed themselves as Europeans in an Asiatic land. Common Jews answered them in kind, and the alienation grew. Detested and scornful, German Jews were the Peace Now of that time.

Lacking Zionist ideals, the cosmopolitan yekkes became the major voice behind the idea of a binational state, or even Jewish autonomy under British rule. They advocated peaceful solutions and accommodation of Arabs. The German Jews were remarkably pacifist as a matter of law-obedience. They had an aversion to mob violence, and they suffered from guilt. They lived under the tremendous guilt of “the drowned and the saved.” They could not forget that the immigration certificates handed to them were refused to others, who subsequently perished. By helping the Arabs, they mitigated their failure to help European Jews

The British occupiers turned the Jewish Agency (Sohnut) into a Judenrat. The British issued to the Sohnut a limited number of immigration permits, which it distributed at its own discretion. In effect, the British made Jews to perform selektzia, choosing between life and death for their compatriots. The Sohnut acted sometimes cynically, other times sensibly or desperately. It distributed visas to Palestine among its socialist supporters and to young people with agricultural training. But before Germany occupied Poland in 1939, Sohnut passed half its visas to German Jews who, at 500,000, were just 17 percent of the total number of Jews in Poland. Naturally, the Jewish Agency thought the German Jews were in more immediate danger than the Polish ones. The yekkes, accordingly, lived with the knowledge that they had received their visas as a matter of Sohnut’s misjudgment, even though they weren’t qualified by age and profession.

Many German Jews who came to Palestine did not have a trade or means to secure productive employment. Nor did they want one, as they viewed redneck Jews with disdain. Later, the Israeli “cultural elite” became infected with this attitude.

When the Jewish state had been formed, the yekkes were the only educated class. Automatically, they became academics, media professionals, and judges. They imprinted German values on their students. Those were the extremely nihilist values of the most assimilated Jewish community of the time. If God had a purpose in the Holocaust, it could only have been stopping the assimilation, preventing that plague from coming to the Land of Israel, just as a generation of the Exile had to die in the desert. That purpose had failed, as yekkes exerted disproportionate, overwhelming influence over the Israeli educated class.

Politically, the Germanized court system received a major boost when Herut-Likud first came to power thirty years ago. Socialists recognized that the changing Israeli demographics would spell an end to their dominance: Sephardic Jews had bitter personal experience with Arabs and would vote for right-wing parties. Here came the Supreme Court option: if the court elects its own members, it becomes completely insulated from the changes in public opinion—and incidentally, from Zionism too. Common Israelis may vote for whomever they like, but in the end the Supreme Court would control legislation—striking down some laws, ammending others still in the Knesset by informing MKs of the court’s opinion—and dictate new laws in the court’s decisions. The Supreme Court has even assumed executive power by ruling on the army’s actions, the route of the separation barrier, and myriad other issues, which amounted to its managing the country.

Short of simply shooting the traitors, Justice Minister Friedmann’s battle to have the Knesset appoint judges was the next best thing.

Jewish law was meant to put an end to superfluous pagan religious laws, with their myriad deities and complicated rites. The Torah leaves a lot to the people’s discretion for a reason: that they keep thinking about the law, and have no trouble practicing it.

Rabbis began constructing a “fence around the law,” bringing up additional prohibitions to preclude inadvertent violations of major commandments when the Jews went into the Exile. Now that the Exile has ended, the concept of the fence has become irrelevant and highly counterproductive, as it drives Jews away from Judaism, whose rules are actually simple and straightforward.

Jacob bribed Esau with, among other things, milking camels. Jewish tradition asserts that the forefathers accepted the yoke of the commandments before Moses received them on the Sinai. That is, Jacob did not imagine that the prohibition of non-kosher meats precluded him from drinking camel’s milk (camels are a non-kosher animal). Non-kosher animals—just like the equally-unsuitable-for-food human beings—enjoy great protection in Judaism. We refrain from eating them out of respect for their lives rather than because of their uncleanness (humans are clean, but we’re not cannibals). Just as it is permissible to hire (but not eat) humans, it is also permissible to work, shear, milk or otherwise use non-kosher animals—anything short of killing them. Jewish children can play with pigs by the same logic which allowed Jacob’s household to drink camel milk.

By proclaiming some milk non-kosher, the rabbis created the problem of kosher milk. They require supervision to make sure that the cow’s milk is not mixed with horse or camel milk. If ever there were a far-fetched fear, this is truly the one.

Jewish children drink the milk of their non-kosher mothers for food, and can likewise consume the milk of other non-kosher animals. An obvious rejoinder is that children do not have to observe the commandments. But breast-feeding requires the participation of a Jewish adult; either all Jewish mothers grossly transgress by offering their non-kosher milk, or kosher laws don’t apply to milk. And indeed, Rashi says that kashrut is only applicable to meat, not to any other animal parts or products.

The meat-milk prohibition refers, according to Maimonides, to a pagan rite of boiling a young goat in its mother’s milk. He noted that the prohibition is in the section dealing with pagan practices rather than dietary laws. The meat-milk ban had nothing to do with food in the first place.

Rabbis expanded the meat-milk issue to avoid inadvertent violations. Boiling other meat in milk was originally prohibited because goat meat could theoretically be sold as beef. By such reasoning, all meat should be prohibited: what if someone is selling pork as beef? Inadvertent violations are not sinful, and the problem of fake beef is not urgent in our days of kosher supermarkets.

Chicken-milk combinations were banned lest someone see you eating chicken with cheese and think you were consuming a cheeseburger. By the same reasoning, you should not go out with your wife, lest someone think she’s your neighbor’s fiancée. Someone could see you eating a beef burger and think it is pork—that’s no reason to become a vegetarian. “They-might-think” reasoning is irrelevant at home: obviously, your wife knows she didn’t cook a goat in its milk. The absurdity is underscored by the fact that cheeseburger itself is not prohibited: it is beef rather than goat meat or veal, and it is not boiled in milk, as the Torah is careful to specify.

Rabbis advance yet another argument: self-imposed restrictions show our love to God, our willingness to go an extra mile. But do they read his mind? Why presume that he would like us to expand his prohibitions? The government limits driving speed to 65 miles per hour; would anyone show his patriotism by driving 20 mph?

I doubt your wife would interpret certain self-imposed restrictions as a sign of love. Why imagine that God wants more restrictions of us? He who created the animals and had the man name them to establish dominance would probably love us to eat meat in various forms. It is not even nice, let alone justified, to reject them. We’re explicitly commanded to enjoy the meat of our sacrifices. Judaism is not a monastic perversion but a religion of joy in that holiest place, the World Created.

The path of expanding prohibitions is arbitrary and precarious. There are prohibitions regarding various forms of incest. Should we expand them to the remote, even the seventh-degree kin out of love for God? Or take food: Through kosher laws, God banned all animals for food and only made a permissive exception for four animals. Here his intent to limit animal slaughter is manifestly clear. Should we all become vegetarians? Foreseeing our questions, the Torah enjoins us from subtracting from the laws—but also from adding to them.

“There are enough prohibitions in the Torah for you to invent new ones,” says the Talmud. The Torah’s laws are foremost practical. The laws are so easy that the nomadic Hebrews observed them in Sinai. Some commandments interpret the others: thus, the prohibition of homosexuality is consequential to “You shall not commit adultery.” It is sensible, therefore, to interpret commandments in the Oral Law—but not violate the commandments’ plain sense.

On one hand, the sages pronounced correctly that no word or letter in the Torah is superfluous. On the other hand, rabbis disregard the wording. The Torah says, “You shall not boil a kid in his mother’s milk.” “Boil”—not cook in any other fashion; a cheeseburger is okay. A specific prohibition of boiling makes perfect sense in the context of the pagan rite.

Another fixed point is “his mother’s.” That might be remotely interpreted as “someone of his kin,” just as “your fathers” refers to ancestors generally; but it cannot possibly be read as “any milk.” The Torah does not prohibit boiling a goat kid in cow’s milk.

There is some latitude in understanding the word gdi, kid. In the Tanakh, gdi never certainly means any other animal besides goats. In particular, a gdiah is a she-goat. Commentators assert ex nihilo that gdi can also mean lamb, but that’s unlikely, given that there are other words for she-lamb (rchl) and lamb (seh). Even if gdi means lamb, the two points are clear: gdi means only a young animal and never a calf. In many contexts, gdi is taken from herd; there were no herds of cows in the ancient Middle East. The most inclusive reading of the commandment prohibits boiling a young lamb or goat in, respectively, sheep or goat milk. The commandment is simple and unobtrusive; the balance is made by rabbis.

Consider the gap between Torah and halacha. Boiling a young goat in goat milk was extended to cows, then birds (chicken), then any mode of cooking, then any contact, then any food which includes chicken or milk, then dishes which were used to serve milk or meat, then storage, then sinks, then eateries—and now we have separate meat and dairy kosher restaurants.

Without a doubt, Israel will give away the Golan Heights. Despite the brouhaha over their annexation, no prime minister has ever seriously believed that Syria would sign peace with Israel without the Golans. It is not that the heights are that important for Syria—it only possessed them from 1929 to 1967. Rather, peace is unimportant for it. Unlike Israel, Syria does not regard a peace treaty as a stand-alone prize. For a major concession—diplomatic recognition of a Jewish state in what it sees as Greater Syria’s land—the Syrians want a tangible payoff, at least the Golan Heights and Lake Kineret. The Syrians won’t budge on their demands for a simple reason: they don’t need a peace treaty. Unlike the odd Jews who keep imploring for peace after winning three major wars and scores of proxy confrontations, the Syrians are in no rush for peace. Israel is full of crazies who keep pushing the government to sign peace with Syria, but no politician in Syria pushes for peace. When the balance of want is on the Israeli side, it is not surprising that Israel pays the price.

Just how high is the price? Not critical, by any rational measure. Of course, we cannot trust Syrian promises to demilitarize the Golan Heights. Nothing precludes Syria from changing its mind after signing the peace treaty, and Israel won’t be able to do anything about it. The world would not support Israel in breaking the peace treaty if we attacked Syria over re-militarizing the heights, just like the world stood idle over the re-militarization of Rhineland, or Sinai in 1967. Rationalist thought is primitive: it looks at the final act rather than the complex chain of actions that led to it. By attacking Syria over the re-militarization of the Golans, Israel will be branded an enemy of peace, just as the world branded us when we preempted in 1967. Syria, like Egypt in 1967, would be scolded at most for violating a treaty.

On the other hand, the Syrian militarization of the Golan Heights is not a significant threat to Israel. We would know all the installations there and would be able to destroy them in the opening minutes of a war. Terrorist shootings would be unlikely: Syria has no history of staging terrorist attacks against Israel from its own territory, but only through intermediaries. The loss of the early warning stations would be painful, but something like the American X-band radar in the Negev would compensate for the loss.

The only reason to object to returning the Golan Heights and giving away half of Lake Kineret is irrational, though irrationality makes it no less real. The loss would be extremely painful to Israeli morale. Sinai has been ours for only twelve years, and very few Israelis have ventured there. Gaza, Judea, and Samaria are important only to a right-wing minority. The Golan Heights’ case is entirely different: the land has been with us for more than four decades. It is a perfectly “leftist” place, where even peace junkies from Tel Aviv go to ski and trek. It is a towering landmark, not like the jerkwater sand dunes of Gaza. Three generations of Israelis have grown up with a firm understanding that the Golan Heights are “ours.” Abandoning the heights would deal an across-the-board blow to Israeli nationalism, tearing at the conscience of the right and left alike. And for nothing. Begin, at least, gave up Sinai to stop major wars. That was a crime, a strategic stupidity, an act of treason—but sensible nonetheless. No comparable excuse exists in the case of Syria, which cannot fight Israel even with Iranian support.

A similar situation holds for the Palestinians. Their leaders have climbed a high tree by demanding Jerusalem, the Temple Mount, and 100 percent of Judea and Samaria. Unless an exceptionally popular wise leader or an exceptionally strong authoritarian ruler arises, no Palestinian politician can climb down from that tree. Israeli politicians have known the terms since the Oslo negotiations, and only keep postponing the discussion. Unless we plan to annex the territories and expel the natives, there is no basis for a peace treaty with the Palestinians, short of giving in to their demands. Like Syrians, they enjoy the status quo. Palestinians have sovereign rights without sovereign obligations. They do not have to feed themselves, but thrive on international aid and massive theft from Israel. They do not need to guard their borders or crack down on their militants—their Israeli enemy does it for them. They enjoy unhindered control over most of Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem, and practically possess the Temple Mount. At the same time, they remain at the forefront of international attention through their conflict with their Jewish occupiers. Life is good for them. If they are to sign peace treaty and fall into obscurity, it must offer them improvements over their current situation.

First, the West Bank Palestinians want to avoid being swarmed by refugees. Jewish distaste for the Palestinian residents of refugee camps is nothing like the hatred other Palestinians feel toward them. When Sharon tried to dissolve the Gazan criminal enterprise by resettling some refugees in the West Bank, local villagers drove them out. A million and a half refugees cannot be absorbed into West Bank society. Even if UNRWA builds them new camps there, there still would not be enough jobs—nor could they take any jobs after having lived on foreign aid for four generations. So the Palestinians insist on resettling their refugees elsewhere.

Nor can the Palestinians accept any compromise on Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. Why would they give up their control over those places? If we Jews want a peace treaty with a defeated terrorist no-nation, then paying for it with our holiest place is the only option. The move is not unthinkable. Far from it, it is silently accepted by every Israeli politician of note. The demagogs procrastinate because they do not want to go down in history as having abandoned Jerusalem to Palestinian Arabs. Is giving away places so important to Jews impossible? Not at all. Israel gave away Hebron with its Cave of the Patriarchs—a site holier than the Western Wall, a mere support structure. Schem with its Joseph Tomb, and Bethlehem, with the Tomb of Rachel—they are in Palestinian hands. Sinai, with its Mount Horev, where Jews received the law, was returned to Egypt. In practical terms, Sinai’s oil wells and Gaza’s gas field are no less important than any district of Jerusalem—yet they were given away. And what is so important for Jews about Jerusalem’s Arab districts? There is no question that short of expelling the Arabs, we’re better off divesting from their villages and refugee camps, which are foolishly attached to Jerusalem municipality. It is better to have them behind the wall than in our capital; cheaper, too.

Qualms about partitioning the Old City smell of missed history classes in secondary school. The Old City is not old—it is an Ottoman structure. Its walls are laid out arbitrarily, with no connection to the city’s ancient borders. If antiquity is of any importance, then yes, Israel must uproot the entire Arab quarters—Jewish, too—and dig for the First Temple’s layer. Unfortunately, only the layer is to be found there, not the Temple.

As for the Temple Mount, we’re better off giving it away. That seems counter-intuitive, yes, but it is true. It is a lesser sin for Jews to give it away than to refuse to build the Third Temple there. The rabbis who wait for the supernaturally built temple and ban Jews from ascending the mount will also sigh with relief once the place is out of our reach.

Israel does not need peace treaties with Syria or the Palestinians. Such treaties harm the Jews greatly while offering no corresponding advantage. If, however, the decision to sign them is made, the government should not kill the nation with the death of a thousand cuts. Do it quickly.

The ayatollahs’ regime is crumbling, but at the same time it is taking over other states: Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and Sudan. In Egypt, too, Iranian influence is rising. It remains unknown whether the Iranian satellite regimes will become viable before the ayatollahs lose their power. Hamas operated for many years without Iranian assistance before Israel assassinated the fiercely independent Sheikh Yassin, and Hezbollah also proved capable of surviving by selling drugs and low-level money counterfeiting.

In any entropic system, the overall trend is toward moderation, and we would expect the Middle East to moderate just as Europe did. On other hand, there will be many pangs on the road to moderation, and even Europe is arguably still capable of producing violent outbursts.

The price of oil is in the $70 range, which spells trouble for Arab economies. Oil is the only thing that differentiates them from African paupers, but when the price reaches $60–70 alternative fuels become attractive and start replacing oil. Additionally, increased fuel efficiency will decrease the long-term demand for oil as older, fuel-hungry cars break down and retire. The oil consumption boom in India and China may not spell riches for the Arabs, as Russia is a more likely supplier, the worldwide crisis has set back developing economies considerably, and their fuel-efficient micro-cars are not like the Buicks of the American baby-boomer generation. Faced with politically motivated interruptions of the gas supply from Russia and Iran, Western European countries avidly seek alternative energy sources.

Most importantly, oil and gas cannot beat the overall trend of the Arab world’s declining share of natural resources in the world’s GDP. Even as Arab oil income is rising, it is falling in relative terms; Arab economies continue to shrink compared to Western ones. Oil buys the Arabs progressively less Western weapons and corporate shares. The dwindling of their oil income is particularly painful on the background of exploding Muslim populations and their ever-increasing demands for welfare. Rural populations stream into cities where they get used to welfare. The increased political awareness of the population requires the unpopular governments to continuously increase welfare allocations in order to buy compliance.

Economic troubles won’t preclude the Arabs from developing high-ticket nuclear weapons as the development became cheaper due to the proliferation of nuclear technology. Iran won’t become so poor as to be unable to spare a few hundred million dollars per year for subversive movements in other countries. If Israel’s nuclear deterrence holds, and wars are limited to conventional weapons, the economic downturn will preclude Muslims from maintaining capable armies, and diminish the chances of a large-scale war. On other hand, cash-strapped Iran waged a Chinese-style war with Iraq, in which the ayatollahs relied on insufficiently equipped but suicidally-minded soldiers. Though primitive mass armies might fight wars between Arab states, there is little chance of a similar attack on Israel: Egypt, potentially a Muslim Brotherhood country, cannot march its troops across the vast Sinai desert to attack Tel Aviv; Hezbollah cannot amass that many suicidal soldiers in laid-back Lebanon, and Syrians are very far removed from the level of religious indoctrination necessary to push them by the millions over the Golan Heights into Israeli population centers.

Whatever is the long-term trend, in the short term Israel’s enemies will become more radical. Iran is besieging Israel from almost all sides: Hamas is dependent on it for weapons, Hezbollah for money, Assad is just in love with the ayatollahs, and Egyptian radical groups have developed substantial ties with them. Bringing democracy to Lebanon and the Palestinian territories dealt a mortal blow to moderates: now they cannot brutally suppress their radical opponents and must compete with them in elections. Abbas cannot afford to be seen as less anti-Israeli than Hamas. He lacks Hamas’s credibility, which was won by unrelenting struggle against the Zionists and which can justify compromises. Abbas therefore cannot agree to any concessions whatsoever, ever the minor territorial exchanges that Olmert offered him. Even if Abbas signs a deal with Israel, even if he pushes it through his corrupt PLO Council, Hamas and PIJ won’t accept the deal—and it is only their acceptance which matters in terms of ending terrorism. Fatah’s younger terrorists of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades and Tanzim cannot look inferior to Hamas, and would join it in rejecting a deal with Israel—unless Israel cedes the Temple Mount to the Palestinians and allows potentially millions of refugees to return. Israel’s crackdown on Hamas in Gaza created a situation in which the terrorist group’s Syrian leadership became its international mouthpiece, and with Iranian help, the financier. Heavily dependent on Iran, and lacking independently minded leaders of Sheikh Yassin’s caliber, Hamas cannot be made to change its rejectionist stance any time soon—not until the ayatollahs’ regime falls down.

In Lebanon, Hezbollah has to remain militant. The terrorist group has developed a reasonably sophisticated military wing, but has no civilian agenda. In peacetime, when the Shiites do not need its protection from Israelis, Palestinians, or local Christians, Hezbollah has no platform with which to attract voters. Even though Lebanon slipped toward Islamization after much of its middle-class Christian population emigrated, the country is still far removed in its religious fervor from the Shah’s Iran. There are no significant centers of Islamic studies in Lebanon such as were available in Iran. Despite the influence exerted by armed fundamentalists, Lebanon remains a secular country. That, however, is not a guarantee against a Hezbollah takeover. The terrorist group has built a parliamentary bloc of over 30 percent, amassed significant arsenals, and infiltrated the US-backed Lebanese army, thus credibly positioning itself for a putsch.

Many revolutionaries have faced dilemmas similar to the Hezbollah’s: once they come to power, they have to enforce their values on society or they will quickly disappear in political competition. The Bolsheviks and ayatollahs imposed their values upon their respective societies, but Hezbollah stands very little chance of repeating their ugly successes. It is inconceivable that Lebanese Christians, Druze, Sunnis, and atheists would accept Hezbollah’s fervent religiosity or pan-Islamic patriotism. Hezbollah’s only option if it wishes to remain a prominent force is to continue its militancy. Judging by its tremendous military buildup in the absence of Israeli designs on Lebanon, the terrorist group clearly aims to take the fight into the Galilee, first to liberate former Shiite villages, then to return the refugees, and finally to help the Palestinians regain their entire country.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood might take power in transparent elections, or through riots if the central power is weakened; the first scenario is more likely. The Brotherhood will renounce the peace treaty with Israel, or at least circumvent it with extensive aid to Palestinian terrorists.

In Syria, young Assad is an admirer of Hezbollah and Iran. Less pragmatic than his late father, he is also smarter and more daring. It might be possible to woo Assad away from Iran with strong economic incentives, but such support must be unequivocal. The low-level American messengers who demand much, offer little, and provide no guarantees cannot induce Assad to abandon Iran. Assad became even less likely to embrace the United States after the Russians offered extensive military cooperation. That situation would only change if Iran were to prove unable to finance Syrian-Russian deals and the Russians refused free goodies to Syria. Israel can achieve peace with Syria in exchange for the Golan Heights, but that peace would be different from normalization. No agreement would prevent Assad from sponsoring Hamas, PIJ, and Hezbollah. Since the Americans have pushed him out of Lebanon, Assad cannot abandon Hezbollah, his major arm there. Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon assured still closer links with Hezbollah: while his father had allowed only Iranian shipments to reach the terrorist group, and even stopped them on occasion, young Assad delivered to Hezbollah Syria’s own Russian-made weapons.

No one is willing to fight a war. Syria stands no chance against Israel. As for the guerrillas, a large-scale confrontation would turn them from an efficient terrorist force into an inept army. It took Khomeini’s persuasion to churn out tens of thousands of suicidal soldiers; Hamas and Hezbollah cannot scramble more than a handful of martyrs who only inflict statistically minor damage on Israel. The state of extreme hostility will persist, ruptured occasionally by violent outbreaks.

The peace process solves nothing.

There was a continuous intermingling between Jews and Midians. Some Midians lived among Jews and were so intimate that Moses refused to let them go, lest they reveal significant military information to enemies. Many Jewish men had relations with Midian women, prompting Pinchas to assassinate one of them along with his Midian wife. Pinchas’ action, the murder of a nice interfaith family, earned him eternal blessing from God himself.

The genocide of the Midians is traditionally thought to be Moses’ last earthly assignment, though “you would join your peoples” can be taken literally as a permission to leave the Israelites. Whatever the case, why were the Midians singled out for prosecution? By this time, Jews had plenty of violent enemies, and the Midians were friendly to the point of readiness to intermingle. It is this intermingling that the Jews were commanded to avenge. Not surprisingly, the genocide was made Moses’ business: he had started interfaith relations with Midians by marrying Zipporah, and he had to expiate his sin by killing his unsuspecting relatives. The sin of interfaith marriage was great: when Moses did not abandon his pagan wife immediately after hearing God speaking from the burning bush, God sought to kill him in desert, and savvy Zipporah averted divine wrath by circumcising their child.

Hebrews, a deeply polygamous society, inherently lacked enough Jewish wives and therefore often intermarried. Like Moses, many Hebrews had married Midianites. The solution was found in genocide: once all other Midianites were exterminated, those who had married Jews automatically became rootless and honestly embraced Jewishness as their only possible identity.

The transgression was Jewish, so why kill the Midians? Here lies a concept of immense importance for modern Israel: God doesn’t expect Jews to be perfect. Other nations are exterminated for their transgressions, but not Jews. The Torah is explicit that the Canaanites lost their land because of their transgressions, but Jews would return there after having been dispersed. The Exile has ended and Israel reestablished not because of Jews’ merits—we don’t merit that much—but only because God has a purpose for Jews. We’re his instrument, experimental mice if you wish. He realizes his divine plans through us. Whatever happens to our enemies is not for our sake, but for his. On that, I believe, Satmar is wrong: even ruled by crooks and socialists, Israel is not an accident, but a part of the divine plan laid out in prophecies.

Back to the expedition against the Midians. It was so important that even Levites joined it. The participation of Levites indicates that the affair was a slam-dunk one—Hebrews did not normally risk their priests. The fighting was lopsided: the Jews numbered more than 600,000 males, but thought it enough to send just a 12,000-strong mob against the Midians.  Not a single Jew was killed in the expedition, but among the prisoners were 32,000 virgins. Evidently, the Midians were a large and peaceful nation exterminated by the Jews on God’s order. As if the genocide was not enough, Moses lashed out against the Jews: “How dare you to leave all women alive?… Now kill all the male children, and every woman who knew a husband.”

Still, the Torah calls Moses “the humblest man.” Could a humble man preside over genocide? The answer is a definite yes. Moses’ humility was his entire submission to divine will. A tremendous erosion of the concept took place afterward: Jewish humility came to mean submission to people, even down to enemies and oppressors. Whatever his own views, Moses entirely accepted God’s definition of morality. Divine decrees set the standard of morality, and anything God told him to do was moral by definition. Even genocide was moral when perpetrated on divine orders.

Modern Jews should not shrink from the explicit commandment to cleanse the land God gave us of its hostile inhabitants.

Would a reformist rabbi stand out on the street corner, near his temple, and proudly tell passersby that here God’s chosen people assemble? Does he even know that God calls Jews “the people who shall dwell alone”? Jews who intermarry with gentiles act on a simple realization: there is no rational reason to be Jewish. There are nice, ethical, honest, smart, funny, and good-looking Gentiles. No trait is unique to Jews. Jewish culture? There is no specific Jewish culture; we have assimilated the cultures of various nations, from Holland to Iraq. Jewish history? Past shouldn’t determine the present. Jewish heritage? Our only heritage is religious, and once the religion is abandoned, heritage becomes an empty name. Jewish ancestry? That’s racism: I was born Jewish, and he was born Black. There is only a single conceivable reason not to marry a gentile: because God told us to be his people and dwell alone.

Lies are soothing, but they remain lies nonetheless. Consider the last one, about universal brotherhood. The Torah indeed calls non-Jews our neighbors, but you wouldn’t like to know where. Close your eyes to the politically correct world. God told the Hebrews to borrow valuables from their Egyptian neighbors before the Exodus. The only time in the Torah when non-Jews are called our neighbors is when we’re about to defraud them. Why? Because only at that time were the foreigners willing to help us, as God instilled temporary love of Jews into their hearts.

If that smacks of being dangerously un-Christian, rest assured that the Christian approach was similar. In the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus implies that even the despised Samaritans are our neighbors if they are ready to help us.

This brings us to another popular lie: unlike their ancestors from time immemorial until 1945, gentiles now help Israel, and our entire existence depends on American benevolence. Really? In 1948, the US Administration recalled its UN vote in favor of establishing the State of Israel and embargoed arms shipments to the Jewish state. That was three years after the Holocaust, when Jews were fighting the war of survival. America refused even to provide Israel with manuals for the Sherman tanks, and Jewish spies got them from the Soviets who received the tanks through the lend-lease program. In 1956 and 1967, the US General Staff prepared operation plans for landing in Sinai to defend Egypt against the Jewish aggressors. You think the American attitude toward Israel somehow radically changed in 1973? Not at all. Kissinger only sought to counter the growing Soviet influence, and started arms deliveries to Israel in response to a massive Soviet airlift to Egypt; the military aid came too late and remained mostly unused. To prove that US Administrations seek influence in the Middle East rather than Israel’s good is simple: America gives about as much aid to Egypt as to Israel, and sells much more advanced weaponry to Arabs than to Israel. Relative to GDP, Egypt and the Palestinians receive a lot more American aid than Israel.

America fought for Kuwait and pacified Iraq, both times expending more money than its cumulative aid to Israel over the decades. America liberated the fiefdom of Kuwait, but had no intention of defending Israel in 1967 and 1973.

Peace became the primary objective. There is an easy way to achieve peace. Actually, it is the only way: get out of this land. Jews can live in peace with Arabs by living in Canada. A Jewish state on what Islam considers Muslim land, on the land which the Palestinians consider theirs by birthright—such a state will never be at peace. Peace treaties are fine, but don’t confuse them with peace. There has been no peace in this land, ever. Ancient Israel accommodated religious minorities—a constant source of prophets’ condemnations—but still fought her neighbors incessantly. Jews have fought the same enemies—Egypt, Syria, the Canaanites, and Assyria—for three thousand years. Did history stop in our time? Not only was there no peace in this land, there was no peace anywhere in the world. European countries fought the two bloodiest wars ever just a few years ago. The current lull might last for decades, maybe a century—there have been similar truces in European history—but no land lives in eternal peace. Peace is never a product of good faith negotiations: if the faith were good there would have been no war in the first place. Nor is there any room, literally, for settlement: the land is too small to divide. The peace-talkers talk about the utterly indefensible borders, about Jewish towns interspersed with Arab villages, about carving cities. That’s a Berlin Wall scenario.

The peace process is a big scam. Israel survived the war of 1973 only because of the depth of defense provided by Sinai, which she had liberated in 1967. The Carter Administration forced Israel to give up Sinai. Today, Carter is a (pea)nut case and anti-Semite, but back then he was the peacemaker. Egypt promised to demilitarize Sinai, but so had it promised in 1956—a promise on which it reneged in 1967. America guaranteed Egyptian non-belligerency in the Camp David peace treaty, but so it did in 1957 to induce Israel to evacuate the Sinai, which she had conquered in 1956. Eisenhower promised Israel in 1957 that he would intervene should Egypt close the Tiran Straits; when Egypt did just that in 1967, the US Administration only pushed Israel to refrain from preemption.

The peace process is about anything but peace. Suppose Israel accepts Palestinian statehood here and now. What next? Nothing. The Saudis already acknowledged, and Bush Administration concurred, that it would take a long time for Arabs to establish diplomatic relations with Israel even if a Palestinian state is created. Iran—along with the American client state of Saudi Arabia, the world’s premier sponsor of terrorism—is not even considering a diplomatic arrangement with a Zionist entity.

And what is the value of diplomatic relations? Israel is at peace with Egypt and Jordan. Both allow the practically unrestricted activities of anti-Israeli guerrillas such as Hamas, PIJ, and PRC: they train there, seek donations, and purchase weapons. No normalization with Egypt has taken place in thirty years of peace: Egyptians are hostile to Israel, the government media lashes out against Jews, and Egypt continuously modernizes its army, whose only opponent is Israel. Peace with Egypt and Jordan hinges on the stability of their governments. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’ parent organization, is the largest opposition party, slated to win by a landslide in the first less-than-totally-rigged elections. The Muslim Brotherhood in charge of the capable Egyptian army is Israel’s nightmare, and it is not too distant. In Jordan, the monarchy is doomed just as in any country, and a Palestinian majority would take over the government now usurped by a handful of pragmatic and ruthless Bedouin.

Perhaps we can stem the Palestinian-Jordanian trouble by giving in to the Palestinian’s demands? Give them a state! That won’t change anything. For Palestinians, Haifa and Tel Aviv–Jaffa are as much their land as Ramallah. Those cities were Palestinian before 1948. The Galilee is Palestinian; its many districts have almost no Jewish presence. Indeed, Israel itself is largely Palestinian: young Arabs constitute 34 percent of her youth. Do you think they would content themselves with living in a state which calls itself Jewish, has a Star on David on its flag, and sings of the Jewish soul in its national anthem? Don’t think badly of the Arabs. They are good patriotic fellows, and will fight such a state.

Speaking of rights, what rights do Jews have to Tel Aviv? They built it? So they have built countless villages in Ukraine, and houses in America. Arabs built villages in Galilee. Should they be sovereign there? Construction incurs homestead rights at best, never sovereignty. The historical right? Jews never lived in the area. Even in the Herodian period when the Roman protectorate of Judea extended to the sea, the seashore was settled by pagans. Religious right? Here you are. But our religious right starts not from Tel Aviv. It starts from Hebron, where Abraham purchased the first land plot in Canaan and the forefathers are buried. It starts in Schem, which was conquered by Jacob. It extends to southern Lebanon and Jordan—which indeed the League of Nations allocated to the Jews. But the British carved Jordan from the Mandate territory for a friendly princeling who had been evicted from Iraq.

You looked at the map, and that Palestinian state is so small, you say? Wrong. It’s bigger than the habitable Jewish part of Israel. Next time you look at the map, understand that Negev is a desert, and Galilee is as Arab as Ramallah. According to the American-Saudi peace plan, Jews are crowded onto a beach strip sixty by fourteen miles. Do you think a fourteeen-mile-wide state is defensible? Only in the sense of a thirty-second siren warning before rocket strikes.

Here comes ethnic-blind democracy. A huge country such as America or Russia has to be pluralistic. But why should tiny Israel accommodate Arabs? They have twenty-two countries nearby and can enjoy a perfectly Palestinian society just a few miles away. Many Americans move farther in search of work opportunities than the Israeli Arabs have to move to their new place of residence. Jews have left all the Arab countries; can we ask Israeli Arabs to please move out of our only state? Americans are entitled to their own country; when Mexicans try to settle there, they are at least called illegals. Why cannot Jews have a country of our own? What size land plot is not too big for Jews?

Why don’t we allow the 1948 refugees to return to Israel? They have exactly the same right to this land as the Arabs who currently live in Israel. If Jews have made some Arabs to flee, and don’t allow them back, why is it different with other Arabs, those who now reside in Israel?

All Zionist leaders proclaimed the necessity for a state with a Jewish majority. If it is moral and sensible to insist on limiting the number of Arabs to a minority, why isn’t it moral and sensible to limit their number specifically to an insignificant minority? That’s what the early leaders did. Ben Gurion authorized massive reprisals against Arab civilians. He closed their villages for weeks at a time, disrupting their life and economy. He ordered evictions and hostilities against Arabs, and pardoned the Jewish perpetrators such as in Kfar Kasem. The mainstream Jewish army, Haganah, attacked the infamous Dir Yassin village alongside the ETZEL and LEHI “terrorist groups.” The 400,000 Arabs who fled Israel in 1947-48 had a good reason to do so.

Did I just confirm what the media tell you, that Israelis oppress the Arabs? It all changed in the late 1970s. Then, Israeli leftists attacked the right-wing government for implementing the very same anti-Arab policies which the previous leftist governments did. Now Israeli Arabs pay virtually no taxes, don’t serve in the army, build housing without permits, reject municipal bills, and go unpunished for crimes and rioting. Israel’s official policy is to avoid bothering the Arab citizens lest they revolt.

You were told there is no solution to Israel’s existence but peace. Was there peace in Europe from the First World War until the Second? Was there peace from the Napoleonic wars to the Franco-German wars? Peace is peace, and of course there is no war when there is peace. But what peace was ever eternal? In every peace we should think of winning the next—imminent—war. So far Israel has been pretty good at that. We repelled Egypt in four wars, and took Sinai. We repelled Syria in three wars, and took the Golan Heights. We repelled countless aggressions from Lebanon, and got petty Shebaa Farms. We have repelled Palestinian terrorists over and over again. Arafat was sitting in Tunis, defeated and despised, until Shimon Peres brought him to Palestine as a dummy to sign peace with. Even at the peak of the Intifada, the number of its casualties paled to the number of victims of road accidents. Just why does Israel need peace with Palestinians, or Saudis, or Syrians? They will not become friendly to Jews, or stop military buildup, or cease to be a potential threat. Israel, amid a sea of Arabs, would never be able to decrease her army—which indeed grew substantially in dollar terms after the peace with Egypt. Peace would only constrain Israel’s strategy: she bombed Syrian nuclear facilities in 2007, but would have hesitated to do so if there were peace between the two countries. If Syria signs peace with Israel and afterwards continues with its military nuclear program, would Israel break the nominal but touted peace in order to eliminate the security threat? So a peace treaty is not always a good thing.

I cannot tell you what to believe in, but I can show you that everything you believe about Israel is false.

Many people on the left just happen to be there. They were taught false liberalism and honestly know of no alternative. Let’s talk.

We want a state with a firm Jewish majority. Such a notion was enunciated by every Zionist ideologue, from Herzl to Weizmann and Ben Gurion to Golda Meir to Rabin and even Shimon Peres. On this, there is no disagreement among Jews, save among the fringe elements.

Three questions arise. One, cannot Arabs be made loyal to Jewish state? But would an American Jew be loyal to a WASP state? The very name “Jewish” offends Israeli Arabs. If Jews and Arabs are equal, why is the state called Jewish? Why is there a Jewish (Christian, actually) emblem on the Israeli flag? Why does the Israeli anthem praise the Jewish soul rather than the Arab or Middle Eastern one? Just as a Jew would never feel equal in the United WASP States of North America, so the Arabs feel about living in the Jewish state.

Two, is the Jews’ majority status endangered? Yes. According to official data by the Israeli Bureau of Statistics, Arabs constitute 34 percent among Israel’s young. This already ensures them the largest Knesset faction in eighteen years, when all of the young reach voting age. Add the 5 percent of ultra-left Israelis who support the Meretz Party and anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the picture grows worse. Even if the Arabs don’t form a coalition government, they would still be able to demand sensitive ministerial portfolios.

Can the problem be alleviated by increasing the Jewish birthrate? No. The birth rate among secular Israelis is negative: 1.9 children per family. The highest growth rate is in the ultra-Orthodox community—which, like the Arabs, is anti-Zionist.

Our enemies have long recognized the value of demography as a weapon. Arafat called Israeli Arab women the liberators of Palestine, referring to their staggering birth rate: a tenfold population increase since 1948. Ahmadinejad said explicitly that Arab babies are the ultimate weapon against the Zionists.

Two, can the impending problem of Arab demographic dominance be resolved by palatable means? For Ben Gurion, it was perfectly palatable to systematically expel the Arabs and refuse to allow the refugees to return. At the Potsdam Conference, the Allies agreed that after World War II Poland and Czechoslovakia would expel their ethnic Germans—and they did, sending about 12 million Germans to Germany. There are many other precedents for peace through population exchange: Turkey and Greece, Cyprus and Yugoslavia. Population exchange started in Israeli-Arab relations when Jews left Arab countries; it is only natural to complete the exchange by peacefully resettling Israeli Arabs in the twenty-two Arab states which take up 99.9 percent of the Middle East.

But things are even better than that. We don’t have to resettle Israeli Arabs. The only thing we need do to solve the demographic problem is to make them equal to Jews. That’s right, we only need to make them equal. Indeed, the best platform for a political party in the next elections would be establishing Arab-Jewish equality.

Jews serve for three years in the army and afterwards attend military training almost every year. Jews risk their lives to defend the Jewish-Arab Israel. Arabs are exempted, and that should change. If Israel is to be an ethnic-blind democracy, let’s play by the rules. Like Jews, Arabs must be conscripted for three years. They should not take things easy in the non-military National Service—there are not enough sinecures there—but must fight Israel’s enemies like Jews do. When Hamas shells Ashkelon and Jewish soldiers risk their lives in Gaza, fighting urban combat so as not to endanger Gaza’s civilians with massive air strikes, our Arab Israeli neighbors should fight shoulder to shoulder with us. It is both legal and democratic to demand that Arab citizens of Israel join the Jewish citizens in fighting whatever enemies Israel currently fights. Japanese Americans fought alongside their fellow citizens in World War II. Some Israeli Arabs might not want to fight Arabs from Gaza. But note that young Americans had to fight in Vietnam whether they liked it or not, just because their country was fighting there. So the Israeli Arabs have to fight the Gaza Arabs. If they don’t want to be loyal citizens of Israel and fight her wars, they should be jailed. But, being humane, we’re prepared to offer them the option to leave Israel instead.

Citizens’ rights are preconditioned on citizens’ obligations. “Don’t ask what your country can do for you; rather, ask what you can do for your country.” Obligations come first. Israel, a country in a state of belligerence with almost all Arab regimes, demands from her citizens first and foremost that they fulfill their obligation to protect their country. Those who fail to serve in IDF should not be able to vote in the Knesset elections, take government jobs, or receive state subsidies. Democracy is for the responsible, loyal citizenry only.

Israeli Arabs must be equalized with Jews in terms of taxation. Jews pay taxes but Arabs don’t. The Israeli government has adopted a quasi-official policy of not bothering the Arabs lest they riot, and therefore taxation is unenforced in Israeli Arab towns. Their economy is almost entirely tax-free. Those who employ Arabs without paying relevant taxes should be sentenced to exemplary jail terms, and tax authorities should investigate Arab businesses as zealously as they investigate Jewish ones. Economically inefficient Arabs would lose their tax-free competitiveness, and many would emigrate in search of better employment opportunities abroad. Israeli Arabs are unused to the kind of tax accounting necessary for tax cheating, and many would end up in jail for tax evasion. As a humane state, Israel would offer them an option to leave rather than serve jail sentences.

The law should be enforced in Israeli Arab towns just as harshly as it is enforced in Jewish ones. Police avoid entering Arab villages for fear of riots. Arab riots break out for myriad reasons, such as enforcement of municipal payments in Lod or arrest of criminals in the Druze village Pkiin. Rioting is a crime of disloyalty to the state. Some Jews serve long sentences for participating in anti-government protests, but Arabs are not jailed even for rioting. All citizens should become equal. Police must re-acquire the unconditional right to use firearms against rioters, and every participant in a riot should be subject to imprisonment. Again, we are willing to commute jail terms in exchange for banishment.

Arabs must pay for municipal services just like Jews. Israeli Arabs are virtually exempt from paying for electricity and for increasingly scarce water. Government avoids pressing them for payments or disconnecting delinquents for the fear of rioting. Power and water suppliers, accordingly, continuously increase the tariffs to make law-abiding Jews pay the suppliers’ losses from Arab delinquents.

The government must stop the sprawling illegal construction by Arabs. They have illegally built hundreds of thousands of housing units, mostly detached houses on public—and even private—Jewish land. The Israeli government stringently enforces building codes against Jews, and often demolishes Jewish housing—but not even 1 percent of illegal Arab construction is demolished each year. When Israel simply enforces the building laws without regard to the offender’s ethnicity or religion, half a million Arabs will be left without a roof—and many will leave Israel.

Enforce treason laws on Jews and Arabs alike. Israel is in a state of belligerence with Palestine and Syria. Israel forbids Jews to travel to Palestine, but Israeli Arabs travel there with practically no restrictions. Rather, the same prohibitions should apply to Israeli citizens of Jewish and Muslim faith alike. the

Jews should be made equal to Arabs in legal terms. When Muslims and Christians are free to pray at the Temple Mount, Jews cannot be forbidden. Jews can pray in Rome, Washington, or Moscow—but not on the Temple Mount in Israel’s capital? Should Arabs riot, all rioters must be punished. Also, when Arabs have a huge Al Aqsa complex at the Temple Mount—which is mostly an empty yard—Jews should be similarly entitled to build a synagogue there.

Jews and Arabs should have equal settlement rights. If Arabs can live in Kfar Qasem under Israeli jurisdiction, Jews should be allowed to live in Kfar Tapuach without infringing on Palestinian jurisdiction. If Arabs are allowed to buy houses in Jewish communities, Jews should be able to live in East Jerusalem and Pkiin without worries—and police must severely repress those who oppose them.

Israeli Jews constitute 2 percent of the Middle East’s population, but reside, together with Israeli Arabs, on 0.1 percent of the land. A twenty-fold increase in our country’s size would be entirely justified.

Democratic, liberal means suffice to achieve Jewish ends.

What are the alternatives, anyway? I cannot stand the silliness of the “historical right.” Look into an encyclopedia. Jews were sovereign on this land, in traditional chronology, from David’s conquest of Jerusalem in 1034 to 719 BCE when the Assyrians sacked Israel, a total of 315 years. That can be extended here and there: take the fall of Jerusalem rather than Israel, add a few years of Hasmonean independence, calculate from the time of Saul’s raid on Amalek, and so on. But the essence is clear: by whatever measure, Jewish sovereignty was very short. Jewish dominance lasted much longer, from the era of judges (the real ones, not the Supreme Court’s) in the fifteenth century BCE until the second century CE, but that still hardly breaks us even with the centuries of Arab dominance in this land. Ask yourselves: if the direct, proven descendants of the Canaanites were to pop up now, say in Africa, and demand the right of return to their historical land, would you consider their demands relevant?

That Jewish presence in the Land of Israel never ceased and the Jews are its oldest residents is irrelevant: native populations throughout the world are annihilated and subdued rather than allowed to prosper and win sovereignty; look at the Native Indians in America.

Besides, Jews are not settling our historical lands now. The historical lands are exactly the “occupied territories.” The Jewish state was there while the sea coast was dominated first by Philistines, then by Greeks and Romans. Jews held it only for short time, and it was largely a pagan area. Our historical connection to Tel Aviv is just a bit stronger than to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Or take the related argument for Jewish “historical connection” to this land. Arabs, too, have a historical connection to it. Not all of them; some are relatively recent migrants—though even a century-long stay in Palestine makes them more native then the Russian Jews who came in the 1990s. But what is the historical connection of the perfectly proper Jews of Khazar descent to Palestine? Their ancestors never lived here. What is the historical connection of Ethiopian converts to Judaism to Palestine? What warped atheistic reasoning allocates them more rights to the land than the local Arabs? Jews demonstrably have a stronger historical connection to Europe than to Palestine: we spent 1,900 years of our history in Europe, much longer than in the Middle East.

The argument that Jews need a state is also dumb. Chechens need a state. Basques need a state. Some Eskimos, perhaps, think they need a state. There are more than 2,000 written languages in the world; behind each one there is at least one national group. Not even 10 percent of them have their own states. The number of Jews willing to man our own state is minuscule: states are not normally made up for just six million people. Much larger ethnic groups strive for independence with no international support.

Why should atheist Jews have a state in the current location? Palestinians justly rejoin that Europeans made them pay for Christian crimes against Jews in the Holocaust. Theodore Herzl was cynical about Jewish religious rights, left Jerusalem to Christians, and so retained a single stupid justification for founding the Jewish state in the Land of Israel: it was ostensibly a “land without people.” Of course, the land was settled from time immemorial, and even the deserts and swamps were a part of the Muslim world. Would anyone presume to take the vast uninhabited tracts of Siberia away from Russia? If Muslims had no rights to uninhabited desert, what rights does Israel have over the largely uninhabited Negev desert?

The utilitarian argument that no place other than Palestine was available for Jews is wrong and irrelevant. Wrong, because Jews were offered Uganda. That, by the way, was a bad choice: decades later, the Entebbe affair made Uganda’s capital a household name among Jews. Wrong, because Jews could as well take uninhabited land elsewhere: purchase a group of islands, plead for autonomy in the Australian savannah, build a gated community in Arizona, or occupy land elsewhere. If anyone should be compassionate to the perils of landless Jews, it is the European Christians who persecuted us. The Europeans have plenty of near-empty lands, especially in mountainous terrain, suitable for a tiny Jewish state.

The argument about safety is laughable. Nowhere in the world are Jews less secure than on a tiny strip of land perched between a sea of water and a sea of Muslims, besieged by Arabs from within and Arabs from without, where a single nuclear bomb can kill a tenth of the population.

Israel is a bad place to escape from anti-Semitism. If anything, Israel offered anti-Semites a politically correct way to express their hatred of Jews: now they hate Israel; hating a state is okay. The unavoidable Israeli repressions against Arabs provoke a wave of anti-Semitism among the leftists who were otherwise neutral-to-positive to secular Jews.

There is no cultural reason for Israel because there is no Israeli culture. It is American pop in Hebrew, with no connection to Jewishness whatsoever. Israel formally renounced the core Jewish traditions of Shabbat, kashrut, public rules of Pesach, and even Yom Kippur. Forget Israeli culture, there is not even Jewish culture. There is no common history: Sephardi Jews were largely spared the hallmark feature of the Ashkenazi Exile: continuous persecution. Nothing besides religion unites the Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, or the Polish and German Jews.

Israel at first succeeded in developing respect for Jews worldwide. That’s not a proper objective, as Jews never cared about foreign opinion; indeed, we acted contrary to prevailing Christian thought. The Israel that engages in the peace process’ concessions, fails to suppress Arab terrorism, and generally acts weakly, provokes anti-Semitism.

Jewishness without religion is racist. What would Jews say of WASP Americans launching a campaign against intermarriage? Or of white citizens of South Africa urging their kin against marrying the blacks? What would we think of American black nationalists calling upon their tribe to avoid marrying whites? Everyone, however, is completely fine with religious distinctions. It’s okay for a Muslim to refuse to marry a non-Muslim, and so it is for Catholics. It is politically acceptable for Saudi Arabia to forbid non-Islamic worship in Mecca, and for the Vatican to refuse citizenship to non-Catholics. Imagine the US proclaiming a policy of preserving itself as a white, non-Hispanic state, or of the Belgians suppressing the birth rate among their Muslim citizens. However reasonable, such efforts would be detested. A Jewish religious state can restrict intermarriage, banish the Arabs, and do away with foreign worship (and conveniently, also foreign presence) in the Land of Israel.

Jewishness is indefensible on atheist grounds. Anti-Semites all over the world protest the Jewish concept of chosen-ness as racist, and decry anti-gentile pronouncements in Jewish religious books. American liberals already censored the school edition of Huckleberry Finn to remove racist remarks, and it will not be long before they will get to the Talmud and Shulhan Aruch. Liberal “rabbis” have already disavowed “barbaric” and “racist” statements in the Bible. Jews will be unable to defend our religion against liberal onslaught unless we fall back onto the statement of honest belief that Judaism is divinely revealed in its entirety.

There is a single atheist argument for Jews ruling over the Land of Israel: raw power. We are powerful and willing enough to take over this land. As good an argument as this is, it is not without the divine miracle that the handful of us Jews can stand against the Muslim hordes.

Religion provides Jews the only politically correct justification for the necessary actions. Everyone claims that the days are gone when European colonists annihilated the Native Americans to clear a country for themselves and Israel cannot act likewise now. Everyone says that Jews cannot repeat the sixty-year old example of Czechs and Poles who evicted millions of their Germans after the WWII. Cleansing the land of sworn enemies is confused with cleansing it of an undesirable ethnic group, and condemned. The world media screamed when Israel displaced 400,000 Palestinians in 1948. It is unlikely that media would abandon this topic after some months if Israel repeated the trick. But claiming a religious commandment to cleanse the land of natives, however nice and loyal, and to annex all the Promised Land that we hold, is a somewhat more acceptable way of dealing with foreign sensibilities. Few Western and Russian politicians are prepared for a head-on assault on the Bible. Machiavelli was surprised about Ferdinand’s decision to evict Jews from Spain, surmising that his religious justification was a clever ruse, and that the real purpose was to take over Jewish property. Religious justification is still workable, whether you’re a believer or not.

Though one can easily criticize the Bible, there is no point in doing so, as that undermines secular Jewish values as well. People don’t question many concepts with direct bearing on their lives: monetary policy, military intelligence, or state’s investment of their retirement funds. People take on faith incomprehensible scientific doctrines, such as the theory of evolution, parallel lines not crossing in infinity, and the Big Bang. So include the commandments among those unquestioned things.

It doesn’t pay to question whether God gave us the commandments on Mount Sinai or Moses knew the laws earlier and recorded them on Jethro’s suggestion. Just accept as a matter of belief that God revealed himself to the hundreds of thousands of Jews at Sinai, promised us this land in perpetual possession, and commanded us to drive the aborigines out. That position is so much simpler than labored nonsense about historical rights. Is it true? Who cares? What political theories are true? Lenin lied. Marx was wrong. Jefferson’s principles were idealistic, and were never implemented. Plato was a leftist monster who envisaged an Orwellian society. How often people choose to believe evident falsehoods which are expedient and comfortable, such as government’s wisdom, politicians’ relative honesty, or the peace process?
The biblical notions are plausible, sensible, and—as humans proved for millennia—utterly believable.