“Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into [the hearts of] the enemies, of God and your enemies” Quran 8:60
Everyone has the occasional moment when he leisurely walks to a coffee shop and sees an old poor man on the street scrambling for his livelihood. Burdened with unease, we continue into the coffee shop.
Life is not fair. Some people are born rich, some poor; some are smart, others silly; few are beautiful, many ugly. Nations, too, don’t enjoy fairness. Many good nations have gone down the history’s drain; ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome are gone forever, replaced with different cultures. From Canaan to Melos, from Australia to North America, ruthless advanced newcomers displaced the entirely decent locals. All states were created in aboriginal blood; history knows of no other way. What except extermination would make the locals accept the rule of newcomers? What would make the grandchildren of aborigines forget the ancient freedom of living in their land without aliens? Freedom is a very powerful urge. It is also inbuilt; there is no need to learn it. Even primitive tribes long for freedom—the freedom from colonizers.
The United States had to exterminate its Red Indians in order to evolve into a great, safe country; the survivors were herded into reservations, intoxicated with alcohol, bribed with welfare, and isolated with tribal legislation. If the US tolerated its many Indian tribes, they would have bred to majority. The marginal utility of income increases to poor Indians was much greater than to the colonizers, and Indians were able to afford much larger families than the whites. That happens now in Israel.
Advocates of peaceful coexistence forget a minor thing: to ask the Arabs. Would they agree to forfeit their land to Jewish colonizers? Would they accept welfare money in lieu of national aspirations? Would they continue subscribing to a fictitious monogamy by which Israel treats three of their four wives as single mothers and subsidizes them accordingly?
Bolsheviks were not even 0.01 percent of the Russian population when they staged their revolution. Few Germans joined the Nazis in 1929. Hamas numbers hardly 1 percent of Gaza’s population. Numbers don’t matter; determination does. And Palestinian nationalists are very determined to rid their country of Israel.
Jews were perfectly integrated into Spanish society in 1492, into Russian society in 1905, and into German society in 1933. In the 1920s, religious Jews had such good relations with their Arab neighbors—and no intention of building a Zionist state—that they rejected Haganah’s protection in Tiberias, Tzfat, Hebron, and Jerusalem. Those relations, however, changed in a second. Europeans and Arabs massacred Jews, who had no political aspirations; consider therefore how much more certain the Arabs are to rise against their Jewish colonizers. Routine attacks on Jews by Israeli Arabs, disdain for Israeli law evidenced in massive illegal construction and tax evasion, and Israeli Arabs’ support for the PLO hint at the iceberg of hatred below the surface of media reports. The Israeli Arab population is experiencing a youth bulge; ten years from now, masses of unemployed, unproductive youth will watch their Jewish neighbors with jealousy. Defeated by European refugees, insulted by dhimmi dominance, and lacking work ethics, Arabs cannot be integrated into Israeli society. Worse, the government continually provokes them by paying for compliance and tolerating utter misbehavior.
A recipe seems clear: Israeli should be strong and her Arabs will be quiet. But why do we need such neighbors? Enforced quiet is an attitude expected from enemies or criminals, not neighbors. Israeli Arabs are a fifth column, which must be kept fearful. If so, why not just expel them and live comfortably? The assumption of permanent strength is unsupportable. Already now, many areas of Arab settlement in Israel are off-limits to Israeli law-enforcement. Lod, a town few miles from Israel’s only meaningful airport, is one example. Lod’s Arab districts are off-limits to Israeli officers of the court, and police only enter them in armored vehicles. Arab villages and towns of Galilee are similarly autonomous of Israeli justice: from tax evasion to drugs to firearms, they are beyond the Israeli judicial system. Arabs feel free to riot even in Jerusalem; whereas Israeli police act brutally against Jewish demonstrators, often thrashing their neighborhoods (such as Mea Shearim), Arabs are accorded near-polite treatment. Israeli courts routinely sentence Jews much more harshly than Arabs. Older Israeli Arabs, recalling the events of 1948 and 1967, habitually fear Jewish heavy-handedness, but the new generation lacks that experience and recognizes the weakness of the Israeli law-enforcement colossus. Arabs accept Jewish partition of their land into two states only as a temporary solution. Any assertions to the contrary remain on the paper of peace treaties.
Peaceful coexistence with Arabs would be a lovely thing. Unfortunately, no state was ever formed by masses of newcomers peacefully coexisting with aborigines. Violence is indispensable to forming a state. Violence should be kept to an absolutely necessary minimum. Suppose Nazi Germany could have achieved its goal of racial homogeneity by expelling its Jews to Palestine; the wholesale murder would have been politically unnecessary. The Holocaust thus is a crime of genocide rather than cruel political means. Israel can achieve her goal of a Jewish (not mixed) state by transferring the Palestinian Arabs thirty miles to Jordan—a mild cruelty by the standards of statehood; and no gentler means will work. It remains to be seen whether the expulsion would work. Historically, the expulsion of aborigines has only been successful after large-scale extermination campaigns have reduced to insignificance their will and capability to fight back.
The Torah retains its applicability because human nature remains the same. Alexander the Great would wonder at Merkava tanks at first, but he would soon recognize their strategic similarity to his cavalry. Weapons change, but the face of war has remained the same from the earliest clashes of hunter-gatherers up to our times. The instructions given to Joshua for dealing with the Canaanites resound with Ben Gurion’s policies—and fit exactly the Muslim attitude on obligatory vengeance, intigam. To Arabs, the Jews who abstain from exacting vengeance upon Palestinians for terrorist acts are weaklings, unworthy of peace and friendship. Assimilated Jews shrug at their history, but Arabs respect history greatly.
No modern state has been formed differently from the ancient ways, and no war was ever fought differently. Idealists claim that other ways exist; somehow, hundreds of earlier generations missed those humane ways. Jews are not lab rats suitable for experiments; let someone else try to establish a state peacefully. We prefer the old-fashioned, tried and proven, and only known way of statecraft: in the blood of our enemies.