Instead of appealing to the absence of Sanhedrin—which fact did not stop medieval rabbis from executing Jewish criminals—we can concede that priests made harsh laws to enforce morality, and it was hardly ever practiced for the impossibility of proving the crime. Instead of reading the caret punishment as some afterlife deprivation—despite the clear reference to temporal execution in Lev20:17—we should honestly ask ourselves whether the corpus delicti is of divine or priestly origin. This approach doesn’t come close to reformism, a nihilist teaching which reduces Judaism to gentile ethics. I just want to be honest about religion. Whatever is clearly impossible no matter how hard we try just cannot be of divine origin.

The Samson birth narrative confirms that out-of-the-Temple sacrifices were common, as Manoah had no qualms about sacrificing on the suggestion of a stranger who he didn’t know was an angel. Mesha stele speaks of looting “vessels of YHWH” at Nebo, and thus also confirms the operation of non-Temple shrines. Centralized Temple worship could not be a reality: Jews from Israel and Galilee could not travel to Jerusalem for routine purification and festivals. Already the First Temple lacks the Arc, urim and tummim, and the Second Temple lacks sacred objects altogether. The Temple is foremost a political institution of the Jewish nation. We should not wait for the ideal Temple to descend from the skies, but build up the Temple Mount.

Haredim are the nicest people around, and nowhere in Israel do I feel as much at home as in a Mea Shearim neighborhood. The spiritual depth, ethics, and morality of many rabbis are unparalleled. Their devotion to the Torah, which they study in poverty with the utmost dedication, is mind-boggling. But the hard question is whether their Judaism is true. Should Jews be nice? Torah scholars? Or should we live a full-bodied national life with secular studies, secular jobs, and wars? The Bible offers no indication that God wants Jews to live monastic lives. We’re repeatedly commanded to settle the land, work it, and fight.

Indeed, there is no choice: religious Jews launched massive settlement of the Land decades before Zionists, and Arabs repeatedly targeted the religious Jewish communities, which had no Zionist presence or aspirations to statehood. Subservience to nations is a disgrace of God’s name, and negotiations with enemies who claim the land promised to us testify to our rejection of God’s promises. He did his miracles in 1947 and 1967, but Jews refuse to follow through with our part of the job.

The Golan Heights show how simple the peace process really is. The hotly contested Golans are the safest part of Israel. No terrorists cross from Syria. Sneaking through the hapless peacekeepers is not a big deal. The desire to confront Israel is there: recall the constant stream of guerrillas from Egypt during the cease-fire. Syria has the necessary prerequisites for guerrilla warfare with Israel: strong intelligence, zealots, small arms, and Hezbollah and Hamas expertise. Yet Syria refrains from sending guerrillas into Israel because it fears Israeli reprisals. Israel attacked Syrian aircraft on several occasions during the cease-fire, and overall proved capable and willing to take the war into Syria. Thus, Syria distances itself from guerrilla activity.

IDF mapped hundreds of buildings used by Hamas, PIJ, Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and other factions. Aggressively destroying them will go a long way toward pacifying the terrorist nest.

Extroverted and passionate Arabs recall urban Azeris rather than Muslim highlanders. Eager to establish their social stannding but unable to do so by rational means, Arabs resort to heated arguments, bullying, and spontaneous violence. They are not quiet, thorough, and dispassionate killers like the highlander Muslims. Arabs fight fiercely at first only, and only for a short time. Countered with cruel force or ignored, they cease. Concessions—mini-victories—prop up their pride and they push to continue. Counter-intuitive as that may sound, concessions lead to no peace. Historically, too, peace negotiations between nations have commenced near the war’s end. Negotiations during the war embolden the aggressor and encourage him to persist in violence.

Palestinians themselves weren’t serious about statehood: only from 4,000 to 12,000 of them took up arms against the Jews in the Israeli War of Independence. Other Arabs didn’t take the Palestinian issue seriously until the late 1970s, when the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement ended the possibility of a large-scale Arab-Israeli war for a while. Palestinian statehood thus moved forward as the only credible pretext for refusing normalization of relations with Israel, and the only theater of military operations against the Jewish state. Other Arabs made the Palestinian cause prominent after the Camp David peace treaty with Egypt made war with Israel impossible; Palestinian guerrillas took the Egyptian army’s place in the avant-garde of Arab forces against Israel. The very word “Palestinian” to denote a “nation” became common at that time. Foreign Arabs continually inflamed Palestinian expectations and dissuaded Palestinian leaders from reaching a settlement with Israel.

Israeli Arabs did not revolt in any war between Israel and foreign Arabs. Being dispersed throughout the country, the revolting Arabs would have considerably impeded Israel’s military effort. A common explanation, that they were frightened, cannot explain the total absence of hostile activities: at least some would not be frightened at the prospect of Israeli retaliation. Neither, of course, were the Arabs loyal. Rather, they did not associate themselves with the invading Arabs, who were more hostile and brutal to the Palestinians than Israel. And so, as recently as during the 2006 war, Israeli Arabs didn’t aid Hezbollah, even though there was no fear of expulsion: the same Arabs routinely riot in Israel during peaceful times. They cheered the rockets flying at Haifa, but that’s it. Palestinians feel no attachment to Israel, and very little to other Arabs. Polls indicate that pan-Arab identification peaks after terrorist attacks on Israel, but that’s merely the human tendency to identify with my enemy’s enemy.

Israeli Palestinians are fairly content with nominal Jewish rule, just as they were content with Jordanian rule. But there is a difference. Jordan heavy-handedly pursued assimilation of the West Bankers, while Israel’s policy toward Arabs moved from the original isolation to multiculturalism and affirmative action. Arabs would be content with harsh Israeli rule, as they were content with the rule of the Ottomans or Jordan. But Israeli policy, which gives the Arabs a hope of national identity, is a time bomb. Foreign aid makes life in Palestine tolerable, and thus perpetuates the conflict; if the situation were unbearable to Palestinian Arabs, they would have accepted Israeli offers.

God performs miracles without violating the laws of nature (that’s why there are atheists), and so the Arab flight was prompted by decades of unrest, a crumbling patriarchal society, a closed economy, spiraling clashes with Jews, loss of traditional leadership, and fear. Most Palestinian leaders argued against fleeing the country, but the peasants were of a different opinion. Jews, for their part, slowly switched to Plan D, attacking first the Arab villages, most of which—willingly or not—housed militias, and eventually cleansing the land of Arabs to gain a contiguous Jewish state. Out of hopelessness and fear of retaliation, the majority of Arabs fled Israel in two waves: amid the clashes before the proclamation of Israeli independence, and after the Jews had won the war. Much smaller numbers of Arabs fled during the war itself.

The near-absence of Arab flight from Galilee demonstrates that Jews did not plan to evict them; Arabs fled only the zones of intense conflict, rather than the entire Jewish state. Arabs that remained in Galilee developed into a demographical time bomb, and created an Arab majority in many parts of the Jewish state. Despite the huge influx of Jews since 1948, the Arab population of Israel continued to rise, from 10-19 percent to 34 percent among the Israeli young today. In order to create a Jewish state, Jews had no choice but to make the Arabs go.

Jewish actions followed the cruel logic of war and state-building, nowhere more clear than in Dir Yassin. That village, like many others, had an implicit non-belligerency agreement with Jewish settlements, but eventually succumbed to Arab guerrillas and bandits. Many villagers from Dir Yassin joined the bandits, and raided Jewish caravans to Jerusalem and the settlements. Pervasive ownership of firearms, the Islamic sanction of robbery, unemployment, and the youth bulge assured the village’s militancy. In the attack on Dir Yassin, Haganah forces shelled the village while Irgun and Lehi fighters stormed it, naturally being unable to discriminate between the full-blown militants and armed teenagers. Some women were also caught in the fighting. Testifying to the fierceness of the battle rather than an atrocity, Irgun subsequently paraded the survivors from Dir Yassin through Jerusalem and sent them into the city’s Arab sector. Arab propaganda, however, made the operation into a massacre and frightened many Arabs into fleeing. In terms of killed-for-fled efficiency, Dir Yassin stands out as a brilliant example of good military practice. In PR terms, Dir Yassin became a disaster for Israel for a single reason: Jews admitted it as such. No Palestinian talks about the Egyptian forces of Ibrahim Pasha or the British razing the Arab towns, though the Egyptian atrocities and British cruelties far exceeded Dir Yassin, Kfar Qasem, and all other infamous points of Jewish-Arab clashes. People complain of the things it makes sense to complain of. The Egyptians and the British offered Palestinians no opportunity to vent their grievances, but Jews were receptive to the enemy’s cries—and got more cries in return.

In a historically typical manner, Palestinian nationalism was invented by local bourgeoisie, political bureaucracy, and relatively educated young people. They preferred to rule a non-viable state rather than continue as Ottoman, British, or Syrian administrators. The population preferred to belong to the larger (Syro-Palestinian) entity, but population doesn’t own media and have little say in immediate policies. Palestinian nationalism was never strong: Arafat’s nationalism crystallized in Cairo, and the early Fatah was concentrated in Jordan and lacked a support base in the West Bank. The vast majority of Palestinians, whether in Israel proper or on the West Bank, dislike Israel but don’t care to fight her. The rumors of a Jordan-West Bank confederacy caused no outrage among the West Bank Palestinians. Palestinians in Jordan still don’t protest the attribution to them of Jordanian nationality. Palestinian Arabs differ from Egyptian Arabs about as much as Texans differ from New Yorkers.

The Christian partition of the Land of Israel in 1947 was an ad hoc solution. At the time, Westerners were searching for a one-size-fits-all solution to international conflicts. The Wilsonian utopia had failed miserably, and diplomats saw partitioning as another wonder pill. Scores of countries, from Germany to India, were partitioned at the dawn of the new world order to satisfy all major contenders. That approach proved erroneous: artificial borders are either abrogated (Germany) or soaked with blood (India-Pakistan). The Palestinian state was of the same diplomatic stock as East Germany: a non-viable entity liable to continuously ignite nationalism on both sides. Saudi Shiites are more numerous than Palestinian Arabs, more different from Saudi Sunni than Palestinians are from Syrians, and more viable—they sit on Saudi oil deposits. Yet Saudi Shia didn’t get a state of their own. Transjordanian settled Arabs are more different from Transjordanian Bedouin than East and West Bank Arabs are different from each other; still, Transjordanian Arabs were lumped into a single state, while the East and West Bankers (in fact, the East Bank refugees from the West Bank) separated into two states. A Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria has nothing to do with national rights or justice, but is a rare remnant of the failed post-WWII diplomatic doctrine of partitioning problematic states.

The British Peel Commission didn’t even consider a Palestinian state in the West Bank, but allocated that territory to the already huge Transjordan, carved from the land allocated to Jews by the League of Nations. In 1945, after the Holocaust, Britain restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine even further. If not for Jewish terrorist groups like Etzel and Lehi, the British would have reneged on their promises entirely, and no Jewish state would have come into being. They envisaged Transjordan alongside a mixed Jewish-Arab statelet in Palestine.

Netanyahu raised two demands for accepting a Palestinian state. One is that it either be demilitarized or Israel receive international security guarantees. After the Versailles Treaty, Rhineland was demilitarized, and so was Sinai under the 1957 ceasefire agreement; the world did nothing when Nazis and Egyptians marched troops into their own land. When UNIFIL cannot stop missile smuggling by Hezbollah, it is impossible that the world can live up to Netanyahu’s requirement of ensuring that missiles won’t be smuggled into the West Bank. Palestinians are unlikely to accept demilitarization of their state, but even if they do, nothing precludes them from changing their constitution a year later.

Jews had international security guarantees. Not even in ghettos and death camps, but in 1957 from Eisenhower who promised to keep the Tiran Straits open. When Egypt closed them in 1967, Israel was left alone to fight. International guarantees were excellent in 1972 when Russians and Americans brokered Israeli-Egyptian ceasefire.

Netanyahu’s second demand is Palestinians recognizing Israel as a Jewish state. What does that mean? Jewish according to Meretz which accepts an Arab right to vote the Jewish state out of existence? Even if Abbas recognizes Israel as a Jewish state just like Palestine is an Arab one, that won’t preclude Palestinians in Israel to claim their democratic rights.

To his credit, Netanyahu did not endorse a two-state solution, but rather a self-governing Palestinian entity. To his shame, he failed to realize that such an entity will eventually become a state.

Netanyahu took a firm stance on the non-issue of settlement growth. Except for the three towns and several large villages across the Green Line, natural growth in the settlements is negligible. The issue became so hot that Obama and Abbas would find it hard to retreat from their demands, and the peace negotiations can be stalled.

Netanyahu approach, intended to buy Israel time until Obama cools off on the Palestinian issue, is destructive. If Israel accepts a Palestinian state in principle, all the rest is details. America will shower Israel with fake security guarantees, and Abbas can mutter that he accepts Israel as a Jewish or any other state its citizens decide to call it.

Instead, Netanyahu must have been honest and straightforward:
This is a conflict between West and Muslims rather than Israel and Palestinian Arabs.
Arab countries want Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than peace.
The Saudi peace initiative does not include Iran, which is worth all Arabs combined.
Palestinians want international prominence of the conflict rather than a tiny non-viable state.
Fatah hates to have a state because in the absence of IDF Hamas would take over it.
Jewish problem with the Palestinian state is not security; a terrorist group cannot destroy the fourt-strongest army in the world.
Rather, Israel cannot accept a Palestinian state because Judea is ours, is the Promised Land.
Israel will not accept moralizing from Europeans and Americans who butchered tens of millions in the past decades and still hold colonial possessions.
Israel will not scale back its retaliation against the terrorists armed with rockets.
We value the relationship with American administration, but won’t let it dictate policies of the Jewish state.

Jews have a religious and historical claim to the East Bank, and Transjordan was originally included in the Jewish territory. Though the British later changed their minds and claimed that the Balfour Declaration was not intended to include Transjordan, the understanding was clearly different in 1919. At that time, Zionists planned on settling Transjordan, and the British concurred until the need arose in 1922 to accommodate an Iraqi princeling left without a kingdom. The British carved Iraq from Iran and Jordan from Israel to accommodate the two Faisal brothers, who had been evicted from Syria. A century ago, Transjordan was sparsely populated—about 200,000 Arabs in the area thrice the size of Palestine. Jews were one hundred times more populous worldwide, but received one quarter of the Mandate territory.

Jordan remains a sleepy desert area, but it is slowly closing a cultural gap with the West-Bank Arabs. This creates a basis for the eventual agglomeration of the two banks into a Palestinian state. That development is supported by growing pan-Palestinian nationalism on both sides of the Jordan River. Jordanian Palestinians also see the pan-Palestinian identity as a viable counter-balance to the current dominance of Jordan by the Bedouin minority. Jordan (or Palestine, whatever the name) on both banks of the river would extinguish Israel’s water supply as the inefficient Arab farmers start drawing the water unsustainably. Israel will have no choice but to force Jordan’s sparse population to move to the east, and reclaim the water sources. The world somehow accepts minuscule Arab populations occupying huge tracts of lands with prehistoric density while Israel is pushed into eight-mile-wide borders. Such an arrangement is not viable, and Israel will have to return to the 1919 plan of settling both banks.

For the entire history, things were allowed to run their course. Time and again, great leaders intervened and caused ripples on the ocean of human society. A few years later, the things returned to their normal order. Alexander the Great’s empire did not survive a day after the butcher’s demise.

With ever-increasing speed, the last three centuries show the two developments: deliberate intrusion into social framework and the global reach of such intrusions. For thousands of years, Plato’s monster ideas of reshaping societies lay dormant because no one had the sufficient power. It is impossible to reshape a society of the town size: faced with major inconveniences, its members would simply move to a nearby location. The monopoly on human souls is essential for leftists whose raison d’etre is changing the naturally established order.

The modern leftism was jump-started by Rousseau. Unsurprisingly, he sought to do away with the dissenters in his Utopia. Leftists cannot afford a dissent which challenges their policies. Since the policies are often detrimental to many individuals and certainly to the smartest and the most productive ones, the right to live freely would allow the most lucrative subjects to escape the leftist paradise. Besides draining it of resources, the escape would set a dangerous precedent to others. For that reason, the Soviets banned emigration.

The leftist drive to all-permissiveness is unrelated to freedom, but a typical nihilism. Leftists deny the majority the most basic freedom: to live in a consensual society. The rights of homosexuals are weighed against the majority’s right to live without them. Leftists push their nihilist agenda for an immensely important reason: to destroy the societies’ traditional framework. In the process, they train the majority in submission to their ideas. “Their” is a keyword: the commoners become used to accepting whatever policy is urged upon them.

The Soviet Union was a bit premature: people resent brute force but readily submit to nicely packaged policies. Marx predicted correctly that free societies will be transformed to communist ones on their own, slowly and nicely. Russians resented the KGB oppression, but Americans fell into the net of nice slogans. Who can oppose freedom for gays? It is unthinkable to oppose freedom.

The Soviet Union also failed on another count, the scale. Better life was lurking from outside its borders. But where would an American escape? Europe is liberal, the Muslim world is barbaric, and the islands are economically backward. For the first time in history, leftists have the global reach to assure than no significant group can escape their jurisdiction. Sensing their advance, many otherwise hostile groups choose to cooperate: large entrepreneurs who must be hostile to leftism supported Obama.

Leftists need to take one final step before they triumph. Stalin, an evil genius, sensed that step correctly. Just like in any revolution, in order for leftism to triumph the old order must be destroyed. The centuries-long advance of leftism was relatively soft, but the final touch involves an open war.
Leftists found a way to eat their cake and keep their hands clean. They need not wage the war themselves; Muslims can do it for them. Here come the rogue nukes.

The United States waged massive wars in Korea and Vietnam, and continues significant operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Taking out Pakistani and North Korea’s nuclear facilities is no problem in military terms. American diplomats are not clinically stupid: everyone realizes that talking to North Korea is a dead-end approach as the communists can get more respect by having nukes and more money by selling them. Taking out Iran’s nuclear facilities is a still simpler affair with no side effects: America’s Arab allies clamor for the action. Ignoring the Pakistani nuclear stocks in Saudi Arabia which 100% depends on the United States for protection cannot be justified on any grounds. Letting Egypt pass with its low-profile nuclear program at the time when Mubarak would accept any compromises to assure the West’s complacency is transferring the power to his son cannot be explained away in any rational terms.

The explanation is before those who wish to see it: leftists need a major nuclear war away from the West’s borders. The Middle East’s annihilation would end the power of militaries which can do nothing about terrorist nuclear threats and the power of oil corporations which would lose their base. Western countries will remain intact while their societal order is destroyed.

And leftists will rule over the ruins.

Arabs owned the land on the hills as communal property; village elders redistributed the land among the villagers once in a while. No similar communal institution existed for land ownership in the plains and coastal areas of Palestine. The Ottoman land law of 1858 introduced titles for the land, thus allowing Palestinian notables to register empty lands in their names; previously, land ownership had been proved by cultivation. From the 1870s, Palestinian notables started selling the plains to Jews; thus the Palestinian ownership of the plains existed for years, or decades at the most—a far cry from de facto statehood, and much less than the time for which Jews have subsequently owned those lands.

Palestinian hill communities were self-governed: Turks, Egyptians, and the British rarely ventured into the Palestinian hills, but employed Palestinian notables as liaisons. No similar self-government existed in the plains, which were worked rather than settled. Nor have the plains always existed. Most of the Palestinian plains were desert and marshes, which were subsequently developed by Jews. The 10 percent of the Palestinian lowlands Jews had purchased before 1948 amounted to about half the arable land; a group which settles half the land is surely entitled to self-determination. Even by the early twentieth century, the coastal areas and plains were almost unsettled, with about 5,000 Jews and not a much larger number of Arabs living in the agricultural communities there.

To summarize, Palestinian Arabs have a good legal claim to about 40 percent of the West Bank they intermittently settled for centuries, taking off to pursue Bedouin life during droughts. They have no homestead claim to 60 percent of the West Bank—which they don’t settle even now—nor to the plains, which they had never settled before the Jews took them over.

Speaking of human feelings, it is futile to argue in terms of formal law. Arabs note correctly that no amount of land purchases by Jews gives us the right to statehood. In no country can a landowner claim sovereignty by virtue of purchasing a large enough parcel of land. Still, Arabs resented and fought the massive purchases of land by Jews even before the Jewish state became a reality. Look at how modern Israelis resent foreigners purchasing housing units in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, or Arab construction in Galilee. No one likes to live alongside aliens, still less when the aliens are aggressively expanding their influence into one’s habitat. Israel unreasonably restrains its natural xenophobia. Arabs protested even the British plan to print “Palestine” on stamps in Hebrew alongside Arabic, but Israel adopted Arabic as an official language. Far from soothing their grievances, Israel’s move inflamed Arab nationalist hopes.

Palestinian Arabs existed in several distinct groups. Palestinian hill farmers are typical Syrians. Palestinian dwellers of port towns are close to their Lebanese counterparts. There was a considerable enmity between Palestinian farmers and port dwellers. Foreign Arabs recognized Palestinian hill farmers as Syrians, and applied the term “Palestinians” to port towns’ dwellers only. While the foreign Arabs are contempt of Syrians for their cowardice and dishonesty, they hate the port-town Palestinians as brigands – an attitude toward port communities shared worldwide. The Palestinian national identity is often extended to include Jordan Bedouin who, though visually similar to the West Bank Palestinian farmers, are drastically more backward and lack any communal culture even in the vaguest sense of the term. Palestinians also include a significant number of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa who came to Palestine since the mid-nineteenth century to find jobs in the booming citrus industry. Today, a major Palestinian group is the professional refugees who live in Lebanon and Gaza camps for generations and developed into brigands with no productive skills and the accumulated hatred which would take generations to dissipate.

Those groups of Palestinians lack a unique common culture, dialect of Arabic language, religious tradition, or history. Other nations molded from various groups with distinctive ethnic, religious, linguistic, or cultural features. Palestinians lack the distinctiveness which characterizes a nation or even a tribe. Palestinian Arabs had little chance to develop distinctiveness: common Islamic religion, written Arab language, Syrian influence, and subsistence economy precluded cultural diversity. Palestinians are only a nation in the sense of nation-state. That’s the horse and the carriage question. Other peoples first developed as nations, then amalgamated their territories and built states. Palestinian Arabs, on the contrary, are treated as a nation because they settle a territory.