Palestinians need the conflict to live on. Their economic way of life is empty. Lacking a work ethic and a culture of learning, they are bound to primitive manufacturing and subsistence farming. Even if they miraculously reached the efficiency of Jewish farmers in Gaza, Palestinians still could not employ their millions of ever-breeding people in farming. Extorting aid-funds from Muslims and the West is necessarily the Palestinians’ main business. Even the currently content landowners will become discontent in the next generation, as their children ask for the modern lifestyle rather than goat-herding.

The Israeli ruling clique needs the conflict for many of the same reason as the Muslims. Israel, ridden with socialism and welfare, lags economically miles behind the West. To be prime minister of an impoverished minuscule state in the middle of nowhere is dubious glory. To be a warrior prime minister of the state on the front line of the battle of civilizations and on front pages of Western media is more attractive. Israel’s rulers loathe giving away her land, although for reasons that are neither religious nor nationalist; rulers want to preside over a bigger state, and no government ever willingly gave away the state’s territory. Under pressure from foreign peers to satisfy the Palestinians, the Israeli ruling clique relinquishes the land grudgingly, and irrationally delays the process. If Judea, Samaria, and Gaza are not Jewish lands, why delay? Give them to the Arabs, and let them build a failed state there—who cares? Concentrate on stopping the infiltration rather than controlling the Palestinian entity.

The West supports the conflict for balance-of-power reasons. It takes the miracles of resourcefulness from the American leaders to push for peace (and so attain reputations as powerful peacemakers) with one hand, and resist the peace with the other hand. Mild warfare creates the ideal situation for international arbiters who are sought by both sides. The profits are not merely political, but also military (bases and influence) and economic (arms sales). When the smoldering conflict blazes into a war, America, France, and Russia scream and interfere to stop the fighting: arbitration is nice, but a full-blown war in the oil region is not desirable.

Media fans the conflict by exaggerating the news and exacerbating spiraling tensions. Peace is one-week event; war has been making news for close to a century by now. Peaceful life provides content for township newspapers; major outlets seek bloody sensations.

Moralists are interested in finding and trumpeting injustices rather than bringing justice. Peace is not their objective.

Conservative politicians support a hard line per se. That line could coincide with colonialist habits (such as anti-Arab prejudice); anti-Semitism; contempt for the weak, undeveloped, and uneducated; or other features. Hardliners don’t want peace, but rather enforcement of their preferred lines.
Voters want peace, but don’t make policies.

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.

Human lives have a price on them, and it is not high price. Firemen risk their lives for moderate wages, and often enter burning buildings to save property, not other lives.

The US has materially assisted in murdering more civilians in Afghanistan since the 1980s then could credibly have died in America in an Afghan-sponsored attack. Lives, especially the lives of other people, are a commonly accepted price for many odd goals: opium, oil, or democracy.

All wars, in all times, killed many people, including non-combatants. Wars are not inhumane, but all too human. Throughout history, people who were decent in peacetime have committed atrocities in wars. Nothing has changed. Soldiers take off the clothes of morality when stepping into the bloodbath of war.

To save lives, do not start unnecessary wars. Once wars are started, do not hypocritically decry the death toll.

Religious difference, such as Judaism, can be a source of tremendous pride, but such pride requires tremendous knowledge. Unless one is pushed to study from childhood, why would he suddenly start learning something that seems irrelevant? A few would learn, but most wouldn’t.

For most of history, Jews were pressed into being different. The very early, almost forced education, social pressures, low mobility, and universal hostility precluded them from baptizing and assimilating. When the hostility was absent, as in India, Jewish communities assimilated.

Ancient Jews were notoriously un-Jewish, and consistently provoked the prophets who lashed out against their iniquities. They bowed to idols and surely didn’t keep anything resembling the vast rabbinical law. Jews survived then by being a political entity, having their own country.

In the Exile, rabbinical law and Christian hostility preserved Jewish nation. Today, however, we cannot survive as a strictly religious entity. Christianity has already dissolved into myriad sects, and lost its significance for self-identification for most people. Jewish assimilation is not unique, but follows the Christian model. In a time of religious cynicism, religious identity cannot survive.

Our only choice is the ancient choice: a militant, highly unusual, recognizable state. Jews need a clear political identity, and this requires a clearly Jewish state with no Arabs. After becoming zealous patriots, Jews would seek to rationalize their nationalism, and adopt Judaism as the national religion. This is a sure way to preserve Jewish identity for the foreseeable future. It requires a very strong political entity.

The Ancient Greeks did not try to show the Persians who was more civilized, liberal, and tolerant. The Greeks were not afraid to sink to the level of their despised enemies. War is no time for poetry or taking moral high ground. Hungry mobs sack the food stores: when survival is at stake, ethics become unimportant. Survivors might hope to rectify the wrongs and revert to morality; but dead men and dead nations bear no morality.

Ethics are a set of restrictions on natural behavior for peaceful, comfortable coexistence, and they are inapplicable in wartime. Ethics apply to neighbors—those with whom one could peacefully coexist. Ethics were never intended and have rarely been practiced for enemies.

The Torah prohibits murder, not killing. Jews should kill enemies and heinous criminals. The Torah does not hesitate to prescribe the extermination of whole nations when that is the only choice. Modern Israeli politicians imagine that the Palestinians would forget the humiliation of losing their land, children, and brethren. The American settlers crushed the indigenous Indians into oblivion. Not so with blacks, who now claim privileges and build up black nationalism. South Africans had to repress the blacks to build a beautiful and safe country, but did not annihilate them; the blacks, of course, fought the injustice, won, and destroyed the country. Sensitive Jews might not like the annihilation of indigenous Arabs—but no other option exists to build a lasting state of Israel. Any other approach pointlessly prolongs the suffering on both sides. One good thing is that now—unlike in the times of Joshua—a nation can be finished off by assimilation. There is no need to kill the Palestinians; dispersing them into neighboring Arab countries would work just as well.

Israel copies the US army in its thirst for hyperexpensive gadgets, but lacks the Americans’ major advantage, the mammoth financing. Only 4 percent America’s, the Israeli military budget pales in comparison. IDF purchases ultra-modern weapons untested in any real combat, whose marginal utility dwindles as the price skyrockets. The weapons quickly become obsolete as developers promote new systems.

The marginal utility of incremental improvements confirms that the current weapon types become obsolete. This is like the last weapons of every kind: super-large mechanical bows, fortress walls built hugely thick in a futile attempt to defend against artillery, and mammoth artillery pieces that lacked logistics. Now it’s airplanes at $2 billion apiece or $200,000 interceptor missiles for hundred-dollar Kassam projectiles. We don’t know what will be the next stage in arms development: lasers, earthquake modulators, or even the narrowly avoided nuclear-induced atmospheric fire. Maybe we will see a return to cheap, mass-produced weapons, to $10,000 apiece drones and toy-size ATVs with explosives.

New types of weapons are always considered barbaric, inhumane, too destructive, and abusive to the art of war. Recall the professional soldiers’ opposition to firearms, and later to artillery, or the running of cavalry against machine guns in WWI. Nuclear weapons are another such type of qualitatively new weapons. They are not even overwhelmingly destructive, given the numbers and spread of populations as well as ABM facilities. Nuclear weapons are most dangerous to knowledge rather than humans: in a major nuclear exchange, it would make sense to attack universities rather than population centers; wiping out all significant universities, with their labs and libraries would do more damage to a nation’s economy than killing even ten percent of its population. Even there, defense catches up with offense as electronic technology provides the means for highly dispersed and massively duplicated storage of information, making it nearly indestructible.

Israel cannot rely on air domination in the face of S-300’s. Defense always catches up with offense, and there was no qualitative hike of the means of offense after the introduction of anti-aircraft missile defense. The SAM-5 made Israeli aircraft virtually useless in 1973, and the TOR-1M and S-300 can similarly force the tens of billions dollars worth of Israeli aircraft to the ground.

Even after the Muslim states go nuclear, Israel can still maintain her nuclear deterrent through the expanded Mutually Assured Destruction. Muslims should know that an Israeli retaliatory strike would wipe out not just the offender but every Muslim thing on earth. Let Muslims hunt each other, lest the mad Israel hunts them all down.

Cheap Russian weapons, rather than much smaller quantities of the American ones, might suit IDF’s purposes better. Given the Israeli tactical advantage, lower-quality Russian weapons would do against our Arab enemies. The current situation is the opposite of the 1960s: now America controls the Arabs, and Russia would be happy to rely on Israel. France, too. There are no eternal friends, and the US Administration, which pushes us toward the national suicide of peace, is hardly a friend. It was the US who twisted our arms against preemption in 1973, and we consider their subsequent (too late) support as a mitigation of the damage. If silly Jews desire to have a strong Christian friend, Russia is worthy of note. Israel would be a great client for Russia, better than all the Arab states.

The American payments to Israel are insulting. They give us a bit more military aid than they give to Egypt—about the same amount that Palestine gets from its donors. Americans pay us less than 1 percent of their spending in Iraq. What, controlling Israel, the major regional power, is a hundred times less important than some silly adventure in a British-created Frankenstein of a state called Iraq?

Mossad should concentrate on collecting discrediting facts on foreign public figures. Clinton pushed Barak to give away Jerusalem to cover his Lewinsky scandal; she was Jewish, and it strains credulity to imagine that Clinton was not angry at Jews. What, we cannot find another Lewinsky to get an American president to confirm our right to everything from Litani to the Nile to the Euphrates?

Israeli public views on Palestinian statehood are most evidently correlated to a single fact—Palestinian violence. When terrorism increases, so does Israeli support for distancing our country from the Palestinians. That’s the major reason behind Rabin’s lax attitude toward fighting the Intifada and Olmert’s passive response to Kassam fire from Gaza: the terrorism hugely benefited Jewish peaceniks. Now, with terrorism on the wane, a fearful public can afford a less accommodating stance toward Palestinian statehood, as polls indicate.

Whether the lull in terrorism is permanent cannot be predicted. Public mood erupts in a manner similar to the breaking of glass or concrete: the moment before the rupture, the surface looked perfectly clean, with the myriad spreading micro-cracks undetectable to the eye. Forces work in opposite directions. The passage of time generally dulls grievances, but continuous rubbing of hostile populations increases them. Economic development channels energies toward consumerist goals, but also allows plenty of spare time to engage in non-economic ideological activities. The Arab birth rate has peaked, and the proportion of youth—the backbone of radicalism—will be declining among general population, but plenty of unemployed youth are dangerous right now. Israeli security services have reliably penetrated terrorist organizations on all levels, but grassroots terrorism is growing, and it is inherently unpreventable—how can you intercept a good Arab worker who one day decides to drive his bulldozer at Jews?

The Intifada did not start in response to the Jibril deal, when Israel released 1,150 terrorists; two years passed from the infamous prisoner exchange to the uprising. Rather, the Intifada was a textbook case of spontaneous societal eruption. The current grassroots terrorism can erupt in an Intifada under two conditions: Palestinian society must be boiling hot, and Jewish reaction must be weak. The logic of uprising is similar in the West Bank and in the New York subway: the broken windows of Israeli cars and New York metro cars indicate the authorities’ powerlessness. Just as in New York, measures as mild as arresting passengers who jumped over the toll booths without paying signaled an end to criminal lawlessness, so in Israel the relatively mild measures of prosecuting the throwers of firebombs and expelling their families can prevent a new uprising. Just as in the New York subway cleaning the graffiti made a visible sign of the restoration of the rule of law, so would well-armed Israeli soldiers restore calm to Arab villages. Lacking traditional societal fabric, the occupied population longs for security, even if such security must be imposed on it, and thus it is a duty of an occupier to impose martial law, which is simultaneously just and harsh.

As time goes by, implementing a two-state solution becomes less possible. It is not even the issue that Palestinian leadership neither wants a backwater state, nor can restrain its militants from pursuing more. The Israeli establishment does not want the country to be inundated by Jewish right-wingers from the West Bank, a situation it dreads much more than it fears being inundated by Arabs. Most Jews in the West Bank are centrist moderates, but there are a significant proportion of true right-wingers. At present, the conflict with the West Bank Arabs absorbs their energies; but once evicted from the settlements, having moved to Israel, they will foment unrest and hostility toward Israeli Arabs and the ultra-left. Therefore, the establishment prefers to keep them semi-exiled in the West Bank.

Alternatives to a two-state solution exist. Besides the correct but unlikely expulsion of all Arabs from Jewish land, Israel can count on the failure of the Jordanian monarchy. The Jordanian monarchy will succumb to double pressure: politically, monarchy is an antiquated order, and demographically, Jordan’s Palestinian majority is not content with Bedouin dominance. A change in Jordan’s political layout will involve the East Bank falling to the Palestinians and Bedouins taking over the desert all the way to Iraq. Two Palestinian states are clearly too much, and the West Bank issue will be reduced to a border dispute with Jordan.

An Israeli confederacy is another option. The Israel-West Bank union was extensively discussed during the secret Oslo talks, but that option undeservedly fell into oblivion. As long as Israel is not obliged to support the West Bank financially, a confederacy is a viable option. Israel’s fear of foreign Arabs inundating the West Bank is unfounded: the Palestinians are more than anyone else interested in preventing themselves from being swarmed by immigrants. To that end, the Palestinians have demonstrated their sensibility and firmness in adamantly declining to take in any refugees now in Lebanon and Syria. Just to make sure, immigration policy could be left to the confederate government, where Jewish dominance is demographically assured.

Palestinian statehood is bad for Jews—and incidentally, for Palestinians.

On Pesach, God made himself known to the Israelites specifically by the wholesale killing of the Egyptians (Exodus 7:5, 14:17). Jews also were less than politically correct then: the only time the Torah applies the word neighbor to our opponents is when we borrowed jewelry from the Egyptians without meaning to give it back.

On Hanukkah, we celebrate victory in a brutal civil war where Jewish ultra-Orthodox Maccabeans defeated the liberals who merely sought to introduce some elements of Hellenistic culture and tolerance for other religions. The Maccabean war was not one of independence: Judea merely turned from Syrian into Roman protectorate.

On Purim, we do not celebrate deliverance from evil Haman. He was hanged nine months before that (Esther 8:9) for two offenses: plotting against Esther’s people and apparently trying to rape her (7:8). Mordechai was appointed in his stead. It is unthinkable, in that order of events, that the planned massacre against Jews would have been carried out. According to Middle Eastern customs, an edict not actively lobbied for was doomed to oblivion, so with Haman’s demise the Jews were safe despite the fact that the Artaxerxes’ murderous edict could not be formally rescinded.

The celebration marks Jews killing “those who hated them” (9:1). It was not “an eye for an eye” retaliation or even the rabbinical, “He who comes to slay you, slay him first” because the midrash relates that the haters’ children were also killed. That was a classic war of preemption, albeit a belated one. Haman is called an Agagite, a descendant of Amalek’s King Agag whom Saul had initially spared and Prophet Samuel cut in half. The Haman debacle befell us because centuries earlier Saul, a good Jewish king, practiced “the mercy of fools”—after defeating Amalekites, he had mercy on those who would have had no mercy upon us.

Haman’s example follows the Torah’s exterminatory logic. God commanded the Hebrews to leave no trace of natives in the land he gave us. If they wish to leave, they may do so, but if they dare to fight us, they have to be exterminated to the last child. Divine logic is spotless: if allowed to remain, the natives would always remember that Jews took away their land, and they would hate and fight us forever, becoming thorns in our sides. Under Mordechai’s leadership, the Jews realized that they could not afford to leave their haters alive, and killed them. Leaving the haters’ children would have just perpetuated the violence, as children grow and take revenge.

Jews prevailed over their enemies on the thirteenth of the month of Adar (9:1). On the fourteenth, the Jews rested (9:18) and killed choice enemies (v.14). When we celebrate Purim on the fourteenth, it is about killing our enemies rather than saving ourselves.

This may sound odd to those taught the nonsense that Judaism is love. Sorry, then. Jews are only commanded to love their law-observant neighbors; enemies and transgressors must be hated and done away with. Jews are normal, and like other people we are entitled to hate and kill our enemies. We killed Hamas’ Ahmed Yasin together with his family just as 2,500 years we hanged Haman with his sons. And in case you were told there is no Amalek today, Rashi is adamant about equating Amalek with the Germans, and Israel’s Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi has implied clearly that Arabs are Amalek. If you want consolation, take it in the fact that European settlers conquered America in precisely the biblical manner, exterminated the natives, and created a nice liberal country in the occupied territories. Two hundred years from now, I’d love to be sorry for what we did to the natives in the Land of Israel when conquering it.

On Purim, Jews must become drunk to the extent of not differentiating between blessing Mordechai and cursing Haman. In vino veritas. Drunken people forget the accretions of political correctness and return to the basic truth: Mordechai’s blessing consists in Haman being cursed; his death is our reward.

Lest Jews think that Purim’s course of action is antiquated, the characters’ names are suggestive: Mordechai from Marduk, and Esther from Astarte. The saviors were two assimilated Jews whose names even were pagan. One was a court Jew, another was a Jewish leader eager to become court Jew. In the critical times, they have changed.

As a Jewish nationalist, I was always interested in the Bible’s historical descriptions. As a man of common sense, I account for priestly Sadducean and modern archeological views that much of the chronicled events amount to saga rather than an impeccable rendering of history. Indeed, it would be odd to expect an objectively true account in the Chronicles when such a concept did not even exist in ancient historiography, whose authors set before themselves didactic rather than record-keeping goals. Moreover, nothing like objective historiography exists even today, when contradictory and doubtful facts are reported of recent events, and each side’s descriptions of a war paint a different picture.

The Bible’s historical accounts are precious to me because they show something more important than facts—attitudes. It does not matter that speaking of Joshua’s ambush on the town of Ai, the chronicler gives two contradictory figures in the same chapter, either five or thirty thousand Jewish fighters. The figures can be perhaps correlated by reading “elef” as a detachment of varying size rather than a thousand; such a reading would make sense of the unrealistically high head-count of Jews in Sinai. Still, other details are unrealistic: no sane commander would order his entire army to feign a retreat, as Joshua allegedly did in the battle of Ai. It is impossible to turn around an untrained, fleeing contingent; such maneuvers are always conducted by small detachments.

But the story tells us a thing more interesting than any amount of factual details: the authors of the Book of Joshua view genocide and collective punishment as meritorious, and expected their readers to hold similar views. They describe with admiration Joshua’s acts, which would send your Reform rabbi running for an exorcist—if only he had read the Tanakh when taking his rabbinical classes at a secular school. This concept is of paramount importance for comprehending the Tanakh: the less factually accurate are the accounts, the more important they are to understanding the true, operative Judaism of the real Jews. In that sense the Book of Joshua, which reflects the real attitude, is more precious than Leviticus, with its idealistic pronouncements.

The Book of Joshua is modeled upon the Exodus. Its authors likened Joshua to Moses in many details, and thus obtained religious sanction for their realpolitik views. Joshua mediates between God and the Jews just like Moses did, with the same otherwise-unparalleled kind of unquestionable authority. In fact, Joshua enjoys even more compliance than Moses who had faced not a few rebellions. Theologically inspired volcanic events also made their path in Joshua: Moses received the law on a burning mountain while hailstones smote Joshua’s enemies at Gilgal. Some parallels are clumsy: in an effort to copy Moses’ partitioning of the Reed Sea, the authors of Joshua included an episode in which he stops the River Jordan for the Jews to cross it. That account, however, fails the test of a miracle: it is not realistic. All miracles must be at least remotely realistic; the miracle consists in making a highly improbable thing happen. Not so with stopping the river: the incoming flow would have created a wall of water miles high, which contradicts the divinely created laws of nature. Joshua might not be the best theology, but it serves as a pamphlet by Jewish nationalists of antiquity.

It is hard to escape the impression that Joshua is Machiavellian in its attitude toward religion. Machiavelli referred to the Spanish expulsion of Jews as an employment of religion for political ends. After the victory at Jericho, Joshua was sufficiently emboldened to send only a small detachment to conquer the town of Ai. When the locals beat off the Jews, Joshua sought to reassure his troops, and found a good reason for the defeat in Achan’s keeping booty from Jericho. The booty was proscribed in that case, and Achan allegedly incurred divine wrath on Israel; the concomitant prohibition of rebuilding Jericho was the reason why I never objected to handing the cursed city over to the PLO. If Joshua’s argument were true, Achan’s execution expiated his sin, and the Jews could have conquered Ai with a small contingent. Nevertheless, Joshua dispatched his entire army against that town, and cunningly ambushed the residents. He also resorted to a stratagem when fighting at Gilgal: the Jewish army marched all night and caught the Amorites by surprise. The Jews who wait for messiah might derive a great lesson out of this: even Joshua, acting with the fullest divine assistance imaginable, had to resort to military tricks, and essentially fought the enemy as if he had no divine cooperation at all. Jews must not count on God’s intervention, but have to do his bidding all by themselves. Only after the Jews “slew them with a great slaughter” does the Tanakh say that God fought for Israel (Joshua 10:10, 14). We cannot be sure that God is on our side until we do everything.

The ignorant Jews who decry vengeance have to account for an astonishing phrase, “until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies” (Joshua 10:13). Avenged? The Amorites did not wrong the Jews in any way, they merely defended their land against the Zionists. Moreover, in that particular battle the Amorites did not even go out to fight the Jews, but their own traitors, the Gibeonites. By any standard, the Jews were the aggressors, so why vengeance? The lesson is as paramount as it is politically incorrect: the Amorites offended God and the Jews by refusing to vacate the land immediately. Opposing Israel, however unjust her ways might seem to outsiders, is a crime which merits vengeance.

Joshua also defies modern Jews’ legalistic notions. In a blatant case of collective punishment, he sentenced Achan’s entire family, including his children of both sexes, to death. Children do not bear their parents’ guilt only in common legal matters. In cases of national security, evil must be punished with sufficient severity to prevent recurrence. When the entire Jewish people is at stake, it is far better to kill many innocents than to risk recurrence. If this cruel logic of the real world applies to Jews, it applies all the more to our enemies. The notion of collateral damage to enemies was alien to Joshua: all of them must be killed.

The only exception to that rule were the Gibeonites, and they provide a lesson on coexistence. The Gibeonites, a Canaanite tribe whose settlements can still be seen near Jerusalem, survived Joshua’s divinely ordered genocide by deceitfully making themselves serfs for the Jews. Their servitude, moreover, was of the lowliest type: they hewed wood and carried water for Jews. Menial labor, you see, was never popular among Jews.

The Torah, theoretically, commands Jews to expel the natives rather than kill them. By the time of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan that prescription was understood to be excessively idealistic. Rabbis, accordingly, interpret it as an offer of a choice: if the natives refuse to leave, they have to be killed, because killing them all is the only practical way to observe the divine commandment for Jews to settle the land and rule over it. The fact that the Gibeonites resorted to subterfuge in order to deliver themselves into slavery suggests that the third rabbinical option for natives, staying in the land under tribute and servitude, was unheard of at the time.

Nor were the Jews particularly humanistic. The Tanakh relates no qualms of theirs when Joshua told them to exterminate every living being of Jericho except the families of traitors. Nor did the Jews become more compassionate as the slaughter progressed; they similarly annihilated other towns. Looting has been the only change from Jericho onwards: once Jews proved to God their ability to fight selflessly they were allowed in other conquests to loot their murdered enemies—who, actually, were not enemies in any sense, but peaceful residents of land that Jews had decided to take over. Our brethren had less reverence for foreign leaders then than we do today: Joshua hanged the king of Ai from a tree after exterminating and robbing his people; quite a lesson for dealing with a petty king of Jordan.

The ostensibly humanistic concerns turn out under closer examination to be more cynical. Jews are prohibited from cutting down an enemy’s fruit trees—not because of any ecological concerns, but for the simple reason that those will be their trees, and cutting them down in a fit of anger makes no economic sense. Likewise, when Jews are commanded to besiege towns from three sides only, leaving the residents an escape route, the reason is that we need to take over the land. Genocide is a means rather than the end. If former inhabitants leave our land voluntarily, we won’t need to cleanse it of them. So let them leave the town if they want. This is different from blockading Gaza: border openings must exist to allow enemies to flee forever, not for supplies to come in and perpetuate their existence in our land.

Even if Israel now descends to the depths of moral idealism and concedes the Palestinians’ rights, the Arabs would abandon the agreement once they become strong, and reject Israel’s right to exist. Even in the moral idealists’ plane, Palestinians already have a state of their own, Jordan. The Balfour Declaration legally gave Transjordan to Israel in return for Jewish support in WWI. Then again the Jewish state was halved in 1947 to make room for the Palestinians, whom even Jordan refused to accept. What possible right could the Palestinians have to Judea?

Why should Israel compromise with the Palestinians instead of driving them to Jordan and compensating them for the assets they leave? A Palestinian state in Gaza would continue low-level warfare with Israel; thus, the compromise is not viable tactically. Other Arabs despise the Palestinians and don’t care about them. Arabs will fight Israel when they feel strong whether we settle the Palestinian issue or not; thus, no strategic viability. Regardless of the Palestinian state, Israel would have to maintain military readiness against Arab armies; thus, no economic viability. Nor is there any moral reason to compromise: Palestinians already have a state in Jordan, and are not entitled to two states.

Holding onto the Jewish lands is not a matter of Israeli supremacy. A county-sized country can’t talk of supremacy. It’s a matter of honor (Judea), survival (minimal depth of defense), and plain common sense (why give away something for no reason?)

Mexico acquiesced to the loss of a third of its territory to the US not because Mexico was powerless against its neighbor. Palestine is powerless against Israel, yet successfully bugs us with suicide bombers. Powerless Chechnya confronted Russia, and Northern Ireland confronted Britain. Determined groups, however small, can win. The Russian socialist revolutionaries, Ataturk, and Nasser are a few examples.

Mexico accepted the territorial loss for two reasons: the US never offered to return the land, and the US is culturally and economically attractive to Mexicans. To lose to a superior is no shame. Israel provokes the Palestinians with promises of giving them the land. Israel’s penchant for accepting commands from Washington positions her as Uncle Sam’s poor nephew, not worth the Arabs’ respect. A weak giant is the most provocative posture. Arabs learned to exploit Israel’s moral and democratic weak points.