There is a critical difference between Swedish and Israeli socialism. Swedes are a relatively homogenous crowd, while Israelis have well-defined groups of spongers: Haredim, Arabs, blacks, and elderly immigrants. The corruption is especially heinous in regard to blacks: besides direct subsidies (financial rather than a fixed number of bananas per family), they hugely benefit from minimum-wage laws, which means that hardworking Jews are subsidizing those falashas. Many Jews don’t even understand that minimum wage is the largest tax they pay.
It is this corruption that allows government to perform its anti-Israeli tricks. Haredim accepted the Gush Katif eviction after Sharon threw their leaders a bone of slightly bigger subsidies. Settlers keep silent about the destruction of outposts because the government subsidizes settlements.

But aren’t subsidies natural for a state? Not at all. The government does not obtain the funds miraculously. It taxes and distributes. The nation as a whole receives no favor from government for which people should reciprocate gratefully. Rather, government bribes them and pushes them into compliance with their own money. The absurdity of the situation lies in the fact that government legally robs decent, hardworking Jews to buy the support of others for policies detrimental to those Jews. Their own money is taken away and turned against them.

In classical Athenian democracy only people of certain means were allowed to vote. In Israel, tax-negative citizens must be barred from voting. Incidentally, that would disenfranchise Arabs, and also discourage government from politically motivated subsidies.

Moshe Dayan, a legendary warrior, was a simple defense minister in 1967, which is largely an administrative role. Far from saving Israel, he stopped the Arabs fleeing from the West Bank and gave the Temple Mount and the Cave of the Patriarchs to our Muslim enemies. If not for him, we could have had a depopulated West Bank and full control over our holiest places.
Golda Meir, a grandmother of all Jews, is singularly responsible for thousands of Jewish deaths in the Yom Kippur War because she procrastinated and postponed the preemptive strike until after the holiday.
Yitzhak Rabin, a paragon of honesty, campaigned on promises of tough measures against Arabs. At the same time, Beilin negotiated on his behalf with the PLO in Cairo.
Arik Sharon, the king of Israel, won elections by ridiculing the leftists’ plan to disengage from Gaza—only to carry it out himself with unprecedented brutality.

Lieberman never intended to follow through on the “No loyalty, no citizenship” slogan that won him elections. His own version was more down-to-earth: “No national service, no national insurance.” The popular slogan was invented by Birnbaum’s marketing guy. Lieberman knew that there was no way the leftist and center parties would vote to disenfranchise Arabs, their biggest constituency. Neither did he put into effect his other electoral promises. A Palestinian state, far from taboo as he promised, is being negotiated away by his own ministry.

Bill Clinton’s press secretary famously and undiplomatically described Netanyahu as a “liar and cheat,” a view shared by Bibi’s relatives. He lied on every one of his electoral promises. Oh right, we can understand that, he is under American pressure.

Israeli mythology is not limited to leaders. Take the water issue. We know from economic theory that the cost of any goods is pegged to the cost of producing the last unit. If a company spent a lot on R&D for a particular product, but faces competition from its low-cost re-engineered version, it will have to sell at the same low price. Alternatively, when the supply is finite, the relation is reversed: coal is valued at the cost of extracting it from the least feasible mines, despite the fact that there are mines with lower production costs; their owners are said to obtain rent—an unearned income. What has that to do with Israeli water? Very simply, the price of water in Israel is pegged to the cost of desalinated water, which is the most expensive water. Never mind that desalinated water is a small part of the total supply. Essentially, the Israeli government and the water company sell us water from Lake Kineret at the price of desalinated water. The higher are desalination costs, the higher are their rent profits.

The personal consumption of working adults stands between 100 to 200 liters per person per day. Arabs wash less, but let’s allow them the same generous consumption. That brings the Israeli total to less than one cubic kilometer per year, a very small amount even for a drought period. Most water is consumed by economically inefficient agriculture. There is a legend that Israeli agriculture is super-efficient, but that’s nonsense: even European agriculture, which has lower water and transportation costs, is heavily subsidized. Water, like all natural resources, belongs to human citizens, not to corporations. Farms have no claim to our water, certainly not at subsidized prices. They should pay more than individuals, rather than vice versa, as is the case now. The figure of one cubic kilometer shows the nonsense of the official figure of just fifty million cubic meters supplied to our Arab enemies. By any measure, they must be receiving from Israel four to eight times that much, both officially and through semiofficial theft.

Democracy can only survive if people are interested in truth.

The shift in the proportion of the religious population will be mitigated to a yet-unpredictable degree by the secularization of religious communities. In the age of the Internet, they cannot remain as closed as they were before, and the opening of their communities drives their values to the lowest common denominator with the surrounding milieu, thus secularization. Israeli religious communities are treading the path followed by Jewish religious communities of Eastern Europe 150 years ago.

Religious communities will become more radical. One reason for this is the prevalence of male births caused by the low frequency of intercourse. Biologically, significant delays in sexual relations slightly increase the probability of conceiving a boy. An excess of unmarried males greatly radicalizes communities.

Another factor is ideological: when the leaders of a community which opens itself to the outside world moderate their values to preserve their connection to the flock, radical teachers gain prominence. The Catholic Church today has a more extreme stance on moral virtues—notably its opposition to abortion—than two hundred years ago. Wahhabism, an unusually fundamentalist teaching, is the fastest-spreading movement in Islam today, challenged by the even more radical Salafist version. When ancient Israeli society fell apart, rabbis radicalized Judaism by erecting “a fence around the law” with many additional prohibitions. Jewish religious radicalism can take two forms: legalistic halachic and nationalist, the last being more probable. Halachic regulation became so expansive that it regulates every smallest action of a haredi Jew, making it impossible for any single man to learn all of his halachic obligations. Just at the time when the number of ordained rabbis has skyrocketed and the pressure for them to invent more halachic norms is at its peak, there is no room for expansion. We might expect, therefore, a tide of rabbis who concentrate on political issues rather than halacha.

The rabbinical establishment will efficiently oppose them with its money power. By keeping its flock from holding jobs, haredi rabbis control them through social welfare distribution. This is how the Soviets controlled their subjects. Radical rabbis will lack funding and thus remain on the fringes. The absolute number of their adherents, however, will increase tremendously. They will destabilize the moderate Israeli society for its own good.

At the same time, the religious population will be further pauperized. Religiosity exhibits a positive correlation with poverty. Paupers are religious, while affluent people, immersed in consumerism, rarely ask themselves existential questions. In the modern world, income is increasingly related to secular education, which despite Rabbi Soloveitchik’s efforts, remains largely off-limits to religious Jews. Secular education provides answers to existential questions which are contrary to religious postulates; therefore affluent and educated people generally leave religion. Paupers, on one had, tend to be radical, but on the other they depend on the government for welfare handouts. As the religious population grows and society’s mainstream increasingly opposes subsidizing it, the religious community might find itself financially ostracized and turn radical.

This term, Netanyahu was not tough. Though shock-shelled by Obama’s rhetoric, he was slow to give up – but then came the Gaza flotilla debacle.

Why were the boats intercepted 80 miles out at sea? The depth of a blockade is only 20 miles. An interception on the open seas is a clear-cut act of piracy. An honest mistake, made because no lawyer was present? You bet. The Border Police refused to take part in the operation because they lacked jurisdiction outside of Israeli territory. The Navy knew that it was committing a breach of international law. Yet the order was given. A senseless order, because the boats could as easily have been intercepted within the blockade zone – legally.

Why intercept the boats at all? Their cargo had been inspected at Greek and Turkish customs, and presumably by Israeli agents as well. Everyone knew they had no meaningful weapons on board. Would the boats docked in Gaza have created a dangerous precedent which could later have been used to facilitate arms trafficking to Hamas? The Israeli government is not in the habit of dealing with remote threats; if it were, Hezbollah would not have been able to amass 50,000 rockets, nor would Syria have aimed 1,000 ballistic missiles at our cities, nor would Hamas have been able to smuggle in antitank and antiaircraft rockets. The boats were not stopped because they threatened, even remotely, to set a precedent.

If anything, the Israeli government was especially careful about the flotilla because it had been financed by Turkey. No way would the government carelessly and deliberately jeopardize our already strained relations with the Ottomans. So there must have been an overwhelming reason for the interception.

Without doubt, the Gaza flotilla was going for the Exodus scenario: a highly publicized attempt to break the blockade of Palestine. They even spent extra time wandering around the Mediterranean sea to garner all available attention. There was next to no cargo on board: these were passenger ships, what cargo! And even the arrogant Israeli intelligence could not have missed the preparations being made for a violent encounter among the ship’s 650 passengers. They were playing out the famous Jewish-British confrontation. Recognizing the similarity, British diplomats were among the first to condemn Israel. According to the scenario, there would have to be deaths.

A ship with so many passengers can hardly surrender. How are the passengers supposed to disembark to be transferred out of Israel? With too many people on board, surrender was not an option: they had not prepared for the trip for months only to be detained by Israelis. Numbers have a power of their own: a boat with dozens of passengers is easy to take over, but hundreds of people are likely to fight.

With full knowledge of the likelihood of confrontation, the Israeli government sent Navy commandos rather than Border Police to make the interception. Anyone familiar with Navy training could have predicted the ensuing fiasco. The Navy is simply not trained for this kind of operation. Recall the indiscriminate shootings that took place during the early stages of the first Lebanon war. The Border Police, on the other hand, are well prepared and trained to control riots with non-lethal means. The Marines were lost: in a clearly hostile situation, they were only allowed to use paintballs! And no peacenik piece of trash in the government is going to go to jail for sending Jewish boys unarmed into a combat zone. The Marines’ initially meek reaction, predictably, encouraged the mob and escalated the subsequent fighting. Whereas a few live shots would have sufficed to quell the riot, the initially mild reaction ensured significant casualties-most importantly, among the Marines.

Besides choosing the wrong type of troops for the operation, the government sent an insufficient number of them. Who in his right mind would send a few dozen Marines against hundreds of violent protesters? We are not even talking about a typical anti-riot operation in which a wall of police presses against the mob and relatively few policemen are required to man the confrontation line. The Marines were dropped from helicopters right into the middle of a hostile crowd.

When the first Marine who landed on the Marmara was attacked on the spot, Admiral Marom should have changed tactics immediately. It is hard to doubt his expertise in such simple matters, but they continued dropping the Marines with paintball guns onto a ship which was exploding with rage. Apparently, the Marines did not receive fire cover from several helicopters right above them, despite being in mortal danger. They went with mere pistols against hundreds of armed rioters: in close combat, the rioters’ knives and axes were easily equal to Navy handguns. Someone sent the Marines to their deaths, and one is left to ask oneself about the role of Admiral Marom, who narrowly escaped discharge a year ago due to his tendency to frequent strip joints, and who may be indebted to high-ranking leftists in the establishment who saved his job.

Unimpeded satellite translation of the confrontation from the boats speaks volumes. Why wasn’t the Navy ordered to jam the activists’ communications? Mistakes like this do not happen in well-planned, routine operations in which scores of professionals cross-check the most minute details.

The pro-Palestinian activists were on a suicide mission. What did they expect, to fight off the Israeli Navy with knives and firebombs? Or did they expect to escape being thrown into Israeli jails after attacking Israeli Marines? No, theirs was a suicide mission.

The world was also surprisingly prepared. Germany, unwilling to see Jews return to Bavaria, is normally our staunch ally. Yet, the German PM condemned Israel immediately, though the Marines acted in self-defense. The French, Italians, and nearly everyone else followed suit immediately, though the casualties, even if inflicted on peace-loving civilians, were minuscule by anyone’s standards – certainly by the standards of the NATO countries fighting in Afghanistan. Completely ignored was the fact that the ‘peaceniks’ attacked the Marines rather than vice-versa.

Obama is a special case. His honey-sweet invitation to Netanyahu was immediately suspect. Okay, Obama needed to repair his relations with America’s Jewish community, but what is the point of a hollow meeting? Obama can remove his feet from the table while speaking with Netanyahu, but he will still be pressing the Jewish state to abandon Jerusalem and live with a nuclear Iran – not a big deal, indeed, since a life like that wouldn’t be long. Then, conveniently, came the Gaza flotilla debacle, and the scheduled meeting was abandoned. Instead, the US State Department joined the chorus of international condemnation of Israel. Tell me that Obama did not know about the impending debacle.

Such string of operational errors in a simple intercept could have happened on its own – in which case, the government is guilty of criminal stupidity. More likely, Israeli leftist establishment framed Netanyahu.

The last time there was such a provocation against Netanyahu’s government, it cost us Hebron. Let’s see what concessions they ask for this time.

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.

Ben Gurion similarly resigned himself to the death of the six million (seven million, actually, as many of the Soviet victims were not registered Jewish). He refused to channel the money collected for Jewish settlement activities to ransoming Hungarian and Romanian Jews. Zionists not only didn’t pound on all the doors to push to save European Jews, but ostracized Hillel Kook, whose group did just that.
Zionist restraint has been dictated not by concern for Arabs, but hatred of Jews. During the War of Independence and for a decade afterwards, Ben Gurion repressed Arabs with an iron fist, expelled them, and condoned wholesale murder in Kfar Kasem.

In 1976, incited by Jordan, Palestinians launched a Land Day. Israel’s military administration, duly warned of the upcoming pogrom, refused to send reinforcements into Hebron and the settlements, thus leaving Jews there to be murdered by rioting Arab mobs. The Jews defended themselves valiantly, but the army detachments only arrived after the fighting had subsided.

In 1994, again, the army knew that the Arabs were preparing a pogrom on Purim. During a meeting in military headquarters, Dr. Baruch Goldstein was told to arrange medical aid to Jews, but no reinforcements were brought into the city.

Prisoner exchanges show a similar disregard for Jewish lives. To gain media applause, Israeli political bosses free hundreds of Jew-murderers.

Assimilated Israeli leaders despise common Jews, who remind them of their own roots. Poor (Sderot) and religious Jews are detested still more. When there is an occasion to have them killed by Arab hands, Israeli leaders don’t object.

Israel lost the war when she signaled to common Palestinians that they won’t be targeted. Collateral damage amounted to less than 0.5 percent of the population. The rest were safe and were promptly paid compensation for their destroyed property—with Israeli tax transfers. Under such conditions, Gazans have no reason to withdraw their support for Hamas. Most guerrillas escaped unscathed too, even though IDF knew their—or at least their families’—locations.

The recipe for a successful anti-guerrilla campaign is well-known: exceptional violence. Anyone with the remotest connection to the guerrillas should be a legitimate target, and not just for shooting but for much more horrible modes of death. Russians in Chechnya did not mind shooting at any aggressive-behaving villager; some Chechens were thus prompted into the fighting, but most chose to change their expressions. Now, that is definitely neither nice nor legal, but it is efficient.

Counter-terror is just that, a terror against terrorists, or rather their support base. In the long run, counter-terror offers no solution: modern armies can rarely sustain excessive cruelty over long periods. Popular expectations of cruelty increase while the cruelty decreases, and terrorist supporters are emboldened by the perceived lack of cruelty.

Whatever the Israeli Supreme Court says, Arab human shields and family punishments are standard military measures and IDF can continue them without moral damage. They are insufficient: short of burning the villages along with their inhabitants, punishment-raids cannot succeed; in the current situation, Israel lacks that option. Short of the raids, we can do exhaustive police work, close all communal institutions (including universities and media), and expel all Palestinian opinion-makers from teacher activists up. That would pacify the hostile territory. But the only long-term solution, and the least painful one, is the one Machiavelli suggested to all conquerors: expel and disperse the hostile population. Only with the Palestinians gone could the Jews go on with their lives.

Incidentally, the transfer would also benefit the Gazans. A million and a half people cannot develop economically on a tiny strip of desert; certainly not these fourth-generation refugees who lack even the meager skills of the West Bank Arabs. Foreign Arabs want that criminal mass to stay in Gaza rather than inundate Muslim countries; not the least, foreign Arabs use Gazans to trouble Israel. Once they have been expelled to Lebanon, Gazans can leave the refugee camps and build normal lives. Many would prefer to stay in the refugee camps on UNRWA’s lifetime assistance, but the point is that in Lebanon, local government would police the camps with most illiberal means. Just like it bombarded a refugee camp with artillery to quench the Fatah al Islam insurrection, the Lebanese army will do the same to other Palestinian terrorists. This is in no small part because Lebanese, like other Arabs, hate Palestinians; but it would also be done to avoid Israeli retaliation against Lebanon for Palestinian attacks.

The seemingly cruel measures are often the kindest.

Iran itself is not the biggest problem. The biggest threats to Israel come from Pakistan and North Korea, both irresponsible proliferators. Pakistan is on the verge of an Islamist takeover, and some of its nuclear bombs are reportedly stored in Saudi Arabia. North Korea would sell nukes to any cash bidder regardless of his terrorist affiliation.

Russia is a bigger problem than the Arabs. It has built a plutonium-producing reactor in Bushehr, will build more blocs there, and agreed to build similar quasi-military reactors in Egypt and Venezuela. Anti-aircraft batteries at the Russian Navy base in Tartus cover most of Syria against Israeli strikes.
Talks of Palestinian statehood are outdated: Palestinians already have a state with its president, government, passports, ambassadors, and a small army.

Israel agreed to fund Hamas years ago in order to weaken Arafat. Israel also agreed to fight Hamas. But the Jews don’t agree to talk to Hamas—what nonsense. If you fight it, you talk to it. Israelis close their eyes to the reality that Hamas is the true Palestinian government. Talking to the worthless Fatah doesn’t help—we can get the same results talking to Navajo Indians.

Israel imagines herself in control of Gaza, and so closes its crossings. That is neither sensible nor legal. Israeli control of the crossings is the major legal argument in support of her responsibility for Gaza. Instead, opening the crossings and bombing Gaza as an enemy state in response to any attacks from there is the way to go.

The Israeli war in Gaza stemmed from the self-delusion that the Palestinians might revolt against Hamas. Instead, Hamas claimed victory by virtue of surviving the Israeli assault, and gained popularity among common Arabs in Gaza and abroad for standing up against IDF despite having been abandoned by every Arab government from Cairo to Tehran. The war branded even the Syrian and Iranian governments as “moderates” and “collaborators” for their failure to help Gaza, and greatly promoted Islamic radicals.

Face the reality.

His only solid goal is driving the maximum number of Arabs from Israel. On that point, he lacks the principled positions of Rabbi Kahane (unconditional transfer) or Rehavam Zeevi (buying out the property of the Arabs who agree to leave). Lieberman opts for a politically correct solution of territorial exchange with the Palestinian state, swapping Arab-populated regions of Israel for Jewish settlement blocs on the lands controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Like most half-measures, that one is unworkable.

First, Israeli Arabs don’t want to become Fatah Arabs. They reject Fatah’s right to conduct territorial exchange on their behalf. If the territorial exchange appeared on the negotiating table, the Arabs from soon-to-be-swapped areas would move to other areas of Israel. Nothing precludes those villagers from moving, say, to Jaffa, where they won’t be subjected to a population exchange.

Second, a territorial swap will create the familiar situation of divided families. Any extended Arab family would always have relatives on both sides of the border. The position of the Israeli Supreme Court on such matters is well established: the Israeli government is expected to provide the Arabs opportunities to meet. So the border traffic would be huge, and would pose a high security risk.

Three, the territorial exchange would bring us to the 1947 UN map, which we fought against in the War of Independence. That plan created several hardly interconnected Jewish enclaves surrounded and interspersed by Arab enclaves. Such a state was of course doomed. Lieberman’s plan would create an even worse map, as the Arabs spread mightily out of their 1947 locations.

Four, Lieberman’s plan ignores the problem of illegal construction. Israeli Arabs have actually settled territories several times larger than their zoned locations. Demolishing that massive illegal construction in a politically tolerable way is impossible, and abandoning such huge areas to the Palestinian Authority is impractical.

Five, kibbutzim and Arab villages in Galilee, as well as settlements and Arab towns in Gush Etzion, are so intermingled that separating them for the purposes of territorial exchange is impossible. A border which includes Jewish villages and excludes Arab ones would look like a drunkard’s path on the map. Such a border would be indefensible, and a security liability.

There is a fundamental contradiction between realpolitik and nice politicking: viable politics is never nice. Arabs from the exchanged areas (in Lieberman’s plan) would not like to leave and would have to be deported. So why not deport them without land?

Rational people mind their beer and chips rather than national ideas. Successful nationhood is always a bit mad: from the club-wielding Hebrews in Canaan to quasi-messianic Zionists in kibbutzim, also in Canaan. Another name for madness is passion, and it takes a lot of passion to prevail over enemies who want neither your house nor money but vague pride and sovereignty.

Western powers submitted to Ho and Gromyko because of their simple approach: “no” to any concessions. Affluent countries don’t really need the things they negotiate for, whether South Vietnam or ballistic missiles in Turkey, and give way once faced with unrelenting opposition.

War-making is irrational. Rational powers have no credibility in military matters. Obviously, they would rather negotiate than fight. Even when they fight, they do so for no apparent reason and follow no predictable pattern, like in Iraq.

Mad rulers understand others of their ilk well: Russia clamped down on Georgia but not on Lithuania because the West would have no choice but to react, at least with sanctions. The art of madness is to feel the extent of the other side’s bluff, and not cross the line.

Credibility hinges on zero tolerance for infringement on one’s interests. Russia lets Lithuania go thus far, but cannot allow the same freedom to Georgia because South Osetia and Abkhazia are de facto Russian provinces, a sphere of legitimate interest. Russia can tolerate them being nominally ruled by a friendly regime in Georgia, but not a pro-American one. The same holds for Ukraine: Russia would accept the Crimea as part of Ukraine insofar as Ukraine remains closely aligned with Russia (“Let me carry your bag, and you would carry me”). Israel’s credibility has been completely destroyed by her inaction in the face of rocket attacks: if semi-nomads from Gaza can lash out against Israel, then everyone can. It’s better to overreact and kill an extra thousand enemies than to expose your weakness by inaction.

Madness is a very safe strategy for a relatively self-sufficient power: no one wants to mess with a mad government, but few want to deal with it. Even the German government’s insane attitude elicited no substantial international opposition until 1939, when every Western European country finally felt threatened. Foreign powers refrain from messing with a mad government until a clear and present danger arises to themselves, and even that danger they are willing to discount. On numerous occasions, the US has betrayed its vassals to a mad enemy: South Vietnam and Georgia are just two examples; also note the Kurds and Hungary, whose populations were incited to revolt by US government radio and other agencies—and were then abandoned. On the other hand, the US is forthcoming to its allies when the enemies are rational: America diplomatically defended Egypt against Israel, Britain, and France in 1956. Rational governments normally lose conflicts with mad enemies because, rationally speaking, some territories or concessions—especially those of allies rather than one’s own—are not worth the risk of a major military confrontation.

Israel has a successful history of madness, defined as hyper-reaction: Jews took Arab hostages to exchange for Israeli MIAs, destroyed the entire Lebanese civilian air fleet in retaliation for the hijacking of Israeli planes, and shelled Jordan in response to terrorist attacks. Israelis did not apply the mad response to Egypt, and that country bugged us incessantly in wars of attrition. When Israel calmed down a bit with Lebanon, the PLO guerrillas increased their attacks, leading to the 1980 war. Even so, the PLO violence was moderate, largely in the spiral of Israeli and Palestinian strikes where the difference between attack and counterattack has evaporated. Overall, our mad reaction has critically deterred the enemy.

Though the policy of madness incurs setbacks in direct foreign investment, the extent of these setbacks is debatable. Western corporations both small and large dealt extensively with pre-war Germany and communist China. Investors line up for tenders even in Iran, despite the bizarre regime and sanctions. If Israel creates an internationally competitive economy, no amount of political adventurism will impede its development.

But haven’t it been said, An eye for an eye? Such a reading is simplified. The lawgiver really meant, half of your enemy’s eyes for half of yours. If the immediate Muslim enemies are sixty times more populous than Israel, then we should retaliate against sixty of them for each Jewish casualty. Also, criminals are fined two to five times the amount of immediate damage, in order to punish them for undiscovered crimes. Since killing the most wanted enemies in any strike is unlikely, we’re justified in avenging the damage five times over; five times by sixty times is three hundred times. And there was also a precedent set by Joshua bin Nun, who offered the enemies a choice between exile, surrender, and extermination. This lesson is fully applicable today.