The Israeli blockade of Gaza absent a war or UNSC peacemaking resolution presumes that the Strip is under Israeli control—exactly the point which Israel otherwise tries to reject in order to abandon her responsibility for ensuring the delivery of humanitarian supplies to Gaza. Declaring Gaza to be merely a hostile territory, as the Israeli government did, does not legally justify the blockade.

Why blockade Gaza at all? Three different reasons were advanced, none of them valid. First, Israel tried to put pressure on Gazans to get rid of Hamas in favor of the PLO. Second, Israel claimed the blockade is a means to force Hamas to release Shalit. Third, the blockade was meant to cut weapons supplies to Gaza. Tunnels made that last goal futile, and it is also illegal: a country generally cannot prevent another country from rearming itself.

What problem do we have with Hamas obtaining some weapons? Syria has 1,200 mid-range missiles, all of them aimed at Israeli population centers. Hezbollah has 60,000 rockets, similarly targeting Israel. Israel is also the primary target of Egyptian and Iranian missiles. Rockets in Gaza won’t add to the problem.

The problem is deterrence. Syria and Lebanon do not use their missiles against Israel because they fear retaliation. Hamas does not fear it because its territory is blockaded, ergo it is not an independent state, ergo Israel is responsible for Gazan civilians. It would be much easier for Israel to abandon the blockade, give Hamas all trappings of sovereignty—and pave the way for retaliation.
Why bother Hamas with arduous imports and lose profits ourselves? We can offer to supply Hamas with short-range rockets. But there is a string attached: should rockets, ours or Iranian, be used against us, we will bomb Gazan cities into the Bronze Age.

The South African debacle shows that the world cannot tolerate a problem for too long. Israel has failed to solve this issue for 43 years, and it only becomes hotter with every year of Palestinian struggle. Arab terrorism in the West buys Israel some respite, but also strengthens the voices in the West who demand that Israel be pushed to make concessions. Fortunately, since Arafat’s death the Palestinians have lacked a charismatic leader who looks as good on Western TVs as Nelson Mandela—who was also a terrorist. The West’s attitude will depend ultimately on Israeli resolve: no one likes to campaign for a hopeless issue. Israel may suppress Palestinian nationalism or pointedly drag out the negotiations; the one thing to be avoided is hope. Even negotiations may be branded as hopeless. As long as Israel does not announce any breakthroughs in the peace process, Western activists might lose interest in it.

The world leaders view acceding to Palestinian demands as the only way to calm the media and interest groups. Israel can counter that trend by showing the world that proclaiming a Palestinian state would create a problem of unmanageable proportions: Israel will fight that state in full force over any terrorist attack—of which there will be many—and plunge the region into war.

It makes no sense for Israel to refuse to cede the land to the Palestinians. In the end, our “occupation” of the West Bank will bring on the same sanctions which we would have incurred by expelling the Arabs. So expel them, live through a few years of sanctions, but afterwards enjoy a comfortable, homogenous state.

A demilitarized Palestine would be outright dangerous because it would be a tempting target for takeover. Both Syria and Jordan have designs on the Palestinian territory, and Syria has designs on Jordan as well. Israel might find herself in the uncomfortable position of sending Jewish soldiers to defend Palestine, as she did for Jordan.
Israel, counterintuitively, needs a well-armed Palestine if such a state is to be formed at all. A militant state would serve as a buffer between Israel and Syria. It would also shift the center of gravity away from Syria, a development which might make Lebanon more stable and moderate. Strong Palestine and Syria would bleed each other with wars of attrition. Palestine lacks sources of income and technology, and would rely on Israel for weapons. Such reliance would assure Israeli-Palestinian cooperation more than any treaty. Other Arabs hate Palestinians, and a strong Palestine would be no less provocative for them than Israel, thus reducing the hatred directed at her.
But to try such a gambit as making Palestine a strong and militant state would require an Israeli leader of the caliber of Bismarck, rather than Bibi.

As Israel reduces its military pressure on the Palestinians, the militants lose their incentive for the two-state “concession.” Instead of pounding or suffocating the Palestinians into signing a peace treaty, Israel has made their life sufficiently comfortable that formal independence won’t improve it—especially now that they have de facto independence. Their current situation is better than formal independence: they enjoy self-rule and international recognition even of Palestinian passports, but shoulder no responsibility for their economy, with Israel providing municipal services and jobs for them.

As IDF successfully eradicated terrorist presence from the territories, Fatah has remained distant from common Palestinians. Peres presented the terrorist group as a real power in order to make Arafat, who was then a nobody hiding in Tunis, into a peace puppet. Today, Fatah is still a gang with little connection to the Palestinian masses, hated for repressions and racketeering, and only able to rule by distributing huge amounts of foreign aid. A Fatah man can win presidential elections as the best-advertized thug, but the movement itself shows bleak results in municipal and parliamentary elections.

Fatah’s old leadership is really old; most of them are over the age of seventy. The young guard is more militant. Placing the Palestinian government under independent Fayad and pushing the gangsters away from governmental positions radicalized Fatah. Removed from the daily running of the country, they found militancy the only occupation available to them.

Democratic elections in the West Bank could bring moderates to power. Unaffiliated with Fatah, they might represent the majority of people who are tired on the conflict and want it over. Unlike the militant and ideologically driven Fatah, ordinary Palestinians couldn’t care less about the 1948 refugees and welcome Jewish settlements, which provide them with lucrative jobs. But Fatah and Hamas crush independent political expression. The would-be moderates cannot attract votes with aid, which remains Fatah’s domain. Even rich Palestinians cannot finance new parties because the government would immediately crack down on their income sources. Fatah will also crush any alternative political and philanthropic infrastructure.

In order to prevail, the West must recognize that Fatah is no longer congruent with Palestinian leadership. The terrorist group’s military and political wings are two separate entities by now. Common Palestinians can support ex-Fatah politicians who want some sort of quiet with Israel, but those politicians must rid themselves of the ballast of militants. The West must abandon the intransigent Fatah completely, support a few moderate parties, and channel aid through them rather than through a Fatah-affiliated government. No longer restrained by the need to look nice to Western donors, Fatah would return to active terrorism, but IDF can quash it.

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.

A valid argument can be constructed that such deaths were unavoidable once Hamas embarked on its military opposition to Jewish state. Hamas caused them to be killed, and Jews acted like automatons: threatened, we reacted. In that sense, we had no free will in the question of whether to attack the Gazans: Hamas left us no options. No free will means no guilt.

But there’s a deeper moral dimension: human beings are entitled to hate those who hate them. When Palestinian children watch Mickey Mouse shows about killing Jews, when Gazan kids participate in Hamas demonstrations dressed as suicide bombers, when Arab teenagers do in fact become suicide bombers—I have no problem at all seeing them killed.

Palestinian Arabs challenge the God of Israel; by their very actions they assert that God’s promises to Jews are false. For this desecration, they deserve to be killed.

It doesn’t matter in the slightest that those who died haven’t killed any Jews yet, or perhaps will never kill any. They are members of an enemy nation. Like in Sodom, they had a choice, the option to leave the place of evil. Even inside Gaza Strip, there are plenty of empty spaces where the proverbial good Arabs could have escaped the anti-Israeli regime. They didn’t. Moreover, they have voted either for Hamas or Fatah terrorists, which are the same thing to us.

Children don’t bear their parents’ guilt only inside communities. On a national level, they still do. That’s why Amalek was exterminated for the sins of its remote ancestors. And don’t tell me that Amalek is no more: time and again, the Scripture speaks of it being killed, yet it emerges again. Amalek is alive, and can be easily identified by its determination to murder Jews. Children who live due to their parents who are Hamas voters are responsible for Hamas actions.

The killing in Gaza is sanctioned religiously. Nations in the Land of Israel have three choices: submission and unquestionable loyalty, exile, or death. The choice is valid only before battle: presumably, their post-battle choice would not be honest, but just a temporary ruse.

Hate is the only common ground between the Israeli right and left, between the Jews of Yitzhar and northern Tel Aviv. They differ on every issue but hate the Arabs similarly. Liberalism aside, no leftist Jew wants to be threatened by Arabs within Israel or in the near abroad. Goodness is passive, only hate is actionable and unites the masses. When crossing Jordan, Joshua bin Nun rallied the Hebrews around common hatred and struggle with the natives rather than Shabbat or kashrut.

It would be great to speak the words of Torah to leftist Jews, but that won’t work. At least, not the traditional words. The Torah fully recognizes human nature and sets nationalist, even exterminatory goals for Jews before they enter Canaan. The Hebrews might diverge on many matters but they equally wanted a country without hostile peoples. Not incidentally, the Hebrew word for neighbor is a cognate of evil: common hatred of outsiders builds nations. Then we can proceed to educating everyone about the Torah. In fact, they would ask for Torah in order to substantiate their nationalism and hatreds. No one wants to be just hateful, but seeks to rationalize and justify his hatred with suitable ideology or religion.

Palestine’s economic development plan is counterproductive. Historically, states become aggressive at the initial stages of wealth accumulation; when the government is rich but the wealth has not yet trickled down to the people, they are not yet affluent, and so are not averse to war. Likewise in early stages of economic development, corporations earn unusually high margins, invest a lot, and propel the economy. Later, demands for higher wages eat into corporate earnings and investment resources, and slow down the economy. It is likely that high personal income taxes make corporations more resistant to net wage increases, which disproportionately increase the corporations’ tax obligations; thus, higher personal taxes increase investment resources and boost the economy. In the initial stages of economic boom, both states and corporations are militarily and economically aggressive, respectively.

Ancient Rome and Persia were rich but aggressive, as were France, Britain, and Germany in the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Poor countries cannot afford large-scale wars. Countries with a long histories of affluence fight colonial wars and conduct faraway expeditions, but they do not fight wars which are likely to endanger the personal affluence of their citizens. It is newly rich countries that fight: witness industrialized twentieth-century Russia or industrialized nineteenth-century Germany. British industrialization gave a boost to its colonial adventures.

It is the same with the Arabs: Soviet aid made the Egyptian and Syrian governments economically capable of war-making, and Western oil purchases similarly empowered Iran. On the other hand, Saudi Arabia distributes a significant portion of its oil revenues to its citizens, and they do not support open wars, though they giggle as the Wahhabite regime spreads its ideology and supports terrorists tacitly. Israel’s biggest hope with Egypt is not Hosni or Gamal Mubarak’s crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, but a slow development of the Egyptian middle class, which cares more about its mortgages than about Israel—provided that no economic downturn makes mortgage repayment impossible and turns them against Israel instead. Even in Egypt—the oldest Arab economy with decent traces of civilization—an all-embracing economic progress is unlikely as the elites enrich themselves from the government’s table and unskilled villagers pour into the cities, exceeding the demand for labor and decreasing average wages.

No similar progress is possible in Palestine. To be sure, compared to other Arabs the Palestinians have a sort of work ethic and are renowned for entrepreneurship. Most of them were busy developing their fields when the Saudis and Jordanians were riding camels; as age-old farmers, the Palestinians are more advanced than their herder neighbors. The early-twentieth-century immigrants to Palestine from Arab and African countries were enterprising too, similar to the sort of economic migrants from Europe who boosted America’s productivity. Feeding parasitically on Israel for six decades, Palestinians achieved the highest economic growth rate among non-oil-based Arab economies.

Lawlessness, however, puts a limit on their economic development. The Palestinians have created nice cottage industries, but cannot cooperate on the larger level to run large modern enterprises. It took European immigrants to America two centuries to mold themselves into a law-abiding society, all the way from Indian wars to cowboy shootouts to lynch-mob justice to decreasingly corrupt government institutions to the modern age of transparent government. Fortunately for Americans, their political development coincided with the industrial age: by the time the world economy switched to large industrial enterprises as its backbone, American settlers had developed a relatively law-abiding society. Or look at the Egyptians: millennia of strict governmental order made them law-abiding and suitable for an industrial economy.

The Palestinians, like the Afghanis, Somalis, and others, have lacked an effective state and area not used to submission and following rules. Worse than the Afghanis, the Palestinians have lost the commonsense morality of villagers during their decades of displacement, upheaval, and subjection to the oppression of the Israeli military and local thugs. UNRWA’s handouts greatly worsened the situation, as four generations of Palestinians were born, grew up, and died with the assumption that one’s income is unrelated to his work. Honesty, discipline, and hard work are terms lost on most Palestinians today.

Tens of billions of dollars in economic aid to Palestinians ended up in the bank accounts of top terrorists and in the pockets of their 110,000 associates from various Palestinian security services. Fayad’s government cut down on the explicit embezzlement a bit but continued with the sinecures, monopolies, and the leaders’ pet projects. Fayad has no options: refusing to pay salaries to a hundred thousand gun-toting Palestinians would sweep away his government, which is doomed in any case as the strongmen won’t put up with being deprived of their direct access to aid money.

In the evolutionary sense, societies are no different from other organisms: some have inborn illnesses, other develop lethal diseases, and a few survive and outperform the others. Palestinian society is dead, and any aid to it would only prolong the suffering of the Jews who must deal with it. That’s besides the sheer immorality of aiding your murderous enemy.

The Gaza problem might go away. Palestinians might grow tired of hardships and fighting, and elect a moderate party. Given the current level of Hamas, PIJ, and PRC armaments, they are unlikely to cede their grip on Palestinian society. Moderates would be denounced as traitors, and suitably killed. During decades of hopeful moderation, the Palestinians will extend their rocket range and continue attacking Israel.

Israel’s incursion into Gaza would be disastrous. Fake morality would send Jewish soldiers into Gaza slums without artillery cover, leaving them open to mine traps and snipers. As soon as IDF withdraws, a victorious Hamas will reemerge.

Hamas can be rooted out only by police means. Israel has to reoccupy Gaza and conduct Sharon-style police actions: engage tens of thousands of agents and provocateurs, impose collective punishment, punishment on suspicion, and suspend due process. The work should be uncompromising: no Palestinian government or authorities, no police. And importantly, no prisoner exchanges.

The original reasoning for prisoner exchanges, enunciated during the Entebbe crisis, was that the swap is permissible only insofar as no military option exists. The reasoning goes that a government which cannot protect its citizens has to exchange them. In Gaza, the military option is eminently easy: arrest scores of Hamas officials and keep shooting jailed Palestinian terrorists on an hourly basis until Israeli hostages are released, and refuse to release any Palestinians whose jail term has expired. As long as Israel acts madly, no kidnappings would take place.

Logically and morally, however, Israel should take a different approach. It is wrong to expend Jewish lives and resources to police Gaza for decades. It is an enemy entity with an enemy population whose elected government kills Jews. Those people are far from defenseless: in fact, Hamas has created formidable defenses including tunnels, mines, anti-tank and anti-aircraft rockets. Gazans are an enemy, and Gaza is an enemy state. So take care of Jews, and bomb Gaza just like the Allies bombed Dresden.

The disengagement was tactically sensible. From 2001 to 2005, Hamas fired more than 5,000 rockets and shells at Gush Katif. The former residents who nostalgically extol their life in Gaza forget that 149 people were killed during those years and many more were maimed. Though police measures improved the situation, it’s hard to imagine why Hamas would shell Gush Katif less than Sderot: as the Kassam industry proliferated, the attacks should have taken off.

The disengagement also made sense politically. Sharon probably reasoned that Israeli withdrawal would both create some international goodwill toward Israeli peace efforts and establish a terrorist state in Gaza so that the world would not impose the same solution on the West Bank.

It’s questionable whether Hamas would have been elected if Israel had stayed in Gaza. The US would have pushed for democratic elections and Hamas’ victory, but IDF could have exiled the Hamas candidates.

After disengagement, IDF lost its freedom of operation in Gaza. The army still conducted a lot of secret forays into enemy territory, but the scope of operations fell far below that in the West Bank. Hamas bomb masters and rocket artisans worked in relative safety, and improved their work in terms of quantity and quality.

In terms of defense, Gush Katif was not tremendously different from Sderot: a half-mile-wide no-pass zone around the settlements would have eliminated hand grenade and other personal attacks; then, like Sderot, Gush Katif could only have been hit by Kassams.

The disengagement stemmed from the leftist delusion that all problems can be solved. But witness the century-long fighting in Chechnya or Ireland to realize that many real-life problems lack an immediate solution. Whether we disengaged or not, the rockets would have continued falling, we would have retaliated, and so on. In many countries, border areas remain unruly.

The disengagement was a consequence of warped priorities: of peace over Jews and Jewish ideals. It should have been preferable for an Israeli government to displace thousands of Arabs from the Gush Katif buffer zone than thousands of Jews from Gush Katif.

Theoretically, the Gush Katif withdrawal should have pacified the Arabs, as their demands were met. In reality, the two tendencies clashed: Arabs felt victorious but had no good reason to press on. For all its radical rhetoric, even Hamas accepted the reality of the Jewish state. But having been incited by Israel’s defeat in Gush Katif, Arabs were sensitive to any pretext for resuming the attacks. Thus, Israeli restrictions on border crossings quickly escalated into an all-out rocket war. Short of the restrictions, any other pretext would have done. In a familiar spiral of violence, small Palestinian groups fired on Israel for minor or imaginary offenses, Israel increases its offenses in response, larger Palestinian militias join the fray, a conflict breaks out, is mediated, and brought down to ceasefire. Soon, the cycle starts anew.

The disengagement produced the opposite results with Jews. It established a precedent of massive action by Israel against Jews. Sure, there was the Yamit eviction three decades before, but Jews had only lived there for a few years, rather than three generations. Gush Katif’s destruction also ran contrary to the Zionist spirit of settling the land, and the Zionist atheist premise that “whatever land we developed is ours.” Defeated in Gush Katif, Israelis tried to forget the debacle. While Palestinians jumped on every opportunity to attack Jews, Jews shrank from action even on clear and unacceptable provocations. Palestinians built on their success, Jews buried their shame.

The disengagement was not a disaster. Just as the biblical kingdom expanded and shrank on occasion, so the modern Israel, under a decent leader, would have retaken Gush Katif. But its destruction was a strategic error.

If Israel didn’t counterattack in 2006, 2007, or for most of 2008, then surely the Kassam attacks were not worth a military operation. Some other country could have claimed inability to stop the attacks, but Israel, with one of the world’s strongest militaries, would have had no problem quashing the Palestinian guerrillas. Israeli inaction for three years in the face of rocket attacks has a single explanation in world opinion and the international legal system: the Kassams, as the Palestinians assert, amounted to mere harrassment, and were not a military affair. The issue of proportionality in the Israeli operation in Gaza is similar to a hypothetical nuclear attack on the Vatican for its support of the Nazis: too late. A true proportional response would be striking Gaza, especially government buildings there, the same day that Kassams strike Israel—every day.

If Israeli retaliation against Gaza fails the legal test of proportionality, perhaps the ante bellum would do? Not really. Three years of not responding to Kassam launches created a new status quo, as Israel implicitly accepted being shelled, if at a low level. When you tolerate something for three years, you cannot suddenly change your mind and demand the restoration of a three-years-gone status quo.

Israel must deter the Palestinians from attacking her, but the government made our actions illegal and our response disproportional. Not that we care.