The peace treaty with the Palestinians doesn’t seem close, unless the Bush-Rice duo orchestrates a major political assault on Israeli government. Even so, Palestinian state exists de facto: with president, parliament, and even many countries’ embassies. Does anyone protest the media calling Abbas Palestinian president?

Olmert negotiates the borders of Israel which include the settlement blocs. He is anxious to avoid the Gush Katif-type evacuation trouble. As long as the settlements remain inside Israel, most settlers won’t protest giving up Judea and Samaria.

The government might leave the faraway and militant places like Kfar Tapuah alone, not evicting the settlers. They will be allowed to remain there just as any Israeli stay abroad, and left to the Palestinians to harass, intercept en route, and make their life untenable.

Nothing would change when the government signs peace accords with Palestinians. As long as most settlers are not evicted, the status quo won’t be changed. Almost no Jews venture into Schem or Ramallah, anyway. The West Bank Palestinians won’t start shelling Tel Aviv a la Shderot, as they know that would provoke massive retaliation; Jews hesitate attacking Iran but would have no qualms about invading a weak Palestinian state.

Bringing massive numbers of Jews into the territories to stem the evacuation is not an option. Once the border is demarcated and legalized, it would be plainly illegal for them to cross the state border, and few takers would appear. Crossing the state border beyond the official checkpoint is not merely an act of politically inspired civil disobedience but a clear-cut crime.

Moreover, the “front line” of the possible government action in Judea and Samaria is long. Jewish conservative activists failed defending Gush Katif, where the confrontation line was minuscule. The army can also wait out the protestors: tens of thousands of people cannot hold vigils for more than a few days, as they need to work for living. The army, on the contrary, can stay there for months, waiting for the human wave to dissolve.

Israel can be as well located in Uganda. The beaches of Tel Aviv are a part of the Promised Land, but so are Jordan, Iraq, and Lebanon. The seashore was settled by Philistines, then heavily gentilized, controlled by the Romans. Jews have very little historical connection with the seashore. On the contrary, the very area Israel abandons to the Palestinian state – Judea and Samaria – is the core Jewish land. Hebron was King David’s seat of power, Schem conquered by Jacob; the ancient Jewish state was located specifically in the area that Jews are giving away now. Ignore the uninhabitable Negev Desert, Galilee and the Little Triangle near Lod settled by Arabs, and Israel is reduced to a tiny beach strip 14 by 80 miles; even there, Arabs constitute 34% among the young. Jewish population shrinks to the Tel Aviv – Netanya strip of the beach and the Haifa enclave.

But haredi’s influence increases with their numbers, especially as they are a uniquely coherent and zealous group. As conscription becomes increasingly unfashionable among atheist Israelis, haredi might become the major force in the army. As secular Jews emigrate, haredi will become a majority or at least the largest voting bloc.
Jews lean to the right as they see that every peaceful measure fails with Arabs from Palestine to Iran, and Arab enemies grow stronger.

Even if Olmert gives up Judea, another leader can take it back.

The Arabs believe we took their land. No amount of propaganda would change the fact that their dunes have become our gardens. “Their” is more important than “dunes.” On the contrary, Israeli education, available to Arabs, emphasize the nobility of nationalism, perseverance, and national liberation struggle on Jewish example; Arabs readily apply the example to themselves. There is not a single example in history where conquerors (and to Arabs, Jews took over their land) lived peacefully with the conquered. The victims were always eliminated to insignificance. Otherwise, acting in the very human (“inhumane”) manner, the victims revolt. They don’t believe in conqueror’s benevolence but read it as moral or physical weakness, and see it as an opportunity to prevail.

Peace negotiations lead to peace only when the argument is not essential for the warring parties; both France and Germany would love to annex Alsace-Lorraine, but can also live without it. When the argument is over the essential territory, the soul of the nation, it is not amenable to negotiations. The only way to live in peace is eliminating the threat. This truth is simple, but not nice, and so many imagine that somehow the history has stopped in our time, and all which was true before is false now, and wolves lie with lambs, and nations negotiate the core issues. That mindset is apocalyptic; our days are hardly the last days, and the human mentality does not change. If anything, the wars become bloodier.

Media coverage show us the enemy faces, and we see the enemy as individuals rather than the mass. Individuals arose compassion while masses – fear. Seeing your enemy, unwarlike as he is on TV, makes you unwilling to fight him. Imagine Allies’ media reporting live from fire-bombed Tokyo and Dresden, showing burned children. That would naturally have an impact on American public. The extensive media coverage of Arabs similarly turned them from enemies into “people like us.” Few understand that enemies are indeed like us, and their goals are like ours – and that is exactly the reason we fight, because both of us critically want the same tiny piece of land. Each of us wants to be a master of his life rather than depend on the possibly benevolent rule of aliens.

Assimilated Jews know a single line from the Torah: “You shall love the alien.” Many even imagine it runs as in Christianity, “Love your enemy.” But there is Exodus 23:31: “And I will give the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall expel them.” The aliens whom we shall love are those who accepted basic tenets of Judaism. They are either full converts or God-fearers, but in any case we are mandated to love them because they are loyal and strive to be good citizens of Jewish state. Nothing can be farther from Israeli Arabs who identify with Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians – not with Jews or Israelis.

The Torah is practical. We cannot come to an agreement with sworn enemies, or live peacefully with those who consider themselves rightful inhabitants (and therefore sovereigns) of the land. There is no peace process, but there is a process that brings peace: namely, cleansing the land of our enemies.

Giving the Palestinians all areas they want won’t bring peace. Palestinians control all those areas now. Except during the riots, Israeli police don’t show up in the Arab-occupied areas. Even Arab villages inside Israel are off-limits to police and court officers: the police enter the Arab places like Lod in armored vehicles only; that’s in Israel, not the West Bank. Palestinian state would be a permanent offense to the Arabs: did they fight all those years for a tiny, nonviable statelet? So the Palestinians will press with more demands: free trade with Israel (flooding our markets with their tax-free produce), migrant labor, access to Gaza (contiguous Palestinian state means discontinuous Jewish one). Palestinians will unite with their brethren in Jordan, who form a majority there and will take over that country in democratic fashion after the inevitable failure of Jordanian monarchy – after all, monarchy fails everywhere. The West Bank will annex Jordan rather than vice versa. Refugees returning from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Gaza would turn the Palestinian state into a state of criminal anarchy: those people have no useful skills for four generations, no place to live, and no desire to work; imagine resettling Harlem inhabitants into Manhattan.

Israeli left has no compassion to Arabs. The West Bank is given away only because Israel doesn’t want to assimilate another three million Arabs. But Arabs in Israel bred from 150,000 to 1.5 million in sixty years. They are already 34% among Israel’s young. Israeli Arabs contribute to violence against Jews statistically much more than Gazans or West Bankers. Israeli troops find it easier to conduct operations in Gaza than in the Arab villages of Galilee. Separation barrier can stem the flow of terrorists from Gaza, but attackers from Arab communities in Israel reach Jewish areas unimpeded.

Israeli left doesn’t like the Arabs; it hates Jews – or, rather, Jewishness. Inundating Israel with Arabs is the left’s way of finishing Judaism off. The leftists resist feeling themselves second-rate Jews, Jews without Jewishness, and so do away with it. Zionism is a no-brainer; Judaism requires decades of studies. Any crook can become Zionist politician; they stand no chance to become a prominent Torah scholar. Abandoning Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, Gaza, Galilee to Arabs is not meant to establish peace or justice – these are the last things the leftists are concerned about. The concessions mean ending the left’s ideological humiliation – ending the Jewish state in the process. At some point, the leftists will change their course. Like King Herod, they will realize usefulness of religion for their statehood needs, and will embrace Judaism. By that time, it may be too late.

Religious matters are black and white. God either told us to take and keep Jerusalem, or he didn’t. Jews, therefore, must either hold on to Jerusalem no matter what, or give it away as the hilly town is not worth the trouble. Negotiating Jerusalem is exactly like negotiating Jewish religion with Palestinians. The religion is either true or not, there is no ground for discussion.

Sovereignty is a fiction. East Jerusalem is to all practical purposes an Arab territory now. Israel’s sovereignty only gives Jews the honorary right of subsidizing the Arabs there. Jewish conservative activists make a great fuss about taking another acre for “illegal outposts,” but their efforts are irrelevant: even if Israeli government annexes all the Jewish-squatted land, Arabs would still control Judea and Samaria demographically. Arabs fully control East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, Lod, Akko, most places in Galilee. Jews are increasingly left with the Negev desert (also roamed by Bedouin) and a beach strip. The peace process solves nothing, but only institutionalizes Israeli defeat.

Israeli conservatives act like ostriches: Olmert soothes their conscience by promising to relegate the Jerusalem issue to the last stage in peace talks with Palestinians. It’s not even important that Olmert lies and, as Palestinians never fail to announce, negotiate Jerusalem now.

Leaving the core issues for the last stage in negotiations is fundamentally wrong. Would you discuss a delivery time for the furniture set if you don’t agree with the seller on price? In our situation, the seller doesn’t even want to sell.

Leaving the core issues for the later assures that Israel would give way on them, as the entire pressure now dispersed over several subjects will be concentrated on the issue of Jerusalem. The story would go thus: “Okay, we have agreed with Palestinians on just everything else, the peace is so close. Should we refuse peace because of the Arab-populated Jerusalem areas which we the Jews cannot live in, anyway?” Once all other issues are settling, partitioning of Jerusalem will be passed automatically. Neurotic Jews can rebel and refuse such peace, sublimating into the issue of Jerusalem all the distrust they feel to their government, but if counting on that, then what the peace process is for?

Israeli policy of piecemeal concessions is devastating. Jews give away their bargaining chips one by one, lose bargaining power, and have the international pressure on the “leftover” issues increase. Back in 1972, Israel rebuffed Sadat’s peace offer (whether realistic or not) of comprehensive peace with Arabs in return for Sinai; the Palestinians were ignored. Four decades later, Israel will find herself without the Sinai, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank – but still not at peace with Arabs. Almost every Muslim leader have already declared that even ceding the West Bank and Jerusalem to Palestinians would not lead to immediate peace with Arab countries. And even where Israel has peace, there is no normalization: common Egyptians and Jordanians hate Israel now just as before we signed the peace treaties. Iraq and Kuwait, two countries under the US foot, flatly refused peace with Israel. Iran cannot be expected to sign peace with the Zionist entity even if Palestinians get a state. Saudi Arabia is the last country Israel wants to be at peace with, as the flow of Saudi oil money into Israel, already considerable, will skyrocket as Saudis buy out the Holy Land. Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon cares not a bit about the Palestinians and would not embrace Zionists even if Arafat is re-buried on the Temple Mount, as he might be if the Palestinians get Jerusalem. Peace with Syria would spell a military fiasco for Israel, as Syria will upgrade its arsenals under the protection of peace agreement like Egypt does – to strike later with vengeance.

Negotiations over Jerusalem with Fatah are puzzling. British hunted down Jewish terrorist groups Etzel and Lehi instead of negotiating with them. Fatah members continue attacking Jews, Fatah pays salaries to Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades with the money dutifully transferred by Israel, and in especially odd occurrence, a bodyguard of Ahmed Qurei, a top Palestinian negotiator, was killed in a firefight with IDF.

The peace process is fraud. Israel is not at war with Palestinians – or if we are, then bomb them out of existence rather than supplying them water and electricity. Palestinian threat to Israel is laughable: just ban the Arab migrant workers, and suicide terrorism, already happening just once a year, would almost cease. At any rate, Arab terrorism claimed many times less Jewish lives than ordinary car accidents. Ending Kassam and Katyusha rocket fire is also a no-brainer – not with the absurdly expensive Iron Dome system, but with the common police measure of invading Gaza once a year or so, killing a couple of thousand Palestinian guerrillas, damaging their infrastructure to the Bronze Age level, and enjoying calm for another few months. Banning the UNRWA and other aid sources from Gaza and the West Bank would be a much greater service to peace than ceding the Arabs Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa together: Palestinians should care about employment rather than live on foreign aid and use the ample idle time for radical activities. Paupers in search of food won’t have time for terrorism.

Jews believe in the peace for various reasons. Some Jews are plainly self-hating, and just want a trouble for the Jewish state. Others are too tired of war, and just want to close their eyes to see the ivory tower of peace and happy relations between Jews, Egyptians, Iranians and whoever else. Some are primitive rationalists – look at the numbers of Jews in the utopian movements such as the communist one – and believe that every human problem, however immensely complex, can be reduced to a formula, discussed, and settled. Some politicians are crooks who use peace process to fool the masses into electing them. Some, notably the security establishment officials, see clearly that military methods fail to solve the problem, and opt for peace settlement. They just don’t realize that even in mathematics, and surely in social relations, some problems are inherently unsolvable. Or it may be the other way around: the leftist Israeli establishment appoints the brainwashed ultra-leftists for security positions, and naturally they support the hollow peace.

So instead of seeking an immediate solution, which ought to be wrong, Jews must accept the reality of intermittent low-level conflict which would drag on for the foreseeable future. We really don’t know what would happen in a few decades. Improvements in nuclear power generation can devaluate oil, causing immense poverty and hunger in overpopulated Arab countries. Such a scenario would increase the number of desperate terrorists but diminish the threat by impoverished regular Arab armies.

Arabs might get nuclear weapons, and surely leak them to terrorists who might or might not detonate them in Israel. That threat would only increase if peace agreements are signed, as Israel will find it diplomatically hard to preempt against friendly Arabs’ nuclear facilities.

Arabs might breed in Israel to the third of voters, join coalition with Jewish ultra-left and non-Jewish parties, and vote Jewish state out of existence, thus solving the problem of coexistence with Arabs. Or Jews might drive the hostile elements out of Israel.

There are so many unknown variables in the peace process that trying to predict it amounts to nonsense. Some things, however, are easy to understand. The Arabs don’t need peace with Israel: both peace and its absence are fine with them. They don’t need Israel’s assistance and don’t fear her attacks. Peace treaty won’t change the Arab behavior: they will continue supporting anti-Israeli terrorists if only to drain their countries of radicals and won’t entrust Israel to be a vizier of Muslim funds (economic cooperation). The only substantial economic feature that would come out of Israeli-Arab peace is heavy investment by Muslims in the politically sensitive Israeli real estate, the process which is well underway now and only waiting to be legalized.

Arabs, being completely indifferent to the peace process, offer Israel no concessions: Judea and Samaria must be abandoned, Jerusalem divided, and the refugees – compensated, with some of them allowed returning to Israel. That’s not really a peace plan, but an odd demand for capitulation of a victorious power to the defeated aggressors.

Israel, on the contrary, gives way continuously and receives nothing in return. Arabs did not reciprocate the evacuation of Jewish settlements from Gaza, a major step which divided Jewish nation and left a scar for decades. Rather, Arabs intensified their attacks on Israel. Superficially, that applies to Palestinian militants only, but they enjoy support of every major Muslim state: Syria (weapons), Iran (money and training), Egypt (logistics), and Saudi Arabia (money and diplomatic support).

Back in 1972, Sadat offered Israel peace with all Arabs in return for the Sinai and the Golan Heights, with no heed paid to the Palestinian state. Recently, Saudis offered Israel peace with all Arabs in return for Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. Now Israel negotiates with the Palestinians minute details of transferring them Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem without expecting reciprocal peace with Arabs countries. The terms become progressively worse.

But the real peace problem, it’s not without, it’s within Israel. Israeli Arabs form a third of Israel’s young and absolute majority in several regions. The Jewish state now abandons religiously, historically, and strategically important lands to the Palestinian state so as not to be swarmed by two million Arabs living there. Reduced to the nine-mile-wide beachside state, Israel will be swarmed by her own Arabs – who accept no peace process. It is an official policy of the PLO – indeed, a democratic maxim – that the Palestinians will breed to majority in Israel and then vote to unify it with the West Bank Palestine. Moderates among Palestinians proclaim they have no problem with Jews living in the resulting Arab state.

Time solves the insolvable problems. Communism vanished from the book of time, leftist terrorism of 1970s ran to the end, and Islamic terrorism won’t be eternal. Radical ideas do not last long as burning societies fall back into tranquility. The current levels of Palestinian terrorism are artificial, entirely propped by Beilin-Peres policies which brought the defeated PLO from Tunisia to the West Bank, enthroned it, subsidized heavily, and promoted internationally as a peace partner. So a shabby cat felt itself a lion. Palestinians support fighting Israel for two reasons: hope and hopelessness. A hope to prevail, and daily hopelessness of their lives. Both can be solved, by the overwhelming force and emigration, respectively. The Muslim Brotherhood, PLO, Hamas, in turn became political organizations; other guerrillas will follow the same road. Palestinians will always remain hostile to Israel, as Jews took over what the Palestinians think is their land. Such hostility would translate into low-level sabotage, but not a meaningful war.

The peace process lacks a historical precedent. Never did hostile states negotiated peace for decades under fire. Peace never came through negotiations, but only through one side’s defeat. America negotiated with Vietnam for decades, but Vietnam was not at war with America; North Vietnam was at war with the South – and utterly defeated it. So the peace process failed in Vietnam, like elsewhere. Peace process is a leftist fallacy, a primitive rationalist approach to immensely complex problems which in fact can be exhausted, but never solved.

Exhausting the Palestinian problem is easy, and Israel did it with success: behead the national organizations, expel their leaders, everyone of the slightest stance in Palestinian society. No great numbers are involved: ousting a few thousand top members of Fatah, Hamas, and other popular organizations would do. When Israel kept systematically expelling PLO associates in 1960-80s, everything was quiet on our Western Front. Even though the PLO tried ruling Palestine through its Department of Popular Organizations which oversaw everything down to students unions, it was nothing compared to the electrifying fact of Arafat’s presence in the West Bank.
Beilin-Peres clique brought Arafat from Tunisia to the West Bank, literally let the jinn of terrorism out of the bottle. They meant good, they meant Arafat to be their peace puppet. So they were wrong. As usual, societies pay in blood for leftists’ crumbling projects.

The majority of the Netherlands’ population was good to Jews during Holocaust. But the problem is, the Dutch were also good toward their minority who collaborated with Germans. The minority hunted us, and so 75% of Jews were murdered. The majority of Israelis are decent Jews who wish their country well. But unless they stand up to the vicious leftist minority, too few Jews would survive in Israel.

Why doesn’t Israel accept the Arab peace initiative? It offers Israel normalization with all Arab states (though not Iran) in exchange for returning to the 1967 border, Jerusalem, and a solution to the refugee problem. That’s basically what the Israeli government agreed to; most Israelis accept the solution except partitioning Jerusalem. The differences are mundane: Saudis want full return to the 1967 borders while Israel offered to exchange settlement blocs for similar tracts of empty land, and Palestinians agreed. The peace plan does not require Israel to accept the refugees, just to find a solution: presumably, compensation will do, and the US and EU would be happy to foot the bill for resettling the refugees in Palestine.

The issue of Jerusalem is the matter of names. What is the Jerusalem which Jews want for our eternal capital? The sprawling Arab neighborhoods of “East Jerusalem” are not Jerusalem in the biblical sense. Jews lived there, but we also lived in Hebron, Schem, and the entire Judea. In religious terms, giving away Hebron and Schem (which the majority of Israelis accept) is a crime incomparably worse than abandoning the districts of no special significance east of the ancient Jerusalem.

The Old City’s issue is commonly misunderstood. The Old City of Jerusalem is merely an Ottoman structure. Razing the Old City’s walls would clarify the point that most of it lacks biblical significance. The only real problem, the land plot of tremendous importance to both Jews and Arabs is the Temple Mount. It is unthinkable for a state claiming biblical rights for its existence to abandon the most central place in Judaism. Although unthinkable, it actually takes place now: Israel bans praying Jews from the Temple Mount while Arabs enjoy the place even for their latrines.

So what are the options regarding the Temple Mount? First and preferable, raze the Muslim structures and build the Third Temple. That, however, won’t be. A combined opposition of leftists, assimilated Jews, and religious Jews would preclude such a scenario. To clarify, almost all religious Jews believe that the Third Temple will supernaturally descend from the sky. Maimonides derided that view, but it gave root among the clerics who would rather be praying than doing anything.

The second option, advocated by some nationalist Jews, is to build the Temple on the Temple Mount without destroying the Muslim shrines. That, too, is unrealistic as Muslims would object to desecrating their holy place, religious Jews would demand supernatural Messiah coming on the clouds, and animal rights groups would protest the intended offerings.

Counter-intuitively, Jews save their national face by abandoning the Temple Mount. If the place is not in our hands, then at least we can claim innocence for not building the Temple. And if a true leader like Meir Kahane would arise, he would have no trouble cleansing the Arabs out of the Temple Mount, Judea, Samaria, and all the way to Nile and Euphrates.

If we do not intend to build a religious state of Judaism,
If we are not going to maintain a Jewish state by expelling the Arabs,
Then it makes every sense to accept the Arab peace initiative.

"I'm ready to negotiate with the PLO. I believe we should sit with them and tell them, No." Rabbi Meir Kahane

Arab countries don't care much about Jews getting a tiny state somewhere in the unruly lands of Palestine - unruly to the extent that even Ibrahim Pasha's army, acting atrociously, hardly enforced a semblance of order here. Like the kids from a bad neighborhood, they tested the newcomer with kicks and found him okay. Arab rulers judge the issue of Israel pragmatically: in 1967, for example, the annihilation of Israel would have given Nasser the laurels of an undisputable pan-Arab leader and solidified his support at home. Today, Egypt finds its peace treaty with Israel highly useful, as it allows Egypt to receive massive American aid, build an advanced army, bug Israel with the time-tested fellaheen strategy, and feel safe against Israeli retaliation. Egypt's domestic propaganda uses Israel to vent the mob's feelings, and its security services steer radical Muslim organizations to fight Israel rather than the Egyptian government. Egypt, thus, is perfectly fine with its status quo vis-a-vis Israel.

Saudis enjoy both the laurels of peacemakers and pan-Arab diplomatic leaders, and of the flagship of Islamic anti-Israel struggle which supports Fatah, Hamas, PIJ, and other terrorist organizations. Just like Egypt, Saudi Arabia finds Israel useful to suck the energies of domestic radicals.

In a famous piece of folly, Moshe Dayan announced after the 1967 victory, "I'm waiting for a phone call from Hussein." The idea was that the Arabs would rush to get back their lands in return for peace. Rational Jews like Moshe Dayan have long forgotten that national pride is not for sale; for those Jews, everything has a price tag. Naturally, Arabs reacted contrary to Dayan's expectation with their famous Three No's: no to negotiations, no to peace, no to recognition of Israel. Syria cared very little about the Golan Heights which it only acquired decades before; Jordan accepted losing the West Bank, which was never its major concern, anyway, and Egypt couldn't care less about the Sinai: a useless desert settled by hostile, unruly Bedouin away from Egypt's traditional sphere of influence or the Nile farmers' mentality. Arabs were smart enough to sense that Israel seeks peace, and would eventually give way to their demands, especially as the implacable Arab hostility pushed the West to push Israel for a settlement. Cunning politicians imagine that they can fool their opponents in artful negotiations; in reality, the simple, straightforward, firm positions often win. The Soviet Union routinely prevailed in diplomatic encounters with Foreign Minister Molotoff as the "Mister No" and so do the Arabs. When one side refuses to give in, the other side does.

Israeli peace mavens (and Talmud describes doves as the most cruel beings) imagine that Arabs want economic and financial cooperation with Israel. Those countries, however, are so backward that they cannot even refine their own oil into petroleum. The idea of economic development is alien to Arab mind. Economic cycles in Arab countries proceed in this manner: pump oil - waste the proceeds - steal the balance. Even if Arabs miraculously convert to Adam Smith's faith, they have plenty of qualified pastors with the best economic degrees from England, France, Germany, and the United States. They simply don't need Israel. Besides, there is not much of the touted Arab wealth. The ten-fold population increase in the twentieth century created huge pressure on Arab budgets which no oil can compensate. Unable and unwilling to work productively - work is just not a part of their Bedouin culture - Arabs consume oil revenues for welfare in the real time, and per person allocations continue shrinking.

There are other, non-Bedouin Muslims, mainly in the Nile Delta of Egypt and in the river plains of Iran and Iraq. The millennia-long agriculture imbued them with certain work ethics, but their habits are still tremendously behind those required in the technological age. It is not for nothing that even in Israel Arab graduates of Jewish universities lag behind the Jews in employment tremendously, or that the Israeli Arab farmers are backward compared to Jewish farmers just a few miles away from them. The world's economy is satiated with diligent hands of China and Southeast Asia: there is no demand for Arab hands. Agricultural revolution, which touches the Islamic world only now, will produce huge unemployment in agriculture, flood Muslim cities with jobless, unskilled peasants and radicalize the societies - such as happened in Russia in the early twentieth century and as happens in Turkey today. No amount of Israeli involvement would significantly improve Arab economies.

The current Middle East is different from the one sixty years ago. The Arabs bullied a new kid on the block, found him tough, and accepted him - without saying so much. A watershed comment was reported recently in Jerusalem Post: a senior Kuwaiti adviser said that Israel's strike on Iranian nuclear reactor is preferable to the American one. On the surface, he meant that Israel is Kuwait's enemy, America is a friend and Kuwait would be embarrassed if its friend attacks Iran. But the fellow said, "less embarrassing," implying that Israeli strike doesn't differ from the American qualitatively. His point was that Israel is "one of us" and so can exert a sort of brotherly admonition on Iran. Russians exhibit love-and-hate relationship with America which parallels the Arab hate-and-admiration attitude to Israel. So long as Israel acts strongly and avoids pleading for peace, Arabs would respect her and eventually enter into de facto peace.

What should be done about peace talks with Arabs is simple: nothing. Israel gains nothing from peace treaties with Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and the like. We will not risk substantially reducing the IDF, and Arabs will not start loving us as cousins. Palestinian peace advances should be ignored: if they want a state, let them proclaim it in whatever areas they actually possess. If they continue fighting us, we will fight back as one fights states. If they carp at Jerusalem or settlement blocs, we will repel that aggressor state. No Palestinian migrant workers in Israel, no trade with Palestine, no services provided to it, just abandon the areas densely settled by Arabs. Many countries have unruly border areas, and Israel can live with unruly West Bank. Don't object to Palestinian statehood and don't agree to it, but ignore it. In any negotiations, Israel only gives, but takes nothing. Abandoning all negotiations with Arabs is objectively the most beneficent approach Israel can take.

The Arab position on Israel didn’t change at all. Human mentality doesn’t change. About ninety years ago, a prince of Mecca named Faisal signed an agreement with Zionists recognizing the Jewish right to the land and actually welcomed Jews. His successor recently unveiled Arab peace plan which ostensibly welcomes Jews in the Middle East. Saudi rulers even secured theological backing from their corrupt and subservient clergy for the peace with Israel.

Egypt, too, is fairly consistent in dealing with Jews. It fought Israel under the king Farouk, communist Nasser, pragmatic Sadat, and cynical capitalist Mubarak. In Mubarak’s case, the war is tacit, as Egypt allows Palestinian terrorists a free hand in supplying weapons. That policy is not new, either: Egypt supported Palestinian fellaheen fighters from 1948 to 1967, at which time Israel took over the Sinai and pushed Egypt sufficiently far away. Israel fought Egypt in 1956 specifically because of its support of fellaheen, and the US intervened on Egypt’s behalf: first diplomatically, followed by a military threat to Israel.

Jordan’s policy didn’t change. It treats the West Bank as Jordanian territory, banned or ignored native Palestinian organizations from 1947 onwards, and intermittently hosted and ousted Palestinians. Jordan’s goal is clear: to swallow as much land as it can. Pursuing that objective, Jordan cooperates with Palestinians to destroy Israel, but keeps the Palestinians in check so that they don’t destabilize Jordan. If other Arab countries do away with Israel, Jordan would love that, but it doesn’t want provoking a powerful Zionist neighbor. When Jordan had an upper hand against Israel, it annihilated virtually all traces of Jewish presence in Jerusalem, but when there is no hope of prevailing, Jordan is equally ready to sign peace treaty with Israel.

Palestinians could have proclaimed statehood long ago, but beyond the empty declaration of statehood by the PLO in Tunisia, they didn’t. Peace with Israel means for Palestinians accepting responsibility for their lives, which they cannot. Palestinian economy, meager before the 1940s, is irreparably damaged. A million-something Gazans cannot be meaningfully employed, the refugees coming back from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Gaza would find no arable land for themselves. Some Palestinians will always be discontent, and the continued guerrilla attacks on Israel, even if reduced to a minimum, would still provoke retaliation which disrupts Palestinian attempts to build a normal life. Palestinian state, no more the focus of world’s anti-Semitism, will gradually lose the massive foreign aid. In other Arab countries, agricultural improvement went slowly, and the influx of displaced peasants into cities was gradual, though even such an influx shifted national politics greatly. In the case of Palestine, refugees who have long lost the employment skills will flood the cities, double and triple their population, and make them into perpetual slums, where poverty breeds more poverty, one unemployed generation breeds another, and all of that breeds crime and terrorism. So the Palestinians leaders sensibly ask from Israel maximum concessions in the peace process to delay their statehood as much as possible.

Iraqi Arab Nazis repressed the Jews, prompting their emigration in the late 1940s. After the US occupied Iraq and manipulates its government as puppets, there is still no peace agreement with Israel.

Israel cooperated with the Shah of Iran even to the extent of helping him with his nuclear program, but peace was not an option. Neither is it an option now, regardless of the Saudi peace plan.

Lebanon is too fragile to sign peace with Israel. Opposition would haunt the government which signs such an accord, and now that Iran-backed Hezbollah controls Lebanon, peace treaty is altogether unlikely.

Syria was a prominent enemy of ancient Israel, and so is now. Syria’s core territory includes a part of the Land of Israel, and Syrian mentality, notorious even among Arabs, precludes any true peace with Israel.

This brings us to the question, what does peace with Arabs mean? Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, but comes nowhere close to normalization. The people of Egypt and Jordan are hostile to Israel, government media approves and fans the popular hatreds, and economic contacts are negligible (short of the few high-profile traitors of Jewish background using Jordan to skip on taxes and ecological regulations).

Centuries of prosperity made Westerners, including Jews, straightforward. That laziness of thought is often presented as honesty. Affluent people who live in established societies want a degree of honesty from others and offer it in return. The cultural phenomenon of honesty is not inbuilt: the medieval poets’ praise of knightly honesty was a blunt lie. And so the Arabs are not honest in the Western sense. Not dishonest, either - just practical. Westerners, too, are not paragons of honesty or morality in foreign relations, but Arabs don’t even bother substantiating their whims with acceptable rhetoric.

And so the Arabs claim they want peace with Israel.

In 1947, BBC reported that the vote at the UN was conducted under pressure and that the large audience at hand demonstrated its predominantly Jewish character by applauding the UN resolution's adoption. The same “impartial” BBC shapes the world opinion about Israel now.

The US soon withdrew its 1947 vote for establishing Israel. Britain conducted its usual policy of siding with the weaker to crush the stronger: at times Jews, at other times – Arabs. Russia’s only foreign policy goal is to stir the events and thus bug everyone. France remains attached to its imperial paranoia and builds the imperial alliance with Muslims it is unable to finance or sustain. The UN leadership runs among the world powers, pleading for money and positioning itself as everyone’s ally; naturally, an ally of everyone is an enemy of Israel. There was zero goodwill on the level of governments toward Israel: Europeans supported Israel as a way to get rid of the Jews they failed to annihilate completely, and Britain evacuated its forces from the Land of Israel because Jewish guerrillas carried out thousands of terrorist attacks in the 1940s.

Arbitrators are acceptable when they have no agenda of their own. Friends are expected to share our agenda. America and especially the Quartet of peacemakers are neither friends, nor arbitrators. The best-wishing members of the US Administration want Israel to live in peace. That’s not what the Jews need. The original idea of Zionists – a safe place for the Jews – went up in the smoke of Auschwitz which the Zionist leaders did not care about. After Stalin’s death ended the Russian plans for finishing the German work and annihilating the remnant of Jews in Siberia, safety was not an immediate problem for European Jews. Plans for the Jewish state on Muslim land created a huge security problem for the previously peaceful Jewish communities in Arab countries. The sixty years of fighting prove that in security terms, Israel is a complete failure. The only reasons for Jews to stay in Israel rather than move to Canada are religious and nationalist. Those reasons do not concern the US Administration in the peace process, and are entirely antithetical to Russia and the UN.

Israel essentially brings her case before thoroughly anti-Semitic judges. Even if the judges act objectively, Jews cannot accept their decisions because Jews want a subjective solution. The Britain objectively reasoned that Jewish immigrants don’t need Transjordan, and cut it off from the Balfour Declaration’s territory. Then the UN objectively reasoned that the remaining Palestinian Arabs need a state of their own, and partitioned whatever was left of the Jewish homeland. European settlers, on the other hand, rejected objectivity in America and ethnically cleansed a country for themselves. Jews, too, are partial to our own interests. A Jewish state in the Land of Israel seems as an injustice to Arabs and the Quartet, but it’s very just for the Jews.

As Mao Zedong remarked, a proposition could be true and false at the same time: true for some, false for another. Why would we want arbitrators who find the Jewish propositions false?

It’s all about statistics. The world is superficially concerned about the six million Jewish deaths rather than twenty million Russian in the WWII because the entire Eastern European Jewry has been wiped out, while the Russian nation was only dented.
It’s also about savagery. Jews were murdered with unexpected – historically standard – cruelty, while Russians were mostly killed in the normal military operations.

The world built around the Christian “Love your neighbor” is a pipe dream. It never existed nor ever would. The world built around the Jewish “Love your neighbor” is ruthlessly practical: it only loves neighbors, never – aliens.

The world never changes. Plays of Euripides resound with our souls today; the twentieth-century wars, if anything, were bloodier than Persian-Greek wars, and equally savage. The religions proclaimed thousands of years ago attract billions of adherents. Morals don’t change. Never.

Some of Israel’s best friends recognize the immense treachery of the US Administrations pushing Israel to the suicidal peace process – a lopsided path of capitulation to the Arab enemy. Our friends, however, lament that there is no solution. That’s untrue, and they usually recognize that immediately by clarifying that there’s no morally acceptable solution. Check your morals.

In terms of morals, European settlers in America were remarkably similar to Jewish settlers in Canaan. The gap of three thousand years is nothing, and the subsequent two centuries mean even less. Germans – the most civilized European nation; French – the most cultured European nation; Russians – the most soul-scratching nation; Italy – the tenderest nation; all of them committed immense atrocities just decades ago. Would someone imagine a change in homo sapiens mentality in a matter of decades?

The permanent peace in the Middle East is unattainable. It is similarly unattainable in any other place on earth. It is a matter of biology and million-year-old animal behavior: nations fight. No well-wisher would change that.

Long periods of peace are easy to come by. The horrible details are well known. In order to be safe from your enemy, kill him first. If someone wants to kill you, kill him first. Don’t investigate his mentality. Don’t break your head trying to invent the terms acceptable to him. There are none. Conflicts between nations are not business disputes, and cannot be arbitrated. It is all-or-nothing, the matter of national pride and therefore national existence. Just like Maccabeus and bar Kochba bet the Jewish existence, so should the Jews today – unless they want to pitifully praise the millennia-old heroism in the festivals devoid of meaning.
Like the old heroes? Go produce a few new ones.

Jews can safely exist in the state of Israel. Safely to a degree. Safe for some time. To an unknown degree. For unknown time. The safety won’t come through conferences, peace settlements, or two-state solutions. If Jews want a state like other nations, then they should build a state like other nations did. By cleansing the desired land of our enemies.

By killing the 0.2% of the world’s Muslims still alive on the 0.5% of the Middle East’s land.