Justice is only applicable domestically because it presumes a shared system of values. A thief and his victim share the same values; the thief betrayed them knowingly and intentionally, thus there is a moral ground for punishing him. International and civil clashes presume a different system of values. Both peoples consider the land theirs; who is to blame for the casualties? Thus, international justice is always sacrificed to peace, or perhaps expediency. An alliance with the devil may be short-lived, but it offers a respite nonetheless.

The Torah deals with such a scenario of inherent injustice when describing an out-of-town rape which left the woman incapable of finding a spouse. It is called “as if one man arises against another.” No amount of compensation or retaliation resurrects the victim, thus justice cannot be restored.

Absolutes are never attainable, and absolute justice is a myth. Sometimes we have to abandon justice for the sake of peace.

But a treaty with Arabs leaves Israel about as peaceful as Northern Ireland.

Jews are framed as enemies of peace because Arabs are unflinching. When the Arabs refuse to yield and Jews yield consistently, foreigners take Jewish procrastination in yielding as malicious. The enemy of peace is someone who can yield but does not. Arabs cannot be expected to yield, thus the Jews became an obstacle to peace.

The Arab refusal to yield is recognized as sensible: they are fighting for nationalist goals. Jews, on the contrary, speak in terms of security. Foreigners rightly assume that the current confrontation offers Israel no security, and imposing some restrictions on the Palestinian state answers Israeli security needs.

Israel can only escape her image as an enemy of peace by switching to a non-conformist position. Technically, the purely religious attitude is the most profitable: the Promised Land is ours, period. Adopting such a position would be a big gamble. The vast majority of Westerners retain their Christian background, and can tune into religious Zionism. The opinion-makers among journalists and leftist groups are decidedly anti-religious and would blame Israel for religious fundamentalism. The outcome of such a split between the Christian mainstream and the nihilist elite is uncertain. Israel will also have to play carefully by religious rules, since her hypocrisy would otherwise be spotted immediately. Jews can only claim a religious justification for our state if we indeed make it religious, at least in the public sphere.

Israeli non-conformism can more plausibly be based on nationalism, with religious overtones. Though we consider nationalism a senseless modern invention, it strikes a chord with the leftists, who long ago switched from international solidarity with the proletarians to ideological imperialism and economic protectionism. The world must be told that we won’t cede the Temple Mount just as the Russians wouldn’t sell the Kremlin; that we will not partition Jerusalem just as the French wouldn’t split Paris; that we won’t evacuate Judea and Samaria just like the Americans wouldn’t leave New Mexico.

Russia’s most successful foreign minister was Andrei Gromyko, “Mister No.” At his time, Russia was not particularly powerful: America had vastly superior resources. He was successful specifically because of his refusal to negotiate, which masked Russia’s weakness.

The refusal to compromise must be supported by the determination to win: the staunchest defense fails if it is passive. Russia exploited every opportunity to foment conflicts abroad: small Russian aid to Vietnam caused massive American expenses. Palestinian Arabs exploit every crack in Israeli security to conduct terrorist attacks. Israel, however, shrinks from acting against the Arabs. Instead, Israel must become very active against them. The actions may remain low-profile and inexpensive, but the publicized raids must be conducted daily.

Instead of trying to appear nice, Israel must up the stakes and refuse to cooperate. At that point, the West would either blame the Arabs for not yielding to the mad Jews, or forget the issue as it ignores scores of unsolvable conflicts around the world.

It all changes considerably when we expand our outlook to the mid-term. Think about policing the Arabs. If we don’t want that job we can just withdraw our forces from the area; Palestinian statehood is irrelevant. We police them now so that they don’t build up a significant militia and attack us later. How likely is it that they would do just that from the safety of their own state? Both Fatah and Hamas indeed aim to subvert Israel; otherwise, why a truce rather than peace?

The bottom line is, can we choose convenient paths now which will disproportionally endanger our children later? The answer is far from straightforward. All societies are sufficiently immoral to risk their children before risking the adults: look at the fact that armies are composed of teenagers. Youngsters are easier to indoctrinate, and arguably they are less valuable to society: the manufacturing and transmission of knowledge are carried out by adults.

But can we opt for convenience now while increasing the risk to our nation as a whole? Probably not, if there is any value in being Jewish. This bears on the long-smoldering debate about the Holocaust victims’ behavior. Some claim they sanctified God’s name with steadfastness in the face of death. Others believe they desecrated his name by going as animals to slaughter. The only relevant point was made by Solzhenitsyn: if Soviet citizens had met the KGB agents with axes, there would have been no Gulag. By refusing to fight in hopeless situations, the dying Jews encouraged the Germans and Ukrainians to murder our compatriots in other places.

Ina time of national emergency, one loses the option of complacency, or even dignified death. Not only his life, but also the quality of his death becomes expendable for the good of others, or for the purpose of limiting the evil which befalls them.

In our case, we’re not allowed to seek peace with the Arabs for the benefit of our safe life. We must stop the Arabs and the Western anti-Semites firmly, and accept suffering now for the safety of our nation in the future.

Compromise is a weasel word: in effect, it means that a person cedes something to gain something more valuable for him, whether he eats his wife’s ugly breakfast for the sake of peace in the family or cedes land for peace. In theory, compromise is profitable. In Israel’s case, the compromise is a one-sided affair, essentially forgiveness. Israel gains nothing from the compromise but gives away a lot. She agrees to the 1948 territorial solution after the Arabs fought it in several wars and killed tens of thousands of Jews. Israel agrees to forgive the murder of those on whose behalf she has no power to speak, absconds from the duty of revenge, and gives the Arabs everything they wanted—despite the fact that they attacked us and lost. Everything they failed to take through war, Jews give them through peace.

The Judaism of the Torah knows no forgiveness. Even a victim cannot forgive the offender. In rabbinical Judaism, forgiveness is merely a moral option after the punishment is meted out; that is not the regular meaning of the term, “forgiveness.” Punishment is absolute, not commutable. The Torah’s unforgiving justice has a single goal: creating a pure society. On the national level the punishment is even stronger, as it extends to future generations. Even among Jews, children are punished for the political and religious guilt of their fathers (Lev26:39).

Amalek did not simply attack the Jews, he committed a far worse offense: he “did not fear God.” And so we are commanded to exterminate him in the remotest generations. Similarly, the pharaoh’s crime was not just refusing the Jews the right of emigration; worse, he said in his arrogance that he did not know God. That is the crime scores of Egyptians were killed for during the Exodus.

The Arabs who attacked the Jewish state did not commit the simple crime of murdering a Jew. Such murders happen all around the world, and frankly are of little concern to the state. The Arabs rebelled against something more important than individual Jews: the Jewish nation, the Jewish state, and ultimately God. That we have no right to forgive.

I understand atheists; back in my childhood, I was one. I understand liberals, though am sorry for their perversion of the freedom doctrine. The Jews who swallow insults, however—I fail to understand them.

I remember insults. If kosher laws were not a divine commandment, I would have observed them anyway because so many generations of Jews were persecuted for observing them. And I would keep the Sabbath because the Soviets forced us to work on that day. I would read the Torah because the Church kept burning it for centuries. So I could never understand the Jews who finish the Nazis work by intermarrying.

Likewise in politics. A thousand practical and religious arguments can be advanced in favor of abandoning East Jerusalem to the Arabs. But no: after we wept with joy upon taking the city from them, how can we give away a single block?

What kind of losers are Jews to abandon Hebron to Arabs? If the fact that it was King David’s capital is irrelevant today, consider the insult of being treated as a loser: instead of dividing the city and allowing the Jews equal access to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the holiest standing Jewish site, the Arabs tell us to get out. They expel us, the victims and the victors, and audaciously count on foreign opinion to push us out. They expel us now just as they did during the 1929 massacre.

I’m the last person out here to support the “illegal” outposts. They are useless, a waste of effort, and the vent the government offers to right-wing activists. But look, so many of them are named after dead Jews. The outposts were established in the memory of terror victims and bear the victims’ names. The Arabs killed our brothers and sisters; now the Americans and Europeans are pushing us to dismantle their memory.

In the peace talks, the Arabs refused to move a single village of their own, but insist on destroying dozens, possibly hundreds of Jewish villages. What kind of a nation makes its own people homeless to please a defeated enemy? Decades after being evicted from our homes by Nazis—and a few years later, by the Arabs—how can Jews swallow the insult of being evicted again? Jews, heads down, in tears, would walk away from their houses, and the fourth-strongest army in the world would stand idle, unable to protect them. Oh, no: the army will busy itself evicting Jews from their villages as the Arabs dance and cheer nearby. As usual in pogroms, the Jews will dig graves, this time to unearth the bodies, to bring hundreds of thousands of corpses to new cemeteries lest the Arabs throw them to swine. In a few hours, the Arabs would enter the abandoned villages and turn synagogues into stables.

Ingenuous, artful, scheming Jews lose to an Arab bunch. The Arabs get a state free of Jews; not a single one remains in his home. Jews get an indefensible state where Arabs constitute a third of the population; not a single Arab is relocated to his own state.

A century ago, decent gentiles committed suicide after an insult a fraction of this one. Jews prefer a national suicide—and submit to the insult.

Inherently insecure, Israelis look for protection and partners. They embraced the monster Stalin, who planned to murder all Soviet Jews in 1953. After a brief flirtation with France, Israelis turned to the United States for protection despite numerous and clear indications of their protector’s treacherousness: a weapons embargo in 1948, a threat to fight on Egypt’s side in 1956, the prohibition of a preemptive strike in 1967, the ban on destroying Egyptian army in 1973, protests against bombing the Osiraq reactor in 1981, a push for democratic elections in Lebanon and Palestine, barring Israel from an attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities, ad infinitum.

Still more shamefully, Israelis seek support among Palestinian enemies. They look for Palestinian moderates, imagining a difference between Fayad and Haniye; both want this land in its entirety. Judea and Samaria are calmer than Gaza for a single reason: IDF operates in the West Bank freely rather than undercover as in Gaza.

To prop their delusions, Jews ask the Palestinians to show their goodwill by disarming the terrorists. The Palestinians don’t fight their terrorists nor have any reason to do so; Jews, too, fought their Irgun terrorists half-heartedly at most. Palestinians cannot wind down terrorists organizations. One reason is that their central power is too weak, but another is that Israel would stop negotiations once the Palestinians had calmed down; Israel only gives in to the terrorists’ force.

Barak and Olmert offered Arafat and Abbas almost everything; nothing came out of that. The West Bank Palestinians hate Israel, but even more they hate their own refugees, who would stream back. They hate occupation, but a visa regime would devastate their economy, which parasites on Israel. After so many years of war, seemingly on the winning side, they see any compromises as too painful. That’s besides the basic impossibility of drawing the drunkard’s-path border between the interspersed Jewish and Arab villages.

Economic development won’t change Palestinians for the better. On one hand, Jews started their state dirt poor, so poverty is no impediment to statehood; on other hand Israeli Arab youth is used to relative affluence, has digested Israeli benefits, and being economically secure can afford to hate Israel, their benefactor. If anything, the economic development of Palestine will militarize the Arabs: before affluence trickles down to the commoners it is concentrated at the state level. Historically, this is the most dangerous phase: the state has the economic means to wage a war, and the poor population has not yet grown averse to it.

No Cyprus solution is possible here: both the Turkish and Greek Cypriots lived there for centuries, none are newcomers—or worse, refugees—whom the other views as having taken the land from them. The separation which so far had worked out in Cyprus (and will fail eventually) cannot work for Jews and Palestinians.

Any true separation must involve expelling all Arabs from Israel into a state of their own.

Negotiations depend critically on each side’s adhering to its promises. But that is not the case here. After Israel left Lebanon, Hezbollah found a pretext to continue fighting us in Israel’s occupation of a tiny piece of Syrian territory at Shebaa Farms. Then Hezbollah’s leaders proclaimed their goal of liberating former Shiite villages in Galilee. After Israel retreated from Gaza, Hamas demanded the right of transit through Israel. Fatah claims not to be bound by the agreements Israel signed with the PLO, and other factions have even less reason to adhere to those agreements. Whatever peace treaty the PLO signs with Israel, Arabs will claim Haifa, and Galilee, and Yaffo as the next steps.

Negotiations allow an aggressor time to strengthen himself and defeat or frighten his smaller opponents. In 1939, Stalin signed a non-belligerence treaty with Nazis and gained his country two years of peace―but he lost France. No one in Israeli General Staff has slightest doubt that Syria and―after the victory of Muslim Brotherhood―Egypt are bent on attacking Israel. Yet, instead of demilitarizing them forcibly, Israel negotiates and cooperates with these enemies while they amass arsenals.

Back in his hotel on the Rhine after meeting Hitler, Chamberlain told journalists that there was still hope for peace, but “everything depends on the Czechs.” Likewise, the current pressure on Israel: the world accepts the aggressor’s demands because they are non-negotiable, and blames Israel for delaying acceding to them. International mediators hate the victim for their failure to protect it. They even despise the victim: Masarik, the Czech representative in Munich, noted that Chamberlain did not try to hide his bored yawning during the meeting.

The mediator’s nations and parliaments fully supported their “anti-war” efforts, and welcomed appeasement as peacemaking. Refusal to appease was proclaimed a violation of peace. The concept of “victims of peace process” does not belong to Shimon Peres. The British ambassador to Germany suggested that Poland must bring sacrifices (Danzig and the corridor) for the sake of peace.

Border rectifications were calculated for maximum insult. In Israel’s case, Palestinians have no objective problem with preserving settlement blocs. Step-by-step increase demands. Hitler had not planned from the beginning which countries to attack, but every victory emboldened him for more. Likewise, there will be no end to Palestinian demands, all the way to affirmative action.

If Israel must be grateful to the UN for establishing it, so must Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria, which owe their existence to others. At least, Israel won her independence war on her own, whereas Poles failed miserably, and Czechs and Austrians didn’t even try.

Britain and France waited for Germany to conquer Poland, so that absence of the state would give them an excuse for not intervening. America and France watched as Israel struggled in 1973, and attempted to drive a wedge between moderates and hawks: during Chamberlain’s government, Hitler continually lambasted Churchill and refused to negotiate with him, though Churchill didn’t want to.

The aggressors were not strong; just recently, Germany and Palestine had been victims―yet they succeeded by bullying and threatening war.

Czechoslovakia was the only democratic country in Central Europe, a staunch supporter of the League of Nations’ mutual defense system, very friendly with France and Britain. Israel, too. Unlike Israel, Czechoslovakia had a mutual defense treaty with France.

The Czechs lost politically even though they were overwhelmingly stronger than Germans: thirty-five well-trained and well-armed divisions, tanks and aircraft, and strong border fortifications. Israel wins wars but loses negotiations.

Britain and France abandoned Czechs despite great strategic advantage they would have gained by supporting them.

Czechoslovakia agreed to transfer Sudetenland to Germany, but rejected the details: immediate eviction of all Czech inhabitants and German militarization of the region. Israel agrees to abandon Judea to Palestinians, but fights over details. Accepted the rape, if only it would be nominally negotiated and peaceful, but not by German army or Palestinian terrorists . France and Britain praised the Italian offer in Munich, which only rephrased a German ultimatum they had rejected a few days before. Like Czechs, Israel will eventually give up on the details. On August 30, 1939, Polish government agreed to negotiations with Germany over Danzig―something it had refused before―but rejected a humiliating demand for its representative to fly to Germany immediately, insisting instead on a meeting in a neutral country.

Procrastination in negotiating details made final settlement far worse than the unacceptable original demands. Such a worsening of terms happens in any negotiation in which the winning side has time to digest the concessions and whet its appetite for more.

After Munich and Oslo were signed, the aggressors received many more concessions through work of multilateral commissions.

By far, most Palestinians don’t want a war, but most Germans didn’t want one in 1938, either.

The other side’s allies are treated as enemies: France declared war on Germany to defend Poland, but that enabled Germany to paint France as an aggressor. Muslims do the same thing to America, which merely protects Israel against them.

Sudetenland never belonged to Germany, just as the Golans hardly belonged to Syria.

Germany remilitarized in spite of sanctions, as did Iran. France’s inaction gave Germany time to build the Western line of defense, which made French involvement dangerous. Likewise, if Iran, Syria, and Egypt possessed nuclear bombs, that situation would preclude foreign help to Israel in the next big war.

Arabs, like Nazis, have no trouble lying blatantly in public speeches, and world takes their peace rhetoric at face value.

Czechoslovakia wasn’t invited to Munich, just as Israel is not included in the Quartet or UNSC.

Germany armed Czechoslovakian Germans and incited riots. So does Hamas incite Israeli Arabs.

The chief of the British mission to Czechoslovakia and the League of Nations commissioner for Danzig sided with Nazis. So did the UNRWA with Arabs.

The victims of Nazi aggression were offered fake guarantees against further aggression, and received a few soothing concessions (e.g., occupation of Sudetenland would be done in four steps rather than immediately, though it ended up being done in ten days).

Other countries joined the fray: after Germany annexed 11,000 square miles from Czechs, Hungary annexed 7,500 square miles. Syria follows the lead of the Palestinians.

Resistance, even when planned but not executed, was taken for an offense and provoked more demands. The Czech mobilization in this way is like Israel in Gaza.

France reneged on its security guarantees to Czechoslovakia in Munich, but guaranteed its new borders. The new guarantee also proved worthless when the Germans marched into Prague, having forced the Czech president to invite them.

Czechoslovakia’s population had been 23% German, about the same as the ratio of Arabs in Israel. After the war, the Czechs expelled three million Germans―just the number of Arabs in Israel and the West Bank who must be removed.

Peres’s plan might have worked if executed promptly enough. Arafat should have been handed a statelet and allowed to run it independently, thus ensuring that yesterday’s terrorists would become today’s inefficient bureaucrats. Israelis, however, did not want to make the uncomfortable decision to withdraw from Arab-populated parts of Judea and Samaria. As Israel procrastinated, the PLO grew stronger. It became entrenched and obtained international support as a legitimate government, but lacked governmental responsibility for its people. Being able to blame Israel for Palestinian misfortunes, Arafat could afford extreme political positions. The fact that Arafat refused Barak’s offer of a meaningful Palestinian state confirms a simple truth: Palestinian leaders are satisfied with a de facto state and do not want the responsibilities of de jure self-government. Unless we decide to expel the West Bank Arabs, it is in Israel’s interest rather than the Arabs’ to create a Palestinian state there.

Supporting the PLO evolved from a short-term tactic into a strategic goal for Israel. If the PLO does not want to accept our objective of a quiet and complacent neighbor state, why do we maintain it? The terrorist organization exists because Israel funds it through tax transfers, allows its leaders and sympathizers freedom of travel, and hunts its Hamas opponents. Decades ago, we expected the PLO to at least maintain calm in the West Bank. That proved impossible first during the grassroots Intifada, and later in Fatah’s confrontations with other terrorist organizations and criminal clans. Now America helps Fatah to create a police force. But why do that for Fatah?

Israel experimented with village associations, a sort of relatively free municipal elections which substituted local leaders for the PLO. They failed because the terrorists kept assassinating them. So let’s train police battalions for village associations rather than for Fatah. Then we can outlaw the PLO and kill a few thousand of its top members. Hamas won’t be a problem: its popularity hinges on its network of social services which should be destroyed, and their functions passed over to village associations.

Israel may continue helping the village associations, but otherwise she must withdraw and burden the Palestinians with their own affairs. That is, again, unless there is a decision to expel the Arab population. Besides all other evils, Israel’s presence in the Arab-populated areas of the West Bank is laughable. Normal nations occupy territories to exploit their resources or effect political changes. Israel does the opposite: she supplies and finances the PA, and preserves her terrorist nemesis in power. The liberal United States censored media during its occupation of Japan and Germany, barred officials, banned parties, and changed school curricula. Those measures eventually created an acceptable, nearly pro-American attitude there. Israel does the very opposite in the West Bank. She accords local media a degree of freedom unprecedented in Arab world, so they engage in anti-Israeli incitement. Israel finances Palestinian schools, but exercises no control over their programs. Indeed, Fatah officials grade exam papers in East Jerusalem schools. Unsurprisingly, Palestinian schools teach hatred of Jews. While Americans proscribed high-ranking Nazis from holding bureaucratic posts in post-war Germany, Israel allows major terrorists to sit in the Palestinian National Council. The results are predictable.

But would not Iran take over the West Bank? That is not very important. Iran’s presence in the West Bank depends logistically on Syria. During reign of Assad Sr, Syria severely curtailed Iranian shipments to Hezbollah, but Assad Jr reversed that policy. Likewise with Palestine: Iran can only be strong there if Syrian government is very friendly. But with a strongly pro-Iranian government in Syria, the West Bank is no longer critical. Iran can stock missiles in Syria just as easily as in Palestine. Small Palestine will be subject to Israeli surveillance and signal intelligence, and thus any major military buildup there is unlikely. Since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, Iran has been unable to build a very strong presence there. Under the best imaginable conditions, Iranian presence in Lebanon would still be very limited: okay, Hezbollah has some 50,000 rockets, but it could have acquired them on its own. In fact, 5,000 rockets carefully hidden would serve Hezbollah just as well in a war with Israel.

Instead of slamming Fayyad for declaring his ambition for an independent state in two years, Israel should have offered one immediately. Instead, we keep subsidizing the West Bank through tax transfers, labor migration, and produce dumping. Israeli Arabs take inexpensive wives in the West Bank and further upset Israel’s demographics. West Bank Arabs squat on land beyond the likely borders of their state.

Procrastination is a bad policy. Expel the Arabs or let them live.

A reciprocal peace process only exists in the minds of its supporters. Why does any country agree to peace? Not because of goodwill, or there would have been no war in the first place. Rather, peace is a product of cost-benefit analysis: continued fighting is not worth the goal. If the fighting subsides, its new lower level may be perceived as corresponding to the goal. For example, most Israelis don’t want Judea and Samaria at the price of hundreds of terrorist attacks per year, but are fine with holding the territories if there is a single attack annually. Polls indicate spikes in popular support for ceding the territories after major terrorist attacks.

The peace process cannot involve gradual pacification, as this diminishes pressure on the aggressor—and the aggressor ceases to want peace. This is equally true of Israel and Hamas. Normally, peace ensues after devastation peaks.

A gradual peace process will constantly be violated, and each side grow increasingly dissatisfied with the other. In the spiral of violence, cause and effect are never clear-cut, and mutual accusations abound. Each side is certain the other has violated the agreement, and both soon view the agreement as void. This was the case with Oslo accords.

The Israeli demand for the Palestinians to rein in their terrorists as a precondition of peace is absurd. The peace—or rather, the Israeli capitulation—is only attributable to those terrorists. Most Jews did not oppose their own terrorists—Irgun and Lehi—to live peacefully with the British. The “Season” was largely a show, as many kibbutzim sheltered the right-wing fighters nominally hunted by the Left. Jews did not curb their own terrorism, but we want the Palestinians to fight their terrorists, who are vastly more numerous and entrenched than Irgun and Lehi. Palestinian terrorist groups are diverse, and many of them are very small, with diversified funding. It would take an utterly lawless, repressive, large, and well-trained Palestinian police force to root them out. Realistically, terrorism can only diminish slowly, over the years—or perhaps decades—as guerrillas see other opportunities for social advancement, mostly in the economic and professional spheres. Arafat’s policy of providing them with sinecures is unsustainable and makes terrorism a prestigious occupation, which is sure to result in more terrorism. Fatah and Hamas demonstrated their inability to curb terrorism in the West Bank and Gaza, respectively—through no fault of their own.

This systemic inability to eliminate terrorism precludes the “peace under fire” scenario. Theoretically, Israel could withdraw from the liberated territories while terrorist attacks continue, satisfy the Palestinian demands, and expect the other side also to leave her alone.

That won’t happen because any Palestinian can easily make a pipe bomb and bring it into Israel to rectify past grievances; someone like Iran would always be there to aid them. Israel won’t violate the peace agreement with retaliatory strikes, and will be thus limited to absorbing the blows. Passive defense never works, and Israeli security would collapse under Palestinian terrorist bites, however insignificant each of them is.

Peace is only possible with a state. Unruly territories need to go through the state-building phase before they can promise peace to anyone. Palestinians are now in an impossible situation: they cannot build a state because they are at war, and they cannot end the war because they have no state to impose peace on the population.

Pacifying the West Bank is no trouble for a strong state. Overcrowded refugee camps must be dispersed, its residents offered resettlement in villages. UNRWA aid must be eliminated: Palestinians should work hard for living rather than plot against Israel while sitting idly on welfare. All nationalist organizations and charities must be closed. All the opinion-makers, from imams and librarians and up must be expelled; they are less than one percent of the population. Liberal studies in local universities must be banned. Preferably, the entire population should be relocated to Jordan and Lebanon, but if they stay, they must still be controlled efficiently.

Israel’s only option for peace is to annex the West Bank.