Shelling of Sderot highlights an interesting problem nation-states try to forget: absence of large-scale security. Historically, border areas are a trouble zone. Peace agreements were rare; nations mostly coexisted on ad hoc basis, uneasily. Border skirmishes were common. On positive side, borders in constant flux reflected the real-time balance of power. Neighboring states fought the conflicts on small scale, mostly in border areas. Peace agreements changed that situation. Parties adhering to peace promise refrained from exploiting their current military advantages. Discontent and power disparity grew. When the wars finally erupted, they tend to be total. Peace treaties, like other barriers to natural course of events, suppressed many minor problems until they become one big problem. Total wars replaced continuous skirmishes.

Nation-states hate to admit that peace treaties do not bring peace. States are built on the promise of safety for their citizens. City-states amalgamated into nation-states to be more secure – but ended up facing total wars which brew beyond the walls of peace treaties. Modern states heralded the end of the era when every clan stands for itself and every man walks the street armed. States promised security in return for taxes. Sderot shows that promise is false.

Europe licks wounds after the two world wars and the US is more attractive to Mexican laborers than Mexican guerrillas, but most of the world borders are not safe. Border between Iraq and Turkey, Iraq and Iran, Egypt and Sudan, Syria and Lebanon, Abu Dhabi and Oman, Israel and Gaza are transparent to people and weapons. No wonder, Israeli border is also transparent to rockets.
Border areas were always lawless. Rome established pax Romana throughout the civilized world, but Cicero notes that rare person ventured in Roman suburbs for the fear of being killed, robbed. The countries the West arrogantly calls “failed states” are a historical norm. It was unusual for a central power to establish itself in border areas. Mighty Soviet Union exercised next to no control over its Asian and Far East border zones, and America cannot secure its borders with Mexico and Canada. Most states cannot rein in their fringe groups and guerrillas; those who can are a totalitarian aberration and don’t exist for long, since they invariably suppress political opposition alongside guerrillas. Whether Israel reaches peace agreement with Palestinians or not, some of them will continue terrorism. Israeli government presents peace treaty as panacea forgetting that Israel recently sustained terror attacks even from Egypt, a country at peace with Israel and with strong security apparatus.

Carpet-bombing Palestine would solve the problem of terrorism only temporarily. The 1948 war inflicted on Arabs no less suffering than wide-area bombing, but the Palestinians soon returned to terrorism.

Smart states settled border areas with retired legionnaires or militant pioneers; stupid Israel settled them with welfare recipients. Instead of dismantling the settlements, Israel should line up her borders with colonies and give the Jews there a carte blanche for countering Arab terrorists – with punishing raids, if needed.

Israel only needs to arm the settlers and turn a blind eye to their actions.

Jews, like people of other nations, could live wherever they like. Scores of Arabs live in Israel, and Jews can similarly live in the Palestinian entity-turned-state. Israeli Arabs live in homogenous villages, and Jews can live in settlements. Arabs claim the property they owned in Israel before her independence, and Jews can claim real estate they owned in settlements before Palestinian state was created. Foreign citizens, including many Jordanian spouses of Israeli Arabs reside in Israel, and Israeli citizens can reside in Palestinian state. Two generations of Jews were born in the settlements of Judea and Samaria; birth in the land, especially land without statehood, confers right of residence. Historically, many Jews resided in Muslim states, and Arabs claim the Jews left of their own volition; Palestinian state can be a test ground for peaceful coexistence of Jews and Arabs.
When Britain left Hong Kong and other colonies, it didn’t demolish the towns and forced its citizens back to Albion; on the contrary, it negotiated safe stay of British nationals. Some French similarly left in Algiers and Indochina after the colonial power withdrew, and moved to France much later because of safety concerns. After dissolution of the USSR, Russia abandoned its colonists in previously annexed Baltic states; most received citizenship of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. Even when US evacuated its military bases (not peaceful colonies) from Philippines, many American citizens remained in the islands.

Israeli entity, however, plans to demolish Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria and evict Jews before transferring the territories to Arab rule. International law doesn’t justify such move. Poland and Czechoslovakia repatriated ethnic Germans after WWII, but crucially, they were expelled by the host states, not forcefully removed by Germany. In Israeli situation, that would equal to Palestine expelling the Jews instead of Israel pulling them out. Israeli eviction of her citizens from the settlements is without precedent, but also illegal. Israel refuses to expel the Arabs who legally reside in the Jewish state, but expels the Jews who resided in the settlements according to law of the land (Israeli military law) before the Palestinian state was created.

Israeli government cannot evict Jews from settlements because it cares for their safety. Governments of free countries issue safety warnings to their citizens; forcing someone to accept protection is racket. Nor could the government evict the Jews because it owns the land through the Jewish Agency; settlers have right of use of that land after they legally built houses on it. Government compensation for demolished houses confirms that they were destroyed illegally; otherwise, why compensation?
The eviction amounts to forced population transfer, a war crime. To comply with human rights standards, transfer must be voluntary; each person must have an option to stay in his current place of residence. Article 7 of International Criminal Court (Rome statute) declares forcible transfer a crime against humanity. Forcible transfer is a form of ethnic cleansing. International Criminal Tribunal convicted Yugoslavian officials for exactly the crime Israelis committed in Gush Katif.

Israel evicts Jews from the settlements based solely on totalitarian doctrine that sovereign governments exercise full discretion over their subjects. Republican (liberal) democracies established legal safeguards of private choices. Free countries recognize their citizens’ rights to stay anywhere, including abroad. Soviet Union prohibited its Jews to emigrate to Israel; Israel prohibits its Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Free countries ban their citizens from visiting hostile states, thus Americans cannot visit Iran or Cuba. Such restrictions are war effort, intended to pressure an enemy; the ban extends on politicians, common citizens, and corporations. Israeli situation is different: its politicians regularly visit Palestine, its companies do business with it, and both countries officially seek to remove hostilities rather than apply additional pressure. Travel or residence ban on Israeli citizens who wish to live in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, lacks legal precedent.

Liberal democracies cannot pass any law they wish. They cannot mandate their citizens to walk on one leg, live in single-story buildings only, or to not live in some places. Israel prohibits its citizens to live in officially abandoned settlements. Even if Jewish houses there are demolished, the land remains public, unused. People can freely walk such land and live there without erecting buildings; public land is available for non-profit use by default. If Jewish houses are not yet demolished, Israeli government cannot mandate its citizens to vacate their dwellings.

Israel evicts the Jews not only from public land held by the Jewish Agency, but also from Jewish private land legally purchased from Arabs. Jews should sell their private plots to foreign trusts. Israel has no jurisdiction over foreign-owned property on foreign (Palestinian) land. Same holds for houses in Hebron: Israel only restricts Jewish purchases there; foreigners can buy houses and lease them to Jews.

Doctrine of eminent domain allows governments to buy out private real estate at fair price. It does not, however, let the government ban its citizens from returning to the empty land; Israel not only evicts the Jews, but also bans them from returning after the buildings are destroyed. Only sovereigns can practice eminent domain; Israel refuses sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, and cannot evict the settlers through eminent domain.

Governments destroy private real estate through the doctrine of nuisance when the property in question clearly damages nearby communities. Such reasoning is applied to dangerous factories, for example. Imagining that the settlements represent nuisance to Israelis by impending the peace process is empirically unsound: peace did not prevail forty years ago before the settlements appeared, nor did it follow the withdrawal from Gaza. Nuisance law allows demolishing property, not evicting citizens.

Israeli government behaves illegally toward its citizens, not outsiders. Israel demolished no Arab villages just in the name of public interest. Arab lands were taken only for specific military projects, fully satisfying the criterion of narrow public interest. Compared to other countries, legalistic Israel is averse to practicing eminent domain; scores of abandoned Arab properties clutter Israeli cities.

If Jews abandon Israeli citizenship, Israel will be legally unable to discriminate against them and will not demolish the settlements.

Baruch Marzel is the most wonderful guide I’ve ever met. In fact, he is not just a guide, but also leader of Jewish National Front Party, a former right hand of Rav Meir Kahane.

Listen to the story of Arab animals murdering a Jewish doctor during the 1929 Hebron massacre of the Jews. They couldn’t break into his well-fortified house, but the doctor of pure heart opened the door to a screaming pregnant Arab bitch, at which point the Arab mob stormed his house. See the photo of his surviving daughter, whose brain is leaking from her broken head. There is no photo of the doctor’s wife, whose hands and legs were cut off, or of their daughter who fought Arab rapists until they slit her throat. See the photos of Jews, rabbis and doctors, shining with otherworldly purity – murdered by Arabs. Look at Hadassah hospital, which treated Arabs for free until they raped and massacred the nurses. The Arabs who slaughter each other today in Iraq, will they hesitate to slaughter Jews again?

Learn how Moshe Dayan sent Jewish troops to stop fleeing Arabs and asked them to come back to live in Judea and Samaria, how Dayan gave the keys to the Tomb of the Patriarchs to a local imam who couldn’t believe his eyes. The Arabs expected the Jews to avenge the blood of the Hebron victims, and fled. The Jews didn’t care.

Hear the story of the new Jewish presence in Hebron: how outgoing Defense Minister Moshe Arens gave the Jews 30 hours to build a settlement, and how Rabin, in his first act as Defense Minister, stopped the construction. Listen to the story of the Jewish women who broke the Israeli army’s blockade of Hebron – a blockade against Jews – and held a building for 13 months together with their children, isolated from husbands.

Meet the people happy to live for decades in caravans at the foot of the preserved stairs by which Abraham entered Hebron. Meet these Jews, who live in extreme poverty, but are the happiest human beings on earth.

See Jews driving with open windows and Jewish children playing fearlessly in the streets of Hebron – while Arabs close their windows with bars. Understand how 600 Jews stand tall against 120,000 Arabs. It isn’t easy or safe, and you will see AK-74 bullet holes in their houses’ walls and meager furniture.

If lucky, you will see a demonstration by Peace Now scum demanding that the Jews be evicted from Hebron, King David’s seat of power. You will notice how the peaceniks push the Arabs into the front ranks of demonstrators and incite them to threaten the Jews. Watch soldiers coming to shake Baruch’s hand in admiration.

Visit nearby outposts – Jewish houses on the most ancient Jewish land, which the government proclaimed illegal – and pay attention to the tons of books. Warriors, farmers, scholars.

It doesn’t matter whether you believe that Adam and Eve are buried in Hebron. This is our land. Please consider helping the Jews there. As of now, they lack money to legally buy enough guns.

The Peace Now movement protests a purchase of the new houses in Hebron by Jews. One allegation is that the Jews possibly forced the Arab seller into an unfair deal. It’s difficult to see how a few Jews could have evicted an Arab supported by thousands of his brethren, Israeli police and military administration, and Jewish human rights organizations always ready to file a suit on his behalf. The Arab who built a four-story house is obviously well connected and wealthy, and not an easy prey. The story is pretty simple: the house in question was built too large, and the owner could not realistically finish it, thus sold it for a large amount, relative to Hebron’s real estate market standards. The Jews of Hebron know that Israeli military administration scrutinizes their every real estate acquisition, and naturally took care to make the deal impeccable.

It’s a strange military occupation. Occupiers arm the occupied with the weapons that have no practical use other than attacking the occupiers, now or a bit later. The Arab population possesses massive quantities of illegal arms, including automatic weapons, and builds thousands of illegal houses while the Jews could not own defensive automatic weapons, are severely limited in the amount of ammunition, and cannot reconstruct their existing houses, let alone build new ones. A situation when the occupier is distinctly disadvantaged to the occupied is historically unusual.

If Arabs are allowed to live and work in Israel, then the Jews should logically have the same entitlements in the Palestinian-controlled territories. To demand that the Jews leave Hebron is very much like demanding that Arabs leave Tel Aviv.

The Jews don’t insist on sovereignty in Hebron, but merely on religious and administrative autonomy allowed under Muslim law to dhimmi. In the recent initiative, many Jews consider abandoning Israeli citizenship to legally stay behind the Green Line once Israel withdraws. Living at the steps by which Abraham entered Hebron is more important to some Jews than proximity to Tel Aviv striptease clubs.

Unlike the situation in the settlements, Jews of Hebron did not even take any substantial plot of public land, but consistently buy houses from Arabs. No Jewish real estate looted and appropriated by Arabs in 1929 is restored; the balance of claims is overwhelmingly on the Jewish side.

Perhaps the Jewish presence in Hebron obstructs the peace efforts? It’s hard to see what exactly is conducive to peace. Given the Lebanese war and the shower of rockets on Sderot, concessions seem to bring no peace. Hebron offers a lesson in peacekeeping: Jews there walk openly and drive with open windows, while Arabs put bars on their houses’ windows. That’s despite the fact that Arabs possess vastly more weapons that the Hebron Jews. The biggest exposition in the Hebron museum relates to the 1929 massacre: Arabs and Jews lived peacefully side by side, until one day the Arabs massacred the Jews, including the nuns of the Hadassah hospital that cared for them free of charge. Those who imagine that human mentality has changed in eighty years would do well to witness the brotherly slaughter in Iraq.

The disputed house controls a strategic location, connecting Jewish huts in Hebron proper to the last resort escape route to Kiryat Arba. It is a question of whether the Jews or the Arabs will eventually shoot from the house windows to clear the road when major clashes occur. The army won’t interfere, as it did not when Baruch Goldstein was forced to defuse the impending pogrom. Eventually, the defense would be up to the Hebron Jews themselves, and they critically need the strategic height of that house.

The Peace Now demonstrations in Hebron incite the Arabs. It didn’t occur to Arabs to sue the Jews for the houses they just sold to us – until the Jewish lawyers suggested them. It’s a no-loss for Arabs to side with some Jews against the other. The Peace Now works hard to destroy the anti-Semitic canard that Jews stand for each other.

The protests in Hebron have an odd look: Israeli left and Arab right pitted against the religious Jews. The Jews continued their business as usual amid the protesters’ screams. People who proudly live in bullet-ridden caravans near the place where all prayers flow to before ascending to heaven are not easily intimidated. The most startling thing was the faces of Jewish children dashing around the disputed house — the faces of Torah scholars, workers, and warriors, faces with no trace of fear or hatred. A long-forgotten type of Jew is being re-born in Hebron.

Jews use to live on the brink of death. That leaves little space for compassion to neighbors, let alone to others. Jews, accordingly, grew treacherous. From the shameful episodes of the Holocaust to Israeli abandoning the Christian South Lebanon Army to delivering thousands of Israeli Palestinian collaborators into the hands of Arafat after the Oslo agreements, Jews betrayed their friends. Betrayal is silly: a friend helped in danger might not feel indebted, but at least he would cling to the benefactor for practical purposes. Israel betrayed the SLA, and lost the 2006 war in Lebanon because she lacked brutal associates who could do the necessary dirty work. When the abandoned friend does not go away, he has to be suppressed. Thus Israel represses the settlers who manned her frontier areas for decades.

Leftists imagine that if Israel retreats behind the Green Line, peace will follow. Little could be more ridiculous. The Israeli left and the Arabs understand the Green Line differently. The Green Line, as the Arabs see it, goes through Jerusalem. Israel will have to partition her capital. After a few years, demographic changes inside Israel will put Galilee outside the Green Line. Shall we give it away, too?

Retreating and giving way to the Arabs will not bring Israel peace. No country has ever traded land for peace. Israeli compromises embolden the Arabs to ask for more. After obtaining a Palestinian state, they will ask for compensation and the right of return for descendants of the refugees.

Show strength to make peace. States are built on threats, not goodwill. States exploit each other’s weakness and cooperate only as the second-best option. Strength must be unqualified. Arabs see Israel as powerful but weak, because she imposes idealistic moral constraints on herself. There is another way to peace: make cooperation with Israel feasible for the Arabs. Syria arms Hezbollah, and Hezbollah pushed Syria out of Lebanon. Europeans are idealistic and divide the world between friends and enemies. Arabs deal with others as opportunity arises and may cooperate with Israel regardless of the enmity.

The economic cooperation Israel offered earlier means nothing to the Arabs. They can get much more from the major powers that court them and for nothing. Military cooperation matters. The Arabs have bought plenty of low-end weapons from Russia and are now buying from China. Most of them do not significantly endanger Israel. She could mass-manufacture second-tier arms and supply them to the Muslims. Israel has a good military reputation, and Muslims would rather buy from her rather than from China. Ideological expansion is by far the most efficient way to wage war. Nothing breaks the enemy’s will to fight like propaganda.

Arabs do not feel some metaphysical attachment to Islam, just a communal ideology like many others. There are few religious zealots in Muslim countries. The Central Asian countries were atheist during Soviet rule. Western consumerism conquered the minds of the Soviet people and will similarly poison the Muslims. Their religious leaders feel the threat and attack Western ideology. The proper response for the West is to intensify the propaganda rather than to retreat from the Islamic world. Propaganda is a weapon; if you have it, use it even though the other side screams bloody murder. Satellite broadcasting, subsidized movie shows, free glossy magazines—particularly pornographic—will eventually break Muslim anti-Western sentiment down.

Jews moved into the Middle East like someone moving into an inner-city neighborhood full of paupers and bandits. Closing the door is one way to live, rare fights with the neighbors are still better, but the best option is to convert them.