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ISRAELI VICTORY WITHIN GRASP

by Richard H. Shulman

Victory over the western Palestinian Arabs is within Israel's reach. Only a little action would make it reality. Unfortunately, Israel lacks the intelligence and leadership to pursue this golden opportunity, what some would see as a God-given opportunity. Israel is throwing away its chance to overcome.

Everyone is remarking about how Fatah has brought the P.A. to bankruptcy. The P.A. failed to set up a business infrastructure that would encourage investment, and extorted from the businesses it has. It lived on foreign aid, much of which it stole and the rest of which it diverted into aggression against Israel. The donors, morally obtuse and even antisemitic as they are, began to cut back.

The electoral victory by Hamas created a policy vacuum. Countries sought their bearings. How to treat the Hamas-ruled P.A.? Should they donate to it? The US and the EU vacillated. Then the vacuum began to fill up. Leftists, who stick with failed ideology and the perverted idealism that accompanies it, began to make excuses for treating Hamas as a normal and legitimate ruler, even while Hamas indicated it would accelerate the war on Israel and its longer-range targets. That does not faze leftists and apostles of appeasement.

At first, Israel made its usual statements of bravado, that it would neither deal with nor subsidize a Hamas regime, not that it ever should have done anything in behalf of the Fatah regime making war on it. Then it began to reverse itself, as usual. It failed to think the situation through. It usually fails to do so. One wonders whether it can if it tried.

Although the rest of the world often treats Israel as a pariah, it also looks to Israel for guidance. It gauges how much anti-Zionism it can get away with, by what Israel does. When ostensible friends of Israel in Congress see the government of Israel taking some anti-Zionist measure, they see it as sanction to follow suit. They don't want to be more pro-Jewish than the Jewish state. It is a morally defective attitude but a human one.

Suppose Israel had seized the leadership in this matter. It would have pointed out that it made several peace agreements with the P.A., in which the P.A. undertook to eradicate terrorism and the bigotry that motivates it. The P.A. broke the agreements and pursued religious war. Now the people there endorsed Hamas, which is more truculent. Therefore, these people are not without hope, but hopelessly belligerent in the hope of conquest if not genocide. They deserve no state, no territory, and no subsidy.

Israel, its leaders should assert, will redirect the excise taxes formerly given to the P.A., to its own victims of P.A. terrorism. It will not provide services to the P.A.. It urges the rest of the world to acknowledge that the P.A. is part of global jihad with a particular enmity towards the Western countries that have been subsidizing it. Let these countries withdraw their assistance.

The result of such as policy indeed would be bankruptcy. It also would produce chaos. This Israel fears, or is its excuse for continuing to transmit taxes to the P.A., under pressure by the State Dept.. Chaos without money, however, is better then order with money, money that fuels jihad. Without government services and foreign aid, and under chaos, the Arab population would decamp and depart. The menace would recede. The Jewish people would reclaim the core of their homeland. Jihad will have been shown not to pay. It certainly would suffer a great defeat. Casualties would diminish.

There are other ways to defeat the P.A.. They could be defeated militarily. Israel could bombard towns from which terrorists, condoned by the P.A., bombard Israel with rockets. Israel, however, has no taste for that. The rest of the world would condemn it; Israel is sensitive to foreign criticism. The criticism would be improper, but that does not matter to Israelis. They would flinch at accusations that this kind of retaliation, recognized as proper under international law, injures innocent civilians. Innocent civilians? Not in the P.A.! Its whole society is radicalized. The people there want to destroy Israel by whatever means, however criminal against innocent civilians. Israel has a right to protect its innocents from attacks by Arab criminals.

The Palestinian Arabs, including the Arabs of Israel, should be dispersed, so as to be rendered innocuous. When they can't make a living in the P.A. off other people, they would scatter. When they no longer could aspire to conquer the Jewish state (the nerve of Pres. Bush declaring his support for Palestinian Arab aspirations!), they would no longer have a collective purpose.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com.