Facts on the Ground: A Visit to Wartime Israel

What does "winning the war" even look like?

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I just visited Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank), Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv.

I participated in community security assessments in Judea and Samaria with young IDF soldiers moonlighting from their bases — stepping in for government to design and arrange funding, procurement, and delivery logistics; and install security solutions. Israel truly is a startup society.

I had conversations with anguished fathers who want their sons back and mourning mothers whose sons died in booby-trapped tunnels looking for hostages.

I visited with rabbis on ethics of mission and hostage balance, implications for government legitimacy.

I sat in on all-day, one-to-one Knesset meetings and follow-up with ministers, leadership contenders, regional governors, Members of Knesset (Israel’s legislature), former ambassadors, historians, and authors and journalists.

I was introduced by a former senior Israeli intelligence official for private meetings with Palestinians who see themselves oppressed by their own Palestinian Authority leaders, as well as potential participants in a new Palestinian leadership entity.

The bottom line upfront: Jew hatred is winning. Israel needs to decisively restore security for its 250,000 displaced Israelis neighboring Gaza and the northern border with Lebanon. What the war cabinet sees as a “seven-front war” is only in the middle of the beginning. And Israel itself is the front line of civilization in a global battle against medieval nihilism of political Islam, orchestrated by the edge-of-nuclear Iranian puppet master.

Israel must sustain unity of purpose over personal political ambitions in looming inquiries and elections. Disunity among the nation of Israel has been celebrated and exploited by enemies on October 7th, as is the case throughout history.

One potential path forward could be for Israel to embrace its own Arab minority citizenry to develop a new concept of practical peace for Gaza and the West Bank, understanding that all the inhabitants of Israel — Jews, Arabs, Christians, Druze — share common asymmetric vulnerability to organizations of terror, whether sheathed in jihadist ideology (Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad) or bald antisemitism and rejection of the Jewish state of Israel (the Palestinian Authority).

Jew hatred has endured over millennia, from the days of the Patriarchs. No Western-imposed “two-state solution” will end it; nor will “co-existence.” Israel’s inhabitants must ultimately live together, under one regime of law and order.

The strategic path for the “day after” could be to “end the occupation” — suspend military law in favor of Israeli civil laws (with local Palestinian community self-governance), impose strict sanctions for violence, and eliminate violent sharia doctrine from educational and religious systems.

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Israel is in mourning and struggling in multiple dimensions: militarily, spiritually and, below the surface, politically. Plenty of anger and recrimination suspended for national survival — for now — but inquiries, reckoning, and new elections loom large.

Some positioning I heard on the issues seemed more geared to what officials thought voters want to hear than what might be best for the nation. Careerism in democratic nations is a fundamental shortcoming we’ll be seeing in many countries this year. Beyond all else, Gen-Z soldiers are leading the nation forward with great resolve and confidence in the justice of Israel’s cause.

The war cabinet is barely functioning, leaving Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant conducting the war essentially alone, while they simultaneously juggle diplomacy to shore up security in the north and east (the West Bank); attend funerals; tend to hostage families; deal with baseless accusations of “genocide”; field U.S. demands of a “two-state solution” for the “day after”; and of course position for their own political futures.

What does “winning the war” even look like? Everyone understands that if 250,000 displaced Israelis neighboring Gaza and Lebanon cannot safely return home, the war is lost, Israel effectively shrinks, and attacks on the country will continue. Hamas needs to be put out business for violence or governing — a practical necessity and understood to be a Saudi precondition to formalizing normalization with Israel and providing capital for Gaza’s reconstruction — and Hezbollah needs to be pushed more north into Lebanon as previously agreed in a UN resolution.

A full-scale conflict with Hezbollah, with much greater firepower and 300 miles of tunnels up to Beirut, would be much more costly and difficult for Israel. While U.S. President Biden has been exceptionally supportive, his administration, and the U.S. national security establishment, are unlikely to risk directly facing Iran if U.S. forces were called to “have Israel’s back” on this front.

Tensions are also building in the West Bank, as prosperous Palestinians who worked in Israel run out of money, and Israel withholds payments to the Palestinian Authority to avoid diversion to terrorists. There is a real risk that the Israeli and U.S.-equipped and trained Palestinian Authority police might turn their guns on Israel, especially if they too are not paid.

Israeli politicians in survival mode are understandably not ready to consider future policy toward the Palestinians or handling U.S. Secretary of the State Antony Blinken’s demands for the “two-state solution,” even less so with polls indicating that Israeli voters have lost patience with “land-for-[no]-peace.”

There must also be a more creative initiative for U.S. policy than lobbying Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to “revitalize” the Authority so it can administer Gaza. Palestinian Authority leaders’ understanding of “revitalization” seems to be merging with their “brothers in resistance” — Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. What is the U.S. State Department thinking?

Political Islamists are playing the long game of global jihad, cynically using the 1990s Oslo Accords process as cover for violent rejection of Israel and Jews “from the river to the sea.” Hatred among the descendants of Abraham pre-dated by millennia the 1948 War of Independence (the Arab “Nakba”), as well as subsequent wars and peace efforts, while the Jewish People have continuously lived in Judea.

Terrorists like Hamas and Hezbollah will be defeated, and, Israel — without compromising its unique Jewish character — offers Palestinians and other inhabitants better lives than they would enjoy anywhere in the Muslim world. This would be living together, more than “peaceful coexistence,” but it wouldn’t need to risk the demographic control of the Jewish homeland by the Jewish People.

There will eventually be an opportunity to show Blinken a reimagined concept for peace updated for the current most urgent need in Gaza. Can the Arab inhabitants find leaders who renounce violence and disregard the self-destructive practice of rejecting and killing other tribes, specifically Jews? The Abraham Accords process paves the path. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have held fast and said to be preparing billions of dollars of investment commitments to rebuilding Gaza. But Gaza must not be permitted to become a multi-billion dollar terror base.

Guided by former senior Israeli intelligence professionals, I spent many hours with Palestinians who are fed up being used as tools for “the resistance.” They would rather see the benefit for their people in living and working constructively in Israel. These Palestinians expressed fears of “the enemy within us” such as Palestinian Authority thugs and 11 security forces, and the Authority’s Islamist extremists of all stripes.

In East Jerusalem, Palestinian Israelis report finding themselves buffeted with conflicting allegiances to their own community (tribal) leadership, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, and Israel. Whatever else they represent, Israeli and West Bank Palestinians are both hostages of their own leaders, no different than Gazans used as human shields by Hamas. It will take courage for these rational Palestinians to stand up to their hateful culture, but at least some appreciate that this is their best option.

The Palestinians need an entirely new administration, populated by technocrats who are interested in actually helping their people instead of exploiting them for the money and honor of killing Jews.

While I was talking about the idea with a governor in Judea and Samaria on January 4th, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant published a “day after” plan affirming that Israel will retain security oversight in Gaza as it does in the West Bank, but has no intention of involving itself in civil administration there. He referred to an unspecified “Palestinian entity” for this purpose, definitely not Hamas or, by implication, the Palestinian Authority.

Sorry Mr. Blinken, there is no “revitalizing” the Yasser Arafat and Abbas-run Palestinian Authority; they have poisoned the minds of two generations of Palestinians. The Authority occupies its own people and uses them exactly as Hamas does. They are the problem, not the solution.

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for his part, has kept from talking about a two-state solution that he inherited without ever believing in it, he has not yet revealed to the world the stunning positive developments that have quietly taken shape in the West Bank in recent years, including miles of brand new roads and utilities, as well as cross-cultural entrepreneurial and cultural initiatives available to neighboring Palestinian and Jewish communities.

These are the “facts on the ground.” The Palestinian communities want to plug in, but the the Palestinian Authority won’t allow it. Has Blinken or anyone of significance in his State Department (or most “pro-Israel” Jewish organizations) ever seen what’s going on in the West Bank outside of the Palestinian Authority’s terror center in Ramallah, or are they simply reading social media posts speciously claiming Israeli “settler violence?”

An all-new Palestinian administrative entity would be comprised of people who demonstrably stop underwriting, inciting, and financing terror; respect the rule of law; appreciate the rights and dignities accorded to all inhabitants of the land in Israel’s Declaration of Independence; and immediately revamp the Palestinian educational curriculum to prepare the next generation for the 21st, instead of the seventh, century.

One can understand how grieving Israelis could be skeptical now that a group of such Palestinians would be willing to risk defying the Palestinian Authority; however, I have reason to believe that at least some of the children of East Jerusalem Palestinian-Israelis educated in the Israeli system — and headed to bomb shelters with the rest of Israel — might be ready to prioritize their Israeli identity and good lives.

If a Palestinian-staffed entity coalesces and proves itself capable of administering the rebuilding and repositioning Gaza on a civilized track, it could also in due course assume administrative responsibilities for Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Israel could then “end the occupation” by suspending its military presence in the West Bank, applying Israeli civil law, with local community self-governance and development rights for everyone.

I call this approach: “no mas.” No Hamas. No Abbas.

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