Israel is not going anywhere.
The “situation” is not that complicated. The Arabs — who have violated the world’s peace for over a century — have never had to sacrifice anything for peace. And the time has come for that to happen.
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This is a guest essay written by Lisa Liel, an Orthodox Jewish mom, objectivist, and Zionist.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Israelis refer to the incessant Arab attempts to murder all of us as “the situation.”
And this “situation” is not particularly complicated. Arabs have acted for over a century against the idea of any Jewish polity in the Middle East. Some of them have come around in recent times, thanks to the architects of the Abraham Accords, but in every case, they’ve insisted on maintaining a core element that will cost Israel its ability to survive.
Today, it is clear that there are only three options: either Israel ceases to exist, or the conflict continues without end, or the Arabs who identify as Palestinian leave.
There cannot be a “demilitarized Palestinian state.” The world has made it abundantly clear that “demilitarized” means “occupation.” Judea and Samaria cover 16 times the land area of the Gaza Strip, and unlike Gaza, they are not in the periphery, but smack dab in the center of the land. Israel cannot survive 16 Gaza’s in her heartland; it is a fantasy.
Israel is not going anywhere. And we cannot allow the current state of affairs to continue. This only leaves one option. By persuasion, by bribery, or by force, the enemy must be removed.
The most obvious way to do this, is to recognize the fact that a Palestinian state already exists. It is called the Kingdom of Jordan. A majority of Jordanians are Palestinians. The queen is a Palestinian. The crown prince, the next king of Jordan, is a Palestinian. It is, in all but name, a Palestinian state.
Many Jordanians resent the fact that they are ruled by a royal house created by British colonialists. While outsiders see Arabs ruled by Arabs, the truth is that Hashemites from Arabia were given the Emirate of Transjordan by Great Britain, violating their commitment to a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River.
Jews had bought and settled land on both sides during Ottoman rule, and when the British unilaterally granted 79 percent of the area to the Hashemite prince Abdullah I, the Jews on the east side of the Jordan River were expelled.
The Colonialist Origins of ‘Palestine’
The name Palestine was never used by Jews or Arabs native to the region. It was a name created by the Roman Emperor Hadrian in a fit of pique after the Bar Kokhba revolt1 in 135 CE, and was used thereafter by the European heirs of the Romans.
The three “mandates” granted to Great Britain and France by the League of Nations in lands formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire, which were intended to foster the creation of independent states, were given the names “Palestine,” “Syria,” and “Mesopotamia.” None of these names were used by locals. They were purely European.
Syria and Palestine were the northern and southern parts of what the locals called “esh-Sham.” And in fact, maps from before World War I often referred to it as Syrio-Palestine, in recognition of the fact that it was a single region to the people who lived there. Mesopotamia was known locally as Iraq, a name that was reclaimed after the British Mandate expired.
There was no ethnic or cultural divide between the residents of “esh-Sham.” The countries now known as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel were all a single backwater of the Ottoman Empire. Sparsely inhabited and possessing little arable land.
The French were given a mandate over Syria, which they split into Syria for the Muslims and Lebanon for the Christians, and Britain split Palestine into Cisjordania Palestine (which they called simply “Palestine”) for the Jews and Transjordanian Palestine (which they called “Transjordan”) for the Arabs.
In both cases, the split was one-sided. Christians were cast out of Syria into Lebanon, but Muslims remained in Lebanon and continued agitating to take it over. Jews were cast out of Transjordan into Palestine, but Arabs remained in Palestine and continued agitating to take it over.
Understanding the Nature of the Conflict
This is, in part, a religious conflict. Islam divides the world into two parts: “Dar el-Islam” (the domain of Islam, under Islamic rule) and “Dar el-Harb” (the domain of the war, not yet under Islamic rule). It has no theological concept of a place that was once “Dar el-Islam” and then reverted to “Dar el-Harb.” In their minds, even Spain is still “Dar el-Islam.”
But in part, it is a colonial conflict. The British imposition of the colonialist name “Palestine” on people who did not choose it for themselves created a problem that has now existed for over a century.
The Jews of Palestine were just happy to have anything. They didn’t complain about losing 79 percent of the land they had been promised. The idea that the world would allow them anything at all was remarkable. And when the United Nations General Assembly voted, in 1947, to allow the creation of a Jewish state in half of what remained, in three non-contiguous cantons, without Jerusalem, they accepted it, like starving men accepting a crumb of bread.
(To be fair, the Arabs of Palestine were also offered three non-contiguous cantons, without Jerusalem, albeit with most of the arable land.)
But the Arabs rejected it, because the idea of a Jewish state in what they considered an “Arab sea” was anathema to them. The Arabs in Palestine immediately stepped up their attacks on the Jews. The Arab countries — Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia — attacked the moment the British Mandate expired in 1948, and did their genocidal best to annihilate the Jews of Palestine.
When an armistice was declared and the war was considered at an end, Transjordan had managed to capture most of the land the UN General Assembly had offered the Arabs of Palestine. Note that the General Assembly had no power to impose this partition; it was advisory only. When it was rejected, the partition became null and void. Cisjordania Palestine reverted to what the League of Nations had determined would be a Jewish homeland.
Transjordan immediately annexed the land it had captured, and changed its name to Jordan, because it existed on both sides of the Jordan River. They called the area on the west bank of the river “the West Bank” and the area on the east bank of the river “the East Bank.” This illegal annexation was recognized only by Great Britain and Pakistan. Even other members of the Arab League refused to accept it.
The Origins of the ‘Palestinian Refugee’ Problem
The invading Arab armies had told the local Arabs to back off to the borders so as not to get in the way, and had promised them that after the glorious genocide, they would return and possess not only their own property, but the property of the Jews.
Many of those Arabs had fled to the west bank of the Jordan River; when Jordan annexed the area, rather than settling them, it built them refugee camps, so that they would never feel at home, so that they would always feel like refugees, always feel angry, and always dream of ending the State of Israel.
Egypt had taken a corner of the land known as the Gaza Strip. They did not annex it, but neither did they grant the Arab residents any rights. There, too, they built refugee camps, to prevent the Arab residents from settling down to normal lives.
Both Jordan and Egypt fostered the discontent and fury of the refugees they had created, caring nothing for their welfare. Their only use was to be weapons in the war against Israel.
For 19 years, this armistice held. Then, in 1967, the Egyptians and Syrians decided to try and finish what had been started in 1948. Israel cabled Jordan and begged them to stay out of it, but Abdullah’s son King Hussein wanted the rest of Palestine, so Jordan joined the invasion. Six days after the Arabs attacked, Israel held not only all of Cisjordania Palestine, but the entire Sinai Peninsula as well.
The State of Israel chose not to annex these lands for two reasons. One was that doing so at the time would have resulted in Israel losing its Jewish majority, which was, after all, its raison d’etre2. But the other (more compelling) reason was that they believed they could use these lands as a bargaining chip. Offer to trade them to the Arabs for the one thing Israel wanted more than anything else: peace.
Israel’s Mistaken Conception
Israel held a flawed conception of how the Arabs thought. They believed that a compromise could be reached. Israel would lose its heartland, but would gain peace. The Arabs would gain half of Israel and forgo the genocide of the Jews.
This never reflected how the Arabs thought. It was a fantasy of Jews whose desire for peace led them to confuse what they wanted with what was real.
Over the years, Israel made many attempts to trade land for peace. The only time it worked was when it traded the Sinai to Egypt in return for a (cold) peace treaty. And this worked only because Egypt’s then-president, Anwar Sadat, had already decided that he wanted to make peace and needed the Sinai so it wouldn’t look like he was surrendering to Israel. Even so, he was assassinated by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad for the crime of making peace with Israel.
Three years prior to the Six-Day War in 1967, with the help of the Soviet KGB, the Arab League created a group called the Palestine Liberation Organization — a tool to “liberate” all of Israel from the Jews by violence and terror. Soon, it was run by an Egyptian terrorist named Yasser Arafat, who began a reign of terror that led to the types of airport security we know today.
The term “Palestinian,” which prior to 1948 had been used to describe the Jews of Palestine (the Arabs of Palestine were called “Arab Palestinians” to distinguish them), was co-opted and used cynically to describe the Arabs of Israel and the lands that had been liberated from Jordan and Egypt. As generations passed, more and more of these Arabs adopted this Palestinian identity, as though it was a nationality.
The Wandering Palestinian Terrorists
Meanwhile, the Palestinians of Jordan were discontented, and in 1970, the Palestine Liberation Organization plotted to take over the Kingdom of Jordan. In what may go down as one of most historically self-destructive acts Israel has committed, Israel alerted King Hussein.
It is easy to see why they did it — “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” They knew that Jordan was not going to attack (and in fact, the Jordanians sat out the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel), but an Arafat-led Palestine Liberation Organization state most likely would. And Israel was tired of war.
The result was Black September, in which the Jordanian monarchy killed thousands of Palestinian Jordanians and expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization, which found a new home in Lebanon. Once in Lebanon, the organization set up camp in the south and began firing missiles into the north of Israel. This went on until 1982, when Israel had finally had enough and invaded Lebanon.
The Palestine Liberation Organization fled once more, this time to Tunisia, where they set up terrorist training camps and joined forces with other international terror groups like the Irish Republican Army and the Japanese Red Army.
The Palestine Liberation Organization would have languished in Tunisia had they not been thrown a lifeline by the Left-wing government of Israel, which wanted desperately to get rid of the lands liberated in 1967.
Under Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the Palestine Liberation Organization was brought back to these lands and handed autonomous lands in 1993 under the Oslo Accords.
The areas of Judea and Samaria (the original names of what the Jordanians had called “the West Bank”) were divided into three areas. Area A would be under the full control of a newly created “Palestinian Authority.” Area B would be under civil control of the “Palestinian Authority” but under military control of Israel. Area C would be controlled fully by Israel.
At the time, Israelis who believed the Palestinian Arabs would use the autonomous areas as a launching ground for terror attacks against Israel were called “enemies of peace” — and the enormous wave of Arab violence in the wake of this agreement was dismissed, along with its dead Jewish victims, as “sacrifices for peace.”
Israel even gave the Palestinian Authority semi-automatic rifles to police their own people. There was an unbreakable belief on the part of the Israeli Left that, if Israel were to make enough concessions to the Arabs, they would see that we can all live together in peace.
This is part of the conception that needs to be changed.
The Rise of Hamas
The Arabs of Judea and Samaria and Gaza, and those areas of Jerusalem that had been held by Jordan prior to 1967 elected a terrorist group called the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) to lead them. The Palestine Liberation Organization rejected these results, and refused to leave office. Hamas was able to take over the Gaza Strip, while the Palestine Liberation Organization continued to rule in Judea and Samaria.
In 2005, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in danger of indictment for corruption, captured the admiration of the Israeli Left by proposing that Israel “disengage” unilaterally from Gaza. Nine-thousand Israeli men, women, and children, some of them third generation in their homes in the Gaza Strip, would be expelled from their homes, and the entire Strip handed over to the Arabs.
And note, while there is an aspect of Islamic hatred in all Palestinian attempts at genocide, in the case of Hamas, it is explicit.
Concessions are really hard to take back.
When the Palestinian Authority was created, those who claimed that it would become a hotbed of terrorism were told, “Don’t worry so much. You’re wrong, but if you turn out to be right, we can just go back in and dismantle the Palestinian Authority. Israel is so much bigger and stronger that there’s really nothing to be concerned about.”
When the Israeli government gave rifles to the Palestinian Authority, those who claimed that they would be used against Israel were told, “Don’t worry so much. You’re wrong, but if you turn out to be right, we can just take them back. Israel is so much bigger and stronger that there’s really nothing to be concerned about.”
And when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed pulling out of Gaza, those of us who said that Palestinians would use it as a staging area for rocket attacks against Israel were told, “Don’t worry so much. You’re wrong, but if you turn out to be right, not only can we go back and retake Gaza, but the nations of the world will finally see who the Palestinian Arabs are, and will laud Israel for having taken such a risk, and will condemn the Arabs for their perverse and genocidal intent.”
All of this leads us to the October 7th massacre. It should have put an end to the false conception that there can be peace with the Arab Palestinians.
Unfortunately, the delusions have not died. They suffered a body blow, it’s true, but the delusions are alive and well — both in Israel and across the rest of the world.
The Conception That Must Change
Theodor Herzl, the originator of political Zionism as a movement in the 1800s, is known for saying in Hebrew: “Im tirtsu, ein zo aggada” — “If you will it, it is no dream.”
This statement was Herzl’s response to the naysayers who claimed that established a modern-day Jewish state cannot be done.
He urged them to change their conception from “We can’t do it.” to “How do we do it?” He changed this conception, and the result is the State of Israel.
But now we are once again in a place of: “It can’t be done.”
I wrote above:
The most obvious way to do this, of course, is to recognize the fact that a Palestinian state already exists. It is today called the Kingdom of Jordan. A majority of Jordanians are ethnic Palestinians. The queen is a Palestinian. The crown prince, who will be the next king of Jordan, is a Palestinian. It is, in all but name, a Palestinian state.
And the obvious solution to Israel’s problems is for those Arabs who identify as Palestinian, but live to the west of the Jordan River, to relocate to the already existing Palestinian “state” east of the Jordan River (the Kingdom of Jordan).
Those who object to this on the principle that it isn’t okay to expel people from where they live must deal with the fact that they accepted the expulsion of Jews from Transjordan in 1922, from Arab countries leading up to and in 1948 and thereafter, and from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
The sad irony is that the only people who have been required to sacrifice for peace have been the people who want peace. The Arabs — who have violated the world’s peace for over a century — have never had to sacrifice anything for peace. And the time has come for that to happen.
We stand at a precipice. Either we remove the Palestinian Arabs from the west side of the Jordan River, or we accept the reality of eternal war. Either we send people who are unhappy where they are to somewhere they can have a chance for happiness, or we accept that their genocidal tantrums are a reality we cannot escape.
I don’t claim to have all of the answers as to how to accomplish this. But I have some suggestions.
Many Palestinian Arabs want to leave. Some polls show the number in Gaza to be over 65 percent. All it would take for them to leave is to open the door for them. Not the door into Israel, obviously. No one can reasonably ask the sheep to welcome the wolf into the fold. But every time that Egypt has opened the Rafah Pass at the southern end of the Gaza Strip, there have been far more Gazans trying to leave than the Egyptians have been willing to allow.
Every country prefers immigrants who bring financial assets with them, who will be a benefit to the economy, rather than a drain on it. If Israel was to offer every household a one-time $100,000 cash grant (a good amount of money in the Middle East), for the purpose of settling successfully in Jordan, or in any other country, they would go to the top of the list of potential immigrants. In a few years, this outlay would pay for itself in reduced security costs.
Those Arabs who choose to disavow any identification as Palestinians, and petition for Israeli citizenship, should be permitted to do so, pending a deep security check, a public oath of loyalty, and a commitment to do national service like all other Israelis. Arab Israelis who are loyal to the State of Israel are valued and respected members of our society.
Anyone who objects to this will simply have to understand that we have been abused too long to take chances again.
As I said, I don’t have all the answers. But neither did Herzl. We did it anyway.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is not unsolvable. But it requires taking a different direction from the failed directions that have been tried over and over and over again without any success.
It requires a determination to do what needs to be done, despite what tears may come, for the sake of a better future for Israelis and for Arab Palestinians.
It requires a belief that we can do it if we are determined to do it.
A large-scale armed rebellion initiated by the Jews of Judea, led by Simon bar Kokhba, against the Roman Empire in 132 CE
Reason for being
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Pakistan is Deporting 1.7 Million Muslim undocumented Afghans.
Trump is deporting millions of illegals and legals-college visas -who threaten national security
So Israel can deport …..all Muslims Hamas in Gaza…
Many good points, although I don't see Jordan accepting large swarms of immigrating Pals. Arab countries love the Pals until the former are asked to open their doors to the latter. Can't say I blame them, considering Pal embrace of terror.