In an earlier incarnation as Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu wanted to hear the world, or at least the allegedly civilized Western world, condemn in emphatic words the barbaric slaughter of an entire Jewish family - the Fogels.
They were slaughtered by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians on a Friday night, even their infant's throat was slit.. But the Prime Minister needn’t have bothered because the world, apart from a few individuals, ignored the crime and, perhaps, always will - as Caroline Glick suggested in her article at the time, Our World: Three Jewish Children.
Most of the world only wants one thing, and that is that the Jews first leave Judea and Samaria (which the nations all call by its Arab name, the 'West Bank'), then leave the Golan Heights, Jerusalem, and finally what’s left of the rest of Israel. Only then, this morally compromised world believes, will there be nirvana, peace in our time, and a new golden age of harmony and brotherly love: Yes, and cows have wings!
No. The world, especially Europe, is proceeding at an ever-rapid pace towards appeasement of the Muslim world, acceptance of Sharia law, and abasement as dhimmis towards triumphant Islam.
Unless very soon, very, very soon, they come to their senses and physically remove the Muslim threat, they will become dhimmis in their own lands and will have no one to blame but themselves – and the Israel-Palestinian conflict will have had absolutely nothing to do with it: So much for “peace in our time.” Instead, a 7th century pestilence will arrive.
The same threat that already is plaguing the West laps at the very gates of the Jewish villages and towns (do not cal them 'settlements' – let us stop using that self-abasing term) that grace the hills and valleys of Jewish Judea and Samaria.
The pestilence came to the Jewish village of Itamar in the form of Muslim beasts from a nearby Arab settlement who slaughtered with long knives a young Rabbi, his wife and three children, including a baby.
The horror of this bestial act riveted the Jewish state, but it left most of the world indifferent. Hence the sad pointlessness of Netanyahu’s demand that the world utter strong words condemning the atrocity.
In January 2005, I wrote a chapter in the first volume of my four-volume work, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. It was titled, “The ultimate answer to Arab terror.”
I had hoped that my suggestion in that chapter would have borne fruit, but it was not to be. So let me suggest, again, what I had posited those eighteen long years ago – a period since in which thousands more Jews have perished or been horribly maimed in Judea and Samaria and throughout all of Israel.
In that same period, some 8,000 Jewish souls in Gaza were violently deported from their homes and farms by a foolish Israeli leader who believed that his action would bring, “peace in our time.” Oh, how the angels in heaven must have wept at such foolishness.
I had pointed out that the Greek playwright of the 5th century BCE, Euripides, once penned the words “Those whom the gods wish to destroy, first they make mad.” I continued. Many may wonder are the words of Euripides coming true for the leaders of the reconstituted Jewish state. Was Prime Minister Sharon acting rationally in his implacable desire to drive his fellow Jews out of their homes and farms in Gaza and northern Samaria?
Well,we now know that Ariel Sharon may have had other motives or may have believed that the answer to Palestinian Arab terror was simply to retreat from ancestral Jewish land (yes, Gaza is ancestral Jewish land) and call it ‘disengagement’ using a perverse euphemism.
I asked two rhetorical questions: “Does the government not understand that seeing Israeli police forcing out Jews and handing their land to Arabs encourages the Palestinian Arabs to perpetrate yet more acts of terror?
“Is it not yet plain to even the far Left within Israel that the Arabs, who call themselves Palestinians, want not just the so-called disputed territories, but all of Israel down to the last downtown city block in Tel Aviv?”
Well eighteen years have passed and today the Jewish pioneers and residents in Judea and Samaria witness Jewish homes torn down while hundreds of illegal Arab structures financed by the European Union cover the same landscape.
I had a good friend who alas is no longer with us. He always ended his letters with these words under his signature: Remember Shalhevet Pass. You too remember, I hope, this Jewish infant who was shot to death by an Arab sniper while in her stroller in Hebron.
Remember too in 1979, Smadar Kaiser, her husband Danny, and their two small daughters, four-year-old Einat and two-year-old Yael, who were awakened in their northern Israel apartment at midnight by gunfire and exploding grenades.
To quote Andrew MacCarthy in a National Review Online article, Why They Celebrate Murdering Children:
“Muslim terrorists broke into their home and while Smadar hid with Yael in the dark, suffocating crawl space, the terrorists grabbed Danny and Einat and marched them down to a nearby beach. There, one of them shot Danny in front of his daughter so that his death would be the last sight she’d ever see.
“Then the ruthless ringleader, Lebanese-born Samir Kuntar, used the butt of his rifle to bash in the four-year-olds skull against a rock. Hours later, upon finally being “rescued” from the crawl space, two-year-old Yael, too, was dead – accidentally smothered by her petrified mother in the effort to keep her quiet as the jihadists searched for more Jews to kill.”
Eighteen years then of futility in the face of Arab knives, bullets, bombs, missiles and venomous diplomatic warfare has availed Israel naught. The answer to aggression from the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians is to act in ways that make it so painful to them that they will come to realize that their violence and bloodlust becomes horribly counter-productive.
By that, I don’t mean inflicting upon them higher and higher body counts. That does not faze them at all, for they welcome death as shaheeds and relish the 72 virgins allegedly awaiting them in paradise. Military responses to Arab violence are effective, but only up to a point.
No there is in addition a far, far more devastating response that Israel must employ regardless of the howls of rage that will undoubtedly emanate from the Biden administration, the corrupt UN and the ever-hypocritical international corridors of power. It is a simple and purely Zionistic response.
A principled Israeli government must make an irrevocable decision to respond to Palestinian Arab murders of Israelis by creating and restoring Jewish villages and towns throughout Judea, Samaria and the Golan. Every time Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, ad-nauseum, murder or harm any Jewish man, woman, or child a new Jewish village will be built and named in eternal memory of that Jewish victim of Arab hate and evil.
And when the world rages that Jews are “building new settlements,” the Israeli, Jewish and Zionist answer must be made by articulate and attractive Israeli spokespersons who understand the cultures of the nations to whom they are speaking.
These ambassadors of Israel must make an undeniable case for why, in response to Arab barbarism and crimes against humanity, Biblical and ancestral Jewish villages are being created or restored: Jewish love of life in the face of Muslim love of death.
This must be official and non-negotiable Israeli policy. Only then, perhaps, will Mahmoud Abbas and his cronies in the so-called Palestinian Authority see where their hate and aggression are leading them. Possess and redeem the Covenanted land; that is both a Biblical and a Zionist injunction.
Bibi Netanyahu is again Israel’s prime minister. Will he finally end the pestilence of the so-called Palestinian Authority and build throughout Yesha?
So let me end with these words from Ben-Gurion:
“No Jew is at liberty to surrender the right of the Jewish Nation and the Land of Israel to exist. No Jewish body is sanctioned to do so. Even all the Jews alive today have no authority to yield any piece of land whatsoever. This right is reserved to the Jewish People throughout the generations. This right cannot be forfeited under any circumstances.
“Even if at some given time there will be those who declare that they are relinquishing this right, they have neither the power nor the authority to negate it for future generations. The Jewish Nation is neither obligated by nor responsible for any such waiver. Our right to this land, in its entirety, is enduring and eternal. And until the coming of the Redemption, we shall never yield this historic right.”
David Ben-Gurion, First Prime Minister of Israel, speech to the 21st Zionist Congress, Basel 1937.
Victor Sharpeis a prolific freelance writer, author of seven books including the acclaimed four volume work titled, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state.