The Terrorist has Won
The Terrorist has Won

How did one hunger-striking terrorist defeat an entire nation?

The minute Israel began negotiating with him, Mohammed Allan became the winner.

It doesn't matter if he is sent overseas or not, my bet is that this won't happen anyway and that in some way or another he will simply go free. He is the winner – that's clear enough.

Why? How did a single hunger-striking terrorist defeat an entire nation? The answer is that with our own hands, we gave him the ultimate weapon – a sense of the justice of his cause.

It began in 1967, when our holy land was freed from Jordanian occupation, and we conceded the justice principle and called our homeland the "territories". 

The Land of the Bible, the sites where our ancient history took place, and most important – the area that holds the key to our destiny because it is the one to which we were faithful all though our exile. This is the area to which we returned, the area that contains the very meaning of our existence – and we turned our backs on it and changed it into negotiable real estate.

And it continued on in 1995, in Oslo, where we adopted a different form of justice, granting recognition to a new "people" that suddenly appeared on the globe, a "people" created only for the purpose of creating a sense of justice in exchange for ours.  A "people" that never existed and whose demands for a square centimeter on earth  had never been voiced unless it was in Jewish hands – a "people" whose raison d'etre is not its own state but the negation of ours.

We did not hand Mohammed Allan that ultimate weapon because of our desire for peace – or because of demographic fears.  Conceding justice led to horrible bloodshed. The demographic problem has a simple solution, one that is just and humane. It can be seen in the last youtube video I posted.)

We gave Mohammed Allen the justice weapon because we are afraid of ourselves, and make sure to flee our identity and the significance of our very existence. That is the way we became occupiers in our own estranged  land. That is how we turned bloodthirsty murderers into freedom fighters.

And that is also how we managed to turn the entire world, the same world that hundred years ago after the Balfour Declaraion recognized our sovereignty over both sides of the Jordan, and Britain decided to help us return to our land and establish our sovereignty and the culture of Tanach, ever-renewing itself and serving as a beacon of freedom for the nations (yes, that is how they talked then)  – that is how we managed to change the world into one which  increasingly sees the establishment of the Jewish State as an error and its Jewish citizens as the new Nazis.

We have tried with all our might to switch our lost sense of justice for an enlightened and ethical aura. We may be "occupiers" for lack of choice, but will leave as soon as necessary – see?  We did so in Gaza and received only terror, so now we must be more careful, but we are conquerors without an enemy – we do not even want Mohammed's country, after all we signed a peace agreement and as  soon as they begin negotiating with us – we will leave.

The world has stopped buying this stalling tactic – if it is not yours, just go, they say, and as far as we are concerned, you can return to Poland.

But what is important for us is – that Mohammed's people cannot be in a state of war with us. We need him so that we can give him this land that forces our identity on us.

That is why we do not relate to him as  an enemy soldier who has been taken prisoner, but as a type of lawbreaking citizen.  A citizen, as opposed to an enemy soldier, cannot be expelled from his own country; either he is kept in jail or eliminated if he continues to be dangerous.

A citizen has lawful and legal rights. That is justice.

And that is how, he –Muhammed – murders women and children and continues to have justice on his side.

And we treat him like a hostile citizen of some kind of entity, and are then subject to injustice and worldwide hostility – like in the parable, we eat the rotten fish and are also chased out of the city.

We do not treat Muhammed as a soldier, as a prisoner, as an enemy – because we are unable to simply state –this country is ours.

That is why we are using what is essentially a citizen's court to try Muhammed.

It is clear that the system is incapable of dealing with this kind of crime, leading the state to  turn to the weapon of administrative detention – a weapon that must not be used – bringing the country to the point of adopting  force-feeding.

Administrative detention, force-feeding – these are characteristics of an occupying power, of a dictatorship!

It seems that one cannot replace a sense of the justice of your cause with ethics and humane behavior – in the end you find yourself back in a dictatorship. There is no such thing as an enlightened occupation– no matter how strong he is, the enlightened occupier will be vanquished by one determined hunger striker.

Because in order to be victorious, to flourish and to survive in our land, we have no choice other than the return to our sense of justice – a return to our inner selves, to our identity.

Translated from Hebrew by Arutz Sheva's op-ed and Judaism editor Rochel Sylvetsky