What is unimaginable for any nation in the world became normal and standard for Israel.
After the dramatic military victory in the Six-Day War, a national and political aberration struck Israel. When Foreign Minister Abba Eban informed the American Secretary of State Dean Rusk of the government's willingness to withdraw from most of the captured territories - in particular from Sinai and the Golan - the interlocutor in Washington was astonished. Why would Israel, which faced a tangible threat of annihilation, agree to return to the hands of the Arab aggressors territories serving as launching pads for attack?
The period following Israel's defensive war elicited a stressful Israeli complex defined as "shooting and crying" characterizing guilt-ridden Jews as a dubious moral asset. The government broadcast a tone of defeatism under the edifying guise of "territories for peace," virtue-signaling statesmanlike magnanimity toward the Arab enemy. It searched in vain for a buyer for the territories in Arab political markets. Successive governments opposed settlement, except in certain cases, and it was preferable that Israel's lands remain empty of Jews to allow for a future withdrawal without unnecessary complications.
The basic political assumption of withdrawal is fundamentally flawed. While Israel strives for peace, the Arabs and Muslims strive for victory and conquest. Golda Meir's famous saying, "there will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate the Jews," ignored the religious and cultural reality in the region. Palestinian Arab parents love their children, and send them to meet Allah and the virgins in heaven. According to the Islamic proverb: "The Jews love life, we [Muslims] love death." Here is a prescription for endless war as demonstrated by Hamas's human shields tactic in the ongoing hostilities in Gaza.
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The stiff-necked Israelis are bound to their native political element and strove against all logic, and not just Middle Eastern logic, not to let reality confuse them.
Significant withdrawals that Israel executed turned out to pave a path to further Muslim terrorism and warfare: from the territories of Judea and Samaria in favor of the PLO starting in 1994; from southern Lebanon in 2000 in favor of Hezbollah; and from the entire Gaza Strip in 2005, which ultimately brought Hamas rule.
Contrary to common sense and accumulated experience, Israel validated the wisdom of historian Barbara Tuchman: "A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests." Israel's march of folly repeatedly sunk into the trap of self-delusion.
To avoid further tragedy in Israel's march of folly, we should heed the stirring words of the underground Zionist maverick Avraham Stern (Ya'ir) speaking in the Jewish idiom of a groom and his bride: "You are sacred to me, homeland, according to the Law of Moses and Israel." One does not divorce one's homeland and one does not forget it, one does not hand it over to foreigners and one never leaves it.
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Israel must formalize the love of the Land of Israel into the sovereignty of the State of Israel. This is a decision rooted in Torah, thousands of years of history, in the recognition that there is no equal among the nations like the millennia bond between the people of Israel and its homeland. In 2025, indeed, the Knesset passed two preliminary bills to apply sovereignty over the territory and settlements in Judea and Samaria.
A sensible country does not foolishly empower its enemies. Israel must not repeat the mistake of 1949 in granting citizenship without conditions or qualifications to hostile Arabs, as it did with its founding. Ideologically, Arabs in Judea and Samaria, like those in the Galilee, the Triangle, and the Negev, have no interest or capability to build a common community of trust and solidarity with the Jewish citizens of the state.
Their rejection of Israel as a Jewish state, itself a product of blind fanaticism, is absolute and non-negotiable. So too must Israel's national resolve for the Land of Israel be absolute and non-negotiable.
Dr. Mordechai Nisan taught Middle East History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.