No Upside

Back in the days of the George Dubya Bush administration, there was a phrase that was used by the Arabs that was to become a condition for a return to the negotiation table: “the humiliation of the checkpoints”. As a security measure, Israel set up checkpoints where Arabs from Judea and Samaria would enter Israel proper (for want of a better term) in order to go to work. This allowed those Arabs to come in without blowing us up. We were not swayed to sympathize with the Arabs. If they want to come in, this is how. Find it humiliating to not be able to murder us? Don’t come in.

I bring this up in the face of a phrase that we are hearing a lot these days: settler violence. The source for this term is much the same as the former one; that is, it is meant to put pressure on Israel for whatever gains that may bring. But that is where the similarity ends.

Attacks by civilians on the Arabs do us no good. When self-defence is already the criterion for accusations of violence, actual real attacks do not help. Whatever we would say as a defence – it’s a few out-of-control kids, it’s not even residents of Judea and Samaria – will have no impact. “That it’s only a few extremists” only works when referring to Moslems.

But I digress.

I generally do not care about what the world thinks about how we choose to defend ourselves. I am on record as saying that I support the annexation of Judea and Samaria as part of the state of Israel, as are Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. I favour the death penalty for terrorists who were not eliminated at the scene, and I think that their families should be deported. In a world that thinks that “the two-state solution” is still worthy of pursuit, my ideas would be rejected, to say the least.

Civilian attacks on the Arabs not only does not help the situation – it won’t make the Jews living there safer – it provides the enemy with another salvo to fire at us. It’s not a lie if we are actually doing it. And it will be used to create more lies that will make the war of perceptions that much harder to fight.

What will make the Jews safer there is the government use of the tools at its disposal. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said that the IDF, the police, and other security agencies should be left to deal with the legal and security issues in the area. I think he is right. But he needs to be, if I may, more right. Judea and Samaria is no less a breeding ground for violent hostility towards Israel and its Jews than is Gaza. The best way to shut down the threat is to shut it down entirely. That means every and any violation of law by the enemy against the state or its citizens needs to be treated with the strictest, most stringent enforcement and application of the law. And if laws need to be strengthened or created along the way, so be it. Just as we take action in places like Syria in anticipation of possibilities, so too must we act in what is the heart of our land.