There are no do-overs

It was the early days of the Oslo nightmare. I remember arguing with leftist friends when they started talking about creating a “Palestinian Authority” in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. My leftist friends, as well as countless leftists in the media, told us we were being paranoid about things, and that if the PA were to ever to be used as a base for attacks against Israel within the Green Line (which of course it won’t, they assured us), we would simply end the experiment and go back to the way things had been.

Right. I told them that it doesn’t work that way, and that we wouldn’t be able to do that, and they laughed at me. “Israel is so much stronger than a Palestinian Authority would be! We could just roll back in and they wouldn’t be able to stop us.” Hmm.

Next, the Israeli government decided to help arm the PA Police Force. It was actually the PA Army, but the leftists denied this. They also called us paranoid for thinking that these guns would be used against Jews. There was a big campaign with the slogan “Don’t Give Them Rifles!” Some of my leftist friends, once again, called me paranoid. “If they were ever to use those rifles against us (which of course they won’t), we would just go in and take them back. We’re so much stronger than them.”

And when PLO terrorists from the PA (remember, Fatah is the PLO) killed Jews with the very rifles we’d given them, nothing happened. How about that. Who could have predicted it?

When Ariel Sharon decided to expel 9,000 innocent Jewish men, women and children from their homes in Gush Katif, we again screamed bloody murder. “The Arabs will just use the vacated land as a staging ground for attacks, which will be able to reach much further into Israel,” we remonstrated with Sharon and his supporters. And once again, we were called paranoid, and enemies of peace. We were assured that this pessimistic forecast was nothing to worry about. “The Arabs — and the whole world — will see that we’re willing to do anything for peace,” they said. (Even commit war crimes against our own people, they didn’t say.) “This will change things, you’ll see. And if the Arabs of Gaza were ever to use it as a staging ground for attacks inside the Green Line (which of course they won’t), how hard do you think it would be to take it back? The Gaza Strip is tiny, and Israel would simply roll back in.”

How did that work out for us?

There are no “experiments” with the Palestinians. Any “test situation” we create with them will be permanent. We gave them autonomy, and they used it to kill us. We gave them rifles, and they used them to kill us. We gave them the homes of 9,000 of our own people, and they used that opportunity to kill us as well. When is the insanity going to stop? An infant can learn that touching a hot oven hurts without needing to try it half a dozen times. Why can’t we learn?

* * *

I wrote the above as part of a blog post back in 2010. But it seems that the lesson still hasn’t been learned. The other day, ILTV interviewed Gershon Baskin, one of the folks who was among the “It’ll never happen, but if it does, we can just reverse it” crowd I mentioned above. ILTV’s Emily Schrader asked him about the prospect of releasing several thousands of Palestinian security prisoners, and it went like this:

Schrader: Now one of the terms discussed was the release of an unspecified number of Palestinian security prisoners. How can Israel be sure these aren’t terrorists who would leave prison and immediately start threatening Israelis again?

Baskin: Israel can’t. But Israel can re-arrest them. One of the lessons I think needs to be learned from the Shalit deal back in 2011 is that we don’t want to deport released prisoners abroad where we have no control of them, we don’t want to send them to Gaza, where they’re out of reach. The best thing would be to release dangerous prisoners to the West Bank, where Israel can watch them, can visit them, can see what they’re doing. There are going to be a lot of unemployed prison authority workers whose job could be to monitor those prisoners released, and if Israel needs to, you can re-arrest them, and if Israel sees that they’re engaged in terrorism or planning terrorism, Israel knows how to neutralize them. This has to be part of the Israeli thinking.

[emphasis added]

In other words, Baskin wants us to return to October 6, only with the addition of all Palestinian security prisoners out and about, particularly in Judea and Samaria, which is already a hotbed of terrorism that Israel has yet to get under control.

He went on in the interview to laud arch-terrorist leader Marwan Barghouti, architect of the first two intifadas, and paint him as a reasonable partner for peace.

If we don’t learn the actual lesson, which is to keep people like Baskin far away from any kind of advisory position, and to radically change the situation, and end the current nightmare of terrorocracy across 40% of our land, it is not only we who will suffer for our insanity, but our children.