I’m calling for a new approach.
Being the “responsible adult” doesn’t work.
Hoping that some day they will come to their senses and understand that coexistence is more profitable than endless war doesn’t work.
Thinking that “after all, they are human beings too and that if we treat them fairly they will act like human beings” doesn’t work.
Providing them with electricity so they can make rockets to try to kill us with doesn’t work.
Keeping their tribal enemies from killing them doesn’t work.
Paying them doesn’t work.
Giving them weapons “to fight terrorism” doesn’t work.
Respecting their religious rights (to behave like 7th century barbarians) doesn’t work.
Treating their corrupt inciter-in-chief like a president doesn’t work.
Destroying our villages and kicking our people out because they claim the land (they claim everything) doesn’t work.
Punishing our soldiers for shooting theirs doesn’t work.
Ransoming hostages doesn’t work.
Not having a death penalty for terrorist murder doesn’t work.
These things don’t work for several reasons. They don’t work because of the honor/shame culture of our enemies; they don’t work because Islam tells them that they really ought to be on top, and Jewish sovereignty is a perversion of the moral order; and they don’t work because they believe in a historical narrative that is false from start to finish.
We have been trying the old way since before the founding of the state. They have never accepted our presence in the land, and they have always murdered us (sometimes more frequently, sometimes less). Now, thanks to our own idiocy, they have set up an indoctrination regime that produces child soldiers that they send to butcher our families. They have created a generation of creatures that will slit the throat of a 4-month old baby or a 70-year old grandfather, and take pride in their work: the Arafat generation. And their parents, too, are proud.
The more we talk to them and try to reason with them, try to meet their demands, the more it feeds their fury. Why should they talk to dogs, pigs and monkeys? There is nothing to talk about, especially not with the Arafat generation.
The more concessions we make, the more they think they are winning and the harder they fight. It’s simple operant conditioning: every time they are violent, we give them something. Violence works for them.
So what works for us? First of all, a fundamental change in our point of view: stop treating them as another people more or less like us, with whom we must find a way to coexist. Coexistence is impossible. It’s not up to us; that is who they are. All we can do is win or lose.
What works is to see them as an implacable enemy that must be defeated by any means necessary.
What works is to stop talking and start fighting. Cut them off from everything we supply them, money, food, water, electricity, communication, transport. Take control of our capital and our holy places (today much of Jerusalem is in their hands). Take control of all of our country. If they send their soldiers against us, even their child soldiers, kill them.
If we’ve conditioned them to behave violently by rewarding violent behavior with concessions, we can extinguish this behavior too. Take away the positive reinforcement and replace it with punishment.
Nobody wants to do this. It’s hard, it’s cruel, and we would rather keep busy with our jobs and our families. We really don’t like war and killing, despite what our enemies say (as they project their own desires and behavior on us).
The alternative is to keep on pretending that we can reach an accommodation with them, because after all they are human too, and so on. We can keep trying to satisfy them. We can rationalize: who really cares about the Temple Mount except religious fanatics? Why shouldn’t we cede more and more land in Judea and Samaria to them? Yes, they are unreasonable, but we have to be the rational ones. After all, we are much stronger than they are. Aren’t we?
This is the path we’ve taken for the past 100 years, more or less, and the path we confirmed in 1993 when we signed the cursed Oslo agreements that caused the death of thousands of Israelis and gave birth to the Arafat generation. It is the path prescribed by European Jew-haters who even today support our enemies in every possible way short of bombing Tel Aviv.
It doesn’t work. What works is to fight for our land, the land that truly belongs to us, the land that they are trying to take with their lying “narrative” and their murderous violence. What works is to undo the damage done in 1967 when Moshe Dayan stupidly gave the Temple Mount to the Arabs, as well as the catastrophe of 1993.
What works is to stop pretending, stop submitting to threats and violence, and start standing up against our enemies. It’s a big job, and we have to start somewhere. So let it be the Temple Mount.
This is the correct formula, finally, here in print.
Not to belabor the point too much, but another friend, who grew up in an area plagued by violent crime perpetrated disproportionately by a particular ethnic group (and a political climate that tolerated it), wound up in adulthood living, as fate would have it, in a different region. One with a traditional intolerance towards that ethnic group.
My friend told me that group members in that region, of which there were a substantial number, were always on good behavior.
Try ‘less government’.
I remember visiting, nervously, a big-city park around midnight, with a friend familiar with the presumably dangerous area.
Friend told me not to worry because the neighborhood was “protected”, and indeed, the park was clean and quiet.