BMacD

First things first. Israel has an absolute right to exist as a Jewish state, and there will be no peace until the genocidal terrorists who are suicidally determined to exterminate the Jews are themselves exterminated. The Jews are the senior occupants of what is still widely known as the Holy Land, having been there for more than 5,000 years. The British in 1917 effectively promised the old Roman province of Palestine to both the Jews and the Muslim and Christian Arabs; it was like selling the same real estate to two parties at the same time with predictable results. If the surrounding Arab powers had accepted the original borders of Israel as proposed by the UN, it would be barely half of its present size. But by unleashing an aggressive war to try to strangle the Jewish state in its cradle and being defeated in 1948, 1967, and 1973, they facilitated the enlargement of Israel. On several occasions Israel has given back substantial territory in transactions of land for peace—in fact returning land to Arab countries who had lost wars they had started in exchange for ceasefires that they almost immediately violated. The U.S. Carter administration’s failures helped remove the Shah of Iran, who was replaced by a militantly genocidal pseudo-theocracy dedicated to exterminating the Jewish people; the only American presidents who have seriously known what they were doing in the Middle East were Truman, Nixon, and Trump. It seems to have been largely forgotten that the present conflict was caused by Hamas’s invasion of Israel, the massacre of 1,200 Jews in the most barbarous circumstances, and the seizure of 250 hostages—an uncontestable act of war. The United Nations has played a shameful anti-Israel role: if you have peace, you don’t need peacekeepers, and if you have war, peacekeepers are useless. Despite a campaign of defamatory hysteria, Israeli forces have caused an extraordinarily small number of civilian casualties by the standards of urban counterguerrilla warfare, especially since Hamas makes no secret of its willingness to run up civilian deaths. The only road to peace is Israeli victory; no nation could wish peace more than Israel does, but when the enemy is prepared to die to achieve a genocidal objective, he must die.