Hope is the enemy

It is 24 days since the murder of Eitam and Na’ama Henkin, the event which is considered the beginning of the ongoing “stabbing (shooting, burning, running over) intifada.”

Last night there was a demonstration in Tel Aviv organized by the “Peace Now” movement. Several thousand people demanded that Netanyahu resign and carried banners calling for a “diplomatic solution” with the Palestinian Arabs.

Several thousand? Once the Left could get tens of thousands to join its protests. But only the terminally blockheaded (and John Kerry) still think that the murder wave has anything to do with “the occupation” or the presence or absence of a ‘peace process’ or settlements in Judea and Samaria or economic deprivation.

It isn’t possible to tell Israelis to deny what they see with their own eyes, and sometimes feel with their own violated or burned flesh.

There are too many counterarguments to the Left’s position. The terror that Jews have experienced in the land of Israel began before the state was founded, continued during the years that that there was no occupation and no settlements, got worse when the ‘peace process’ brought the evil seeds of PLO terror back from Tunis, exploded into suicide-bombing violence when Israel tried to give up 95% of the territories in the framework of a peace agreement, and brought thousands of rockets down on our heads when we unilaterally withdrew from Gaza.

Today’s stabbers and burners and murder drivers come from the highest levels of Palestinian Arab society. No deprivation here.

The knives and guns speak to us, as does the incitement on social media, where Arabs are shown how to cut grooves into their knives and put poison on them in order to make them more deadly. Nothing is as eloquent as the way they ram their cars into Jews at bus stops and then get out to hack at them with meat cleavers, the way Arab bystanders spit at and kick a Jewish woman bleeding from the knife still stuck in her back, the way they throw firebombs into the laps of Jewish children strapped into their car seats.

They aren’t shy about telling us what they want, both by word and deed. What could be clearer? They are telling us, get out, Jew. Their religion, their politics, their ethnic-racial hatred all want us gone or dead. To them we are a different species, like the cats and dogs and farm animals that they casually mistreat.

The Left and our pretend-allies-but-really-enemies abroad keep trying to ‘make sense’ of it, usually by picking on something that we are doing that is causing them to be so ‘frustrated’. They are losing hope, we are told. If we would give them their hope back they would stop killing us – as if concessions ever had any effect except encouraging more terrorism!

For the benefit of those who are still trying to ‘make sense of it’, what is going on is intertribal aggression, common in the primate world and something that has characterized humans for tens of thousands of years. Nothing encapsulates this basic motivator more than Islamic jihad, and there is also a non-religious ideological jihad. Both of these are in play among the Arabs today. And historically, what tribe is more commonly hated than the Jews?

Hope is the enemy, as Jabotinsky pointed out. The more they hope they can get rid of us, the harder they will try. If we want to live with them, we must take away their hope of driving us out. Or, to paraphrase Kahane, screw living with them: drive them out first.

In other words, the Left’s proposals are exactly the opposite of what is needed if we are to survive in our homeland. This is the explanation of the ‘paradoxical’ fact that the more concessions we make, the more terrorism we get. It isn’t paradoxical at all.

We don’t need a ‘process’ to give them hope, we need to destroy their hope. We don’t need to try to calm the waters with restraint, we need to meet their terrorism with the strongest possible hand.

Demolish the houses of terrorists, build in Judea and Samaria, kick the inciters out of the Knesset, and shoot the stabbers. Loosen rules of engagement for soldiers and police. Take back the Temple Mount. Disproportionate force and collective punishment are good. Negotiations are bad, until we are in a position to dictate terms of surrender.

We’re at war with a particularly cruel and implacable enemy. This should be the lesson we learn from the past 24 days, though we should have learned it long ago. Wars are won by both defeating the enemy in battle and making (what’s left of) him understand that he has absolutely no reason to go on fighting.

War is hell, as Sherman said. True. But it wasn’t our choice. Let’s get on with it and get it over with.