Several friends are having coffee at a café. Someone asks: “If Barack Obama gives you ten million dollars, how will you spend it?’ You answer: “I would spend it on building yeshivot (Jewish religious day schools).” Another person gets angry: “That makes no sense! We have enough buildings. You need to spend it on subsiding yeshiva tuitions so that students can afford to attend!” The next one says: “I thought I knew you both better. This is a crisis time — I would donate it to Birthright to bringmore young people to Israel.” The next one: “I would donate it to the yishuvim (settlements) in Judea and Samaria.” Another pipes in: “I would build another Holocaust museum. You can never have too many Holocaust museums.”
The Arabs are not asking to be given the Mediterranean Sea. Thoughtfully, they are reserving that venue for the Jews of Israel.
Soon, they all are arguing and fighting. Harsh words are spoken, and life-long friendships are jeopardized. And then Elijah the Prophet enters the room, and he speaks these words: “News flash! Barack Obama is not going to give you ten million dollars, not one million dollars, and not a single dollar.” Everyone pauses. The Prophet is right. They all thank Elijah and calm down. Back to sipping coffee.
There will not be a “two-state” resolution west of the Jordan River. It never is going to happen. The debate once may have made sense. It no longer makes sense; it is absurd. It never-ever will happen. No one is going to uproot 750,000 middle-class and upper-middle-class Jews from their homes. And there is nowhere to put nearly a million Jews, all uprooted at once. Israel could not even find homes for the uprooted of Gush Katif. Where are they going to put a million uprooted Jews? Is the Knesset going to set up D.P. Camps for displaced persons? Refugee camps like the ones on the borders of Syria and Iraq and Turkey and Somalia? Will they sublease space in refugee camps in Jenin? Will the Knesset ask Poland to reopen the Auschwitz facility for emergency housing? Will they ask the UNRWA to do it? This is never-ever going to happen.
In the naïve days of Oslo, there were leftist Jews willing to give up “land for peace.” A fool named Stanley Sheinbaum, a California Jew who married into the Warner Brothers millions, joined with four other American Jewish naifs and met with Yasser Arafat, arms around each other. Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, others believed Arafat would make peace everlasting if only he were given a country of his own or a foundational land grant intended for statehood. So they gave him the Palestine Authority. They gave him control of television and radio, newspapers, schools, text books, summer camps, naming street signs. Gee, that worked swell.
After Arafat checked out, the insane idea of a “Palestine” country consisting of two disparate lands — Gaza on one side and Judea-Samaria on the other side — quickly blew up when Hamas seized Gaza from the P.L.O. or Fatah or whatever name Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) called his henchmen. In seizing Gaza, Hamas terrorists tortured and murdered so many Fatah terrorists that Abbas ultimately realized that, if he wanted to keep Hamas from gaining Judea and Samaria, he had to cancel future elections, pretty much for the rest of his life. So he ended up with an elected term that expired six years ago and never held another election. Smart.
Ehud Barak boasted his creative thinking as he just walked away from South Lebanon without any quid-pro-quo deal, his sure-fire way to create a haven of stability. Immediately, Hezbollah rushed in and soon were shelling Israelis throughout the north. Ariel Sharon, after trouncing Barak electorally, in great measure because voters rejected Barak’s failure, eventually replicated the insanity by walking away fromGaza without a quid-pro-quo deal, expelling the Jews of Gush Katif. Hamas rushed in and soon were shelling Israelis throughout the south. That leaves Israel’s Left with only two boundaries to give away: the Mediterranean Sea and Judea-Samaria.
The Arabs are not asking to be given the Mediterranean Sea. Thoughtfully, they are reserving that venue for the Jews of Israel. And only the most oblivious and suicidal of Israelis harbor any notion that an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria will result in peace. If Israel were to withdraw from Judea and Samaria, the question is not whether Arab terrorists would enter and start shooting rockets into Tel Aviv andHaifa (and Raanana and Herzliyah and Kfar Saba and . . .). Rather, the question only is who: Al Qaeda? ISIL? Fatah? Hamas? Force 17? PFLP? Or one of the hundred new terrorist outfits that have not yet been heard from? They grow every day not like weeds but like kudzu.
The Labor Party leadership knows this. Every single time the rockets of Hezbollah and Hamas are extinguished, they re-stock. Every single time that Israel allows cement and steel inside for re-building hospitals and schools, the materiel ends up being used instead to build terror tunnels. Everyone in Israel, except for 5 ultra-leftist Knesset members from Meretz, and the delegation of Arab List Knesset members pledged openly or quietly to erase Israel from the map, has it figured out.
A “Two-State Solution” is a “Final Solution.” We Jews do not do so well with other people’s Final Solutions for us.
France has other ideas? So be it. In a century, if not sooner, the French will be knocking on Israel’s doors, pounding and pleading, like today’s immigrants into Israel from Africa, begging to be granted asylum and refuge from the demographic change that will end their way of life. They do not know it yet. But tell your children that you read it first here.
As for “American guarantees” that “we have Israel’s back,” ask the South Vietnam government how those guarantees worked for them. South Vietnam disappeared from the map, watching all the guaranteeing Americans race for the helicopters to get out. It made for a great musical scene on Broadway. The Americans came in to secure South Lebanon. One day, 241 marines were blown up by Arab terrorists, and America left the region. Israel does not have that luxury.
And Obama? His word does not matter. He does not matter. The plain fact, after six years, is that he now is revealed to be a shameless public liar. Ask the former government of Yemen how Obama’s protection helped. Obama? He promised Americans that, if they liked their health plans and doctors, they could keep their health plans and doctors under a new Obamacare health law. It was a lie. He drew a red line with Syria. He backed down. He told people for six years that he lacks Constitutional authority to change American immigration law unilaterally, and then he did so anyway.
He lies. Sometimes he knowingly lies, and sometimes he makes promises without thinking through the consequences, therefore needing to change his mind afterwards when he figures out the calamity he has caused. Sometimes he is too inconsequential to honor his promises anyway.
And then there is his National Security Advisor, Susan Rice.
It always cheapens an opinion editorial to engage in name calling like “stupid” or “idiot.” So we shall say of Obama’s National Security Advisor merely that she is inartful and lacking in political erudition. In America, she is a punchline to jokes. When America’s ambassador was murdered in Benghazi, on the eleventh anniversary of September 11, she appeared on one television talk show after another, blaming his assassination on a ten-minute Youtube video that virtually no one had seen.
When Obama released five major Al Qaeda terrorist leaders in return for a captive American soldier named Bowe Bergdahl, Rice went all over, repeatedly telling the newsmedia and the American public that Bergdahl had served the American military with “honor and distinction.” Meanwhile, in the outdoor world of reality, from whose glaring daylight Obama thoughtfully shields Ms. Rice, Bergdahl now is being charged by the military with desertion and with one count of “misbehavior before the enemy by endangering the safety of a command, unit or place.” So her opinion does not matter either.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is already advising American Jews that only Israel can guarantee their future, not America. In the topsy-turvy world of Obama’sWashington, that actually is the most honest statement of all.
There is no room for another terrorist country in Israel. There is no inherent need or “right” for a “Palestine.” America is not creating a separate country for its Native Americans — no Sioux State, Navajo State, or Cherokee State. Not even a single “Indian – Native American State.” When will Putin create an independent Armenia? When will France or Spain give independence to Basques? What of a Kurd country carved out of Turkey? Surely, Turkey can be carved.
Even if a “Palestine” were created insanely in the “West Bank,” that would not address the majority of claimants who insist that they and their fig trees came from Yafo or Haifa or somewhere else that Jews have blossomed and have no interest in living in Jenin. That is why those who do live in Jenin call their homes a “refugee camp.” Who ever heard of natives living in “refugee camps” in their own country? The thing is, they do not regard Jenin or Ramallah as home, merely a stepping stone to King George Street in West Jerusalem. O Jerusalem! — a city that neither they nor the Koran coveted through their first thousand years, until Jews lived there. They want Tel Aviv and Haifa and Beersheva and Ashkelon, not Ramallah. The country they covet is not Gaza nor the “West Bank.” They want pre-1967 Israel, all of it, and nothing less.
When Jordan illegally occupied Judea and Samaria before June 1967, did the PLO terrorize Jordanians as “occupiers” of “Palestine”? Did they attack Egyptian airliners or athletes then, even though Egypt held Gaza through those years before June 1967? No. They did not want Gaza or the “West Bank.” Rather, Al Fatah attacked Israel. Israel is their “Palestine.” Ours, too.
A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. Look at a picture of the Hamas logo . Or the Fatah logo. It is not the “West Bank” and not the Gaza Strip. It is, rather, pre-1967 Israel. All of it. That is what they want. That is all they want. Obama may speak of a “Two-State Solution,” and Hillary Clinton may speak of a “Two-State Solution,” but it never will happen. Look at the pictures. Those who represent the “Palestinian People” want a One-State Solution: Israel off the map, and they in its place. For those who cannot listen, they just need to look at the pictures. Even the politically myopic are not literally blind. Look at the pictures. One-State Solution.
There is little chance that one day Barack Obama will give someone (other than his kids) ten million dollars, and there is no chance that there ever will be a “Two-State” resolution west of the Jordan River. It never will happen.
Rabbi Dov Fischer is author of General Sharon’s War Against Time Magazine (Steimatzky: 1985). His political commentaries have appeared on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, National Review, Los Angeles Times, and in other major American publications. He formerly was Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, is an adjunct professor of law at two prominent American law schools, and is Rav of Young Israel of Orange County, California. He is author of Jews for Nothing (Feldheim: 1983) and is in his fifth year as a member of the National Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America. His writings can be found at RabbiDov.com As with all of Rabbi Prof. Fischer’s writings, this commentary expresses his own views.
