Armed Liberal has up on the idea of a Palestinian state.
And for me also, this week has been a turning point. Maybe it was the compelling argument of why a Palestinian state can’t possibly exist now, or maybe it was the latest atrocity. (Did anyone check to see if Arafat’s ritual condemnation came after, or before the bombing? )
Or maybe I’m just tired of the stupid bastards destroying their own lives and striving to take as many of those around them with them as possible.
There are decent and moral Palestinians; men and women who do not wish death and destruction on their neighbors; who want only to live normal lives in peace. I am convinced of this; I have to be, for to imagine an entire people so depraved as to be without possibility of salvation is a thought so black I can’t contain it in my mind. So I cling to that article of faith that there are Palestinians who do not regard the deliberate murder of children as a valid expression of “resistance”.
But it seems self-evident that at this point, there simply aren’t enough of them to matter.
I don’t wish death or even suffering upon the entire Palestinian people. I don’t even want them driven out of the West Bank and Gaza, as some have suggested — and not in jest, I suspect.
But I am past the point of believing that they, as a people at this point in time, have a right to a state. Nor can they be trusted with even the basic freedoms a civilized society should expect and aspire to.
Israel’s policy of moderation — and that is what it has been, despite what you’ve heard — has failed. And it will continue to fail so long as Israel allows the pseudostates which the PA has created in the West Bank and Gaza to continue to fester.
It is not time for yet another incursion into the territories, to be followed by a pullout in a few days. It is time for Israel to take full control of the West Bank and Gaza. All of it. And it is time for the complete and total disarming of the Palestinian people. No armed PA security force(s). No militias. No police. No guns, no bombs, no mortars, nothing. Israel should sweep in, and when they do, they should pack for a long stay. For they will have to be there a long, long time.
The Palestinian people will suffer; many of them will be innocent. They will have few of the basic freedoms that they should as human beings expect. They will live in a true police state. And for this, I am sorry. But while I remain sympathetic to the individual Palestinians who are truly blameless, my tolerance for the vile behavior of the Palestinian society is at an end. It is a sick and diseased creature in its current state, and it should be put down. In time, perhaps, a new culture can be grown in its place; one that satisfies the aspirations of the Palestinian people while not reflexively bringing murder to its neighbors.
To be clear: this is not a call to genocide. It is not even a call to violence. Where Palestinian society calls for death to reign down upon their enemies the Jews, I know that the Jewish state will continue to demonstrate that it is indeed a civilized nation, worthy of those terms. There will be no massacres. There will be no mass graves. There will be incidents, there will be mistakes. People will die who should not have. But they will, on balance, be just that: mistakes. Not the deliberate acts of barbarism that the Palestinian culture has elected to make its tool of choice.
And what should we, America, be doing while this housecleaning is taking place? Fixing the real source of the problem: the corrupt and twisted regimes that finance psychotics like Hamas in the first place. Syria. Saudia Arabia. Iraq.
The conventional wisdom has been that once the Palestinian question is resolved, we will have a freer hand to work through the other issues plaguing the region.
The conventional wisdom has it exactly backwards. Even with the brutal course I propose of a full Israeli takeover of the territories, there will still be terror and death so long as the money and arms continue to flow from the regimes who benefit from such violence.
Even Israel does not have the might to address all of these petty fiefdoms of blood all at once.
But I know a nation that does.
Let us hear no pathetic cries of “national sovereignty” and “American imperialism”. Let us ignore those who will rise to defend the tyrants and the murderers out of reflexive allergy to “Western hegemony”.
And let us simply hope that our society has the collective will to know what must be done, and to do it.