As long as Israel acknowledges that the Palestinian Arabs’ national claims to statehood in Judea-Samaria are authentic and legitimate, Israel can never be secure externally, or internally.
“The Arabs… will not flinch from the war of liberation… This is a fight for the homeland – it is either us or the Israelis. There is no middle road. The Jews of Palestine will have to leave…We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors – if there are any – the boats are ready to deport them.”
– Ahmad Shukeiri, Yasser Arafat’s predecessor as PLO chairman, few days prior to the Six Day War
Claims of historical or religious ties of Jews with Palestine are incompatible with the facts of history and the true conception of what constitutes statehood. Judaism, being a religion, is not an independent nationality. Nor do Jews constitute a single nation with an identity of its own; they are citizens of the states to which they belong.
– The Palestinian National Charter
In my column last Friday, I warned that we were on the cusp of carnage. This grim prognosis came true even more rapidly than I had feared.
Early on Tuesday morning, Arab terrorists brutally struck down Jews at prayer inside a Jerusalem synagogue.
New phase in old battle
In the wake of the column, I was interviewed by the Voice of Israel’s Dan Diker, who asked me whether the recent incidents of Arab terror constituted a new phenomenon, or merely a continuation of the Arab enmity experienced in the past.
My response was that they were, in fact, both.
On the one hand, they reflect the continuation of obdurate Arab refusal to countenance any expression of Jewish political sovereignty. On the other hand, they are part of the emergence of a new, more menacing phase of that process. It is, sadly and predictably, a ghastly culmination of almost a quarter-century of gutless, guileless Israeli policy that has drastically undermined Israel’s deterrence, and dramatically emboldened its Arab adversaries.