If you don’t want another massacre, then Gaza needs to be a part of Israel like Tel Aviv and Haifa.
Imagine two families with two kids each. In the first family, when the older boy beats up his younger sibling, the parents get involved on the side of the younger son. The latter knows that he can bother and nag his brother and when the whooping comes, his parents will come in to save the day. The other family also has two sons. When the younger boy starts up, they let the older boy take care of him short of severe bodily harm or hospitalization. The younger boy quickly realizes that if he wants to graduate from 5th grade, he should either keep his distance from his brother or learn to get along with him on his terms.
The two examples above will serve us for the Arab-Israeli conflict. Whenever Israel has won a conflict or minimally taken land, it has been ordered to return it—and then the conflict continues along. When England sent its armada to take back the Falkland Islands, nobody really told the Brits that hey, you know, the colonial stuff is over. Give it back to Argentina and call it a day. No, the British fought, lost soldiers and equipment and in the end triumphed. They hold the islands to this day and even the locals don’t seem to be pushing too hard to get them back. But not so with the Israelis. They held southern Lebanon. Out. They gave back Sinai for a lousy peace with Egypt. They yanked their people out of Gaza only to get a pogrom of Holocaust proportions as thanks. And because the Arabs know that Israel is not allowed to keep what it takes through war, they keep scheming to attack again.
Instead of the deadly and failed “land for peace” model after the 1967 war, the approach should have been quite different. “Well, you’ve lost a lot of territory which will now be Israeli. If you want to lose some more, keep attacking.” This would have been the second parental model from above. The Arabs would have realized that attacking Israel means losing territory for good. Israel could have continued on to Damascus and Cairo in 1973 after recovering from the initial blows of the Yom Kippur War. If Daddy Assad had seriously thought that Israel would take big chunks of Syria and not have to give them back ever, he might have told Sadat that attacking Israel is a bad idea. But since whatever Israel takes in defensive wars has to be given back, then what’s the big risk? So they’ll hold some land for a few years, but we’ll get it back and attack again. Israel is the international yo-yo.
There is no reason why Gaza should be returned to the “Palestinians”. One should note that Gaza was under Egyptian rule from 1948-1967, when Israel took it in the Six Day War. If Israel had not left Gaza in 2005, one thing would have happened and one would not. What would have happened would have been the continued attacks in Gaza against Israeli towns and soldiers. What would not have happened would have been the October 7, 2023, attack, as no Palestinian group would have been able to assemble men and weaponry for such an assault.
Prime Minister Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu needs to give a very simple speech: 'In light of the murder of our people by Palestinian terrorists that started this war and in recognition of the loss of hundreds of IDF soldiers fighting Hamas in Gaza, we will take ¾ of the Gaza strip as a permanent addition to the state of Israel. Initial use will be military but we reserve the right to reestablish Israeli towns in the future as per our discretion only. We gave the Palestinians Gaza in 2005 and they used it to kill our people. They have forfeited all claims to this land. It will not be given back to the Palestinian people in order to kill more Jews. This decision is final.'
That’s how wars worked from time immemorial. Combatants fought and the stronger or wiser won and kept what it won. For 80 years, the Japanese have been begging the Russians to give back the islands taken at the very end of World War II. Not only are the Russians in no hurry to give back these war prizes, nobody in the world seems to be interested in pressuring them to return the islands to Japan. If the Japanese had quit the war a month earlier, there would have been no atomic bombs and no lost islands. In the past, if you wanted your land back, you had to fight to get it. Because the UN and others have always told Israel that it cannot keep one inch beyond what it was allotted in 1948, the Arabs have always known that the outcome of any war is transient. Sure, we lost Sinai but they’ll have to give it back. The Palestinians are still babbling about a capital in east Jerusalem. Anyone who has visited Israel knows how the Old City and the surrounding areas are completely integrated into the modern city of Jerusalem. In the Russian model, Israel would simply say that the Jordanians were warned to stay out of the 1967 war. They came in at Nasser’s urging and lost both Jerusalem and the entire west bank of the Jordan River. It’s Israel. Finished. Over. Done. If you want a country, you can overthrow Jordan and Amman will be your capital. Jordan is already 60 percent Palestinian and in the original British model was to be the Arab state alongside a Jewish Israel. But Israel is the world’s yo-yo so eastern Jerusalem is supposed to be ripped out of Israel and given to a pack of murderers because of history, reasons, etc. When Israel shows that it does not care what the world thinks, the world actually respects her and leaves her alone.
If you truly want peace, then let wars determine the ownership of land. If you want endless war, tell the Arabs that Israel can’t keep what she has won. The KGB invented the PLO, but it is the lefty West that has pushed them not to make peace. Look at the kooks on and off campus demanding “from the river to the sea”. They want Israel to cough up not only post-1948 spoils but to simply wipe itself off of the map. Israel’s response should be equal and opposite; Gaza is ours. If the Palestinians will not leave of their own volition, then we’ll set aside a small area for them to live. The rest of it belongs to Israel. Don’t start wars you can’t win.
My mother-in-law was a wonderful woman. When she was 12, she left her home in the Old City and went to school in the new part of Jerusalem. On her way home, she learned that she could no longer go home because the Jordanians had sealed off the gates. The Jordanians took all of the Jews in the Old City prisoner and eventually sent them to the new state of Israel. Nobody asked Jordan to let them go home. Nobody asked the Jordanians to give up their conquest. Today, China holds Tibet, Turkey keeps a third of Cyprus, Russia rules in parts of Georgia and Ukraine and the Brits don’t want to give Spain Gibraltar. The world makes mild noises but does not demand the return of these territories. Israel should stop apologizing: we were attacked, we went to war, and we are keeping what we took at great cost of men and material. If you give it back after the war, then you will prove that you are weak and are waiting for the next big attack to come in the future.