Often, reality calls on
us as individuals and as a nation to overcome. To overcome is to stop
ignoring the roots of the conflict and to peruse the Hamas charter,
which calls in the name of God for Israel's destruction. "The
Palestinian problem is a religious problem," the charter states, summing
up Hamas thusly, "Allah is its goal, the Prophet its model, the Quran
its constitution, jihad its path and death for the sake of Allah is the
loftiest of its wishes."
To overcome is to say
to the Christian West and to ourselves: This is not terrorism, it's
Islam. It wasn't a gang of terrorists that gained control of Gaza, but
six faithful legions speaking through religious and social foundations,
electing Hamas in Gaza by a wide majority. It is neither mysticism nor
opium. It is institutionalized religion rooted in a structured ideology
galvanizing millions of people worldwide to action. This is not the
ninth-century "One Thousand and One Nights." Just look around, there is
mass killing in Iraq and Syria and thousands of Christians fled Mosul
this week fearing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's new Islamic caliphate.
To overcome is to
liberate oneself from the childhood notions of fences and walls. These
do not make a reality -- they conceal it. Evil has not disappeared from
beyond the fence, it rockets at us from above and digs at us from below.
It's sufficient enough to imagine Mahmoud Abbas setting the situation
straight, or that at the end of the operation, as the pundits and
intellectuals have said, the issue will go to Ramallah. But who is this
Abbas, anyway, to the hundreds of thousands of people who elected Hamas
in 2006? We tried this experiment once already. It was called the "Gaza
First" plan and it failed in every way.
To overcome is to deal,
first and foremost, with the ideology that is raging against us. The
Israeli response, attacks as it were, feeds the international media as
if this actually were a conflict between neighbors and not a decisively
ideological war. Not all Islamic values are negative, but the ones
fueling this war certainly are. From our vantage, they should be at the
center of this war.
We must rivet our gaze
to the Muslims and say, at each and every forum: In this struggle with
Israel -- it is you who are heretic; you have profaned both religion and
morality, for this world wasn't meant for occupation, theft and
destruction, as you shamefully accomplished through so much of history,
but for thriving and development. The postmodern West doesn't know how
to say this. Perhaps it is afraid. This we proclaim in an unequivocal
tone, through tanks and aircraft. We will not let you do to this
territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea what the
Islamic State group has done in Mosul or what Assad has done to your
brothers in Syria.
You have desecrated our
relations as well. "We shall inherit the east of the land and its
west," as it is written in the Quran. Don't buy the Christian story
(some parts have already been redacted). We are the true sons of Israel,
those whom Muhammad encountered in Medina, an ancient nation that has
returned home -- this time, forever.
To overcome is to
recognize all of this and to take responsibility for the entire
territory, at least the existing model in Judea and Samaria.
Demilitarize Gaza, take control of its open territories, isolate
municipal areas and go city after city clearing terrorist cells, work
with local governors who declare both their opposition to Hamas and
their commitment to civil society, and help them to rebuild it. It will
exact a certain price and take much time, but it will lay the
fundamental conditions for returning order to the region. If we finish
up with negotiations between two equal sides under Tony Blair with a tie
and a smile, it will be very sad.
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