Israel’s Darkest Day David P. Goldman

For the time being, Israel will keep Gaza under siege. It has a grace period due to the world s revulsion at Hamas, but this will not last forever. As pictures of starving Gazans circulate in the coming weeks, world sentiment once again will turn against the Israelis. If Israel cannot strike a killer blow against Hamas on the ground during the next few weeks, its strategic position will be permanently weakened.

The terrible events of the past several days make clear that the existential urges of the ancient world cannot be erased with the bland brush of modernity something that the Serbs of Kosovo, the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh, and the Ukrainians of Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kherson learned already. The twentieth century resolved its ethnic wars by population transfers, some orderly, some horrific. The Israeli-Arab conflict should have been resolved in the late 1940s with a transfer of roughly equal populations. The Arab states aborted the transfer by imprisoning 800,000 Palestinians as permanent refugees and incubated a monster.

There will be no two-state solution in Israel; after Hamas gulled the Israelis into complacency and then committed horrific acts reminiscent of the Holocaust, Israel will not, and should not, countenance Palestinian statehood. One way or another, the population exchange of 1948 will be completed sometime during the next several years. Either Israel will destroy Hamas, and the population of Gaza will dwindle over time through emigration, or a large number of Israelis will deem the cost of a Jewish polity too high, and decamp for Europe or the United States. This may seem cruel, but if the events of the past few days have taught us anything, it is that the monsters of the ancient world still walk abroad in daylight, and they will not be banished by the bland pronouncements of diplomats.

via lawliberty.org