Accepting Our Limitations
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In another brilliant column, Caroline Glick begins with the shutdown of the Israeli Arab Death Cult Summer Camp I wrote about earlier today, and concludes with a perceptive outline of the political realities that define the current Arab-Islamic hatred for Israel (and in a larger sense, for all infidels): Accepting our limitations.
The fact that neither Israel nor the US has the wherewithal to transform Palestinian society by forcing a political transformation of the Arab and Islamic world that it feeds on should not lead to the conclusion that we are powerless to enact changes for the better. It simply means that we should not direct our actions towards a goal the establishment of a pacific, liberal democratic Palestinian state that we have no ability to achieve.
Our limited power to change the Palestinians must force us to look at the situation from a new perspective. We cannot wipe out the ideologies that foment terrorism but we can destroy, through military means, the Palestinians’ ability to carry out their attacks. We cannot prevent Arab-Israelis from watching al-Jazeera, but we can take legal action against those who act on the station’s violent message.
While it is clear that given their annihilatory agenda, the Palestinians cannot be allowed to have sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip, there are other options that will enable them to have political freedoms that will not threaten our survival. Autonomy arrangements, like those suggested by Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, are one option. Another, as suggested by Tourism Minister Benny Elon, would involve the restoration of Jordanian citizenship to Palestinians in Judea and Samaria and its conferral on Gaza residents. This too would work to satisfy the necessity of placating the Palestinians’ reasonable need for a political identity separate from Israel.
In the longer run, if the US were to devote the resources necessary to develop alternative fuels to oil, the cultural attraction of authoritarian jihad fueled by Saudi and the Iranian oil wealth would be decisively curtailed. In its wake, perhaps the Arabs and Muslims will finally be willing to revisit their cultural doctrines and guiding assumptions. At the very least, they would lack the financial resources to act on them.