Back in 1973, while the invading Egyptian Third Army was surrounded and under a hermetically sealed siege, east of the Suez Canal, the IDF was on the African side of the water, in a town called Faid, 30 miles or so from the pyramids. There was nothing between us and Cairo, there was no Egyptian military left, including their airforce. We had an opportunity to take Cairo. Not to annex it, not to expand Israel into another continent – but to rub their noses in it. We had them down, with our boots on their necks, and we pulled back.
It was downhill from there. In less than seven years, the man who is more responsible than any Jew in history for Israel’s current humiliation, Prime Minister Menachem Begin, signed an agreement that instituted a new morality: If you come to murder me and I overcome you and take your land, you can get your land back if you promise not to murder me.
The Oslo Accords were merely the logical extension of that immoral pact, sealing a deal whereby troops of professional Arab murderers—on the brink of extinction, mid you— were imported from Tunisia and from other spots in the Middle East, to govern in territories which we promptly vacated, in exchange for the same promise: we won’t murder you.
The only difference was that much of the Sinai territory we gave back in 1979 was far away from Jewish homes (with the distinct exception of the city of Yamit). But the land we handed our murderers in 1994 was right next door to us. We actually invited bands of armed, ruthless killers to settle across the street from us and live in peace.
Ever since that point in our history, we’ve switched completely from fighting wars—to containing terrorism. Until that point we still had some notions about winning: we did chase Arafat and his killers from Lebanon. We did maintain a satellite Christian Lebanese army to fight the Hezbollah. But over the past 18 years we’ve moved to contain, contain, contain.
We are no longer interested in the other side—as far as we’re concerned they could kill each other, as long as they don’t do anything to us. This is why we built the despicable Security Wall between us and the PA (leaving whole swaths of Jewish towns and villages on the wrong side). And this is why we created the magnificent technological marvel, the Iron Dome. Because we are in the business of containing the terrorists and absorbing their attacks. We are definitely not in the business of killing the terrorists and freeing both our own people and the civilians suffering under the terrorist yoke across the border.
Last night I watched three morally corrupt men: Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Barak, and Foreign Minister Liberman, renege on every last statement they had ever made regarding the war against Hamas.
Back in 2008, Netanyahu campaigned in the southern communities with the slogan of We Must Topple the Hamas, no ceasefire, no negotiations. And Liberman actually demanded, as a condition of his joining a Likud-led coalition government, that destroying the Hamas be included as a bona fide item in the coalition agreement. And Barak, after the 2008 Cast Lead operation, assured us that the Hamas would never be able to re-start firing at Israel after the damage they had sustained.
Last night the three tenors of the apocalypse gave a de facto recognition to Hamas as the legitimate government of Gaza, boosted Muslim Brother Egyptian president Morsi’s world status as peace maker and a strong ally of the U.S. (who will give him $12 billion to shore up his current social disasters), and showed the Arabs that the only way to get anything from Israel is through violence against civilian Jews.
The quiet will be over soon enough, the civilian casualties will start mounting again, and we will be right back where we started, with no strategic assets and several billion dollars poorer.
We’ve lost this war.