Here are 40 lessons from the Katyusha war on the Jews:
1. Nice fences do not stop missiles, rockets, and mortars.
2. Complete removal of Israeli forces and Jewish settlers from an area merely signals Israeli weakness and invites escalated Arab terror and aggression.
3. Hizbullah and Hamas cannot be defeated with air strikes. There is no effective alternative to ground invasion and ongoing Israeli military control of the ground.
4. Unless the Israeli military controls the ground on the other side of fences, those fences achieve nothing.
5. Goodwill gestures by Israel increase terror.
6. Goodwill gestures by Israel never produce moderation of Arab goals and demands, but rather the opposite.
7. Terror is not caused by settlements but by the removal of settlements.
8. Terror is not caused by Israeli military occupation but by the removal of Israeli military occupation.
9. It is impossible for two sovereign entities to exist between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean.
10. No matter how many concessions Israel makes the world will always justify Arab terrorism because there will always be still one more capitulation Israel fails to make.
11. No matter how nice Israel is to its Arab citizens and no matter how many affirmative action programs it implements, Israel will always be accused of being an “apartheid regime.”
12. The Israeli far left is an openly anti-Semitic movement that seeks Israel’s destruction and automatically endorses the enemies of Israel in nearly all things.
13. The Israeli Labor Party and its Kadima cousin may be more effective at fighting terror, once they decide to do so, than Likud. If it were a Likud government fighting Hizbullah, the Israeli Left would take to the streets in mass demonstrations against Israeli “imperialism and war crimes” and the Israeli media would declare that half a million protesters had turned out.
14. The real enemy of Israel is not Arab fascism but Jewish leftism.
15. Much of the world has no qualms seeing Jewish civilians murdered by terrorists.
16. The Israeli Left will oppose every conceivable act of Israeli self-defense.
17. Israeli niceness and flexibility fan anti-Semitism.
18. Arab terrorists do not morph into statesmen.
19. Israel bashers do not care about dead Arab civilians, other than as a useful tool with which to bludgeon Israel.
20. Many on the worldwide Left would not raise an eyebrow if Israeli Jews were shipped off to concentration camps in cattle cars – except perhaps to demand improved rail service.
21. The vast majority of Israeli Arabs and nearly all Israeli Arab politicians support terrorism and wish to see Israel destroyed.
22. There are hundreds of Jewish professors in Israel who serve as an academic Fifth Column and who collaborate with the enemies of their country.
23. The Arabs will not accept an independent Israel within any set of borders, no matter how small. Hence reducing Israel’s territory does nothing but signal weakness and destructibility.
24. The only country on earth expected to respond to the mass murder of its civilians by turning of the other cheek is Israel. The only country on earth that has spent years trying to defeat aggression and terrorism by turning the other cheek is Israel.
25. No matter how Israel responds to aggression and terrorism, it will always be seen in many quarters as a “disproportionate” response. The only “proportionate” response is complete capitulation.
26. Those who claim that anti-Zionism is different and distinct from anti-Semitism tend, on close inspection, to be anti-Semites themselves.
27. The only people on earth whom the Left believes should be denied the right to self-determination and self-defense are the Jews.
28. “Palestinians” are not a nation in any true sense of the term and never were. They are simply Arabs who happened to migrate to Western Palestine. They have no “right” to statehood.
29. Israeli leftists, rather than learn from the failures of their policies and “ideas,” complain that their policies are not applied thoroughly enough.
30. The moral and legal responsibility for every single Arab civilian killed or injured in the Middle East conflict rests squarely on the shoulders of the Arab terrorists.
31. There is no moral or legal reason for Israel to refrain from attacking terrorists and murderers when they hide among civilians.
32. Too many of the “anarchists” and others who protest against Israel’s security wall want the wall removed because they want terrorists to murder Jewish civilians.
33. Palestinians are the Sudeten Germans of the Middle East.
34. There are no non-military solutions to the problem of terrorism.
35. One can only make warwith one’s enemies. One can only make peace with one’s defeated enemies.
36. There are no significant differences between the agenda of the PLO and the agenda of Hamas and Hizbullah.
37. One cannot make peace by pretending that war does not exist.
38. One cannot buy off anti-Semites and Islamofascists with trade concessions and subsidies.
39. The only way to stop terrorism is to kill terrorists.
40. No terrorist has ever murdered anyone after he was executed.
Steven Plaut, a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press, is a professor at the University of Haifa. His book “The Scout” is available at www.Amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].