Horowitz: The only humane solution to the Hamas problem

What would you do if you were in charge of Israel? The only way to save your people from an unlimited supply of bloodthirsty genocidal jihadists is to flatten Gaza (and possibly even parts of Judea and Samaria). That is a simple fact. Hamas hides all of its assets, personnel, and rocket launchers in sensitive civilian areas, including hospitals, so massive civilian casualties are inevitable. Yet nobody in Israel’s government desires that outcome. Hence the perpetual catch-22 Israeli leaders are confronted with and why they have paid for their hesitancy with so much blood.

There is only one solution, and that is for the United Nations, European Union, the U.S. State Department, and Arab nations — all of which claim to care about the so-called Arab Palestinians — to use a fraction of the political and financial support used to prop up the status quo death match to instead offer voluntary transfer to the residents of Gaza out to Egypt and other Arab countries. To the extent that these leftist leaders believe flattening Gaza or blockading it is inhumane, that is the degree of culpability they must bear for promoting the impossibility of a militarized “Palestine” rather than offering relocation.

Israel has tried everything possible to avoid this impasse and has suffered more casualties than any modern Western nation would bear in order to avoid completely destroying its enemies. Israel gave back numerous biblical homelands recaptured in a purely defensive war. Yet every time the Israelis offered “land for peace,” that land was used for blood. These people are not in search of land; they are out for Jewish blood and eventually for the blood of all infidels. Just look at any European capital.

The Arabs living in the Holy Land are the most subsidized human beings in the history of international aid. They even created a fake term — Palestinian — to retroactively draw a connection to the land. But again, this was never about land, opportunity, health care, infrastructure, or being lifted out of poverty. They love jihad more than they love the future of their children. Hamas will use every last ounce of concrete and piping for genocidal weapons rather than for infrastructure, and it has the backing of far too many civilians. Hamas even published a video bragging about how it digs up water pipes to be repurposed for rockets against the Jews.

“Humanitarian aid” pays for the Hamas war machine. One cannot disentangle civilian and humanitarian causes from Hamas because Hamas operators are the hospitals, they are the firefighters, they are the police, they are the judges, and they are the construction crews. So brazen is their use of international aid for jihad that senior Hamas official Ali Baraka even credited their successful attack to Israel’s naïve belief that Hamas had focused at last on internal governance.

“We made [Israel] think that Hamas was busy with governing Gaza, and that it wanted to focus on the 2.5 million Palestinians there and has abandoned the resistance altogether,” Baraka boasted in a TV interview. “All the while, under the table, Hamas was preparing for this big attack."

Hence any attempt at a diplomatic solution is folly and further places Israel’s shrinking “Auschwitz borders” within range of cheap rockets and ubiquitous infiltration. The only way Israel can maintain the social compact for its people and remain a stable Jewish state is to create and maintain such a security grip on the Arab areas that they could never live autonomously. Then again, the Arabs will never live functioning lives in those lands the way it is now — even if Israel commits suicide and allows them to maintain the status quo, as many on the left clearly prefer.

Arabs have no future under any semblance of Arab government control west of the Jordan River. That isn’t Israel’s fault. That’s the fault of several generations’ worth of Arab “leadership.” To this day, Israel has accommodated more than 2 million Arab citizens even within the tiny pre-1967 border areas, and many of them live productive lives. In the PLO- and Hamas-controlled areas, however, you won’t find a single Jew.

In fact, the very vulnerability Jews face now from Gaza is the result of the 2005 withdrawal (thank you, George W. Bush), during which Israel used its own military to physically uproot every last Jewish resident of the region. Their houses, businesses, and farms were destroyed, and they were exiled from their land. What’s worse, far from fostering a peaceful reconciliation, Israel had to dig up every last Jewish grave in Gaza so that the cemeteries would not be destroyed by the inevitable violence of the local Arabs. Israel gave them full control and a ton of aid to build their own civilization.

And then what? The Arabs immediately began using those lands to launch rockets against the remaining parts of Israel and build tunnel networks that eventually paved the way for infiltrations. The seaports and land ports they controlled were used to import a ton of weapons. This game is over — long over.

Now it is time for them to move.

It is incontrovertibly clear from a legal and historical standpoint that Israel has just as much right to exist in its so-called post-1967 borders as it does in its pre-1967 borders. It is also patently obvious that from a geographical, moral, and security standpoint, anyone advocating a “two-state solution” is implicitly denying Israel’s right to exist in any capacity.

Israel has already surrendered 94% of the land it acquired in a defensive war against its existence: the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza. Anyone promoting an Arab Muslim state in the remaining 6% that would gut the heart of the tiny Jewish state — especially in light of the fact that Muslims control a land mass 640 times greater than Israel — is either woefully ignorant or supports something much more sinister.

This is especially poignant at a time when Israel’s population is growing due to increased immigration from Europe, ironically, because Jews are being chased out of that part of the Western world by Muslims who are turning European cities into Gaza. So where the hell are the Jews supposed to live?

Ironically, no such genocidal sentiment exists against the Arabs. Israelis would be fine with Arabs living under their government and even participating in democracy, as 2 million of them already do. But sadly, that is impractical because so many of them are genocidal and, as the world witnessed 10 days ago, would kill Jews at a moment’s notice. Thus they dug their own grave.

If the world community spent a fraction of the money it sends to fund Hamas on simply relocating as many of the civilians as possible to other lands (640 times greater in size), the problem would be solved. To the extent that there is such a thing as a Palestinian state, it is Jordan, a country with a lot more land.

If Gaza is really a “concentration camp,” as the left often likes to assert, then the solution is to offer voluntary transfer. That is the only way they will ever achieve a chance at a better life, regardless of whether or not Israel blockades or attacks Gaza to defend its people. Israel’s national suicide will never result in a better life for Arabs. Therefore, in order to save its people, Israel must ultimately control all of Gaza, as it did before.

Once the Arab residents have an out, anyone remaining will clearly understand they are making themselves hostage to Hamas’ blood oath against the Jewish people. That is their problem. Hamas must be destroyed down to the last man and missile. The same needs to be done eventually in Judea and Samaria, with an offer for people to either relocate or to remain in peace after the terrorist networks are obliterated. But Gaza is obviously a more imminent problem.

Does this mean that no Arab is allowed to live under Israeli governance (as it the case with Jews in PLO-controlled areas)? Of course not. For those who choose to remain because they truly feel attached to the land, Israel could absorb them under its authority if they demonstrate during a period of parole that they value upward mobility more than jihad, like some of the long-standing Israeli Arabs (as well as the Christians, Druze, and other religions and ethnicities living in Israel proper). Nobody desires their destruction so long as they are able to reciprocate the gesture.

The exact arrangement is something for Israel to work out, but the global organizations that have obsessed over Palestinians for 40 years have an obligation to use their resources to relocate anyone willing to leave. They created this problem, they funded terrorism, they fomented grievance against Israel; they must fix it — or any civilian deaths are on their heads.

One reason explains why this plan would not succeed and has never been seriously entertained until now. It’s that the same Western and Arab nations that wax poetic about the plight of the Palestinian Arabs are violently against absorbing them in their countries. They simply do not want them and instead want them to serve as a viper’s nest embedded among the Jews. And that should tell you everything you need to know.