You know what has ended? Widespread acceptance in Israel of the lie that towns and villages one hour’s drive from Tel Aviv or Jerusalem are the main thing keeping alive the Palestinian desire to kill us.
I think the average Israeli has got it. We can and should live, as Jews, wherever the damn we please in our land of Israel. Arabs who don’t try to harm us can too. That’s the new reality.
The Green Line Lie is over. It’s only a shrinking minority of increasingly extremist dinosaurs who cling to it.
I posted that on Facebook yesterday and it was prompted by a tour I took in the heartland of Israel last Thursday with Ryan Bellerose. We had a stop in a tiny place started 16 years ago where they farm nuts and fruits and run a music pub in the summer looking out on the edge of the desert. From barren rock they made things grow, building terraces and planting and composting to make the land good again. They certainly helped reverse the negative images of settlers that one journalist from The Telegraph in the UK had.
After one thousand years of neglect, suddenly Jews return to their indigenous land and it’s fruitful again.
This place, this hill top that has NEVER been lived on by anyone, with its newly hand made terraces, fruit trees and music pub, founded by two Jews, one whose family came from Iraq and the woman he met there and who became his wife: this is stopping the Palestinians from having their nation? It would be laughable if it wasn’t a kind of religious dogma believed by millions. This should be celebrated not condemned.
So why can’t Jews live there? We’re indigenous to all these lands and more besides. Nobody is seriously saying we should invade and take back all of Trans-Jordan but neither do we need to be embarrased by the progress we’ve made rebuilding our homes on the sites so clearly mentioned in the bible and spoken of by our people for millenia.
What do we do with the descendents of Arabs who moved in (and probably a good many Jews who converted away)? How can we go on without giving them their precious country and citizenship? What about our oppressive occupation?
Yes I’m fine with belligerent and rebellious people not receiving the honour of full citizenship in the ONLY free, functioning and safe state in the Middle East. They should be begging to earn back our trust.
The terrible occupation? Yes, I’m sure it’s a real hammer blow to the honour of the Arabs and brings eternal shame on them. But so too is it terrible getting mowed down by a submachine totting terrorist on the weekend in Tel Aviv or ramed and stabbed as you wait for a bus or having your child blown to pieces in a Pizza restaurant. I’m sure the occupation isn’t a party, but I’m more convinced than ever if the Palestinians all became Buddhists and switched exclusively to self immolation as their “resistance” method of choice, a whole lot of restrictions would suddenly be lifted.
If we have to do anything immediately (and I’m not sure we need to) we should annex our large population blocks and treat the Arabs in Area C as legal aliens with residency rights. The same as, say, voting rights for French or all other EU citizens living in London are treated. Last time I looked EU citizens could’t vote in UK General Elections and the UK was still a democracy. Local elections for local representation but the national stuff, defence, foreign policy etc., completely out of their control. I’d live with that.
We simply can’t have equality while they bring their kids up in hate and we very largely don’t. We were never equal. It was a myopic vision of founders who never fully understood the power of Islam’s utter rejection of Jews who shrugged off Dhimmitude or decided to believe in a fantasy Islam that hasn’t come into being yet.
I don’t have a fully figured out plan, but then it seems neither does anyone else.
But I know this: I live in a suburb of Tel Aviv. And most of the Israelis I meet around my kids’ school would be naturally counted as leaning left on “peace”. Twenty years ago, they tell me, they would have moved every Jew back behind the green line if it would have solved every problem. Most of them agreed with throwing Jews out of their homes in Gaza. Many of them would have signed over Jerusalem too. I don’t know any today who still think that way.
The Green Line Lie, the lie that we’re in a struggle over land, is over. It is Arabs who are the invaders and colonisers not Jews. Islam can’t ever accept the ending of the Dhimmitude of the Jews. Islam will drive Arabs to kill Jews forever. There is nothing we can do to stop their desire to kill us. Most of us have grasped this, moving back to a fake border established in one war won’t help.
