Bolter 21
Both their own history and world history should show them that, if you want peace, you need to control territory.On January 21, the Israeli media reported that the country’s Defense Minister Israel Katz paid a visit to the military command post in Samaria overseeing an IDF operation called “Iron Wall” in progress inside the Jenin “refugee camp” (and never mind there is no camp and the people there are not refugees).
To the media, Minister Katz said there is a change in the IDF’s security doctrine in Judea and Samaria. The next day, his office issued a statement calling the present effort a “high-intensity operation to eliminate terrorists and the camp’s terror infrastructure without the resurgence of terror into the camp after the operation ends…We will not allow the arms of the Iranian octopus and radical Islam to endanger the lives of the Israeli residents and establish an eastern terrorist front against the State of Israel. We will strike hard at the arms of the octopus until they are severed.”
The Iranians, indeed, are smuggling in all kinds of weapons, and there is certainly no shortage in Judea and Samaria of Muslim soul brothers, ideologically allied with the hundreds of Muslims in Gaza who, just last week, terrorized one last time the three young Israeli women hostages on their way to freedom. The Muslim males in what anti-Jews call the “West Bank” would also like to do what their brethren in Gaza did: That is, murder hundreds of Jews, kidnapping and raping Jewish females and using them as slaves. Israel must address this.
<img alt captext="Bolter 21” class=”post-image-right” height=”556″ src=”https://conservativenewsbriefing.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/what-israelis-still-dont-get-about-muslim-control-over-gaza.jpg” width=”300″>The problem is that Minister Katz, as a representative of the Israeli mind, conceives of two kinds of Muslims in Jenin: terrorists and “innocent Palestinian civilians.” He believes Israel can eliminate the terrorists, and Jenin will then become a better and different kind of place.
But the problem is actuarial. The IDF may be able, theoretically, to hunt down all the current, sadistic, would-be sex maniacs who want to duplicate October 7. However, that won’t stop the next population cohort of out-of-control, cruel fiends.
As a journalist during the first intifada thirty years ago, I was embedded in an Israeli patrol of Border Guards in Jenin’s fake refugee area. That experience taught me that Israelis still don’t understand that wars are not fought over eliminating enemy soldiers but over controlling territory. Wars commonly end with winners who enlarge their territory at the expense of the losers.
During the war in Vietnam—a proven impossible win for the US—this was evidenced by the invention of “body counts” by the US Army as a record of “success” that meant nothing.
Israelis these days are scratching their heads over the future governance of Gaza after Hamas has been eliminated. They fantasize that, post-Hamas, a new form of self-government will arise, staffed by non-political technocrats and/or a combination of so-called moderate Arab states with Israel in overall security control. They believe in “behavior modification” and are forever questing for the right policy to transform the Arabs into peaceful, friendly neighbors.
But the only fail-proof way to pacify the Gaza Strip is never floated. Israel must assert the truth that the Strip is legally Israeli real estate. According to the United Nations Charter of 1945, which incorporated the League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate of 1922, Gaza (the “Strip” never existed before 1948) belongs to the Jewish people. The Charter recognized all the land from the river to the sea, viz. Judea, Samaria, and Gaza as rightfully Jewish property.
Ergo, Israel, as the legitimate landlord, has the right to evict squatters, especially when they are a proven cult of homicidal, antisemitic rapists and mutilating murderers.
At Potsdam, two months after the end of WWII, President Truman, Prime Minister Churchill, and Comrade Stalin ordered ten million ethnic Germans living in various European countries to uproot themselves and become property-less refugees in the new, truncated post-war Germany. They were told to leave behind all their immovable property—homes, businesses, churches, and the graveyards of family members. They would not be compensated for all the wealth they were ordered to leave behind.
And why? Because during the war, when the German army invaded these countries, the resident ethnic Germans collaborated with them, which infuriated their fellow non-German, indigenous neighbors. In fact, many of the Germans who did move to Germany did so quickly to escape their enraged neighbors after the War who began murdering them in the thousands.
In 1947, independent, post-colonial India came into being, although two major chunks of territory in the northwest and northeast were ceded to the Muslims as the new state of Pakistan, forcing millions of both Hindus and Muslims to uproot themselves because the new borders left them as minorities within the other religion and they did like not that.
So, what would be so terrible if Israel cited international law recognizing Israeli ownership of the Gaza Strip and designed a humane program for relocating the 70% of the Arab Muslim UNRWA freeloaders to any one of the officially 21 Arab nations, especially those states that, in 1948, attacked Israel on the day it declared independence, launching the war that produced the original crop of Arab refugees? Unlike history’s endless streams of refugees who flee wars into countries whose language they struggle to learn and whose religious life is different, these Arab Muslims resettled in the 21 Arab countries would be perfectly at home in terms of language and religion.
Anti-Israelites would surely protest, saying Israel has no right to expel the “indigenous, ancient Palestinians” who they insist have been living in Palestine for thousands of years—and never mind not one of them knows anything of the language their mythical ancestors spoke in historic Palestine, the way Jews today speak the same language their ancestors spoke in this same country thousands of years ago. The ancient connection to the land is a myth.
Likewise, while the Israelis practice the same religion as their forefathers in this land, the so-called Palestinians’ religion is not native to the erstwhile Land of Canaan, which the Jews transformed into the Land of Israel and Imperial Rome then rebranded as “Palaestina.” They pray to Mecca, which is in the Arabian Peninsula, which is not in Palestine at all. A more accurate and honest label for these “Palestinians” would be “Arabians.”
It is a Sisyphean effort for the IDF to weed out the “bad guys” among the Muslims in Judea and Samaria, in the fallacious belief that all the others are potential “good guys.”
In 1967, Israel emerged victorious against Arab aggressors but never claimed the right to keep the spoils of war. Instead, at Oslo in 1993, Israel tried to “sell back” some of the land in the fantasy that the enemy would be happy with a state even smaller than Israel and become friendly neighbors.
In 1848, the United States concluded its two-year war with Mexico by keeping a third of that country; after WWII, Germany’s neighbors took possession of thousands of square miles of territory that in 1939 had been German land.
In 2025, Israel launches “Operation Iron Wall” into Jenin, its umpteenth raid there in 57 years.
What Israel never does is—without shame or guilt—take land away from the enemy in response to his bloody atrocities. Indeed, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in his last statement on Israel, said Israel must not retain any territory belonging to the Gaza Strip before October 7. That statement proves that holding the territory is a good idea because Antony Blinken is against it, it must be a good one.
Islam is a form of antisemitism. and there is nothing Israel can do to change that truth except to defend itself with no hope of peace, at least until the advent of the Messiah, as Jews experience the concept.
Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hardcover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.
Image: Map showing Jewish territory under the Palestine Mandate of 1922 by Bolter 21. CC BY-SA 4.0.
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