The so-called occupied territories are really disputed territory, gained due to acts of aggression by the Arab states against Israel. There was no Palestinian State in 1967 when the territories were captured. What kind of morality is it, then, to return territory to the aggressor? And where’s the precedent? It rewards aggression—and guarantees it’ll reoccur. If anything, by returning land to the aggressors—the Sinai first—Israel violated Nullum crimen sine poena, the imperative in international law to punish the aggressor. Writer William Anderson pointed out to me that had the Arabs seized parts of Israel in one of their many failed campaigns, there would be no calls to return the land. Come to think of it, before the brutal Muslim conquest, the land was Christia—Egypt, Libya, North Africa, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Asia Minor were Christian, not so? In Israel the West has reclaimed a small spot of sanity in a sea of savagery, where enlightened Western law prevails, and where Christians and Jews and their holy places are safe. (By the way, not once is Jerusalem mentioned in the Qur’an. Muslim fondness for Jerusalem is almost as recent, and certainly as innovative, as the discovery of Palestinian nationhood.) Yet, what is the West feverishly fighting for? The utter emasculation of Israel. The Bully Bush administration is now talking about Israel’s return to the 1949 “Armistice lines.” Amazing—and all the more so when such “thinking” is applauded by paleoconservatives (and by many libertarians). Aren’t they forever decrying the Death of the West? Paleocons certainly stood firm behind the Christian side in Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Chechnya, Cyprus, Sudan, East Timor and Kashmir. And so they ought to have: Muslims have wiped out entire Christian communities in these places, not that the strongmen in power or the talking twits on television have noticed. Yet you’ll often hear paleoconservatives condemn Condi R. and Genghis B. for leaning on, say, Vladimir Putin; but celebrate when they sunder Israel’s sovereignty. It is becoming apparent that to some, bringing about the end of Israel is well worth the deadly price of reviving and consolidating a caliphate. There’s a word for that (besides insanity).
