The Day After

by Dr. Ron Breiman, former Chairman of Professors for a Strong Israel, translated by Hillel Fendel.

What must not be done with Gaza after the war… 

The phrase "the day after" is often bandied about these days, generally in criticism of Prime Minister Netanyahu for not laying out a specific program outlining the desired situation following the current war in Gaza. 

It should be known, however, that this phrase is really a code word meaning "return to the conceptzia" – which itself refers to the mistaken mindset of our military and political leadership ("Hamas doesn't want to fight us," "Hamas [and/or Hizbullah] is deterred," etc.) that brought us to the difficult situation in which Israel now finds itself. Most specifically, the idea of a two-state "solution" is false and dangerous, as is similar arrangement in Gaza.

Even given the very complex situation into which we were forced this past Simchat Torah, the following must be patently clear:

** On the day after, under no circumstances may Hamas rule in Gaza, militarily or administratively. To this end, the IDF must defeat it.

** On the day after, under no circumstances may the terrorist-sponsoring Palestinian Authority rule in Gaza – even if the United States says that it has improved and upgraded itself. The PA does not even have the wherewithal to rule in Gaza, if not with the help of the IDF. But the IDF, under all circumstances, may not serve as a silver platter to help the "good" terrorists of the PLO rule over the "bad" terrorists of Hamas. (Don't forget that PLO stands for Palestinian Liberation Organization – in its entirety, from the river to the sea!) The goals of both the PLO and Hamas are the same.

** We must not let the IDF facilitate the formation of a Palestinian Arab state. There would be nothing less ethical than this use of our soldiers' sacrifices.

** On the day after, the State of Israel must not run the civilian lives of the residents of the Gaza Strip via a military administration [as exists in Judea and Samaria – but see below]. 

By the same token, it must be understood clearly that we will brook no more deceptive talk regarding a "small and smart IDF" that will defend Israel. Israel requires a large and effective army [including the hareidim], whose officers are no longer captive to the Oslo view that "two states" will provide a solution to our problems.

If so, we are asked, "What then? There must be a diplomatic approach and strategy that will enable us to leave Gaza."

Yes, it's true: There is currently no choice other than an Israeli military administration in Gaza for as short a period as possible, up to the point that Hamas is totally defeated. And if we don't get to that point of the defeat of Hamas, we'll never get to "the day after!" 

Only after Israel's total victory can there arise in the Gaza Strip a local leadership that will be able to run the lives of the local residents.

This new leadership, if and when it arises, will have to accept the fact that Israel will retain security control over the area. It will also have to engage with various nations with the goal of building a new reality in Gaza – one that will have costs for these other countries as well: 

• Egypt, which shares a border with southern Gaza, will have to contribute its fair share towards a regional solution by enabling several hundred thousand Gazans to rebuild their lives in the Sinai Peninsula. 

• The United Arab Emirates will have to contribute by sponsoring the rebuilding of Gaza and the resettlement of Gazans in Sinai. 

• Saudi Arabia is invited as well to take part in funding these efforts, and also to give up on its demand for a Palestinian state, which is nothing more than a recipe for the destruction of the Jewish State.

• The European countries, often known as the "international community," are asked to be kind enough to absorb Gazans, each country in accordance with its size. There should be 200,000 in each of the large European countries, and proportionately less in the other ones. This will relieve the problem of population density in Gaza.

• Finally, the United States will have to lead a type of Marshall Plan – a post-WW2 program to aid in the economic recovery of Western European countries. Israel will be able to reduce its security involvement in Gaza as this plan progresses.

There are no magic solutions, or even easy ones. The complex reality obligates us to understand that the three other alternatives mentioned above are much worse than the above. We must not grant them the slightest legitimacy.

Post-Colonialism as an Introduction to Anti-Semitism

by Dr. Avi Bareli, historian, and senior lecturer at Ben Gurion University , translated by Hillel Fendel.

Anti-Semitic college students threatening Jews on campus and calling for Israel's liquidation is not a new phenomenon and is not exclusively related to October 7^th. At least since the 1970's, a post-colonial school of thought has spread and gained steam in academia, seeking to explain Zionism based on two seemingly academic assumptions: that there is no Jewish nation, and that the return of this non-nation to "its land" is nothing more than cruel conquest and dispossession.

According to the cultivators of this approach in Western academia, the group of people known as "Jews" has no right to self-determination. They would be best advised to disperse throughout the world and assimilate, or else continue to absorb the special type of hatred known as anti-Semitism [or both]. The source of anti-Jewish hatred, according to this view, lies in religious separatism, or in the Jews' attempt to be a distinct "people" among the nations - in the lands of the Diaspora, or in Palestine, which, it is claimed, is Muslim or Arab in its essence.

This school of thought has a history starting back in 19th century Europe. It is rooted in the liberal ideology of the European multinational states and empires, and then in the "anti-colonialist" propaganda of early Soviet communism (which itself then practiced oppressive colonialism in its territories). European Communism was instilled with a view that the Zionist enterprise was a dispossessing colonialist enterprise – a far cry from a national enterprise of a native, dispossessed, and oppressed people returning to their ancient homeland.

Today's Brand

The contemporary academic school of thought continues to absurdly "explain" the Zionist enterprise and Israel as an enterprise of pure colonialism, based on the Communist legacy. In its historical explanation of the reasons for the establishment of Israel, it is a distinct academic failure. But this has not prevented it from gradually gaining dominance in the humanities and social sciences in Western academia. This dominance is concretized, for example, in the way the elite Harvard University behaved precisely when it was trying to cleanse itself of charges of anti-Semitism. These charges, it will be recalled, were based on the school's negation of the Jews' right to self-determination, and on the absurdity of its president telling the US Congress that calls for Jewish genocide must be evaluated "in context."

And whom did Harvard appoint for the cleansing operation? Jewish History Professor Derek J. Penslar, who teaches courses, inter alia, in the history of Zionism and Israel. He recently told an Israeli media outlet, for example, that "the Zionist enterprise definitely has colonialist attributes." That is, he feels that the post-colonialist, non-nationalist approach provides at least part of the causal explanation for Israel's establishment.

However, he did qualify this by saying that describing Zionism as a colonial, conquering dispossession of another people explains only part of the historic phenomenon of Zionism.

This halfway approach is very evasive. For if we remove the nationalist motivations that brought Jews from around the world to move to, and invest their capital in, Israel, and remain with only the colonialist motives, we are left with no way to explain the success of Zionism. Zionism is primarily and essentially a movement to liberate the Jewish Nation. A historian who runs away from this conclusion for the sake of some "middle ground" – maintaining that Zionism is both colonial and nationalist – will not be able to counter the arguments of a wave of anti-Semitism that denies that Zionism is a movement for national self-determination.

Harvard can rectify its recent anti-Semitism only by totally denying any colonialist nature to Zionism, and not by taking a pareve, in-between approach.

We see the dominance of this post-colonialist approach to explaining Israel in American academia by the very fact that Harvard chose someone like Prof. Penslar to cleanse itself of charges of anti-Semitism. It is not surprising that a historian like him sought, in the above interview, to take a middle-ground approach even between Jews and those who wish to murder them – even to the point in which he makes a form of equivalence between the bloodthirsty sadism of Hamas and the self-defense of Israel.

[Translator's note: The writer seems to be ahead of his time, even if just by a few days, given the decision by the ICC prosecutor to request war-crime warrants for the arrests of both Netanyahu and Sinwar, warmly welcomed by various countries.]