Two more sets of Israeli parents buried their kids the other day.

Israel has been under increasing pressure from its American friends to ease the unfortunately necessary restrictions it had placed--checkpoints and such--to keep the rabid animals at bay. It did, and--to no surprise--five hitchhiking Jewish students were shot at from a passing car which had gotten through as a result. Two teenage boys were wantonly slaughtered, others wounded...the murderers escaping back to hide amongst their supporters from whence they came. They will, undoubtedly, be treated as heroes for their exploit.

These are the folks with whom Jews are told they will have "peace" with...if only they will just keep on unilaterally giving up a little bit more, and more, and more, and more...

I assume that their alleged "peace partner," President Mahmoud Abbas, will use his own police force to track down the killers.

I also assume that I will win the Florida lottery this weekend...about the same odds.

Moving on to the related bigger picture, here we are, on the eve of Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza--a move that will, undoubtedly, be perceived by most Arabs as a victory in their destruction in stages scenario for Israel. And what, may we ask, have been the dominant Arab responses to this controversial move?

Well, for starters, we have the sweet-talking (but still rejectionist) Abbas and fellow Arafatian camp which wants "quiet," at least for the time being, so that diplomacy-- i.e. international pressure--can continue to turn the screws on Israel, forcing it to forsake the promises of Resolution 242 after the '67 War that it would, at long last, be able to shed its 1949 U.N.-imposed, 9-mile wide armistice line existence for secure and recognized borders. The first step in the Arabs' decades' old destruction in stages scenario is to get Israel back to its vulnerable '49 armistice lines so that it could more easily be cut in half.

And then we have the more honest Hamas and Islamic Jihad camp which openly states that it will never accept an Israel in the neighborhood, regardless of its size, withdrawal from disputed lands, and so forth. These folks have continued to launch attacks, to Abbas' dismay (bad timing), despite Israel's preparations to uproot thousands of Jews from strategically important, non-Arab lands in Gaza and parts of the West Bank. Gaza has been used as an invasion route into Israel since the days of the Pharaohs.

Hamas and Islamic Jihadists have even been threatening to resume full-scale violence (translate that to more blown up buses, restaurants, and such) if Israel takes action to try to stop them from killing Jews. A pretty good deal if you can get it: Murder your enemies and demand that they let you do so at no cost. Down right laughable, if asked of anyone else...but this what the world expects Jews to have to put up with.

So, that brings me to my main thought...

How did Israel allow itself to get cornered this way?

I'm fully aware of the very real pressure from even its "friends," but Jews didn't wait 2,000 years for the resurrection of their state and their dignity to allow this to occur...no matter who is turning the screws.

Even more sickening, how could Arab butchers of babes and other innocents--whom Israel could fry en masse whenever it chose--be allowed to even feel that they had the power to issue such threats, demands, and such?

Some very bad mistakes have been made by Israeli policy makers--again acknowledging outside pressure--which have brought us to this point.

Given this, let's take a look at a few suggestions. But first, let's backtrack a bit to set the stage...

I remember one random bus bombing in particular. This one happened a day before Israel was to be "brought to court" to defend itself for building a fence designed to keep Arabs from disemboweling its kids.

More recently, after the death of Arafat, on Mahmoud Abbas' watch, a half dozen more Jews were slaughtered and others severely wounded for helping Arabs find a way to feed their families in Gaza.
All were incinerated and maimed innocents, whose only crime was existence in a land where their ancestors have lived for over three thousand years. And the murders were followed by the usual hollow condemnations by the alleged "good half" of the Arafatian / Hamas-Islamic Jihad good cop / bad cop team. Not that Abbas, Qurei', & Co. really object, but it's "bad publicity" for their cause. They too call for Israel's destruction, but by "more acceptable" means.
So, even with the Egyptian ghoul (aka Arafat) out of the picture, his legacy still works the strings. Yet that legacy predated him as well. Arabs have long declared the region to be "purely Arab patrimony," despite scores of millions of non-Arabs living there. The latter consented to forced Arabization or were killed.
I believe it was Martin Niemoller, a German theologian, who wrote something like the following:
First they came for the Communists, and I did nothing. Then they came for the Jews, and I remained silent. And by the time they came for me, there was no one left to protest.
Coincidentally, a bit further back on August 19, 2003, another Arab bought his ticket to "paradise" and its seventy or so virgins by blowing Jews apart on yet another bus almost at the same time that a colleague was doing likewise to United Nations workers in Iraq.
Now, what was the lesson from Reverend Niemoller's remarks again?
This is the same U.N. that, at best, has seen a "moral equivalence" between Jewish babes and grandmothers being deliberately and wantonly slaughtered, and Israeli steps taken to try to stop that slaughter.
Before the recent drop in violence due to the cease fire of sorts (Arabs have still continued to launch rockets, mortars, and attack Jews both in the territories and in Israel proper) after Abbas' election, some of the latest Arab suicide bombers claimed they did this to avenge Israel's killing of armed Hamas fighters in Gaza.
Again, they expect to be able to murder Jews at no cost to themselves.
Given all the above, I've come to at least one firm conclusion: Israel has become far too predictable.
The Old Warrior himself has been caving in to constant pressure coming at him from all over, and especially from his so-called friends--the same ones who would have leveled the source of these repeated atrocities had it been done to their own peoples. Among many examples, recent events in Fallujah, sites along the Syrian-Iraqi border, and in Afghanistan come to mind.
Arabs, who refuse to dismantle their terrorist infrastructures and who still do not accept the permanency of a Jewish State, also demand that Israel stand by and do nothing while Jews continue to get butchered. This is the "moderate" Palestinian Arab leader's position as well as Hamas'. They can't seem to figure out why Israel must have such things as a security fence or real borders instead of armistice lines which made it a miniscule rump state and constant temptation to those aiming to destroy it.
As if the answer wasn't obvious. How many other nations would tolerate such horror without exacting just and devastating retribution? Again, think about the daisy cutter and bunker-buster bombs and such America used against our own enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq, as just a few recent examples.
A good part of the problem is, you see, that despite all that the Arabs say, they know that the Jews will try their best to just kill the rats in their dens. They'll go house to house, endangering their own sons, and try to target the exact murderers and plotters as best as possible. That's what had been happening in Gaza and elsewhere, yet such operations only became the Arabs' excuse for the next atrocities. And even the American State Department spoke of these events in terms of an allegedly morally equivalent cycle of violence.
The Geneva Conventions make perfectly clear that militants are not permitted to use their own non-combatants as human shields, that those non-combatants do not prevent an army from pursuing terrorists, and that any harm occurring to the civilian population as a consequence falls on the heads of the cowards using their own people this way. But you'd never know this by listening to the accounts in the press or given too often even by the Foggy Folks.
Given all of the above, there is, again, only one conclusion: Israel has indeed become too darned predictable.
Arabs know that their own wives and children will not be deliberately targeted on buses, in restaurants, shopping centers, in their homes, or wherever. Jews won't stop Arab cars and murder mothers and children in cold blood.
So, what I will state next, I regret, but will say anyway.
By many predictions, a new intifada will break out after Israel withdraws from Gaza and the four Samarian locals in order to force a total withdrawal from all the disputed, non-apportioned territories of the West Bank.
If this indeed occurs, it will be time, given the Arab track record of rejectionism and barbarity, for them to reap what they have sown. The time will have come for massive Israeli retaliation.
Jews have bent over backwards to accommodate the birth of the Arabs' 22nd state--a likely terrorist one, at that, in their very backyard--and second, not first, Arab one in the original April 25, 1920 borders of the Mandate of Palestine. Jordan was created in 1922 on the lion's share, some 80% of the entire territory. Arabs rejected the '47 partition plan which would have added about half of the 20% left--for a total of 90% of "Palestine."
The microscopic state of the Jews was reborn on less than one fourth of one per cent of the region's territory...so the conflict never was about land, but about anyone else besides Arabs--Kurds, Berbers, Black African Sudanese, Jews, Copts, or whoever--searching for their piece of the justice pie.
Given the persistent Arab rejection and barbarity, a new game plan must finally be adopted.
It's long past due for Israel to do whatever is necessary to protect its citizens as best as possible, regardless of how much support and aid the U.S. may decide to suspend. And many a red-blooded American citizen will convey the proper message to the politicians if Foggy Bottom and other Arabists are allowed to have their way with Israel over this.
Poll after poll among Arabs have shown that even if Israel withdrew to its 9-mile wide existence imposed after the 1948 fighting (having been invaded by surrounding Arab countries immediately upon its rebirth)--something UN Resolution #242 expressly does not require it to do--Arabs would still reject its right to exist. So who's kidding whom here? And Israel's "friends" know this as well.
It's time for Arabs to know that Israel will tell the hypocrites around the rest of the world (much of which has also had plenty of Jewish blood on its hands) that it doesn't care what they think and act to protect its own people--as any other nation would--as best as it can.
And, forgive me, but it's also time for Israel to not worry about being too precise in its targeting...for it's time that Arabs fully understand that if they harbor and support terrorists as heroes, they'll share in their fate. President George W. Bush said almost those exact words regarding America's own fight not long ago. By the way, not all of the casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, resulting from American air strikes and such, have been enemy combatants...that's for sure.
When dealing with their own "problems"--a la Assad's "Hama Solution" in Syria (in which ten times more people were killed in a month than Israel killed in over two years of intifada), King Hussein's Black September in Jordan, Saddam's murder of scores of thousands of Kurds over the decades in Iraq (5,000 in one day just Halabja alone), the slaughter of Black Africans in the Sudan, and so forth--Arabs have killed multitudes by poison gas, bombs, and artillery from afar. And all without a peep out of the United Nations. And no hearing before an international court of justice, either.
It's time for Israel to make it clear that it will use its own air force, tanks, and such--the way America and others have--to target the rats' dens instead of risking the lives of its own nineteen-year-old infantrymen by futilely trying to do the job as "morally correct" as possible. This has gained it nothing among the world's hypocrites and cost it the lives of more of its own soldiers instead.
Israel is fighting a war it didn't want. It has repeatedly offered more than fair compromises to its enemies, certainly far more than Arabs have ever offered to any of their own national competitors. But nothing short of its own suicide will satisfy most Arabs. Indeed, Abbas, himself, still calls for this, demanding that Israel allow itself to be swamped by millions of real and fudged Arab refugees.
Arabs don't worry about "ethical choices" when butchering and disemboweling Jews. On the contrary, the more innocent the victim, the more preferred he or she is for shock value as a target. Arabs have videotaped themselves playing with heads and other body parts of Jewish victims and have created museums honoring their barbarity. If ever an enemy deserved its comeuppance, it is Israel's.
Given these harsh realities, if Arabs cease to halt their still continuing attacks on Jews, then it's time that they receive massive doses of at least modified versions of their own medicine.
While I don't advocate stooping to their level by blowing up Arab buses, restaurants, schools, and such, any building, town, or whatever harboring murderers and their collaborators must be recognized for what the Geneva Conventions say it is: A fair military target...Like those that just got leveled by America along the Syrian-Iraqi border and such.
Listen to Article #51/7:
"The presence of the civilian population shall not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attack..."
Article #58b:
The parties to the conflict shall...avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas."

The rats' dens are typically set up in or adjacent to civilian apartment buildings, hospitals, schools, etc., as America has learned for itself in Iraq.
Article #51/2:
The civilian population...shall not be the object of attack. Acts of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited...Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited.

Arabs typically target Israeli civilians.
And those famous funeral processions showing hundreds of the dead butcher's colleagues firing weapons into the air? As I've written elsewhere, it's time that Israel sees them for what they are...one big, legitimate military target.
It's time for Israel to stop letting Arabs dictate how the game will be played. If mothers and infants are fair game for Arabs, then what are the murderers' collaborators for Israel? Keep in mind that Mahmoud Abbas himself was recently carried on the shoulders of the same folks who committed the latest atrocities...and promised them protection from Israeli retaliation to top it off. Among other things, he's incorporating them into his own military.
When that next predictable Arab atrocity is committed against Jews, it will be time for Israel to send the press packing, tell the UN to drop dead, build the security fence as quickly and as strongly as possible with an adequate buffer regardless of what anybody says (permitted by U.N. #242)--so it doesn't have its absurd suicidal 9-mile wide existence again--and ask its friends in the United States to stop having one set of standards for themselves and another one for Jews in their sole, tiny state. When we thought we knew where Saddam was dining, we bombed the restaurant to smithereens, innocent diners present and all. Get the picture?
And the more unpredictable the Israeli response to Arab barbarity, the better.
I wish it had not come to this.
I still wish that there will be another way. I hope predictions about a new intifada will prove to be wrong.
But, if those predictions are correct, and volumes of Arabs start dying relatively randomly (Arabs outnumber Jews 60 to one...they know this...so do the math) as Jews have been doing, perhaps they'll then be less likely to treat their own terrorists as heroes. To date, legions of them normally parade through the streets as soon as they hear of the latest atrocities, their "victories."
While this approach may also not be the solution, Israel has tried everything else (including insanely offering up 97% of the disputed territories, half of Jerusalem, and the like) except consenting to its own demise, and nothing else worked either.
Keep in mind that only after Egypt suffered immense casualties and destruction, after decades of trying to destroy Israel, did it make peace--as cold and questionable as that peace is today. There probably is a lesson here for the good cops and bad cops of the PA, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad-types as well. But Israel, unfortunately, will have to be a much better teacher than it has been up until now.
It's time for Israel to lose its predictability and for Arabs to get a mega-taste of what they've been dishing out.
And it's time for Israel to draw its own lines in the sand and let all know--regardless of the repercussions--that justice demands that it accept no less.