The American Spectator

WHOSE BLINDNESS? br> Re: John Corry’s A Conservative Blind Spot : /p>

I was a bit surprised at the content of John Corry’s article today. Some points are taken as well founded, but there were many that lacked credibility. Most glaringly is the assertion that the IDF’s military responses to the Palestinian attacks have not worked. Whether or not Palestinian resolve has increased, as asserted, the results are drastically different. As I recall, without providing hard numbers (as I would like to do, but don’t have the time) there has not been anywhere near the number of suicide attacks since the defensive began. Prior to the IDF response, attacks occurred almost daily. Now, it’s been days since any attacks.

Key Palestinian killers have been captured and killed. The obvious response to this would be that new ones would rise in their place. We should let time tell that. In the meantime, capture and kill is the appropriate method to disrupt the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure. The offensive has resulted in the capture of PLO munitions and the destruction of at least one bomb making facility where 30 bomb belts were found, ready to go. Ten suicide bombers have been intercepted by the IDF.

In short, a military solution works. Barak offered Arafat 97% of the “occupied territories” in Fall, 2000, and he refused. That was the ultimate political solution, and the Palestinian response was the current Intifada, which Israel finally responded to in the West Bank.

Finally, when the world is “right” and in agreement, we should be wary. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights is hardly respectable — isn’t Syria a member?

p>Cordially, br> — Nathan Moore /p>

John Corry quotes Haaretz as saying that “Everyone knows that if not for the settlements, it would have long since been possible to reach an agreement with the Palestinians.” While adding that he’s “not sure about the “everyone knows” part of that,” he seems to agree. I’m surprised to hear Corry say this. If the events of the last few months have done nothing else, I thought for sure they had laid bare for all to see the essential truth about the Palestinians’ position — this is not a dispute about a few acres of land on the West Bank. This is a war against the existence of Israel, as it has been since 1948. Since 1967 the Arabs have done a masterful job at clouding the issue, and making many in the West believe that the real dispute is over the “Occupied Territories,” but of course, if that is really the only issue, what was the source of Arab hostility prior to 1967?

p>You can’t negotiate over your own right to existence. The fact is that there has never been any possibility of a true “agreement with the Palestinians,” other than one which the Palestinians would view as a temporary expedient on the road to their ultimate goal of the extinction of Israel. Corry looks at the current situation and concludes that only a political solution can end the fighting. I would say that only a thorough military defeat that cures the Palestinians of their belief that they can eliminate Israel will ever create the conditions for that political solution. As with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, they must be defeated militarily before there can be any hope of the Palestinians accepting “a world that is not the way you may wish it to be, but the way it actually is,” i.e., a world that contains a permanent Israel.