Last week Israeli soldiers arrested a fifteen-year-old Palestinian armed with a bomb at a checkpoint outside Nablus in the West Bank. He was the fifty-second Palestinian teenager caught trying to perpetrate a bomb attack this year.

In the United States the closest analogy to such attacks or attempted attacks by Palestinian youths is school shootings, of which there have been a handful over the past decade. Each such incident shocked the nation and prompted anguished debates about what negative societal phenomena could influence young people to carry out such acts.

According to the recent demographic study by the team headed by Israeli commentator and activist Yoram Ettinger, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza is 2.4 million. The population of the U.S. is 295 million, or 123 times greater. Fifty-two attempted youthful Palestinian bombings this year would, in U.S. terms, come to 6,396 attempted acts of mass murder by adolescents in the space of five months. 

On Thursday last week President Bush met with PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas at the White House. While pledging $50 million in direct aid to the Palestinian Authority, Bush told Abbas: “We meet at a time when a great achievement of history is within reach: the creation of a peaceful, democratic Palestinian state. . . . The United States and the international community applaud your rejection of terrorism.”

Bush also told him: “A viable two-state solution must ensure contiguity of the West Bank, and a state of scattered territories will not work. There must also be meaningful linkages between the West Bank and Gaza. This is the position of the United States today, it will be the position of the United States at the time of final status negotiations.”

Abbas, for his part, stated his “determination to maintain and preserve this calm”—a “calm” that, in addition to the U.S. equivalent of 6,396 attempted bombings by teenagers in five months, has included hundreds of incidents of rocket and mortar fire, the suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv nightclub in February and subsequent release of the terrorists by the PA, the constant buildup of Hamas’s power, and on and on—and all this in the vaunted “post-Arafat era.”

The Bush administration views Israeli-Palestinian violence as a diplomatic liability and would like it to end. If that could be achieved by shrinking Israel back to its 1967 borders and ending virtually all Jewish—and probably also Christian—contact with the Holy Land outside of those borders, that is clearly a price Bush is willing to pay. Though not consistent with his professed religious values, it is perhaps understandable in terms of realpolitik.

What is harder to understand is Bush’s persistence in viewing the Palestinian Authority as an imminent democracy, and the removal of Israeli military supervision, while transferring the areas to complete Palestinian control, as a formula for peace. For anything comparable to the Palestinian Authority’s systematic genocidal indoctrination of its young, one can only cite Nazi Germany—which was defeated not by giving it more power, but by military conquest involving a massive ground invasion and bombing campaign followed by years of Allied occupaton, de-Nazification, and reeducation.

Since “the world” clearly will not tolerate Israel’s solving its security problem in the way the World War II Allies were able to solve theirs when they were under violent attack, the next best alternative is at least to allow Israel to keep its military presence—now limited, but better than nothing—in the territories.

Instead the Bush administration—not discouraged by a unilaterally-disengaging Sharon government—keeps leading a march of folly that will result in greater violence and destabilization as the Palestinian Authority closes in on a shrunken Israel that will no longer have checkpoints, intelligence networks, or control of arteries and crossings, and instead will have to rely on sheer military brawn to protect itself.

The resulting “cycle of violence” will be certain to keep the conflict on the front burner in the Arab-Muslim world and could well lead to other countries, Egypt being a prime candidate, joining the fray for a major conflagration.

Concerned Israelis and friends of Israel have tried hard for years to convey these realities—the depravity of the Palestinian Authority, its radical rejection of Israel, the tininess and vulnerability of Israel within the 1967 borders, its need for military and intelligence assets in the territories. Nevertheless, the push to make Israel indefensible continues.

P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem whose work has appeared in many Israeli, Jewish, and political publications. Reach him at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.