Nakba, nakhsa, на хуй

The Arabs consider only two wars against Israel as defeats: The Nakba in 1948 and the Nakhsa in 1967. The reason for this is that they measure defeat only in terms of land loss. I'm not talking about the movement of political borders, but about regions that are no longer inhabited by Arabs. Lost homes, lost fields, lost groves. Places where they had once lived but can never visit again. Keys without doors.

This is why, despite a crushing battlefield defeat in 1973, the Arabs don't feel they've lost the war. While Israel came to control a huge swath of Arab territory after destroying the Syrian and Egyptian armies, no Arab communities were displaced. There were no columns of refugees and no people with useless keys hanging from their necks.

The Middle Eastern equation is very simple.

No mass displacement = no victory.

Anyone telling you otherwise is fantasizing. Any loss except land loss is immaterial. The enemy is willing to suffer greatly to restore his lost honor. Where did he give up and admit defeat? In medieval Spain. Why? Because he were truly defeated there. Not because Christians armies defeated Muslim armies, but because the Muslims were displaced from Spain.

Total displacement = total victory.

As most wars have shown, despite being a very tough people, the enemy is not immovable. Hundreds of thousands fled their homes in '48 and '67 (even though no organized effort was made to displace them) and almost three millions fled their homes in Gaza and Lebanon now.

In Lebanon, a single tweet from Avichay Adraee is enough to send thousands packing. They don’t even need to see Jews with guns. Just an alert is enough. Millions more have fled Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon during intra-Arab wars.

Turns out that the “true owners of the land” can leave it after all.

This brings me to my main point: only displacement can bring security to Israel and peace to the region. Israel isn't an empire. The IDF was created to defeat armies in quick wars, not to be a giant police force.

Israel has neither the mindset nor the resources to rule over millions of hostile people. Nor does it or those people gain anything from such rule. It’s an exercise in sadomasochism. Nevertheless, for almost 60 years, this is exactly how Israel has been behaving, in total contradiction to common sense or reality.

Each time Israel conquered a new territory as a result of a defensive war, it found itself ruling over a hostile population that resisted Israeli rule through guerilla warfare. As we’ve already established, death and destruction don't deter the enemy. They’re capable of sacrifice and steadfastness that we find hard to imagine.

The former head of Hezbollah had once said: “Kill us wherever you may find us. On every front and on the door of every mosque. But know that we are Shia Muslims and we love death. For us, life starts when we become martyrs.”

I see no reason not to believe him.

And so, each battlefield victory became a greater burden for Israel. Each time Israel was handed lemonade it found a way to make lemons out of it.

This was the mistake made in Judea and Samaria, in Gaza, and in South Lebanon. It was avoided by sheer chance in the Golan Heights.

Instead of displacing the hostile population, the IDF mixed with it, creating an environment in which the enemy had an advantage. Arabs are not good regular soldiers, but they’re excellent ambushers and raiders.

I'm afraid that Israel is headed towards making the same mistake again: getting bogged down in Gaza amidst a hostile population and making some kind of a deal with Lebanon that will "retreat" Hezbollah X kilometers to the north.

Such a deal means nothing as long as there are hostile villages on the Israeli border.

Hezbollah fighters are local Shia. They will simply remove their uniform, hide their weapons, and remain where they are. What else can they do? These are their homes.

Such a deal cannot be enforced. Furthermore, the enemy will rightly view it as a victory and will be emboldened to launch more attacks. A single truck can carry enough weapons to launch another invasion of the magnitude of October 7. If you don’t believe me, clearly you haven’t played Tetris enough when you were little.

As long as Lebanese border communities exist, Israelis will never be safe from a sudden invasion. As long as Israel will be managing affairs in Gaza, Israeli soldiers will be open to attacks, even if it’s just a teenager with a kitchen knife. Once again, Israel will be shoehorned into the role of an occupier of people it doesn’t wish to occupy instead of defending its territory from outside threats. And we’ll have no one to blame but ourselves.

For this reason, the only route to security is the creation of buffer zones in which the enemy doesn't have communities from which to lunch attacks. These zones can't be just de-millitarized. They have to be depopulated and deforested. They have to be reduced to deserts that will remind the enemy of the cost of attacking the Jewish state.

Only then will Arabs view the war of aggression they’ve launched against Israel on October 7 as a defeat. Only then will Israel be able to defend its borders from external threats. Only then will it become possible to talk about peace. Only then will the IDF stop being a bloated police force and become a military again.

Anything else will just set the stage for the next bloody war.