Israel’s Strength Is Its Normality

Sabine Sterk is the founder of the NGO Time To Stand Up For Israel. She identifies the strength of the people and state of Israel beyond the breaking news alerts: it is normality, the daily determination to keep on keeping on, despite whatever mayhem and murder its enemies try to inflict. More on her observations can be found here.

When people speak about Israel’s strength, they usually reach for the obvious examples: the Israel Defense Forces, Iron Dome, the Air Force, Mossad, cybersecurity, intelligence, medical innovation, and technology. Yet after years of watching Israel closely, visiting the country repeatedly, speaking with Israelis, and advocating for Israel from abroad, I have come to believe that the Jewish state possesses another strategic asset that receives far too little attention: normal life.

That may sound almost ridiculous when discussing a country repeatedly confronted by terrorism, war, and an extraordinary degree of international scrutiny, but perhaps that is precisely the point, because terrorism has never been intended merely to kill people. Its broader purpose is to destroy the feeling of safety that allows ordinary society to function, making people afraid of buses, restaurants, concerts, schools, markets, and eventually their own future.

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Israel’s answer has repeatedly been remarkably simple: to keep living.

The restaurant opens again, children return to school, another couple gets married, another company is created, another baby is born, and Israelis return to complaining about traffic on the Ayalon while enemies continue predicting that their country has no future.

Foreign observers sometimes misunderstand this, because they see Israelis sitting in cafés shortly after terrible events, crowded beaches or people celebrating weddings during periods of national trauma and conclude that life cannot really be so difficult.

They misunderstand what they are seeing.

Normality is not evidence of the absence of pain. It is evidence of resilience.

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Israelis have taken to heart the motto that saw the British through the Blitz: Keep calm and carry on. It’s now part of their DNA.

It is that same resilience that makes it clear that Israel will not commit national suicide and accept any “two-state solution.” Its claim to Judea and Samaria is based on 3500 years of history connecting the Jewish people to those territories, a connection that the League of Nations recognized when it created the Mandate for Palestine in 1921. But there is another, independent reason why Israel must hold onto Judea and Samaria: without them, Israel has no strategic depth. A Palestinian state in those areas would leave Israel with a nine-mile-wide waist from Qalqilya to the sea, so that an invader from the east could cut Israel in two within a few hours, before Israel’s reservists could be called up. Judea and Samaria are also on much higher ground than the coastal plain where two-thirds of Israelis live; the Palestinians would loom over a much diminished Israel; Ben-Gurion Airport itself would be under the guns of “Palestine.”

Keep reminding people that the Arabs already have 22 sovereign states. They want a 23rd Arab state, by reducing the one Jewish state back within the 1949 armistice lines, so that its defense against an aggressor would be hopelessly undermined. That state of “Palestine,” both the Hamas Charter and the Palestinian Authority have made clear, would expel the 750,000 Jews living within its borders, and would not be a peaceful neighbor, but would carry on a campaign, through diplomacy, to further delegitimize the Jewish state, while also serving as a base for continual terrorist assaults, by Arabs from all over, on the rump state of Israel.

No Israeli government will ever agree to such an outcome. Those pinning their hopes on Gadi Eisenkot defeating Benjamin Netanyahu in the October election and accepting a “two-state solution” do not realize that he has already committed himself to opposing that “two-state solution.” There will never be a state of “Palestine” west of the Jordan River. Jordan’s population is even now 80% Palestinian, and that artificial country should rightly become the state of “Palestine.” The October 7, 2023 attacks awakened even the Israeli left, the former peaceniks, to the genocidal depth of Arab hatred of Jews. There is not, and never was, a true “two-state solution,” no matter how many times the phrase is repeated by the Great and Good. The only “solution” to the jihad against Israel is deterrence, with Israel continuing to build new towns and expand existing ones, in order to strengthen its hold on Judea and Samaria, while leaving the local Palestinian Arabs to govern themselves to the maximum extent possible consonant with Israel security.