With all Israel's recent challenges and controversy over judicial reform, the state of the economy and social divisions, we missed what should have been one of the biggest headlines in recent weeks.

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On the 75th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, the reputable Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 66% of Palestinians believe that Israel will not celebrate its 100th anniversary. Only 27% think the Jewish state will still exist in 25 years.

These results would likely result in a mixture of astonishment and bemusement amongst Israelis, given that the idea that a fully-functioning economically and militarily powerful state will not exist in just over a generation is, to say the least, implausible.

While the survey doesn't teach us much about the future of the State of Israel, however, it does tell us that two-thirds of the Palestinian public believes we will soon be gone.

Clearly, the Palestinians see us as weak, transient and, above all, possible to defeat.

For 100 years, the primary goal of the Palestinian national movement was first to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state and then, after it was established, to destroy it. Like most of the rest of the world, many Israelis believe the claims that this century-old conflict is about land, "occupation," "settlements," Jerusalem or refugees. In fact, it has only ever been about one thing: The violent rejection of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish people's ancestral and indigenous homeland.

That is how the conflict started in the early part of the 20th century and, it appears, a majority of Palestinians believe it will end in their ultimate victory.

This belief comes from two sources.

The first is the incessant incitement and brainwashing by official Palestinian religious figures and political officials, as well as Palestinian media and educational materials.

For example, according to Palestinian Media Watch, in 2021 the Palestinian Authority's highest religious authority, Grand Mufti Muhammad Hussein, assured PA TV viewers that the destruction of Israel is only a matter of time, along with the "liberation" of Jerusalem and its "return to Islam."

Well-made videos are regularly released for Palestinian children and young people on popular social media platforms that claim Israel's end is inevitable and just as the Crusaders were eventually driven out, the Jews will be as well.

The second source is Israel itself.

Since the early 1990s, Israel has shown that it is desperate for peace. As a result, it has taken actions that actually harmed the safety of its citizens and showed that Israel is prepared to concede and compromise on its national security.

The Palestinian leadership has shown that, if it stands firm, it will receive more and more from Israel. The Oslo process, which we are still trapped in 30 years later, demonstrated to the Palestinians that we have given up trying to win the war against Palestinian rejectionism.

Palestinians see Israeli decisions to give away major parts of Judea and Samaria, disengage from Gaza, release thousands of terrorists, hand suitcases full of protection money to Hamas and promise to divide Jerusalem and give up control of the Temple Mount as proof of this.

They see that the "strongest military in the region" runs with indecent haste to Cairo every time Hamas or Islamic Jihad fires a volley of rockets at Israel's south.

They see a Palestinian leader who says he will never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, embraces and financially rewards mass murderers, and compares Israel to Nazis with no response from Israel apart from the odd press release.

They see an Israel uninterested or unable to achieve victory in this long-standing conflict.

Thus, the Palestinians believe the Jewish state will soon cease to exist. This provides the motivation and incentive for ongoing terrorism. Every Palestinian terrorist who picks up a knife or a gun, or launches a rocket, believes that their actions are hastening the end of Israel. Our response, or lack thereof, merely confirms this belief.

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For Israel to stop the violence, it must show that it has the will to survive and achieve ultimate victory. It must show the Palestinian population in actions and deeds that Israel is strong, robust and enduring.

It must convince the Palestinians that Israel is permanent and break their will to carry on fighting by forcing them to accept that they cannot achieve their war aims.

Once the Palestinians have been disabused of their belief in Israel's temporary nature, our leadership can take steps towards accommodation and peace, but not before.

The only way to do this is through an Israeli victory.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The assassination of three senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists is a welcome change of tactics against those who incessantly fire rockets at Israel's south.

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Named "Operation Shield and Arrow," this latest operation appears to be in response to more than 100 missiles fired at Israel the previous week. It is my hope that this is just the opening gambit in a much wider operation. The Israeli military and political hierarchy should look further than the most recent skirmish and see the wider war, with a fuller understanding of the long-term battle it can initiate, and respond accordingly.

It is important to understand that Israel is not at war with Islamic Jihad.

Israel is at war with a murderous Palestinian rejectionism that is more than 100 years old, and now being bolstered and supported by outside actors like Iran and its proxies. Islamic Jihad is just a small part of the enemy's military capabilities, maybe even the smallest. Nevertheless, the battle lines that were drawn long before the State of Israel was established, remain.

Their goal is to defeat Israel and Israel's goals must be, in turn, to defeat its enemies.

Israel's goal is victory, and thus it must use war as "a continuation of policy by other means," as the famed Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz once wrote. This does not mean to push them back, place them on the defensive or, in today's parlance, to "mow the lawn." The thing about mowing a lawn is the grass will eventually grow back. "Mowing the lawn" means a lengthy battle of attrition and a war that will never end.

We have to be more optimistic and more strategic in order to see how the war be won and how Israel can be the victor. Israel needs to move away from sending messages, militarily or diplomatically, meant to move towards a short-lived ceasefire. This has not worked for almost two decades, and will only send hundreds of thousands of Israelis to their shelters or safe rooms for the foreseeable future.

Despite Israel spending billions on its defense, deterrence is currently lacking. Our enemies might fear our advanced weaponry, but they need to also fear our ability to use it to crush them in a concerted manner. Israel needs to use all the tools available in an unpredictable manner. If not, our enemies only grow stronger and more emboldened.

Our enemies are busy creating new strategies and the Iranian-led alignment of several terrorist groups, some with the military capabilities of whole nations, should greatly concern us. Our full response to this should not end with the killing of a few senior military operatives. It must be more powerful and paradigm-shifting. Israel must send a very clear message that anyone who is involved in any way with a terrorist organization is a target.

The model must be the assassinations of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi in 2004. Neither held the weapons fired on Israel, but they stood at the top of a genocidal terrorist pyramid that controlled the means of operation for war.

The rules of the game must change in a shocking and surprising way. We need to use the arrow first and then the shield, not the other way around. We have lived for far too long in an absurd situation in which our enemies decide when the round of conflict begins, how long it lasts and to what level.

Israel's goal cannot be mere temporary peace and quiet. We must have arrows not just permanently pointed at our enemies, on every level, but primed and ready. Our enemies should be shocked and surprised by their use, in both timing and ferociousness.

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This is the way to defeat an enemy, by changing the paradigm.

Israel has the advanced military technology needed to defeat all its enemies in one fell swoop, but our enemies know the Jewish state's calculations well and play within these rules to our disadvantage.

That is why we need to change the rules and our calculations. We need to think about how to end the war and how to defeat our enemies.

Developments in the region are not in our favor, so we must act now.

"Operation Shield and Arrow" can be turned into something more strategically significant. It needs to be open-ended. It needs to focus more on the arrow than the shield. It needs to send a clear message that this is part of a new strategy to force our enemies, on all levels, into retreat and submission until their defeat becomes a reality.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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The storming of the US Capitol in 2021, the mass demonstrations against electoral reforms in Mexico and the current riots in France over pension reform are just a few of the many recent global convulsions involving masses of disgruntled people.

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The demonstrations against judicial reform in Israel are different, however, in that they have major implications for our national security. Since the return of the Jewish people to their ancestral and indigenous homeland, the overwhelming majority of Jews believed that, while they often disagreed, sometimes vehemently, the defense of the nation took priority.

In the lead up to the War of Independence, most of the Zionist paramilitary organizations understood the need to stand united under the command of the Haganah and then the IDF. After the sinking of the Altalena, the Irgun decided not to respond. Even during the painful disengagement from Gaza, the greater good of national security took precedence.

Now, however, the IDF has been placed on the firing line and used as a tool of protest. This is something we can ill afford.

Unfortunately, the ideological politicization of the IDF has been a long time coming.

For many years, our security and political leaders have spoken about the IDF as a social project, a "great leveler" of all parts of Israeli society and an incubator for our hi-tech industry. But the IDF is increasingly influenced by many differing ideological agendas. Some of these influences are certainly to be welcomed, but they cannot and should not replace the overwhelming aim of any defense force: to defeat its enemies.

Winning wars and conflicts should be the primary aim of the IDF, because unlike the US, Mexico, France and most other nations on Earth, the Jewish state is constantly under threat. The enemies who seek our defeat and destruction do not rest, let alone care about our internal politics or ideological differences.

It is also vital to point out that our enemies are taking stock of our current upheavals and see weaknesses they can exploit.

"For the first time since the creation of [Israel], we hear speeches from the entity's president and former prime ministers … along with former defense ministers and generals who talk about civil war and bloodshed," Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah recently said during a speech. "God willing, [Israel] will not reach its 80th birthday."

It was not long afterwards that an infiltrator from Lebanon was able to carry out a terrorist attack in northern Israel. This is precisely why it is in everyone's interest for the IDF to remain firmly outside any political or ideological debate. Soldiers in uniform should not abuse their position to take a particular ideological stance. Reservists should not use their annual service as leverage in service of a political agenda. If they do, then we will end up with half an army, its ideological makeup dependent on who is in political power at any given time.

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Of course, this is an extreme scenario, but there are ominous signs that we could be heading in such a direction. If even a fraction of soldiers or reservists make their service dependent on whether they are happy with government policy or not, it could severely weaken Israel militarily.

We need to create a new social contract among all citizens of Israel that ensures there will be no more refusal to serve, or even the threat of refusal to serve, on ideological grounds. That there will be no more mass petitions calling on people to boycott their annual military service. That there will be no more calls for the IDF to solve political problems.

The IDF must remain above the debate, however vehement it may be. Soldiers have one job: To achieve the goals set by those above them. Military leaders and strategists have one job: To win wars and ensure safety and security for all Israelis.

Everything the IDF does should be in service of these goals. Anything else is an unnecessary and potentially dangerous distraction.

Even when tempers are frayed, and anger and resentment come from every direction, we need to commit to creating a broad consensus that, above all, the IDF must be kept out of the political debate.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Veteran Palestine Liberation Organization politician Hanan Ashrawi has finally accepted defeat.

For many decades, the most seemingly palatable face of the PLO, the female Christian academic's dulcet tones attempted to assuage the fears of many in the West about the PLO's true intentions.

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Frequently appearing on Western broadcasts, Ashrawi would come across as an ostensible voice of reason, leading a cause against Israeli "oppression" and "occupation."

Her appearances and writings in Arabic, however, belied her silver tongue in English. Indeed, in her native tongue, she lambasted compromise with Israel, argued against any Israeli claims to Jerusalem and even blasted former US President Barack Obama for his mention of Jewish history in the land of Israel. She said that talk of the Jews returning to their land was "Obama's adoption of the discourse of extremist Zionist ideology."

She has also demanded an end to the return of Jews to Israel through aliyah, a cornerstone of Zionism.

In other words, Ashrawi is a maximalist – an extremist who cannot countenance Jewish peoplehood, history or national aspirations.

She is just another less obvious version of the violent Palestinian rejectionism that has ensured the continuation of the more than 100-year-old conflict that has seen so much bloodshed in the region.

Her talk lulled Western audiences into believing that all Israel had to do was understand Palestinian grievances and the conflict would go away, while inciting Palestinian audiences into understanding that central to those grievances were the Jewish people's right to self-determination.

The minimum she can countenance for her people's rights is the abolition of another people's rights. She sees no middle ground and has fought for her position in all arenas for almost half a century.

She quit recently because it obviously became clear to her that the jig is up. The constant stream of normalization agreements between Israel and a growing number of Arab and Muslim states has made the Palestinian issue increasingly irrelevant.

There is no Arab-Israeli conflict or Arab consensus, and Palestinian leaders are becoming frustrated that they no longer occupy center stage. The world is moving on, and so must the likes of Ashrawi, who – for so many years and on so many different planes – fought a conflict that doesn't seem to exist anymore.

The result is that she is no longer invited to address Western campuses, the international media or global conferences. She is a relic of a bygone era and at least has the honesty to admit it.

According to media reports, the straw that broke the camel's back and led to her resignation was her frustration over the Palestinian Authority's recent decision to renew security coordination with Israel after months of the deep freeze. But other events undoubtedly contributed to her sulk out the back door and into irrelevance.

She was witness to the beginning of the end of her struggle. The Arab-Israeli conflict is ending before her eyes. Realizing that Israel is not the enemy, the Arab world is no longer kowtowing to the Palestinians and their sense of entitlement.

Others, such as PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, 11 years Ashrawi's senior, could never leave the stage as she did, because of the benefits of their position. 15 years into a four-year term as head of the PA, Abbas sits comfortably in his salubrious fiefdom in Ramallah, fleecing his people and dashing their hopes for a better future.

"There is an erroneous assumption that the Palestinians are defeated, and they have to accept the fact of their defeat," Ashrawi said recently after the Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates were announced. "The Palestinians are willing, generation after generation, to continue their struggle."

These are now known to be hollow words. Even the septuagenarian herself is not willing to continue the struggle. She has accepted the fact of her defeat.

The fact that her statement echoed that of the Israel Victory Project, formulated by her old sparring partner, Middle East Forum president Daniel Pipes, shows that she's been paying attention more than she's like to admit.

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Ashawi may be the first of her ilk to understand that Palestinian rejectionism is at an end, but hopefully, she won't be the last, thanks to the peace-making going on in Jerusalem, Abu Dhabi, Manama, Rabat, Riyadh and Jerusalem.

She has pointed the way for other Palestinian leaders to accept defeat and start building a better future for both Israelis and Palestinians. Let's hope they follow her lead.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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