I’m not one to give anyone specifically military advice, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to comment on the fraud of Trump’s Gaza peace plan. Only one thing really needs to be said, and said at top volume: under no circumstances should any Palestinian militant group disarm for anyone or anything. That goes for Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, the Lion’s Den, and anyone else with a weapon and the will to use it. Do not disarm. Do NOT disarm. To disarm is to commit mass suicide by placing yourself in the hands of confirmed liars and psychopaths. Things are bad, but nothing could be worse than that.

I don’t believe, and have never believed, in the nonsense of the “two state solution.” It will never happen at this point, but if it did, both arithmetic and political science entail that any State of Palestine must have defensible borders and arms sufficient to defend them. 1 + 1 = 2, not 1. A two state solution requires two sovereign states with the full attributes of sovereignty for both, not one state claiming hegemony over a pseudo-state designed to make Western liberals feel good about themselves. If this isn’t what you mean by a “two-state solution,” then the sooner you stop talking, the better. There’s enough twaddle out there masqerading as wisdom on this topic. We really don’t need more.

If the idea of a non-disarmed Hamas et al shocks or offends you, I guess my response is that I couldn’t care less what you think. The Western Allies allied with the Red Army during World War II, despite all the qualms Western liberals had about Stalin after the purges, forced collectivization, the Holodomor, and Molotov-Ribbentrop. The same applies to Palestinians vis-a-vis Hamas et al.; say what you want about Hamas, but they’ll never measure up to the Soviets. No one expected the Soviets, however evil they were supposed to be, to disarm after World War II, and they didn’t. My point is less that Hamas is like the Soviets than that the IDF is like the Wehrmacht and SS. If anyone should disarm, it’s Israel.

I realize that these views put me outside the “pale” of Western opinion, but that’s more of an asset than a liability. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in a conclusive way over the last two years, it’s that the consensus of enlightened Western opinion has about the moral heft of a canister of medical waste. The principles that apply to the one apply with equal validity to the other: keep it away from you, throw it out as soon as you can, and wash off any remaining residue. My commitment to that protocol kept me disease-free despite months of immersion in a hospital full of contagion during the pandemic. With any luck, what worked once can, mutatis mutandis, work twice, even on toxicities more virulent.