Untranslatable

This past Sunday's homicide bus bombing in Jerusalem, which claimed 19 lives and injured an additional 40 persons, has apparently triggered the Israeli leadership to conclude that only the pacification of the Palestinian-held West Bank by Israeli arms will safeguard Israeli citizens. As regards their attitudes toward the Palestinian irredentists and their "authorities," the Israelis have transited from a negotiation-oriented posture to a war-oriented posture.

It's difficult to put oneself in the place of a person who might at any time be violently removed from the world by someone who doesn't care about his own life, nor about the identities of his victims. The continuous anxiety and habits of caution such a state would engender are unimaginable to an American, even after Black Tuesday. Yet that's the position of the typical Israeli.

Israel is one of the world's most heavily armed societies. Its people are continuously aware of the threats to their lives and property. Its security and police forces have much more latitude to conduct investigations and anti-terror operations than any comparable Western nation. Its superb military has acted to punish atrocities against its people with dispatch and impressive focus. Yet the terror bombings continue.

Let's look at this as a problem in linguistics. Why not? All the other approaches have failed.

Individuals communicate through words and gestures. In one-on-one situations, they're usually successful at making themselves understood. Their communications efficiency -- the rate of actual transmission of intended meanings per unit time -- averages over 90%. When the one-on-one becomes a group of three to seven, communications efficiency decreases to about 50%. Repetition, rewordings, and reinforcement of words by gestures and body language become important. Larger groups produce still further deterioration.

Political groups, particularly nations, communicate with one another through a combination of words, trade arrangements, military adjustments, and violence great or small. Whenever matters get really serious, such that a nation faces a credible possibility of truncation or elimination, the military vocabulary becomes the most important, even before it's explicitly invoked. Every forcible act, or preparation for one, says we mean business in language that ought to be clear to anyone involved.

Of course, there's always the problem of working out what business they mean, isn't there?

That's been the Israelis problem with the Palestinians. The Palestinian area, though it nominally answers to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority, has spoken in a contradictory fashion since it was first made autonomous by the 1993 Oslo accords. Overtly, it claims to value peace and insists on its innocence. Covertly -- in statements made solely in Arabic -- Arafat and his lieutenants have encouraged the jihadist, destroy-Israel-root-and-branch mentality among their people, who have responded with enthusiasm. And then there are the bombings and related atrocities.

The Israelis, mindful that the world beyond their borders receives a fragmentary and distorted picture of what happens in their land, and that misperceptions could seriously affect the flow of assistance from the United States, have exercised unbelievable restraint. During the Peres and Barak years, their response to Palestinian terrorism was conciliation and appeasement. They acted as if their interpretation of terrorist acts was benign, as if Israel had real crimes to answer for. In such a view, the Palestinians were at worst overreacting, and should be negotiated with as moral equals.

But the practical import of any communication is in the reaction and response of the listener, not the intent of the speaker -- and to increased efforts by the Israelis to placate the Palestinians and mollify world opinion, the Palestinians responded with greatly intensified violence against Israeli civilians.

There is no way to mistranslate the drumroll of gunfire or the explosion of a Semtex charge. The Israelis, in their recent punitive raids into the West Bank, would have had good reason to feel they were being clear about the consequences of future Palestinian misbehavior.

The Palestinians have responded with further terror bombings. Indeed, the last Israeli tanks had barely cleared the Green Line when the terror campaigns of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade resumed at full intensity.

Thus, regardless of whether the Israeli posture was indulgent or punitive, the Palestinian response has been the same. Since communication by word and small-scale deed have failed, nothing is left but the large-scale deed. The reimposition of Israeli control of the West Bank has been put in train.

Could any rational man be surprised? Given that Israel values the lives of its people, and that the Israeli government is charged with preserving them, what else could it possibly do? Aside from scattering the Palestinians to the four winds?

As far as "world opinion" goes, the only extra-Israeli opinion that ought to matter at this point is that of the United States -- and America will be solidly behind the Israelis. No European capital has had anything to contribute but shameful pronouncements of moral equivalence and lame denunciations of "the cycle of violence," as if terror bombings were as independent of human volition as sunspots.

Violence cannot be mistranslated. Violence that can only be quelled by extermination cannot be translated at all. No signal that never varies, regardless of all changes in circumstances, can be anything but noise. Apparently noise is all the Palestinians have to offer. The same might be said for the Europeans, whose line of condescending disdain for the security of Israeli lives never changes regardless of what the Palestinians do.

It's a terrible thing to decree the subjugation of a people. It would be far worse to see these savage, morally unfit purveyors of death and destruction remain free to work their wills on men and women who want only to walk their own streets without fearing for their lives.

A friend from Free Republic just pinged me to alert me to yet another Palestinian homicide bombing, this time a bus stop in Jerusalem. This atrocity claimed six more lives and wounded forty others.

According to the detailed reports, this particular bomber was fleeing from a group of security personnel when he self-detonated. The Israelis in pursuit must have feared that a bullet would touch off the explosives he wore. So our "freedom fighter" simply zeroed in on the nearest target of opportunity and pushed the button.

According to the brilliant James Lileks, a PLO spokesman was on television earlier today, condemning the bombings "because they strengthen Sharon who wants to bring more settlers into Palestinian lands."

That translates very well. It's now perfectly clear that martial law is much kinder than these animals deserve.

Since communication by word and small-scale deed have failed, nothing is left but the large-scale deed.

One could act step by step and still have a large-scale aim in front of him. To retake a small piece of the Arab infested Samaria and Judea every time a palie terrorist attack occurs is a good idea, but it isn't quite sufficient.

Retake this village or town or area - and get rid of all the palie lowlife in it. You even don't need to kill them (though in certain cases it's preferable). Just expell them all to the Gaza strip. If another terrorist attack happens, repeat the exersize.

Thus you hit two birds with one stone: create "facts on the land" (no Arabs, whom to return the territories to?) and give the diaperheads an opportunity to feel what does it mean to live in real refugee conditions... and if they don't like it in the overcrowded Gaza, they're free to leave for an Arab shithole of their choice.

Or, in the end of the day, Israel could pull a great trick: a reverse annexation of Gaza, i.e. annex it to Egypt errecting a wall between herself and the latrine.

Israel has not yet shown willingness to break the will of the Palestinians to resist. The Palestinians are trying, with some success, to break the will of the Jews to stay.

They are not fighting the same war. Not yet.

If that willingness to fight for their country does exist but just hasn't yet been shown, it's high time to show it.

If the will to survive and prevail had left the Jewish state, than, as the old joke goes, "the last (emigrant) should switch the lights off before leaving".

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