And the Walls Came Down

Here’s Moshe Ya’alon, Israel’s incoming minister for strategic threats:

“The mistake of disengagement from Gaza was that we thought like Westerners, that compromise would defuse a problem—but it just encouraged the problem,” he said. “The jihadists saw withdrawal as a defeat of the West … Now, what do you signal to them if you are ready to divide Jerusalem, or if you’re ready to withdraw to the 1967 lines? In this kind of conflict, your ability to stand and be determined is more important than your firepower.”

Reading that quote, I got that same sick feeling in my stomach I got when CNN reported Iraqi tank divisions massing on the Kuwaiti border: Oh, crap – we’re going to war.

Awful as that is, it’s better than the feeling we all got on the morning of 9/11: Oh, crap – we’re at war.