EDITORIALS: A WAR FOR ISRAEL'S EXISTENCE

Occupation Myth Finally Shattered - Jonathan Gurwitz
Anyone whose memory or knowledge of history extends back beyond 1967 already knew the occupation argument was phony. If it weren't, Palestinian terror groups would have been attacking Egyptians and Jordanians between 1948 and 1967. Yasser Arafat would have created the Palestine Liberation Organization after the Six-Day War, not in 1964. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, like the broader Arab-Israeli conflict, is and always has been about the complete rejection of Israel within any borders. There's nothing new about a two-state solution - the UN came up with one in 1947. But Arab extremists who dreamed of driving Jews into the sea violently rejected that compromise. (San Antonio Express-News)

Israel at War - David Horovitz
Some have branded this latest conflict a continuation of Israel's War of Independence. On both the Lebanese and Gaza fronts, Israel's enemies can make no legitimate claim to be pursuing a territorial dispute: as of last summer, Israel relinquished its hold on Gaza; in Lebanon, it pulled back to the UN-certified international border six years ago. In both cases, Israel's assailants are pursuing a territorial ambition - to unseat Israel from its own sovereign lands. Woe betide a nation under attack inside its sovereign borders if it does not decisively prevail. (Jerusalem Post)

Confronting State Sponsors of Terror Is the Only Option - Michael Oren
For the first time since the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel is facing hostilities on two fronts. If Israel yields to international appeals for restraint and allow tensions to subside, it would accelerate a process in which Syrian- and Iranian-backed terrorist groups in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon can keep the country in a state of perpetual military mobilization, paralyzing it economically and deepening its diplomatic isolation. To deny the terrorists this victory, indeed to survive, Israel must take bold action to fundamentally alter the security situation on its northern and southern borders.

Paradoxically, Israel has been attacked from the two territories from which it unilaterally withdrew with the approval of much of the international community. But Israelis have learned that unprovoked violence against them raises little outcry in the world and that failure to react to isolated acts of terror invites unremitting terror.

Israel cannot hope for quiet along its borders as long as Hamas leaders continue to direct terror with impunity from Damascus and as long as Hizballah receives orders from Syria and Iran. By eliminating the terrorist leaderships in Gaza and southern Lebanon and deterring Syria and Iran from prodding their proxies to war, Israel can restore a reasonable level of security to its citizens. Such measures will also be implicitly welcomed by Israel's Jordanian and Egyptian neighbors, who are similarly threatened by these same terrorist groups. (Washington Post)

Why They Fight - Charles Krauthammer
For four decades we have been told that the cause of the anger, violence, and terror against Israel is its occupation of the territories seized in the Six-Day War. The problem with this claim was that before Israel came into possession of the West Bank and Gaza, every Arab state had rejected Israel's right to exist and declared Israel's pre-1967 borders - now deemed sacred - to be nothing more than the armistice lines suspending, and not ending, the 1948-49 war to exterminate Israel.

Just last September, Israel evacuated Gaza completely. Gaza became the first independent Palestinian territory in history. Yet the Gazans continued the war. They turned Gaza into a base for launching rocket attacks against Israel and for digging tunnels under the border to conduct attacks.

Hizballah, which has representation in the Lebanese parliament and in the cabinet, launched an attack into Israel on Wednesday that resulted in the deaths of eight soldiers and the taking of two others as hostages. What's the grievance here? Israel withdrew from Lebanon completely in 2000, as verified by the UN. The issue is, and has always been, Israel's existence. That is what is at stake. (Washington Post)