When faced with a deadly and determined foe, a nation must choose among three policy goals: negotiation, isolation or military victory.

The rockets from Gaza that rain on Israel nearly every day should remind the world – and the United States in particular – that only one of these strategies stands a chance of success.

Concerning the Palestinians, Israel has tried both negotiation and isolation, with disastrous results.

The Failure of Negotiation

The Oslo Accords of 1993 supposedly represented a triumph of negotiation, with Nobel Peace Prizes handed out to Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat, and a great photo op rewarding Bill Clinton. The novel premise of the approach involved enhancing the power of Israel’s prime enemy, the Palestine Liberation Organization, rather than reducing or destroying it. Israel’s leaders (with the enthusiastic support of the United States and the world community) built up Arafat and the PLO in return for promises on paper, but the result brought continued terrorism culminating in the obscene orgy of violence known as the “Al Aqsa Intifada” in 2000.

History indicates that negotiation never works as a means of settling bitter, bloody, long-standing disputes. The infamous appeasement of Hitler offers only the most celebrated example. Following World War I, the world community celebrated numerous grand, international agreements – limiting naval forces, and outlawing war altogether – but the generation of negotiation inevitably gave way to the worst conflagration in human history.

Major conflicts in every century end only when one side wins and the other loses. Negotiations work only when they amount to detailing the terms of victory or defeat already achieved. In that context, the Camp David Accords of 1978 between Israel and Egypt succeeded (and have kept the peace for thirty years) only because they followed the Jewish state’s second decisive triumph in two major wars. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat knew that the Israeli General Ariel Sharon (yes, that Ariel Sharon) had surrounded the Egyptian Third Army and could have destroyed it at will, had not U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger persuaded Prime Minister Golda Meir’s government in Jerusalem to accept an end to the fighting. After another crushing defeat (following the disaster of ’67), Egypt proved ready to accept the only demands Israel ever cared about: full recognition, and a pledge against further attack.

The Palestinians made similar pledges at Oslo, of course, but those promises followed a dramatic improvement in their international standing, and their Israeli-sponsored return from Tunisian exile, not a decisive military defeat.

The Folly of Isolation

With the collapse of the Oslo Accords, and facing relentless assaults from homicide bombers and deadly terrorist gangs, Israel tried another policy under Prime Minister Sharon. This approach, designated with the euphemistic title “disengagement,” amounted to isolation of the enemy, rather than negotiation or confrontation. By forcing Jewish residents out of harm’s way in Gaza and giving the Palestinian Authority full control in that blighted territory while also constructing a formidable barrier separating the West Bank from major Israeli population centers, Sharon proposed to isolate the Palestinians—or, more to the point, isolate Israel from their murderous madness.

The whole notion of Israeli isolationism shared a similar foundation to the traditional idea of American isolationism: the naïve and simplistic assumption that “if we leave them alone, they’ll leave us alone.”

Supporters of this policy never expected that the unilateral Israeli withdrawal would lead to a sweeping election victory for the jihadist fanatics of Hamas, who soon used force to seize control of Gaza from their hapless Palestinian rivals. The ceaseless rocket attacks show the folly of any policy of isolation—much as 9/11 reminded Americans that they couldn’t isolate themselves forever from the aggressive, international evil of Islamo-Nazism. In today’s world of global conflicts and high-tech transportation and communication, there’s no logical basis for maintaining the belief that high-tech walls or even oceans can forever deter attacks and other dangers. A policy of isolation might provide the short-lived luxury of ignoring a festering problem, but it hardly amounts to a solution. Continued...