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Mass-Migration: The Tiniest Dose of Reality Hits by Douglas Murray

If you do not have control of your borders, with a meaningful set of immigration laws and the right to keep people out of your country, then you do not really have a country.

While the public wants their representatives to control their borders, politicians seem to see only political capital in running the other way. In part this is because there appears to be some kind of “bonus” to be achieved by looking welcoming and kindly, in contrast to the unwelcoming and mean things that borders now appear to represent.

By the end of August, it was estimated that almost 12,000 people had arrived in Canada through this route so far this year. It is a number that constitutes little more than an averagely busy week in Italy at any time over recent years. But even this comparatively tiny movement across an entire year has proven too much for Canada. At the end of last month, Prime Minister Trudeau told reporters: “For someone to successfully seek asylum it’s not about economic migration. It’s about vulnerability, exposure to torture or death, or being stateless people. If they are seeking asylum we’ll evaluate them on the basis of what it is to be a refugee or asylum seeker.”

Bombings and other terrorist attacks are now a common feature of life in modern Europe. On just one day (September 15, 2017), an improvised explosive device was placed on a London Underground train, a man wielding a knife and shouting “Allah” attacked a soldier in Paris, and a man with a hammer shouting “Allahu Akbar” badly wounded two women in Lyon. As the former Prime Minister of France and the present Mayor of London have put it, perhaps this is all just a price we have to pay for living in big cities in Europe in the 21st century: we have traffic congestion, great restaurants and terrorist attacks.

Of course, the public are all the time worrying about other things — not just whether all this is just a taste of something worse to come, but whether anything might be done to stop it. While our political leaders continue to view this as a narrow security-related question, the public can see that it is also a border-security and mass-immigration issue. Across the continent, poll after poll shows the European public continuously calling for migration into Europe to be slowed down. This plea is not due to some atavistic urge or distasteful racist instinct, but something that the public seems to intuit better than their politicians — which is that if you do not have control of your borders, with a meaningful set of immigration laws and the right to keep people out of your country then you do not really have a country.

Since the upsurge in Europe’s migration crisis in 2015, when Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel unilaterally decided to suspend normal border checks and turn an already existing flow of migrants into a tidal wave, politicians and the public have divided from each other over this issue. While the public want their representatives to control their borders, politicians seem to see only political capital in running the other way. In part this is because there appears to be some kind of “bonus” to be achieved by looking welcoming and kindly in contrast to the unwelcoming and mean things that borders now appear to represent.

Politicians such as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Canada have used the opportunity of Europe’s migration catastrophe to grandstand and present themselves as offering a different way. In the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric on building a wall along the US-Mexican border, Trudeau in particular has presented himself as the yin to Donald Trump’s yang. In January, when President Trump was sworn into office, Trudeau sent out a Tweet reading, “To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength.” To which he added the hashtag, #WelcomeToCanada. In March of this year, in another clear response to the US President, Trudeau tweeted, “Regardless of who you are or where you come from, there’s always a place for you in Canada” — a tall order, given the existence of 7.5 billion people on this earth, many of whom are not already Canadian.

Scandinavia: Shift in Immigration Debate by Bruce Bawer

Until recently, the very notion that some European neighborhoods were “no-go” zones was vehemently dismissed by politicians and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic as a myth, a lie, a vicious right-wing calumny. But even as Swedish officials were denying the existence of such zones in their own country, they were secretly mapping them out and overseeing a police effort to liberate them.

The Sweden Democrats are on the rise because voters finally grasp the extent and significance of the damage their elites have been doing to their country — and the elites, both in the media and in government, are scrambling to snap into line in order to keep hold on power.

In some ways, the winds in Scandinavia may be turning, but it does not seem as if Stanghelle and his ilk are about to speak the whole truth about Islam, or to apologize for their inexcusable abuse of those who have.

Not long ago, Norwegian journalists were virtually united in representing Sweden, with its exceedingly liberal immigration policy and its strict limits on public discussion of the subject, as a model of enlightened thinking that deserved to be emulated. Meanwhile Denmark, with its far freer atmosphere of debate (remember the Danish cartoons) and more sensible border controls, was almost universally depicted in Norway as a deplorable hotbed of Islamophobia. That appears to be changing. As Hans Rustad of the alternative Norwegian news website Document.no noted recently, the term “Swedish conditions,” which some of us have been using for years to refer to the colossal scale of Sweden’s Muslim-related problems, is actually turning up these days in the mainstream Norwegian media — although the relationship of those conditions to Islam is still routinely underplayed, if not entirely avoided.

Until recently, Denmark, with its far freer atmosphere of debate and more sensible border controls, was almost universally depicted in Norway as a deplorable hotbed of Islamophobia. Pictured: A Danish checkpoint on the border with Germany, near Padborg, on January 6, 2016. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Case in point: on August 10, the daily Aftenposten ran a piece by Tarjei Kramviken about an official Swedish report stating that police, during the past couple of years, have been pursuing an organized campaign to “take back neighborhoods from criminals who have set up parallel societies.” But the attempt, the report admitted, has failed. Instead, even more such neighborhoods have sprung up, and the level of violence within them has become more common, more brutal, and more spontaneous. If a police car crosses the invisible border, it is pelted with rocks or bottles.

The neighborhoods in question are, of course, Muslim neighborhoods, and the criminals are Muslims. Although the persons in question are indeed criminals — they carry guns, sell drugs, commit burglaries, and break out into the occasional riot — the use of the word criminals seems somewhat euphemistic. We are not talking about some kind of Mafia that has moved into certain neighborhoods, taken them over, and terrorized the locals. The criminals are the locals. They are the young men who live there. Maybe not every last young man, but a high percentage of them. Some of these criminals, moreover, are mere children. One Stockholm cop told Kramviken about “five-year-olds who give the finger to the police and say nasty things.”

The Unaccompanied Muslim Minor Refugee Terror Attack in London Daniel Greenfield

Last decade, Ronald and Penelope Jones were being feted for their work as foster parents. Now their suburban Surrey home was raided in an investigation into the train bombing in London.

The Joneses had won praise for fostering hundreds of children. But their growing interest in taking in refugees from Muslim countries turned their pleasant home with its wooden fences and green backyard into a ticking time bomb.

And that bomb may have gone off at the Parsons Green station leaving behind flash burns and horror.

Earlier, the Joneses had admitted that, “We’ve had a real mix of children from Iraq, Eritrea, Syria, Albania and Afghanistan.” The tidal wave of refugees from these countries has swept across Europe bringing terror and death.

Ronald Jones, 88, and Penelope Jones, 71, like so many well-meaning Westerners, had no idea what they were letting themselves in for until the police were hammering at their door. Now they themselves have been turned into refugees, seeking shelters with relatives, while the police search for clues to the latest terror attack.

The couple became interested in fostering “refugees” when the media barraged helpless listeners with sob stories of Syrian suffering. But while they spoke often of children, the actual migrants are adults.

At the center of the case is Yahyah Farroukh, a Syrian, in his twenties. Farroukh was no child.

Neighbors described a constant flow of traffic to the Jones home. The visitors wore the traditional Islamic clothing often associated with the Jihadists who are the core of the European terror threat.

Prayer mats were set out in the garden. And there were constant cell phone conversations.

Farroukh allegedly invaded Europe by taking a migrant boat from Egypt to Italy.

Another of the alleged Jones “refugees” is an 18-year-old Iraqi from Baghdad who had apparently been monitored by law enforcement. And may have even been previously arrested. A refugee charity allegedly helped bring him to the UK. And arranged to have him placed with the Joneses.

The Iraqi had overloaded even the endless generosity of the Joneses who reportedly found him troublesome and dangerous. And that must have taken some doing.

It was this Iraqi whom police may suspect planted the bomb at Parsons Green station. And when the bomb went off on a crowded train on Friday, the holiest day in the Islamic religion, the manhunt began.

The Iraqi refugee was arrested trying to buy a ticket to Calais.

Calais to Dover is the route that refugees take to penetrate the UK. The Joneses had spoken of one “boy” in their care who had “managed to get in a lorry travelling through Calais.”

The Iraqi refugee suspect had originally come through Calais, but now he was headed the other way.

Islamic terrorism – extrinsic or intrinsic? Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Have Islamic terrorism and violence – in Muslim and non-Muslim countries – been extrinsic or intrinsic elements of Islam?http://bit.ly/2wooego

Since September 11, 2001, there have been 31,722 Islamic terrorist attacks, mostly hitting Muslims. In August, 2017, there were 180 Islamic terrorist attacks in 32 countries, resulting in 1,014 murdered and 1,090 injured.

Christianity is on the verge of extinction in the Middle East. In the past century, over 50% of Middle East Christians emigrated or were killed. According to the May 13, 2015 US House Foreign Affairs Committee testimony, “Christianity could be eradicated from large swaths of the Middle East in the next five years…. In the last decade, the Christian community in Iraq has plummeted from 1.5 million to under 300,000, half of whom are displaced…. [In Muslim countries], there is also real persecution of [Muslim] Yazidis, Turkomen, Shia and Sunni….”

The New York Times reported: “Nearly every day seems to bring a new horror to the streets of Western Europe…. Death and injury have been dealt out by truck, ax, handgun, kebab knife and bomb….”

11 million Muslims have been killed since 1948, of which 35,000 (0.3%) were killed during Arab-Israeli wars. Over 90% were killed by fellow Muslims.

This background – which is consistent with inter-Muslim relations since the rise of Islam in the seventh century – begs the following questions:

1. Is it logical to assume that dramatic concessions to rogue Muslim regimes would convince them to accord “the infidel” that which they have denied their fellow-“believers” for 1,400 years: peaceful-coexistence and tolerance?

2. What are the roots of Muslim aggression against “believers” and “infidels”?

3. Is Muslim contempt toward Western culture extrinsic or intrinsic to Islam?

4. Has the absence of democracy and civil liberties, in all Arab countries, been consistent or at variance with Islam?

5. Why is Muslim violence intensifying in Europe – as Muslim immigration to Europe is expanding – despite the goodwill showered upon the Muslim world and Muslim immigrants by most European governments and societies?

6. Why has there been an expansion of no-go zones in European cities – forbidden to Christian “infidels” – simultaneously with the proliferation of Muslim organizations, in Europe, calling for Jihad (holy war against the “infidel”)?

7. Is the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood – the largest Islamic transnational terror organization – consistent or at variance with Islam: “Allah is our objective, Muhammad is our leader, the Quran is our constitution, Jihad (holy war) is our venue and Shuhada (martyrdom) on behalf of Allah is our wish”?

8. Why has the US – which has never ruled Muslim societies – been targeted by Islamic violence/terrorism, while the USSR/Russia – which has aggressively ruled over millions of Muslims – enjoyed preferential Arab/Muslim treatment?

MELANIE PHILLIPS ON “HELLO REFUGEES!” BY TUVIA TENENBOM

Tuvia Tenenbom, that most acute and incendiary observer of what’s festering beneath the surface of polite society, has turned his attention to Germany’s “refugees”. To his surprise and no little dismay, what he has found out is not so much about these migrants but about Germany itself, and it isn’t pretty at all.http://www.melaniephillips.com/hello-refugees/

In his new book Hello Refugees, he adopts his now familiar but no less devastating tactic of trading on his blond hair, Falstaffian girth and indeterminate accent to conceal the fact that he was born and brought up in an ultra-orthodox family in Israel. He derives his unique insights from the fact that many of those to whom he addresses his faux-naïf but devastatingly direct questions assume he is an antisemite — just like them. And so they open up to him in a uniquely frank manner.

In Hello Refugees “Toby the German”, his previous persona, has become “Toby the Jordanian”. Posing as the son of Jordanian and European parentage, he uses his fluent Arabic to gain access to refugee camps in Germany where access is routinely denied to the media.

What he discovers shocks him deeply. He finds migrants effectively warehoused in wholly inadequate conditions, housed twelve to a “room” in what are no more than, and indeed described as, “containers”. Existing on disgusting food, jobless and with no apparent means of emerging from these holding pens, these migrants have in effect been abandoned by the German state.

Everywhere he goes, people tell him the same thing: that Chancellor Angela Merkel famously invited in more than one million migrants in order to erase the moral stain of Germany’s Nazi past. He concludes that this was not an act of conscience. How could it have been when these people have been left so abandoned? It was instead a move to show the world — and themselves — that this former Nazi state has become the world’s conscience. In other words, it was a cynical move that evacuates the word conscience of all meaning.

Worse than that, Tenenbom also discovers that this public advertisement of collective “conscience” has legitimised and provoked open antisemitism. Repeatedly and gratuitously, Germans tell him that they are now morally superior to the Jews and to the State of Israel which is described as uniquely racist and murderous.

He doesn’t get any of this from the Syrian refugees or other migrants. He gets it only from the Germans. He finds that “anti-racist”, “human rights” activists extolling Germany’s humanitarian gesture and calling for yet more refugees to be allowed in are in fact deep-dyed racists and antisemites.

Tenenbom knew already that Germany is still teeming with Jew-hatred; he has remorselessly chronicled this dismal finding in his previous work. But now, he tells me, it’s much more open and brazen. And that, he says, is because the act of taking in the migrants has allowed Germany to feel it has finally shaken off the stigma of its past. Now it is free to hate Jews again.

BRITAIN’S ALARMING ANTISEMITISM PROBLEM : MELANIE PHILLIPS

In 2002, on the BBC TV show Question Time, I was accused of dual loyalty in front of a jeering studio audience. My crime had been to defend Israel against demonization and double standards by both the audience and other members of the panel.http://www.melaniephillips.com/britains-alarming-antisemitism-problem/

At that time I had visited Israel only twice in my life, two years previously. No matter. A British Jew defending Israel was – and is – immediately accused in some quarters of incipient treachery toward Britain, just as throughout history antisemites have accused Diaspora Jews of dual loyalty or treachery merely because they are Jews.

I thought of my own experience, of course, when I read the report on antisemitism in the UK published this week by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research.

There is currently much disquiet over the Labour Party’s conspicuous failure to address significant antisemitism within its ranks. But there has long been far wider concern among many British Jews about the antisemitic discourse, harassment and physical attacks which have become sickeningly commonplace in Britain over the past few years.

The report’s author, Daniel Staetsky, describes a situation which is complex.

Only around 5% of the population are out-and-out antisemites holding multiple anti-Jewish attitudes. Nevertheless, about 30% subscribe to some kind of antisemitic views.

The key is Staetsky’s distinction between antisemites and antisemitism. For while the number of antisemites is very small, the amount of antisemitism diffused throughout British society is much greater.

That’s because, while people may not feel personal hostility toward Jews, they may believe certain things which are in themselves antisemitic. As Staetsky says: “Antisemitic ideas are not as marginal in Great Britain as some measures of antisemitism suggest, and they can be held with and without open dislike of Jews.”

As a result, the probability for a British Jew of encountering “potentially offensive or, at the very least, uncomfortable” views is about one in three. That’s high.

Staetsky states, however, that 70% of British people hold a “favorable” attitude toward Jews. He reaches that optimistic figure, though, only by reducing respondents’ options to categorize their attitudes. When offered more options, the scenario for British Jews becomes less rosy: only around 39% have “somewhat” or “very” favorable opinions of Jews, more than 5% are classed as “somewhat” or “very” unfavorable and nearly 56% are classed as neither favorable nor unfavorable or as “didn’t know.”

Two groups are shown to be principally responsible for problematic attitudes: Muslims and the Left.

While “significant proportions of Muslims reject all such prejudice,” antisemitism and anti-Israel attitudes are two to four times higher among Muslims than in the general population.

And contrary to the claim by those on the Left that they can’t be antisemitic because they are opposed to racism and fascism, the report says levels of antisemitism on the Left are “indistinguishable” from in the rest of the population.

When it comes to Israel, however, the Left is worse. Even those who are “slightly left-of-center” or “fairly left-wing” are more anti-Israel than the general population, while the more left-wing people are the more they hate Israel. You don’t say!

Moreover, says Staetsky, while only 12% of the population are out-and-out Israel-bashers, close to a quarter of Britons believe, to some extent at least, that Israel is deliberately trying to wipe out the Palestinian population, and about one in five that Israel is an apartheid state.

These are huge numbers for such poisonous lies. And no fewer than 56% hold at least one anti-Israel attitude.

So as Staetsky says, the feeling among so many Jews that they encounter anti-Israel positions all the time becomes immediately comprehensible.

The true extent of antisemitism has, of course, been masked by claims that being anti-Israel is not the same as being anti-Jew. Staetsky, however, states: “The existence of an association between the antisemitic and the anti-Israel attitudes tested is unambiguous.”

Moreover, the stronger the hostility to Israel the more likely it is to be accompanied by antisemitic attitudes such as that “Jews exploit Holocaust victimhood for their own purposes.” And that correlation puts left-wing Israel-bashers squarely in the antisemitism camp.

Staetsky makes the link solely through a statistical overlap between anti-Israel and antisemitic attitudes. I’d go further. Anti-Israel discourse has exactly the same unique characteristics as antisemitism.

4 U.S. Women Hit by Acid Attack in France By Aurelien Breedensept

PARIS — Four American college students were attacked with acid by a woman on Sunday at a train station in southern France, injuring at least two of them, according to the local police.https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/17/world/europe/marseille-france-acid-attack.html?mcubz=0

The assailant, a 41-year-old woman, was quickly arrested in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille. The police prefecture said they were not treating the attack on the American women as a terrorist assault.

The suspect has “a psychiatric history,” a spokeswoman for the police prefecture in Marseille said. “For now, nothing suggests that this was a terrorist attack.”

The four American women, all in their early 20s, were in front of the Saint-Charles train station when a woman threw hydrochloric acid on them shortly before 11 a.m., the police said.

Two of the women were burned, and the other two appeared to have escaped injury, but they were in a state of shock, according to police. All four were treated at a hospital on Sunday.

Boston College said in a statement on Sunday that the four women were students at the college and were enrolled in study-abroad programs. They were identified as Courtney Siverling, Charlotte Kaufman, Michelle Krug and Kelsey Kosten, all juniors.

Nick Gozik, who directs Boston College’s Office of International Programs, said in an email that the women had “recently arrived to start the fall semester.”

In the college’s statement, he added, “It appears that the students are fine, considering the circumstances, though they may require additional treatment for burns.”

The prosecutor’s office could not be reached for comment, but told France 3 that one of the women had been hit in the eye with acid and had trouble seeing.

France has been on high alert for terrorism since 2015, after a series of attacks killed more than 230 people. There have also been a number of attacks by psychologically unstable residents who have sometimes imitated terrorist acts, officials say.

La Provence, the main local newspaper, quoted police sources as saying that after the attack, the suspect had displayed pictures of herself with burns on her body. The prosecutor’s office said the suspect also had a criminal record for violent theft, according to France 3.

In 2013, two American women, Kirstie Trup and Katie Gee, both 18, who were teaching on the island of Zanzibar, were attacked with acid by two men on a moped who stopped, smiled and doused them, severely burning their faces, chests and hands, before speeding away.

In London this year, two teenage boys went on a violent, 72-minute spree in the northeast, spraying acid on five people, the authorities said. The teenagers were arrested on suspicion of robbery and of causing grievous bodily harm.

Geert Wilders: “In My Opinion, Islam Is Not a Religion” by Telegraaf and Geert Wilders

“Not long ago Professor Koopmans found that as much as seventy percent of Muslims find Islamic rules more important than secular laws.” – Geert Wilders.

“Research also points out that 11 percent of Dutch Muslims in the Netherlands are prepared to use violence on behalf of their religion. That is a 110,000 people, twice the size of the Dutch army!” – Geert Wilders.

I personally believe there are extremist people and moderate people. But I do not believe in two kinds of Islam. There is only one…. You get your head chopped off should you wish to interpret Islam…. People who want to come to the Netherlands from Islamic countries should think: this is not a place we want to go to! And we do not do this to bully Muslims, but to keep the Netherlands of the future a free Netherlands.” – Geert Wilders.

Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders is deeply concerned about Muslim integration. In our series Islam in the Netherlands he is warning about the “perishing”of our culture. “It is not five to twelve or two to twelve, it is almost morning!” The leader of the second party in the country is pondering about very far-reaching measures.

Geert Wilders (54) is not surprised at the shocking poll results released by daily newspaper De Telegraaf. The fact that only thirteen percent of the Dutch population feel that the problem of integration will solve itself is a writing on the wall, according to him. And that only eleven percent of the Dutch see Islam as an enrichment proves in his opinion that what he has been calling for years. “If I had said that three years ago, I would have had tens of thousands of police reports thrown at me. But people are completely fed up with it. ”

How do you explain the figures?

“Decades ago, a few thousand people from Islamic countries would stay temporarily. But temporarily turned out to be permanently. Those thousands of guest workers became hundreds of thousands. And in Europe millions of people by now. Back then those people were called upon to integrate and assimilate. But Islam, the word says it already, seeks to dominate. Not long ago Professor Koopmans found that as much as seventy percent of Muslims find Islamic rules more important than secular laws. In Europe almost weekly innocent people are slaughtered in name of Allah and Islam. Proudly. We have been declared war and we refuse to defend ourselves.”

Who is responsible for this?

“I think that probably the worst of all is that Western European politicians have allowed this to happen. Last week Sybrand Buma of the Christian democratic party CDA was suddenly critical of Islam. That is like a bank robber who, twenty years after the robbery, has spent all the money and apologizes for doing so. He is the one who did it. CDA has been in power in the Netherlands for 50 years. ”

Is it not a bit blunt to say …

“No!”

… that Muslims do not integrate?

“I am talking about Islam. But research also points out that 11 percent of Dutch Muslims in the Netherlands are prepared to use violence on behalf of their religion. That is a 110,000 people, twice the size of the Dutch army! ”

But perhaps many Muslims in fact take Islam less serious and profess their faith behind the front door, peacefully. Secretary Asscher of Integration said in this paper last week that those people should not be held accountable for terrorist attacks.

Islamic Rules in Danish Schools by Judith Bergman

The Nord-Vest Private School in Copenhagen, came under investigation by Danish authorities during an unannounced visit after teaching materials were found extolling and encouraging young people to commit jihad. Luqman Pedersen, a Danish convert to Islam, admitted to the authorities that the school wishes to create a parallel Muslim society.

Two former teachers at the Nord-Vest school described how the children at the school spoke of Danes in terms of “them and us”. In a school poetry contest, several of the children composed poems that detailed their wish to beat up and break the legs and hands of the “Danish pigs”.

“I teach religion, but I was not allowed to teach Christianity. Instead, a visiting imam from Iraq taught Christianity… I could imagine that some of the boys I taught could have been radicalized,” a teacher said. The teachers tried to alert both politicians and authorities to some of the problems they had witnessed, but no one would listen.

Some Muslim schools in Denmark appear to be employing anti-Semitic teachers, enforcing gender inequality, employing violence against students, offering poor education in general, and teaching jihad.

There are 26 Muslim schools in Denmark. While they operate independently of the public schools, the state sponsors them heavily — as it does other independent schools in Denmark — covering 75 % of their budget. The demand for Muslim schools in Denmark has grown in the last decade, as Muslim schools have increased their number of pupils by almost 50% since 2007; they now cater to almost 5,000 pupils. (It is unknown, however, how many Muslim children learn in the so-called “Koran schools,” where Islam and Arabic are taught after school to those children who do not attend a Muslim day school. Koran schools — as revealed in the Danish TV documentary “Sharia in Denmark”) — are not under any supervision from state or municipal authorities).

Danish educational authorities are currently investigating seven Muslim schools for failing to follow the laws of independent schools, including the requirement that they prepare the students for life in Danish society, and teaching them about democracy and gender equality. That amounts to more than one quarter of all Muslim schools. The first Muslim school opened in Denmark in 1980. Nearly forty years later, Danish politicians appear to be only beginning to comprehend or take seriously the challenges that several of these schools present to Danish society.

Why Legal Avenues to Mideast Peace Are Misguided By Peter Berkowitz

TEL AVIV — Over the summer, Trump administration officials Jason Greenblatt and Jared Kushner visited Israel and the Palestinian Authority to renew efforts to resolve the conflict over the West Bank—as the international community and the Israeli left refer to the land Israel seized in fending off Jordan’s attack in the Six Day War. In dealing with this vexing challenge, the Trump team should reject the contention increasingly pressed by progressives in and out of Israel—and backed by U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, which, in December 2016, the Obama administration regrettably declined to veto—that legal considerations settle the matter.

Fifty years since Israel’s astonishing victory in the Six Day War over Syria and Egypt as well as Jordan, more than 400,000 Israelis live in the territories the Israeli right prefers to call by the Biblical names Judea and Samaria. While the Palestinian Authority governs most aspects of the daily lives of the vast majority of the approximately 3 million West Bank Palestinians, Israel continues to exercise effective military control over the territories.

The left cogently argues that ruling over a Palestinian population against its will threatens Israel’s existence as a Jewish and democratic state. The right plausibly maintains that withdrawing from the heart of biblical Israel exposes Israel to unacceptable security risks. It adds that uprooting Israeli settlements betrays the Jewish people’s ancient heritage and the Zionist aspiration to rebuild the Jews’ ancestral homeland.

Notwithstanding the weighty political arguments on both sides, many intellectuals in Israel and abroad believe that legal considerations should decide the controversy. Several Israeli professors debated the issue this summer in Haaretz—a newspaper something like the New York Times of Israel. Conducted mostly in Hebrew, the debate exhibits the richness—and the vehemence—of public discourse here. It also illuminates the dangerous propensity of liberal democracies, against which Tocqueville warned 180 years ago, to transform political questions into legal ones.

The “juridification of politics”—to borrow a term from the French thinker Alexandre Kojève—erodes citizens’ civic habits by depriving them of the opportunity to resolve political controversies through democratic give-and-take. It also distorts those controversies, which are inextricably bound up with conflicting interests and perceptions, contingent events, and prudential judgments. To subject them to legal reasoning that purports to yield rational, objective, and necessary judgments is to pretend that one right answer is available for disputes that can only be managed through compromise and mutual accommodation.

In early July, Hebrew University professor of law emerita Ruth Gavison, an Israel Prize winner and eminent center-left voice, expressed sympathy for “the spirit of the occupation’s opponents, Jews and Arabs, who have despaired of the chance to change the situation through politics and are therefore trying to turn the question of the occupation into a legal one (with the justification that the occupation is illegal and must end immediately) or one of human rights (with the justification that the Palestinians have the right not to live under occupation, so Israel must end it immediately).”

She also forcefully warned against it. A legal resolution to the controversy, Gavison argued, “does not advance the end of the occupation but actually deepens the deadlock.” That’s because the resort to legal reasoning obscures “the crucial political, social, cultural and religious processes in Israeli and Palestinian society” and “weakens, on both sides, the fortitude needed for painful concessions based on an agreement between the people and their leaders on what’s the best outcome under the present circumstances.”

In addition, the translation of the conflict into the language of law and human rights perverts the claims of both. “From the perspective of international law, the Palestinians have no ‘right’ to end the occupation—which was the result of a defensive war—and Israel has no obligation to end it without a peace agreement,” Gavison maintains. “This isn’t just an interpretation of the legal situation. It’s the necessary conclusion from the UN efforts to create incentives against the unjustified use of force.”

The critics responded sharply. Mordechai Kremnitzer, deputy president of the Israel Democracy Institute, accused Gavison of putting forward a proposal “to ignore the legal and moral aspects” of the occupation. Yigal Elam, a professor of the history of Zionism and the state of Israel, compared her insistence that the dispute between Israeli and Palestinians was fundamentally a political one to the mindset of German judges who upheld the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of citizenship and prohibited them from marrying or having sex with Germans.