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While I am a graphic artist, I'm not much of a cartoonist. I've tried many times to create cartoons and failed. So, because of this failing, I'm going to have to describe to you the cartoon I imagined in my brain.

It's Passover in Israel. Sitting down at the table are Tzipi Livni, Binyamin Netanyahu, Mahmoud Abbas, Bashar Assad, maybe throw in Condoleezza Rice for good measure. The Pascal Lamb is in the middle and Livni is cutting it up. There's nothing on her plate or the plates of Bibi Netanyahu or Condy Rice. But Abbas and Assad have a big pile of meat sitting on their plates. The Lamb is stripped down to the bone. Across the stripped down Pascal Lamb is the word "Israel".

This scene, scary to me, is not so unlikely, unfortunately. Several years ago, no one thought that the Golan or East Jerusalem would be on the "cutting board". Now it seems nothing in Israel is safe from the massive land giveaway. I say "massive" only in Israel terms, because the entire country is miniscule compared to the land mass occupied by Israel's neighbors.

I'm trying to figure out what the point of these land giveaways is. I can't imagine what "serving up" extensive tracts of land for nothing could accomplish. The only aspiration I can imagine of the people carrying out this land relinquishment is the total destruction of Israel and, its corollary, the complete destruction of the Jewish people.

Over the years, Israel has given over pieces of land won from her enemies in defensive wars, wars during which Israel was attacked by Arab aggressors, land won in the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War. Both wars were efforts by Israel's enemies (most notably Egypt, Syria, and Jordan) to wipe Israel off the map. Both wars, thank God, failed in those endeavors. And, in both wars, Israel acquired portions of land that were incorporated into the land of Israel (the Golan Heights, the Galilee, the Sinai, Gush Katif [the Gaza Strip], Judea and Samaria, and land in eastern Jerusalem, just to name a few). Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt as part of a peace accord (UN 242, the one that Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat signed). This Peace Accord has brought Israel a measure of peace with Egypt in the past 25-plus years.

So, the people of Israel have had some success with the concept of "land for peace". And there was reason to have hope that gifting territory to the "Palestinian" people would bring some degree of harmony. But those hopes should have been dashed on the craggy rocks below after the summer of 2005 when the Israeli government, under Ariel Sharon, decided to forcibly remove Jews from their homes in Gush Katif and surrender the territory to the Palestinian Authority without even the smallest concession. This area is currently being employed as a missile-launching pad for the purpose of raining "anti-personal weapons" down upon the peaceful people of Sderot, Ashdod, and Ashkelon, to name a few places.

The Israeli government under Sharon's corrupt protégé, Ehud Olmert, is now set poised to repeat the disaster of 2005. They are hanging on the precipice, giving Abbas and Assad the opportunity to push them over into the sea. They are planning on moving all Jewish residents out of Judea and Samaria and Hebron.

I can understand why the "Palestinians" want to do this. They are trying to destroy Israel. Their existence as a separate entity, separate from other peoples in the region who share their language, religion, culture, and customs, is for the express purpose of destroying Israel. That is why they chose the name "Palestinians" - so they could claim they were the rightful owners and historical residents. But the coins and stamps that say "Palestine" on them were created by and used by the Jews of Palestine in pre-independence Israel, then called Palestine during the British Mandate period.

We should strive toward Einsteinian sanity - not repeating things that didn't work and expecting them to have different outcomes. We need to learn from our mistakes, whether that mistake was made in 1939 by a British prime minister or in 2005 by an Israeli prime minister. We need to learn that terrorists, like blackmailers, are never satisfied. We need to understand that the Islamists and the Palestinian leadership are the spiritual heirs to Hitler's lies and infinite hatred. And we need to keep them from turning the world into a post-apocalyptic "1984".

We can't allow Israel to be the appetizer for the enemies of freedom. Their craving for the "meat" of free lands will never be satisfied.

Debbie Israel is a graphic artist (see https://www.cafepress.com/compugraphd2 for some of her work) and tutor living in Highland Park.