The Strip is about three times the size of the Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base and it is home to over one million Arabs, most of them stateless, unemployed, on welfare and dwelling in slums, providing an ample pool of potentially violent males who want to get in on the firing of rockets at the Jews or in planting IEDs along the security barrier; or firing anti-tank missiles through the fence at army vehicles or school buses.

What Israel should not be doing is feeding Gaza as it sends into the Strip every day thousands of trucks carrying supplies, commodities, gravel for building. Yesterday the Israeli functionary with the grand and lengthy title of Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories announced that “despite the recent escalation in violence, the authority had coordinated the transfer of 3,656 trucks into the Gaza Strip bearing food and medical supplies.”

Maybe it is just me but I find something simply bizarre going on here. These subcivilized criminals fire an anti-tank projectile into an Israeli school bus, and we are still supplying them with food and medicine? Whatever happened to old-fashioned siege warfare in which you starve the enemy until he can fight no more? What is going on here with Israel sustaining the enemy? This is unheard of in human history, I think.

In 2005, with the retreat from land and communities that were rightfully ours, we should have given the Arabs a year’s notice in the matter of supplying them with anything, not only food and medicine but water and electricity. The message might have been that “You can’t have it both ways, Arabians. You can’t expect Israel to sustain you as you fire rockets to kill Israelis. One or the other.”

In the matter of water, I’ve heard, it might not be so easy to separate, for the two systems are intertwined after all these years. But electricity is another matter.

Of course turning of the water and the electricity would raise howls around the globe; that would echo throughout the solar system, even the galaxy and beyond, that Israel was practicing collective punishment on the Ancient Ones. Okay, The Israelis don’t like these little rocket barrages, the Enlightened say, but why should all of Gaza have to suffer?”

And the Israelis would have to answer that terrorism is the ultimate in collective punishment cruelty. What one crummy little home-made Qassam rocket does when it shoots up and the sirens go off around the Gaza rectangle in the Jewish communities, tens of thousands, scores of thousands of Jews are frightened, fearful for the lives, for the lives of their little kids playing outside. Terrorism’s ethical logic is that every man, woman and child in Israel is guilty and deserves to die. This is the ultimate in collective punishment…