Over the years, some former Israeli security professionals—retired generals, heads of the Mossad and the Shin Bet, and so forth—have come out strongly in favor of plans for the Jewish state to cede control of all or part of the West Bank. When they express such positions publicly, their views are inevitably feted in the Israeli and English-language press. But when Gershon Hacohen, a major-general in the IDF reserves, made the opposite case in a recent article, he received sharp criticism from the former Mossad director Shabtai Shavit. Hacohen writes:

While Hizballah has for four decades successfully terrorized civilian populations on at least three continents, European states have proved painfully slow to designate it a terrorist group, let alone impose sanctions and other law-enforcement measures. Both the EU itself and France only applied the designation in 2013, but still hold fast to a fictitious distinction between the group’s terrorist “military wing” and its supposedly legitimate “political wing.” Nonetheless, the continent has begun to acknowledge the dangers of Iran’s Lebanon-based proxy, and last year six Central European states banned Hizballah completely. Much credit, writes Alex Benjamin, is due to Tsvetan Tsvetanov, the former deputy prime minister of Bulgaria: