Among the common responses to the possibility that Israel will extend its sovereignty to parts of the West Bank is the argument that doing so will prevent Palestinians from forming a state of their own. Not only is this claim not necessarily true, but, write David Adler and Ted Lapkin, it is based on the faulty assumption that an independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza is a desirable outcome:

The creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank will never happen for very good legal, strategic, and moral reasons. . . . The geo-strategic argument is simpler [than the legal one], arising from the fact that Israeli territorial withdrawals most often lead to the establishment of terrorist enclaves on the doorstep of the Jewish state. After Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, it got rocket fire, suicide bombers, and terrorist infiltration tunnels rather than peace. There’s no way Israelis are going to replicate that experiment in the West Bank which is only twelve miles from downtown Tel Aviv.

The collapse of the Arab Middle East into bloody chaos over the past decade affords even greater weight to such geo-strategic considerations. As Syria is torn to shreds by civil war and Jordan teeters on the brink of financial insolvency, Israel simply cannot and will not abandon its most defensible eastern border along the Jordan River.

The moral argument against Palestinian statehood is self-evident as well. The Palestinian Arabs have forfeited any legitimate claim to independence through their repeated rejection of any political compromise that recognizes Jewish national ambitions. The state of Israel affords political equality to all citizens, including 1.8 million Muslim and Christian Arabs who enjoy freedom of speech and religious worship while participating in fair and open elections. By contrast, Mahmoud Abbas, now in the sixteenth year of his four-year term as Palestinian Authority president, demands that any future Arab state in the West Bank must be utterly Jew-free. In other words, the PA is calling for the ethnic cleansing of 460,000 Jews from their homes in Judea-Samaria and Jerusalem.

Earlier this month, an operative working for, or in conjunction with, Hizballah snuck across the Israel-Lebanese border and planted a sophisticated explosive near the town of Megiddo, which killed a civilian when detonated. On Thursday, another Iranian proxy group launched a drone at a U.S. military base in Syria, killing a contractor and wounding five American soldiers. The former attack appears to be an attempt to change what Israeli officials and analysts call the “rules of the game”: the mutually understood redlines that keep the Jewish state and Hizballah from going to war. Nadav Pollak explains how he believes Jerusalem should respond:

Israel cannot stop at pointing fingers and issuing harsh statements. The Megiddo attack might have caused much more damage given the additional explosives and other weapons the terrorist was carrying; even the lone device detonated at Megiddo could have easily been used to destroy a larger target such as a bus. Moreover, Hizballah’s apparent effort to test (or shift) Jerusalem’s redlines on a dangerous frontier needs to be answered. If [the terrorist group’s leader Hassan] Nasrallah has misjudged Israel, then it is incumbent on Jerusalem to make this clear.

Unfortunately, the days of keeping the north quiet at any cost have passed, especially if Hizballah no longer believes Israel is willing to respond forcefully. The last time the organization perceived Israel to be weak was in 2006, and its resultant cross-border operations (e.g., kidnapping Israeli soldiers) led to a war that proved to be devastating, mostly to Lebanon. If Hizballah tries to challenge Israel again, Israel should be ready to take strong action such as targeting the group’s commanders and headquarters in Lebanon—even if this runs the risk of intense fire exchanges or war.

Relevant preparations for this option should include increased monitoring of Hizballah officials—overtly and covertly—and perhaps even the transfer of some military units to the north. Hizballah needs to know that Israel is no longer shying away from conflict, since this may be the only way of forcing the group to return to the old, accepted rules of the game and step down from the precipice of a war that it does not appear to want.