As Mark Dubowitz warned on the Mosaic podcast last week, the lame-duck Biden administration has issued further unmerited sanctions on Jewish organizations and individuals in the West Bank. It announced two on Monday. Cole Aronson and Avi Bell explain why this is bad policy:

America almost never sanctions other democracies, even to resolve disputes affecting hundreds of millions of people—Indian discrimination against Muslims, for instance, or low European defense spending. Americans respect the desire of other self-governing peoples to govern themselves, rather than to obey coercive dictates from Washington. If America cannot peacefully persuade another democracy to change its ways, America lives with it.

Kobili Traoré, who killed the elderly Parisian Jewish woman Sarah Halimi, was let off homicide charges on the grounds of cannabis-induced psychosis. French Jews were outraged that a Jew could be murdered with impunity so long as the murderer got high in advance. But Traoré was never sanctioned, and neither are the less famous Islamists whose thefts, assaults, rapes, and murders are rarely punished by the European democracies they afflict.

American sanctions policy now classes Israel with the world’s worst regimes, including Iran, a state sponsor of terror officially dedicated to Israel’s destruction. But actually, in at least one way, American sanctions now treat Israel worse than Iran: by targeting the speech of its citizens.

With the IDF engaged in ground maneuvers in both northern and southern Gaza, and a plan about to go into effect next week that would separate more than 100,000 civilians from Hamas’s control, an end to the war may at last be in sight. Yet there seems to be no agreement within Israel, or without, about what should become of the territory. Efraim Inbar assesses the various proposals, from Donald Trump’s plan to remove the population entirely, to the Israeli far-right’s desire to settle the Strip with Jews, to the internationally supported proposal to place Gaza under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA)—and exposes the fatal flaws of each. He therefore tries to reframe the problem:

[M]any Arab states have failed to establish a monopoly on the use of force within their borders. Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Sudan all suffer from civil wars or armed militias that do not obey the central government.

Perhaps Israel needs to get used to the idea that in the absence of an entity willing to take Gaza under its wing, chaos will prevail there. This is less terrible than people may think. Chaos would allow Israel to establish buffer zones along the Gaza border without interference. Any entity controlling Gaza would oppose such measures and would resist necessary Israeli measures to reduce terrorism. Chaos may also encourage emigration.

Israel is doomed to live with bad neighbors for the foreseeable future. There is no way to ensure zero terrorism. Israel should avoid adopting a policy of containment and should constantly “mow the grass” to minimize the chances of a major threat emerging across the border. Periodic conflicts may be necessary. If the Jews want a state in their homeland, they need to internalize that Israel will have to live by the sword for many more years.