Naval battles have always piqued the human imagination -- certainly until the advent of aerial combat, but even afterward. Human history is filled to the brim with names such as the Battle of Actium, the Battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Horatio Nelson, the U-boat campaign of World War I and the British voyage to the Falklands. It exists in Israeli ethos as well; the Song of Deborah mentions the seafaring tribe of Dan, "And Dan, why did he linger by the ships-"; in the modern story of Exodus, "clouds over our heads, the wind is mighty"; the Hannah Senesh vessel attempting to smuggle illegal immigrants into Palestine during the British Mandate; of course, the somber days surrounding the sinking of the INS Eilat and the disappearance of the INS Dakar. For a long time, the sea was a lesser battlefield in Israel's wars, but it has long since become a central arena in the war against terror in both Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. The Israeli Navy elevated its reputation when it seized the MV Karine A 12 years ago, and now, with the takeover of the vessel transporting missiles to the Gaza Strip, it has done it again. There's nothing new to say about the Red Sea capture of the Klos C. It's all been said. The pride. The personal security. National security. Disquieting the enemy in distant waters, far from Israel's shores. The long arm. Proof of the Iranian regime's renewed ties to Gazan terror. The world pretending not to understand the nature of the ayatollah regime. Israel's role in rousing the world from its hibernation. But an interesting question remains. Israeli forces are used to battling near the homefront, for the homeland. Even the soldier infiltrating the Lebanese border doesn't go much farther than a few dozen kilometers. But the sailor, how does he feel, hidden away, camouflaged, days that feel like an eternity, some 1,500 kilometers (900 miles) from home? Is he lonely? Isolated? Could he even be spiritually uplifted? Somewhere in one of Uri Zvi Greenberg's writings there is the line to the spirit of, "We have land, we have sea." The sea somehow becomes synonymous with sovereignty, especially given the military arm's far reach. Patience is a virtue Israel could be a few steps away from experiencing the redemption generation's vested contradictions. How is it possible that the great builders of our nation could cause it such near-irreparable, erroneous damage. Their children pore over their studies and toil away, they enlist in the IDF, grow old and serve in the reserves in and around Efrat and Ofra, and whoever dissociates from the historic patrimony is no farther off than Hebron is from Yeruham, Beit El from Raanana, and surely not beyond Israel's secure borders. But with their loyalty and devotion to Jewish national and humanistic roots and the prophetic vision, they have unleashed, through their ardent love, the bitter consequences of isolation, alienation and dissociation. I sensed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was dissembling in Washington this week. If you understand his body language, than you know just how uncomfortable he was dealing with U.S. President Barack Obama, especially after reports surfaced indicating that settlement growth and construction had mushroomed by 120 percent. Given the grueling year against Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and the European boycott, couldn't they have been content with just 80% new construction -- even if it was just to mitigate some of the pressure. Obama has no problem saying that not only is settlement construction undesirable, but "aggressive" as well. They have written chapter one, just one paragraph, another pretext for the world -- part of which is anti-Semitic and part of which is naive -- to throw the Jewish state in the guilty jail cell of this generation. The good people of our nation have suffered throughout history at the lack of understanding by those guided by "gradual progession" or "proportionality." The Prophet Jeremiah versus the king of fools (586 B.C.E.), the moderate government versus the Zealots (70 B.C.E.), the Tannaim versus Bar-Kochba and Rabbi Akiva (132 C.E.), these are bitter examples from the ancient world. But that exists within the revivalist Zionist as well. The pressure to receive everything and to never give up on anything because of the illusion that "God is with us" always leads to big things. The rabbis in the settlements don't teach their youth the essence of life, and hesder yeshiva students don't ask their teachers difficult questions. In 1937, the idea to partition Israel was raised by the Peel Commission. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, forced the Zionist movement to go against the opinions of its officials -- on the Right and on the Left -- Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Berl Katznelson, Yitzhak Tabenkin and Meir Yaari -- but the vicious opposition from the Arabs and the British thwarted the plan. If only a tiny Israel had been established, many of those who perished in the Holocaust would have survived. In those days, a son asked his father how he could be satisfied with such a tiny piece of land, and Ben-Gurion answered his son Amos, saying that this small bit of independence is a bridgehead, and when we can expand -- we will do so. It is impossible to know his intentions at that time, and those who were against the partition did not understand him. Ben-Gurion's true stance was only known years later, when the book "Letters to Paula and the Children" was published (I once found the article "Directions," written by Professor Benjamin Akzin, according to which Jabotinsky, while rejecting partition publicly, in private conversations, hinted that it may be a positive thing, a sort of Piedmont -- the first independent region in Italy on the path to full independence). So who was right back then- And who was right in 1947, when Ben-Gurion agreed to divide Israel, and the Left and the Right objected and vowed in the name of the entirety of the land? And if -- God forbid -- their opinion was accepted, the State of Israel would never have been established. It was at the last minute that the United States and Russia cooperated, and after that was the Cold War and the siege of West Berlin, and it was again impossible to achieve a majority decision like that in the U.N. And who was right in 1979, when former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin forced the Likud and patriotic opponents like then-MK Yigal Allon into the peace deal with Egypt, which benefits Israel to this day? From former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, from former Minister Haim Landau to former MK Geula Cohen -- nobody has apologized to him nor expressed regret. And who was right in 1997, when Netanyahu made the Hebron deal, which looks like a patchwork quilt, and was met with majority opposition in the Likud? Last week, I strolled through Shuhada Street in Hebron, and the agreement that looked at the time like a crazy dream is alive and well, and quiet has been maintained since then. That is the problem with uncompromising people. They believe that history has a stop watch that is fixed for all time, and in the most extreme case, it was stopped for 40 years. The problem with the strict approach against land concessions is that its proponents do not understand the concept "grasp all, lose all" or that the job may not get done in their time, but that they must do their part. And in the absence of Jewish immigration to Israel and the increase in the elites of society leaving the country, and with the thrust of Jewish culture in the face of reality TV -- the nation cannot even take in the entire land now. The time to receive it all has not yet come. In the 47 years that have passed since "we returned to the cisterns," as is written in the famous song Jerusalem of Gold, the contradiction becomes clear: The Palestinians (and with them, the Arab world) were stuck in their unwilling world view of "no negotiations, no recognition, no peace" with Israel that they adopted after the Six-Day War, were it not for the settler movement. Just their feeling that time is working against them and that they are losing their land to the success of the settlers caused them to come to the negotiating table. But the same settlement that forced the Palestinians to talk peace (without meaning it), has positioned itself as an obstacle to peace and opened up to the world, which is already not a steady fan of Israel, a path to blame it for the absence of peace. After everything they learned about Jewish history; and after they inculcated that the Creator of the Universe did not grant the Torah immediately after leaving Israel because the nation was still not ready for it, the time has come for a charismatic leader to tell his followers in the settler movement that compromise is also a divine product.