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ISRAEL AT 56 |
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Steven Plaut
This week is Memorial Day in Israel and
right after it is Independence Day. I have believed for years that the best way
to commemorate these days is by turning them into a battle against the loss of
perspective.
Memorial Day is the more troubling of the
two days. The problem is that Israelis have lost their sense of Jewish
perspective to such an extreme extent, and this becomes glaringly evident on
Memorial Day. Israelis are incapable of viewing their problems and that of the
state within the perspective of Jewish history, in large part because of the
efforts of the radically secularist Israeli Left, which dominates civil
discourse, the media, academia and politics, and seeks to detach all of Israel
from Jewish history and to deny any connection between “Israeli-ness” and
Judaism.
All of this is reflected in the whiny
defeatism that dominates all thinking about the losses of life by Jews
struggling for Israel’s survival. It is blindingly apparent on Memorial Day.
First of all, the atmosphere of Memorial
Day in Israel resembles that of Holocaust Remembrance Day – Yom HaShoah,
in nearly all things: the same siren, the same closing of cafes and restaurants,
the same conversion of the media into official mourners. The timing is also
suggestive – Memorial Day is a week after
Yom HaShoah. If anything, Memorial Day is the more dramatic of the two days,
as there are two sirens sounded on Memorial Day but only one on Yom
HaShoah. And this is not because the loss of soldiers is “more
recent”. The bulk of soldiers killed in Israel’s wars, far more than half, died
in the 1948-9 War of Independence, only three years after the end of the
Holocaust.
The two juxtaposed days equate the
Holocaust with a tragedy that is two six-hundredths its size. Second, all sense
of proportion has been lost. In ALL of Israel’s wars, something like 21,000
soldiers and civilians died, although thanks to the Oslo team the civilians have
dominated the death toll this past decade. These numbers are similar to the
numbers of Jews murdered every two days at Auschwitz at the height of its
“efficiency”. In other words, had Auschwitz operated for only two days longer
than it actually did, the losses of Jewish life would have been the same as all
of Israel’s military and civilians losses! The soldiers killed in Israel of
course died in valor, defending their people and country.
Here we are, 56 years after the Holocaust,
and the country is still gripped with the Grand Oslo Delusion, still trying to
“negotiate” with the Palestinian Nazis instead of achieving total military
victory over them, afraid to follow the lead of the Americans in Fallujah. In 21st-century
Israel, the fact that one or two soldiers got killed per week in Lebanon was
cause for total unilateral surrender to the Hizbullah and its Syrian
masters and for a panic-stricken retreat out of Lebanon to Israel’s
“international border”. Two deaths a week of soldiers in Lebanon, deaths that
indeed could have been prevented had the country’s leadership the courage to do
so, were thought to be sufficient reason for abandoning all rationality and
determination, and for putting all of northern Israel under threat of massive
bombardment from Hizbullah rockets. On the other front, Palestinians
tossing rocks at soldiers in the1980s were sufficient reason adopt “Oslo” in the
1990s, where Israel imported an Islamofascist terrorist army of its sworn
enemies into the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
“Oslo” Israel is post-survivalist Israel,
defeatist Israel, exhausted Israel. “Oslo” was based on a total loss in the
ability to reason rationally, a total loss of historic proportion, a
relinquishment of reality for a make-pretend imaginary universe, and a complete
loss in the Jewish determination to survive as a nation. First and foremost, it
was a complete loss in Jewish self-respect and dignity in Israel. Here we had
the spectacle of Israeli leaders meeting, back-slapping and kissing the same
Arab fascists who murdered Jewish children and only yesterday denied there had
ever been a Holocaust, but at the same time insisting that if there had
been one – the Jews deserved it. The Israeli
media continues to be the occupied territory of Israel’s extremist Left; the
Independence Day issue of Ha’aretz a couple of years back featured a
banner Op-Ed by columnist Akiva Eldar entitled “To the Glory of the States of
Israel and Palestine”, and explaining that Israel will never be truly
independent until Palestine has pushed Israel behind its 1949 borders and
liberated East Jerusalem. He is not even the most extremist anti-Israel
journalist in Israeli journalism.
In Orwellian “Oslo” Israel, defeatism
became the greatest form of triumphalism, cowardice became the highest form of
courage, and McCarthyism was the greatest expression of democracy, at least in
the first few years after the Rabin assassination.
The Israeli military was as blinded by the
loss in perspective as the rest of the country. The military leadership has been
McClellenist since 1992, and was – if
anything – ahead of the rest of the country
in saying amen to the Left’s Vision of “Oslo” and backing the national suicidal
ambitions of the politicians of the Left. The military brass was louder than the
media in demanding a unilateral unconditional surrender of Israel in Lebanon and
relinquishing of the Golan to Syria. Military intelligence has never quite
gotten around to the point where it discovers that Yassir Arafat is a
genocidal terrorist and that there are no differences between the Hamas and the
PLO, if there ever were.
Meanwhile, even Ariel Sharon is trying to
capitulate his way into tranquility. Just what does he think the PLO-Hamas
terrorists will do in the Gaza Strip once Israel has ethnically cleansed it of
Jews and abandoned it?
So, What’s So Bad About the
Sharon-Bush “Disengagement” Plan?
Steven Plaut
Ariel Sharon has presented his
“disengagement plan” to the White House, and it has been endorsed by George
Bush. The Sharon political machine, backed by the Labor Party’s machine and the
Israeli Left, is flooding the Israeli media with ads and promotions for the
“disengagement plan”. Many in Israel are presuming that because the Arab
terrorist groups and the fascist Arab states are screaming in outrage against
the plan, then it must in fact be a positive constructive plan that can reduce
violence and produce peace. Polls are showing that even the majority of Likud
members endorse the “plan”. The Arab critics of course are outraged because the
plan does not provide for the immediate liquidation of Israel and its population
and they oppose all plans that are missing those essential genocidal clauses.
While the Sharon-Bush “plan” has a few positive features and aspects, it augurs
badly and embodies existential dangers for Israel.
So, What's So Wrong with the Plan?
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It rewards terrorism. Ever since
signing the first Oslo “Accords”, the Palestinians showed their devotion
to its clauses as well as their unwillingness to comply with any of their
written commitments by engaging in endless daily terrorist atrocities and
by mass murdering 1,300 Israelis, equivalent to 22 September 11ths when
measured proportional to population. The “plan” rewards the terror by
delivering to the terrorists and Islamofascists a Gaza Strip ethnically
cleansed of Jews. Guess how the Iraqi terrorists shooting Allied troops
will understand and interpret this “deal”!
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The “plan” is a recipe for escalated
terrorism and atrocities. If Israel has trouble suppressing the terror
even today, when the Gaza Strip is full of Jews and Israeli soldiers, what
will happen once they are evicted? What will stand in the way of the PLO
escalating the violence, firing hundreds more rockets into Negev civilian
communities, and sending out dozens of new suicide bombers? What does
Ariel Sharon think the PLO will do in Gaza once the “settlers” are
evicted, take up knitting?
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It is an evil precedent. It signals
that Israel is willing to conduct “talks and dialogues” even while it is
under daily attack by the PLO’s terrorists and its civilians are being
daily murdered. It signals that Israel is willing ultimately to abandon
the West Bank and Gaza to the PLO without the PLO ever having to comply
with a single thing.
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There is no “conditionality” at all
in the “deal”. Israel’s concessions and capitulations are to be carried
out without the smallest gesture from the PLO, and without the requirement
that the PLO comply first with a single clause in any of the accords that
it has already signed in the past!
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While Sharon and his people have
hailed the “deal” with President Bush as effectively recognizing Israel’s
rights to maintain “groups of settlements” where they are concentrated,
such as around Ariel, Colin Powell is already backing off from this
publicly and declaring there is no such US acknowledgement of Israel’s
rights.
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While the “deal” and joint
announcement are being touted by Sharon’s people as declaring there is and
will be no such thing as a “Palestinian Right of Return” to Israel, Arafat
and his minions have already denounced this and re-pledged that there will
be no ceasefire until this “right”, which is nothing more than the Sudeten-like
“right” of Palestinians to dismantle and destroy Israel, is accepted in
full. Nothing in the plan is conditioned on Arafat and the PLO publicly
renouncing this “right”. And the US cannot be relied upon in this regard.
There was a time when the US was “firmly and permanently committed” to
refusing to consider anything more than limited autonomy for the
“Palestinians” and certainly no “state”. Look where we are now.
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The “plan” relinquishes Israel’s
moral claim to the rights of Jews to live anywhere they wish within the
Land of Israel. The plan ethnically cleanses Jews from the Gaza Strip and
parts of Samaria. There is nothing in the plan that limits the rights of
Arabs to live anywhere they wish in the Land of Israel, including in
Israel’s own capital city, Jerusalem. Incredibly and mindlessly, Israel
has allowed a huge wave of Arab migration to Jerusalem in recent decades.
The plan permanently relinquishes the rights of Jews ever to
live in the Gaza Strip, regardless of any Palestinian misbehavior
or violations of any past or future “deals”. The plan has Israel
renouncing all “permanent” military installations in the Gaza Strip,
including its radar facilities, needed to locate Palestinian smuggling
boats, and this “permanence” is not conditional on such delicate niceties
as the PLO halting rocket firings from Gaza into Jewish civilian areas or
its sending out suicide bombers.
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Israel largely renounces its right to
operate checkpoints and inspections to deter and fight terror. This makes
the mass murders of Israeli civilians all that much easier and it damages
Israel’s abilities to do anything to block the movement of terrorists.
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While the joint statement states that
the Gaza Strip will be “demilitarized”, one does not know whether to laugh
or cry at this. Previous “accords” with the PLO said the same thing and
there were never any Israeli nor American attempts to force compliance.
Since the PLO is not even a party to this Sharon-Bush “deal”, this clause
is little more than an insult to the intelligence. And note that the
demilitarization is not a condition for anything. Israeli
concessions are not conditioned on demilitarization and Israel may not
abandon its “permanent” concessions when it turns out Gaza is not
demilitarized.
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Israel once again agrees to the PLO
operating an army. Guess against whom this army will be used. If you think
it will be used against the Hamas and Islamic Jihad, then I have a nice
bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you.
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Israel agrees to demolish all
“illegal Jewish settlements”, but there is nothing that would allow Israel
to expel Arab squatters living illegally on lands they do not own or in
structures illegally built.
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Israel foregoes the possibility of
responding to mass murders and other forms of violence committed by
Palestinians by shutting off the power and phone lines for the villages or
neighborhoods involved.
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Israel pledges to continue to allow
large numbers of Palestinians to enter Israel daily as “day workers” and
this is a guaranteed program for many new suicide bombers blowing up
Israeli buses.
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Israel pledges to continue to
bankroll the terrorists, and this financing is conditioned on nothing. No
conditionality on compliance by the PLO with anything. No conditionality
on ending the atrocities. Nothing.
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The destruction and abandonment of
Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, with no PLO quid pro quo,
provides enormous encouragement to those Arabs who believe that violence
and atrocities are the only way to make gains for themselves. It is an
open declaration that no act of violence by Arabs will ever go unrewarded.
It sets the most dangerous precedent imaginable. Clearly every future
“deal” will now be based on this precedent and will involve unilateral
Israeli depopulation of its Jewish civilians with no Arab quid pro quo
whatsoever. Eviction of Jews from large swaths of their homeland while
never evicting a single Arab from anywhere has become the guiding
principle for all future diplomacy.
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While the Sharon team has been
blustering that the deal means that Washington agrees that the 1967 “Green
Line” will not again become Israel’s future border, there is no actual
such acknowledgement in the deal and Washington has never agreed to any
such thing. In fact, President Bush has repeatedly referred to the “1949
Armistice Lines”, meaning Israel’s pre-1967 Auschwitz Borders (which is
what they were called by Abba Eban).
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While President Bush acknowledges
Israel’s “rights of self-defense”, these are not spelled out and in most
cases where Israel has exercised its legitimate rights in recent years,
such as by assassinating terrorist leaders, the Bush Administration has
denounced these Israeli actions. So it appears that the only form of
Israeli self-defense that is considered legitimate will remain
self-defense by means of capitulation to terrorism.
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While criticizing the PLO’s “lack of
action” against terror, which is a bit like condemning Hitler for his lack
of action to stop the Holocaust, the joint announcement does not
explicitly denounce Arafat for leading, ordering and initiating
most of the terrorism. There are no American sanctions against the PLO for
its non-compliance with any of its previous commitments, nor any sanctions
against it for the endless mass murders it has committed.
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The plan envisages Palestinian
“refugees” being resettled in Arab states, including the future “state” of “Palestine”. The word “only” is conspicuously absent.
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Nothing in the agreement is
conditioned upon the PLO ending its campaign to destroy Israel, nor upon
any PLO acknowledgement of Israel’s right to exist.
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The “plan” utterly abandons the “Land
for Peace” formula imposed on Israel by its leftist governments of the
past, and replaces it with “Land for Good Press Soundbites”, which is to
say – “Land for Nothing”.
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The plan is anti-democratic. Sharon
ran for office opposing just such a plan being touted by the Labor
Party under Amram Mitzna. Voters elected Sharon on that platform and
because they opposed Mitzna’s plan, yet here is Sharon implementing it by
fiat.
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Maariv (April 16) reports that
the plan has secret unpublished clauses involving Israeli agreement to
additional concessions not stated in the public “deal”. The White House
knows the contents of this document. Israeli voters do not. What does that
suggest to you?