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 very
war seems to have its comic side, and in the United States many
a campus is hosting a round-the-clock standup shtick these days
in the form of protests by the Bash-America Left. These pro-Taliban
protesters are the same characters who tear up cities in the name
of "anti-globalization" every few months, with their Nike
shoes, designer jeans, and cellular phones, and who marched to defend
Saddam Hussein from "American aggression and imperialism"
back during the Gulf War. The main motivating force behind the American
Left has always been anti-Americanism, and this has never been so
apparent as during the current war against terrorism. The great
psychologist Eric Ericsson once remarked that radical politics represent
an infantile rebellion against one's parents, and these campus Talibansters
illustrate the point wonderfully.
While this
is well recognized, what is far less commonly known is that Israel
has its own analogue to these people. The Israeli Left is as anti-Israel
and anti-Jewish as the American Left is anti-American. Indeed, the
same psychiatric processes no doubt explain both phenomena.
The problem
is that while the pro-Taliban American campus Left is a marginal
amusement on the U.S. political scene, the Israeli anti-Israel political
Left wields enormous power and indeed has dictated the country's
policies over much of the past decade. The current escalation of
violence is directly traceable to their influence. The developments
in the Middle East cannot be understood unless the role of the anti-Israel
Israeli Left is properly appreciated.
Israel's Left
used to be strongly Zionist and patriotic, as strongly devoted to
the defense of the nation as anyone else. Leftists everywhere, from
the kibbutzim to the yuppie suburbs, enlisted in the elite
units of the military and fought against Arab aggression and fascism.
They might have entertained various ideas, many naïve, about
how Israel should someday be cooperative and forthcoming on the
off chance that the Arabs would ever develop an interest in peace.
But on the daily bread-and-butter issues of the Middle East conflict,
they differed little from the rest of their countrymen. At the margins
of politics, there were anti-Israel (and anti-American) Stalinists
in Israel's various Communist Parties, composed mostly of Arabs
but with some Jews, as well as a handful of pro-terrorist Trotskyite
and Maoist loonies. But the Zionist Left always kept a safe distance
from these groups.
All this changed
following Israel's 1982 "Peace for Galilee" incursion
into Lebanon. That campaign radicalized the Israeli Left in ways
that recalled the radicalization of U.S. campuses during the Vietnam
War. Suddenly, Israeli Leftists hopped aboard the same Israel-bashing
bandwagon pulled by anti-Zionists, anti-Semites, and Arab fascists
all over the planet. Suddenly their country was — in their
eyes — an evil, colonialist, militarist monstrosity. With Menachem
Begin and the Right in power at the time, they did not hesitate
to take to the streets, Berkeley-style, and denounce the "war
criminals" and "murderers" running their government.
Never mind that their government was acting for the purpose of protecting
its citizens, including Leftist citizens, from assaults by Arab
aggressors and terrorists as best it could.
What had begun
as a radicalization of the Leftist fringe in Israel quickly metastasized
into the center. Gradually, factions of the Israeli Labor Party
joined the Leftist assault on the legitimacy of their own country.
Eventually, the anti-Israel, "Post-Zionist" radicalism
engulfed the entire Labor Party. This assault was led by Shimon
Peres, Israel's perennial electoral loser, who imposed his vision
of radical Leftism on his party and on its head, Yitzhak Rabin,
after winning the 1992 election.
Peres is the
guru of the "New Middle East," a utopian vision in which
Internet websites and five-star tourist hotels make territory and
military force archaic relics of the past. Peres was devoted to
the proposition that if the Middle East reality is ugly and discouraging,
then Israeli policy should base itself on the denial of that reality.
He convinced his party that if peace had not yet been achieved,
it was merely because Israelis, like Jiminy Cricket, had failed
to wish for it hard enough. More specifically, he insisted that
if the PLO were granted its own state, it would use this state to
promote the economic well being and social development of its civilians,
and would never have time for irredentist adventures directed against
Israel. Never mind that the PLO itself was insisting all along that
any such Palestinian state would be used solely as a launching ground
for the jihad to destroy Israel.
With Rabin
as nominal prime minister, Peres imposed his delusion on the country,
ignoring the fact that Labor had just run on an election platform
pledging no deals with the PLO and no Palestinian state ever. Israeli
politics then entered an era of Leftist domination and appeasement.
In the minds of Peres and his Leftist followers, the solution to
the conflict was for the Jews to declare a unilateral cease-fire
while the PLO continued to commit atrocities against them. They
urged Israeli Jews to fight terror through self-abasement, self-humiliation,
national self-denial, and cowardice. Every atrocity by the PLO was
met with new offers of concessions by the Israeli Leftists. The
Jewish state became the only country on earth whose state policies
were based on the Christian doctrine of turning the other cheek.
"Goodwill" offers towards the Arabs by the Israeli government,
ranging from inserting Arab propaganda into school textbooks to
proposals to trash the flag and national emblems, abounded. The
far Left exercised hegemony over the media in Israel far more monolithic
than in any other democratic country. Israeli campuses became their
occupied territories. Israelis were lectured incessantly by leftist
leaders and the media about how the conflict was somehow their fault
for trying to "rule over" another "people,"
for placing land above peace, and for being insensitive.
Of course,
the targets of this hectoring had never thought they were trying
to "rule over" another "people," but rather
were simply holding ancient ancestral lands seized by their army
in their 1967 defensive war, when Arab countries had attempted to
destroy their country and rob them of their religious heartland.
They were told that they must choose between land and peace. The
only problem was that it was the Israeli Leftist politicians
who were telling them this, not the Arabs. The Palestinians and
their supporters had never given Israelis the choice between land
and peace. The real choice Israelis faced was between war while
retaining the "occupied territories" and war after relinquishing
them. Peace was simply not an option, despite the desperately naive
hopes of Shimon Peres and his followers.
Much of the
world and the media tore its hair out in frustration at the "obstinate
Israelis," taking its cues from the Peres cadres' adoption
of Arab slogans. The Western media was incapable of understanding
what most Israeli taxi drivers understood clearly, that every concession
and "redeployment" by Israel merely whetted the Arab appetites
for escalation, was seen by the Arabs as weakness, and therefore
encouraged Arab terrorism. The media might attribute the intifada
to Israeli "brutality" and "excesses," but most
Israelis understood that it was caused by insufficient force.
The Israeli
electorate first voted against the pipe dreamers in the 1994 election,
producing the Netanyahu government. Netanyahu, however, did not
take effective measures to reverse the defeatist drift, whether
because of American pressures or because the Likud has always been
short on policy ideas and long on trying to be the Me-Too-Labor-Party.
In 1996, Israelis elected Ehud Barak in the belief that a genuine
Oslo was preferable to Netanyahu's "Oslo Lite." When Barak
offered Arafat essentially the entire "occupied territories,"
together with East Jerusalem, the Western Wall, and the rest of
the PLO's publicly-delineated wish list (with the exception of the
total destruction of Israel), Arafat spat on the outstretched hand
and launched a year's worth of atrocities.
Last year,
the Israeli electorate had finally had enough of Peresian pipe dreams
and elected Ariel Sharon by a huge margin. But Sharon preferred
to govern through a "national unity government," meaning
that the same Shimon Peres, whose disastrous policies had placed
Israel's very existence in jeopardy and whose delusions had just
been roundly rejected by voters, would be named second in command.
Unbelievably, even under a Sharon administration, Peres promotes
his Jiminy Cricket ideas in the name of the government. In particular,
Peres continues to insist that Israel make further concessions to
the PLO even while the PLO murders Israeli civilians every day and
commits countless other atrocities. Peres responds to every Palestinian
bombing and shooting by demanding to be commissioned by Sharon to
hold "dialogues" with Arafat. If President Bush were to
follow the Peres lead, he would offer bin Laden his own country
in the Midwest, provide him with weapons and funds, and offer him
half of Washington, D.C.
Palestinian
terror and aggression have escalated for eight years because the
policies implemented by the Israeli Left rewarded the PLO for doing
so. Back in the early 1990s, the Palestinian intifada had been defeated.
Arafat and his people were off in distant Tunis and were persona
non grata everywhere, especially in Washington. But then the Israeli
Left decided to save Arafat's bacon. Led by Peres, it rescued the
PLO from oblivion, arranged for it to gain international legitimacy,
and allowed it to set up a terrorist army in the suburbs of Tel
Aviv and Jerusalem. By imposing its ideas on the country, the Israeli
Left turned Israel into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. A recent
Chicago Sun Times poll showed that even Americans understand
by a six-to-one majority that Israeli concessions cause terror,
rather than discouraging it.
At this point,
the follies of Israel's Left have not only produced hundreds of
deaths by PLO terrorists, murders committed after the PLO
signed peace accords, but threaten to engulf the region in far greater
instability and bloodshed. The Israeli Left has kindled a jihad
with its demonstrations of Israeli weakness — through its defeatism,
its national self-demeaning, and its assault on the national will
to resist. The past decade of Leftist domination of Israeli politics
now threatens to produce the worst Middle Eastern war ever.
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