Israeli’s Left Problem
They are as anti-Israeli as our protesters are anti-American.

By Steven Plaut, professor at the University of Haifa.
October 29, 2001 9:25 a.m.

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.