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 , this is 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". Furthermore, the soldiers killed in Israel, of course, died in valor, defending their people and country.
Here we are, 60 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 Hizbollah 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 Hizbollah rockets. On the other front, Palestinians tossing rocks at soldiers in the 1980s 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, then the Jews deserved it. The Israeli media continues to be the occupied territory of Israel's extremist Left; the Independence Day issue of Haaretz 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 writer 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 longer any 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?
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 , this is 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". Furthermore, the soldiers killed in Israel, of course, died in valor, defending their people and country.
Here we are, 60 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 Hizbollah 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 Hizbollah rockets. On the other front, Palestinians tossing rocks at soldiers in the 1980s 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, then the Jews deserved it. The Israeli media continues to be the occupied territory of Israel's extremist Left; the Independence Day issue of Haaretz 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 writer 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 longer any 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?