Courage and Honor

Is it a Jewish flaw or merely human frailty that spawned Israel's policy of "land for peace" - a policy that has soaked the Land of Israel in Jewish blood? Some say this policy is animated by a Jewish death wish or by Jewish self-hatred, but "land for peace" as a policy of appeasement is not a Jewish idea.

President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia was not Jewish; yet, despite the heavily fortified - some experts say impregnable - Sudetenland, he succumbed to that spineless policy of appeasement at Munich. The truth is unpleasant: "land for peace" - the policy of Israel's ruling elites - signifies little more than cowardice, a human frailty. This frailty may be more prevalent among Jews whose modern psyche, tainted by egalitarianism, is oblivious to the aristocratic virtue Nietzsche called the "pathos of distance".

Israel's ruling elites, therefore, lack not only courage, but also its cousin, the sense of honor. It is this dual deficiency that produced the policy of "land for peace", which translates into the inane policy of "land for nothing", otherwise known as "unilateral disengagement". The "policy of the brave" is, in truth, the "policy of cowards".

A word about courage. In Plato's Apology, Socrates teaches us that courage is a precondition of wisdom. The coward, rather than stand up for truth, prefers to be "politically correct". His self-abasement, his lack of honor, makes him a liar.

A word about honor. Honor is not "prestige". Honor depends more on self-respect than on the favorable opinion of others. The source of honor is respect for truth (so lacking among Israel's ruling elites). Honor demands more than truthfulness. Alfred North Whitehead saw that "truthfulness as an element of one's own self-respect issues from a reverence for Reason in its own right," hence, for truth in its own right.

In Israel, politicians devoid of honor readily succumb to imbecility, such as releasing and arming Arab terrorists - Jew-killers - to protect Jews. The Oslo Agreement will go down in history as the pinnacle of diplomatic fatuity. This mindless agreement has murdered 1,600 Jews and shattered the lives of tens of thousands more. And there is no end in sight. Leaving aside the complicity of Israel's ruling elites in the criminal consequences of Oslo, here I only want to expose the principal vice of these elites.

I am fed up with the obscurantism of "post-Zionism", which tells us nothing of the character of the elites. Those who have foisted the policy of "land for peace" on the people of Israel are not mere ignoramuses. They are not mindless of Islamic history - a history punctuated by the plunder and destruction of so many Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian and Hindu communities and the slaughter of untold millions of "infidels". They know that Israel is surrounded by a "culture of hate". Day after day, year after year, the people of this culture have shed Jewish blood. Israel's ruling elites are not living in denial. They know what is being taught in Muslim schools and mosques, that a generation of Arab children have been trained to emulate suicide bombers. They know that the successors of the Nazis are dedicated to Israel's annihilation.

Despite their country's awesome military power, Israel's ruling elites lack the courage, and the wisdom, to do what the genocidal intentions of the Arabs require them to do: act with a view to conquering their enemies. Steeped in cowardice, they succumb to the absurdity of surrendering Jewish land to a gang of murderous scoundrels. This cowardice applies not only to the parties of willful appeasement and its leader, who knows nothing of honor; it also applies to the parties of reluctant appeasement, to all parties in the Knesset - secular and religious - whose poltroons advocate "reciprocity" or territorial compromise, with or without a national referendum. They too lack honor. We are dealing here with flawed human beings, secular as well as religious.

It's not their minds that have gone astray so much as their hearts. They are "men without chests". Desperately needed are men of valor and honor; above all, men who love the God of Israel and who therefore hate, as the Psalmist hated, His enemies. Only let such men unite on behalf of Israel's sacred cause and the future will be ours.