[Parts one and two of this article can be read at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=4181 and http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=4187, respectively.]
Jewish Self-Hatred and the Oslo Debacle
The most fundamental question for this new post-Oslo era requiring clear answers is how Israel could have allowed itself to pursue the Oslo peace process in the first place. The answers are very likely to point to the central role of Jewish anti-Semitism and self-hatred.
The great mystery about the Oslo "peace process" is not why it failed, which by now should be fairly obvious to anyone besides fundamentalist theocratic leftists, but why anyone in Israel could have been persuaded in the first place that it might succeed. Secular Zionism was supposed to "normalize" the Jewish people. I do not believe that the Oslo Debacle can be explained without noting the role of Jewish anti-Semitism in its implementation.
In the 1990s, we observed the leaders of Israel from the Labor Party, together with the more radical elements within the Israeli Left, insisting that peaceful relations with the Arabs could only be achieved through a long process of Jewish self-deprecation, self-denial and self-humiliation. Israel's political elite claimed that peace could be achieved through Israel agreeing to turn over its heartland to terrorists, that security could be achieved by the abandonment of security and by Israel distancing itself from its own Jewish roots. They insisted throughout the 1990s that if only Israel would jettison its traditional defense policies and instead trust to the goodwill that would be generated by making concessions to the Palestinians, the Jordanians and the Syrians, then peace would break out. They convinced themselves that military force was obsolete and played no further role; this, in the most barbarous region of the planet. They convinced themselves that peace could only be achieved through appeasement of evil and accommodation of anti-Semitism.
In the early 1990s, Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership were far off in Tunisia, whither they had been banished as a result of the devastatingly victorious, if highly controversial, Israeli military campaign in Lebanon in 1982. The world - or at least the United States - had made its peace with the Israeli position that the PLO was not an acceptable partner in any Arab-Israeli peace talks and that the most that Palestinian Arabs could hope for would be a limited autonomy in parts of the "occupied territories", with no role for the PLO.
The intifada violence that had begun in the late 1980s was essentially finished, with less and less incidents by the month, and with terrorists so desperate for materiel that they were concocting their own zip guns out of household materials, with Palestinian explosives far more likely to kill its handler than anyone else. True, Israeli troops were harassed by Palestinians throwing rocks, but this was a harassment that could have been ended at any time through a firmer response, albeit one with some fleeting public relations costs. The rock-throwing generally threatened neither the soldiers nor the existence of the state of Israel.
But into this picture of near-pastoral tranquility came the Oslo "peace process" and snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory. It was based upon the proposition that economic interests and consumerism had replaced military power as the determinants of international relations in the post-modern world. It sought to reduce tensions with the Palestinian Arabs, who had just been defeated in their intifada, by importing the PLO's leadership into the "occupied territories" and then allowing it to arm itself and build up an army in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The Israeli government provided many thousands of rifles and enormous bankrolls to Palestinian terrorists sworn to destroying the country.
Seven years after the "peace process" had begun, Prime Minister Ehud Barak was negotiating handing over to the PLO the Old City of Jerusalem, including control over the Western Wall, in addition to slabs of pre-1967 Israeli territory in the Negev -- all this while the PLO murdered Jews every day. The PLO's response to this obsequiousness was to launch a war against Israel in the form of the "Al-Aqsa Intifada".
Today, as a direct result of the imposition of Oslo by the Leftist Ascendancy in Israel, the army of tens of thousands of PLO soldiers possesses anti-aircraft missiles that threaten Israeli civilian and military air traffic. About 1,400 Israelis have been murdered as a direct result of the implementation of the policies of the Left, with tens of thousands of other lives broken and embittered. An entire generation of Israeli Jewish children has been traumatized. The PLO terrorists now possess anti-tank weapons, Kassam rockets and Katyusha missiles. They have shelled civilian areas inside pre-1967 Israel. The Gaza Strip is today a large mortar and explosives factory.
The goodwill measures of Israel have produced a campaign of Nazi-like hatred led by the PLO, of which the world has seen no parallel since the 1940s, down to and including virulent Holocaust Denial accompanied by Holocaust justification (never mind the contradiction).
Every single prediction by the pro-Oslo camp has proved itself incorrect and every single warning by the opponents of Oslo has proved itself correct. The PLO was never interested in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict through compromise. That was a delusion of Israel's politicians. "Land for peace" was always a formula for peace that the Israeli elite insisted the Arabs accepted, but never something to which the Arabs themselves agreed. The PLO's ambition in establishing itself in the West Bank and Gaza was simply to use those areas as staging grounds for attacks against Israel, precisely as the demonized opponents of Oslo had predicted. These terror attacks are in the hope of ultimately drawing the Arab countries into a new full-scale Arab-Israeli war, possibly one involving weapons of mass destruction.
The fact that leftist politics in Israel is more theology than ideology should be evident to all in the response by the Left to the countless proofs that its thinking before 1992 was completely incorrect. In the early 1990s, opponents to Oslo were demonized and declared deluded fanatics, people who simply hated peace. History has proven these "fanatics" not only correct, but downright optimistic.
Today, the Israeli Left responds to each and every atrocity by demanding that Israel continue to seek to appease its way to a peace accord. The Left is insisting that new formulas and new concessions be offered, so that - at long last - a "permanent deal" can be signed with Arafat and his stormtroopers. The strength of the Leftist Ascendancy is evident in the fact that leader after leader from the Likud has agreed to operate within the framework of leftist axioms and "thinking", down to and including repeated unilateral ceasefires, offers of unilateral "withdrawals" and endless "goodwill gestures". The power of leftist theology is so strong that even Likud governments seek to implement its policies of "peace through appeasement", wherein the preferred strategy for dealing with terror is concessions and niceness, rather than harshness and the utilization of armed force.
The Leftist Ascendancy indubitably lies behind the cognitive dissonance that characterizes Israelis at the beginning of the twenty-first century, best exhibited in the fact that the vast majority of those who support continuation of the "peace process" also insist they believe that Arafat will follow any deal signed with more terror and more attacks on Israel and that the PLO will violate any future deals it signs.
Future historians will find it a daunting challenge to explain how it could have been that the Jews, often stereotyped as the smartest humans on the planet, with more Nobel Prize winners than any other group, could have allowed themselves to be snookered into the Oslo Accords. How could seemingly intelligent people place their faith in such absurdities? No "normal" people would voluntarily entrust its national security to a group of Islamofascist terrorists and endanger its very existence because of a belief that internet services and consumerism had made defense and territory superfluous. No "nation" on earth would tolerate such a thing. Why did Israelis?
The only possible explanation is that the Israelis who pursued Oslo were not really a "nation". They had never really developed a national consciousness, but had been merely play-acting all along.
In fact, the entire Oslo episode of Jewish history is an indicator not only of the silliness and shallowness of Israeli politicians, but of something far deeper and far more ominous. Very simply stated, the Oslo "peace process" was the byproduct of Israeli self-hatred and Jewish assimilationism inside Zion. And Oslo may very well also indicate that secular Zionism has failed.
The failure of secular Zionism is one and the same as the crisis of "Israeliness". Oslo has shown how shallow and empty is the whole enterprise known as secular "Israeliness". In its bid to replace traditional Jewish identity with civic Israeliness, with Hebrew-speaking consumerism and post-Jewish civil patriotism, secular Zionism has in fact created a bizarre new entity riddled with confusion regarding its own identity, increasingly dominated by defeatists and "post-Zionists" exhibiting virulent self-hatred and self-abasement, willing to blame itself for all of the problems created by Arab aggression and fascism, and all too willing to sacrifice its national interests upon pagan altars of political correctness.
In the nineteenth century, much of the original opposition to Zionism by the religious leaders of Europe was based on their allegation that secular Zionism was thinly-disguised assimilationism dressed up in nationalist symbolism. How ironic it will be if history books record that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first proved them essentially correct.
Much of the problem can be traced to the bankrupt notion that some sort of Israeliness can exist separate from Jewishness. This is the strange form of "assimilationism" that has resulted from the attempt to create a "post-Jewish" Israel. No Israeliness well-anchored in Jewishness could have sanctioned a set of policies based on the proposition that violent anti-Semitism was somehow the fault of the Jews and the result of mistreatment of others by Jews. An Israeliness well-grounded in Jewish consciousness would never have given rise to a struggle for acceptance based upon the presumption that people hate Jews because of Jewish sins, selfishness, shortcomings and misdeeds. Only people detached from and ignorant of Jewish history could have believed that violent anti-Semites can be bought off with promises of high-tech investments and five-star tourist hotels.
Now, in the emerging post-Oslo era, the charade has come to an end. The Leftist Ascendancy and secular Zionist "Israeliness" have undercut the will to survive and very legitimacy of the State of Israel. They are what gave birth to the pathology of self-deception and self-loathing that produced the Oslo phenomenon.
[Part 3 of 3]
Jewish Self-Hatred and the Oslo Debacle
The most fundamental question for this new post-Oslo era requiring clear answers is how Israel could have allowed itself to pursue the Oslo peace process in the first place. The answers are very likely to point to the central role of Jewish anti-Semitism and self-hatred.
The great mystery about the Oslo "peace process" is not why it failed, which by now should be fairly obvious to anyone besides fundamentalist theocratic leftists, but why anyone in Israel could have been persuaded in the first place that it might succeed. Secular Zionism was supposed to "normalize" the Jewish people. I do not believe that the Oslo Debacle can be explained without noting the role of Jewish anti-Semitism in its implementation.
In the 1990s, we observed the leaders of Israel from the Labor Party, together with the more radical elements within the Israeli Left, insisting that peaceful relations with the Arabs could only be achieved through a long process of Jewish self-deprecation, self-denial and self-humiliation. Israel's political elite claimed that peace could be achieved through Israel agreeing to turn over its heartland to terrorists, that security could be achieved by the abandonment of security and by Israel distancing itself from its own Jewish roots. They insisted throughout the 1990s that if only Israel would jettison its traditional defense policies and instead trust to the goodwill that would be generated by making concessions to the Palestinians, the Jordanians and the Syrians, then peace would break out. They convinced themselves that military force was obsolete and played no further role; this, in the most barbarous region of the planet. They convinced themselves that peace could only be achieved through appeasement of evil and accommodation of anti-Semitism.
In the early 1990s, Yasser Arafat and the PLO leadership were far off in Tunisia, whither they had been banished as a result of the devastatingly victorious, if highly controversial, Israeli military campaign in Lebanon in 1982. The world - or at least the United States - had made its peace with the Israeli position that the PLO was not an acceptable partner in any Arab-Israeli peace talks and that the most that Palestinian Arabs could hope for would be a limited autonomy in parts of the "occupied territories", with no role for the PLO.
The intifada violence that had begun in the late 1980s was essentially finished, with less and less incidents by the month, and with terrorists so desperate for materiel that they were concocting their own zip guns out of household materials, with Palestinian explosives far more likely to kill its handler than anyone else. True, Israeli troops were harassed by Palestinians throwing rocks, but this was a harassment that could have been ended at any time through a firmer response, albeit one with some fleeting public relations costs. The rock-throwing generally threatened neither the soldiers nor the existence of the state of Israel.
But into this picture of near-pastoral tranquility came the Oslo "peace process" and snatched defeat out of the jaws of victory. It was based upon the proposition that economic interests and consumerism had replaced military power as the determinants of international relations in the post-modern world. It sought to reduce tensions with the Palestinian Arabs, who had just been defeated in their intifada, by importing the PLO's leadership into the "occupied territories" and then allowing it to arm itself and build up an army in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The Israeli government provided many thousands of rifles and enormous bankrolls to Palestinian terrorists sworn to destroying the country.
Seven years after the "peace process" had begun, Prime Minister Ehud Barak was negotiating handing over to the PLO the Old City of Jerusalem, including control over the Western Wall, in addition to slabs of pre-1967 Israeli territory in the Negev -- all this while the PLO murdered Jews every day. The PLO's response to this obsequiousness was to launch a war against Israel in the form of the "Al-Aqsa Intifada".
Today, as a direct result of the imposition of Oslo by the Leftist Ascendancy in Israel, the army of tens of thousands of PLO soldiers possesses anti-aircraft missiles that threaten Israeli civilian and military air traffic. About 1,400 Israelis have been murdered as a direct result of the implementation of the policies of the Left, with tens of thousands of other lives broken and embittered. An entire generation of Israeli Jewish children has been traumatized. The PLO terrorists now possess anti-tank weapons, Kassam rockets and Katyusha missiles. They have shelled civilian areas inside pre-1967 Israel. The Gaza Strip is today a large mortar and explosives factory.
The goodwill measures of Israel have produced a campaign of Nazi-like hatred led by the PLO, of which the world has seen no parallel since the 1940s, down to and including virulent Holocaust Denial accompanied by Holocaust justification (never mind the contradiction).
Every single prediction by the pro-Oslo camp has proved itself incorrect and every single warning by the opponents of Oslo has proved itself correct. The PLO was never interested in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict through compromise. That was a delusion of Israel's politicians. "Land for peace" was always a formula for peace that the Israeli elite insisted the Arabs accepted, but never something to which the Arabs themselves agreed. The PLO's ambition in establishing itself in the West Bank and Gaza was simply to use those areas as staging grounds for attacks against Israel, precisely as the demonized opponents of Oslo had predicted. These terror attacks are in the hope of ultimately drawing the Arab countries into a new full-scale Arab-Israeli war, possibly one involving weapons of mass destruction.
The fact that leftist politics in Israel is more theology than ideology should be evident to all in the response by the Left to the countless proofs that its thinking before 1992 was completely incorrect. In the early 1990s, opponents to Oslo were demonized and declared deluded fanatics, people who simply hated peace. History has proven these "fanatics" not only correct, but downright optimistic.
Today, the Israeli Left responds to each and every atrocity by demanding that Israel continue to seek to appease its way to a peace accord. The Left is insisting that new formulas and new concessions be offered, so that - at long last - a "permanent deal" can be signed with Arafat and his stormtroopers. The strength of the Leftist Ascendancy is evident in the fact that leader after leader from the Likud has agreed to operate within the framework of leftist axioms and "thinking", down to and including repeated unilateral ceasefires, offers of unilateral "withdrawals" and endless "goodwill gestures". The power of leftist theology is so strong that even Likud governments seek to implement its policies of "peace through appeasement", wherein the preferred strategy for dealing with terror is concessions and niceness, rather than harshness and the utilization of armed force.
The Leftist Ascendancy indubitably lies behind the cognitive dissonance that characterizes Israelis at the beginning of the twenty-first century, best exhibited in the fact that the vast majority of those who support continuation of the "peace process" also insist they believe that Arafat will follow any deal signed with more terror and more attacks on Israel and that the PLO will violate any future deals it signs.
Future historians will find it a daunting challenge to explain how it could have been that the Jews, often stereotyped as the smartest humans on the planet, with more Nobel Prize winners than any other group, could have allowed themselves to be snookered into the Oslo Accords. How could seemingly intelligent people place their faith in such absurdities? No "normal" people would voluntarily entrust its national security to a group of Islamofascist terrorists and endanger its very existence because of a belief that internet services and consumerism had made defense and territory superfluous. No "nation" on earth would tolerate such a thing. Why did Israelis?
The only possible explanation is that the Israelis who pursued Oslo were not really a "nation". They had never really developed a national consciousness, but had been merely play-acting all along.
In fact, the entire Oslo episode of Jewish history is an indicator not only of the silliness and shallowness of Israeli politicians, but of something far deeper and far more ominous. Very simply stated, the Oslo "peace process" was the byproduct of Israeli self-hatred and Jewish assimilationism inside Zion. And Oslo may very well also indicate that secular Zionism has failed.
The failure of secular Zionism is one and the same as the crisis of "Israeliness". Oslo has shown how shallow and empty is the whole enterprise known as secular "Israeliness". In its bid to replace traditional Jewish identity with civic Israeliness, with Hebrew-speaking consumerism and post-Jewish civil patriotism, secular Zionism has in fact created a bizarre new entity riddled with confusion regarding its own identity, increasingly dominated by defeatists and "post-Zionists" exhibiting virulent self-hatred and self-abasement, willing to blame itself for all of the problems created by Arab aggression and fascism, and all too willing to sacrifice its national interests upon pagan altars of political correctness.
In the nineteenth century, much of the original opposition to Zionism by the religious leaders of Europe was based on their allegation that secular Zionism was thinly-disguised assimilationism dressed up in nationalist symbolism. How ironic it will be if history books record that the last decade of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first proved them essentially correct.
Much of the problem can be traced to the bankrupt notion that some sort of Israeliness can exist separate from Jewishness. This is the strange form of "assimilationism" that has resulted from the attempt to create a "post-Jewish" Israel. No Israeliness well-anchored in Jewishness could have sanctioned a set of policies based on the proposition that violent anti-Semitism was somehow the fault of the Jews and the result of mistreatment of others by Jews. An Israeliness well-grounded in Jewish consciousness would never have given rise to a struggle for acceptance based upon the presumption that people hate Jews because of Jewish sins, selfishness, shortcomings and misdeeds. Only people detached from and ignorant of Jewish history could have believed that violent anti-Semites can be bought off with promises of high-tech investments and five-star tourist hotels.
Now, in the emerging post-Oslo era, the charade has come to an end. The Leftist Ascendancy and secular Zionist "Israeliness" have undercut the will to survive and very legitimacy of the State of Israel. They are what gave birth to the pathology of self-deception and self-loathing that produced the Oslo phenomenon.
[Part 3 of 3]