[Parts one and two of this article can be read at http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=4286 and http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=4289, respectively.]
Israel is entitled, in view of the importance of having at least one Jewish state (compared with 22 states, for the one Arab nation, as the Arabs themselves never tire of repeating), to constitutionally enshrine in law that Israel shall forever be a Jewish state. In the name of this supreme value, Israel can take corrective actions that are not always utopia-democratic, but this is what all other nations do in the real world. Refusing to recognize this less-than-utopia democracy with respect to the Jews only, this anti-Zionism, is by definition anti-Semitic. It singles out the Jew, as indeed was recognized by Martin Luther King.
One such corrective action is the limitation of decision-making on the national level to Jews only. This applies all the more if we invoke the well-proven Muslim, and in particular Arab, intolerance to Jewish sovereignty in a territory of any size.
Indeed, the empirically proven failure of the Oslo conception of Shimon Peres comes from his lack of recognition that better economic and educational status will not compete with the inherent Muslim intolerance of the notion of any Jewish sovereignty. The failure of the Peres Oslo conception is demonstrated in the "paradox" that even in countries at "peace" with Israel, Jordan and Egypt, it is the organizations of journalists, actors, doctors, engineers, etc., that are the most virulently anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.
I recall a supposedly secular urbane Palestinian journalist working for CNN extolling on the waves of the BBC the virtue of life for Jews under Islam, but the mask fell when he said that the normal situation was exemplified in the Jews living in the Old city of Jerusalem asking the Turkish Sultan for permission to settle out of the walls of the Jerusalem. According to him, Jews should always ask permission of a Muslim authority before any "independent" act. This is the normal Muslim mentality according to which Jews can only be a second rate (dhimmi), tolerated, humiliated - when not massacred - minority. Even if there is a Muslim-Arab that thinks otherwise, he would soon be intimidated to shut up.
Again, every Israeli can find out that this is indeed the situation by simply asking his Muslim neighbour if he thinks that a state with a dominant Jewish culture is justified. It is the Left's persistent ignoring of this fundamental intolerance in the Muslim-Arab mentality that creates the wishful thinking that led to the catastrophe of Olso.
This mentality is sometimes concealed to obtain the next concession. But it is easy to recognize it if one follows the intra-Arab utterings. Every concession of Israel is cashed in for the final showdown. It is the Israeli Left's refusal to see that peace in this part of the world can only be based on deterrence that now endangers the very existence of the only Jewish state.
A typical reflection of this blindness of the Left in recognizing unpleasant reality is the idea that the referendum on the uprooting in Gaza and northern Shomron should include the very same Arabs that objected and object to the Israeli declaration of independence in 1948. In 15 years, Israeli Arabs will be 30% of the country. What if then they and the Israeli Left will decide to abolish the dominant Jewish nature of Israel? And later still, the Jews of Palestine will turn into dhimmis in yet another Arab totalitarian state, as a prelude to the final massacre. If Israel will not constitutionally anticipate this eventuality when there is still time, the end of the Jewish state, not to mention the final massacre, is very much in sight. And like in the days of Hitler, the leftists and their descendants who helped to create this situation will not be spared.
The so-called liberal, progressive Left, which is in fact gauchiste de salon, was always afflicted by a fixation on one utopic slogan or concept, which created a mental inflexibility disabling them from enlarging their universe of discourse to see other aspects of reality. When they fixated on Stalin, they were not able to see the atrocities he committed. The current romance is with extreme Muslim terrorist fanatics, so they are unable to demonstrate against the atrocities committed, with the full support and participation of a Muslim government, against the natives in the Sudan, for instance. Their fixation on utopic democracy disables them from seeing the overriding value of securing one Jewish state in Palestine.
Typically, Moshe Hanegbi, a leading Israeli legal commentator, is not able to refer to the fact that the very preservation of a democracy requires at times the curtailment of some democratic rights. In his analysis, there is never a concession to the fact that democracy at war is not the same as democracy at peace. Not to mention his focusing, like the rest of the Voice of Israel personnel, on the danger the settlers pose to democracy while completely ignoring the undemocratic conduct of Ariel Sharon.
Israel is sometimes compared to South Africa's apartheid. But in the apartheid regime, there were rules, issued by the state itself, which would be the equivalent of the Israeli authorities not allowing Arabs and Jews to marry, to share the same benches in public parks, to use the same pubs, to work in the same lab in the Hebrew University, to sit in the same bus in peacetime (liberal Israel allows Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews to travel in the same buses, even though it is Arabs only that provide the suicide bombers, and in some cases Israeli Arabs are among the perpetrators). One could compare the segregation period in the south of the US to apartheid, but to take preventive measures of security and self-defense, or measures to secure the dominant Jewish nature of Israel, and to label them apartheid, is yet another Orwellian abuse of language. On the other hand, during World War II, the British locked up Jewish refugees from Hitler and exposed them to perilous journeys to Australia and Canada just because they escaped from German-speaking countries, and the US arrested American citizens of Japanese origin.
As to requirement (B) in Part I hereof, every Israeli can verify that his neighbours think that there is something illegal from the point of view of international law in Israeli settlements and therefore, so the conventional wisdom goes, the more Israeli settlements will be dismantled, the more we shall be loved in the world. The Israeli leftist elite that has infiltrated to gain total control of the legal system, the media and many of the government positions (on the principle that a friend brings a friend), and acting as Lenin's "fools" or because it is bribed, has an interest to perpetuate this false belief of the man in the street, so that the uprooting can be accomplished with a semblance of democracy and without public outcry.
A striking example of this involved the Voice of Israel director who was reluctant to provide a counterpoint to Dr. Alon Liel's labeling of the settlements "illegal", saying, many months before the uprooting plan in Gaza and Shomron was raised, that the Voice of Israel cannot comply with this request. "We have to prepare the nation for the uprooting of settlements," he explained to me. Combining this with similar incidents (such as a conversation with Dov Weisglass in 2001 in which he remained unresponsive to my appeal that the legality of the settlements be taught and asserted), it is hard to avoid the conclusion that in Israel the value of objective truth, as a value in itself, and a basis of rational decision-making and hasbara, is non-existent.
The situation is reminiscent of the Soviet Union, where there were various versions of the newspaper Pravda, but only the Communist elite got the real truth. Objective truth was restricted to the elite and concealed from the rest. The effort of the elite and its subservient newspapers and electronic media in the nineties to conceal from the Israeli public the Palestinian infractions of the Oslo Accords and the continuation of Palestinian and other Arab incitement against Jews is another case in point of this approach.
But what is the point of holding periodic elections if the information needed to effect such election is actively concealed from the public, and a policy diametrically opposed to the one declared before the election is implemented immediately after the election? Israel now is only a facade of a democracy, pretending to go through the motions. But then, only in Israel can the editorials and various professional writers of Haaretz, "the newspaper for thinking people", the Israeli Guardian or Le Monde, write in public that Sharon may well be personally corrupt and his conduct undemocratic, but this should be ignored as long as he carries out the uprooting policy. Again, in a world where there is no "objective truth", there is also no "objective justice".
This article has focused on the legitimacy of the Sharon-Olmert uprooting plan in Gaza and northern Shomron. But it should be clear that the "agreement" of the Sharon government to the Road Map (despite the objection to a "Palestine state" in a special vote in the Likud party and that such a state is rejected in the Likud's manifesto) is illegitimate since it suffers from the same lack of fulfillment of the four gifting requirements described above. This lack of legitimacy makes it invalid for the Quartet to ask Israel to fulfill its obligations according to the Road Map. The gifting involved in accepting the Road Map is illegitimate not only because the Jewish public is unaware of its rights and was not consulted in a multistage procedure as described above, but a gifting under duress is invalid.
There should be no doubt that the Road Map involves gifting away Jewish national rights. According to international law as expressed in the Palestine Mandate of the League of Nations, all empty spaces (which are not privately owned) in Judea, Jerusalem, Samaria and Gaza are to be allocated for dense Jewish settlement, and it is the duty of the Israeli government and the international community to encourage and facilitate this Jewish settlement. This is incompatible with the Road Map, unless a proper procedure of gifting away of Jewish national rights has preceded the acceptance of the Road Map.
In the end, however, some, like David Ben-Gurion, take the view that no generation of Jews has the right even to consider giving away Jewish national rights. He said: "No Jew has the right to yield the rights of the Jewish People in Israel. No Jew has the authority to do so. No Jewish body has the authority to do so. Not even the entire Jewish People alive today has the right to yield any part of Israel."
Israel is entitled, in view of the importance of having at least one Jewish state (compared with 22 states, for the one Arab nation, as the Arabs themselves never tire of repeating), to constitutionally enshrine in law that Israel shall forever be a Jewish state. In the name of this supreme value, Israel can take corrective actions that are not always utopia-democratic, but this is what all other nations do in the real world. Refusing to recognize this less-than-utopia democracy with respect to the Jews only, this anti-Zionism, is by definition anti-Semitic. It singles out the Jew, as indeed was recognized by Martin Luther King.
One such corrective action is the limitation of decision-making on the national level to Jews only. This applies all the more if we invoke the well-proven Muslim, and in particular Arab, intolerance to Jewish sovereignty in a territory of any size.
Indeed, the empirically proven failure of the Oslo conception of Shimon Peres comes from his lack of recognition that better economic and educational status will not compete with the inherent Muslim intolerance of the notion of any Jewish sovereignty. The failure of the Peres Oslo conception is demonstrated in the "paradox" that even in countries at "peace" with Israel, Jordan and Egypt, it is the organizations of journalists, actors, doctors, engineers, etc., that are the most virulently anti-Israel and anti-Jewish.
I recall a supposedly secular urbane Palestinian journalist working for CNN extolling on the waves of the BBC the virtue of life for Jews under Islam, but the mask fell when he said that the normal situation was exemplified in the Jews living in the Old city of Jerusalem asking the Turkish Sultan for permission to settle out of the walls of the Jerusalem. According to him, Jews should always ask permission of a Muslim authority before any "independent" act. This is the normal Muslim mentality according to which Jews can only be a second rate (dhimmi), tolerated, humiliated - when not massacred - minority. Even if there is a Muslim-Arab that thinks otherwise, he would soon be intimidated to shut up.
Again, every Israeli can find out that this is indeed the situation by simply asking his Muslim neighbour if he thinks that a state with a dominant Jewish culture is justified. It is the Left's persistent ignoring of this fundamental intolerance in the Muslim-Arab mentality that creates the wishful thinking that led to the catastrophe of Olso.
This mentality is sometimes concealed to obtain the next concession. But it is easy to recognize it if one follows the intra-Arab utterings. Every concession of Israel is cashed in for the final showdown. It is the Israeli Left's refusal to see that peace in this part of the world can only be based on deterrence that now endangers the very existence of the only Jewish state.
A typical reflection of this blindness of the Left in recognizing unpleasant reality is the idea that the referendum on the uprooting in Gaza and northern Shomron should include the very same Arabs that objected and object to the Israeli declaration of independence in 1948. In 15 years, Israeli Arabs will be 30% of the country. What if then they and the Israeli Left will decide to abolish the dominant Jewish nature of Israel? And later still, the Jews of Palestine will turn into dhimmis in yet another Arab totalitarian state, as a prelude to the final massacre. If Israel will not constitutionally anticipate this eventuality when there is still time, the end of the Jewish state, not to mention the final massacre, is very much in sight. And like in the days of Hitler, the leftists and their descendants who helped to create this situation will not be spared.
The so-called liberal, progressive Left, which is in fact gauchiste de salon, was always afflicted by a fixation on one utopic slogan or concept, which created a mental inflexibility disabling them from enlarging their universe of discourse to see other aspects of reality. When they fixated on Stalin, they were not able to see the atrocities he committed. The current romance is with extreme Muslim terrorist fanatics, so they are unable to demonstrate against the atrocities committed, with the full support and participation of a Muslim government, against the natives in the Sudan, for instance. Their fixation on utopic democracy disables them from seeing the overriding value of securing one Jewish state in Palestine.
Typically, Moshe Hanegbi, a leading Israeli legal commentator, is not able to refer to the fact that the very preservation of a democracy requires at times the curtailment of some democratic rights. In his analysis, there is never a concession to the fact that democracy at war is not the same as democracy at peace. Not to mention his focusing, like the rest of the Voice of Israel personnel, on the danger the settlers pose to democracy while completely ignoring the undemocratic conduct of Ariel Sharon.
Israel is sometimes compared to South Africa's apartheid. But in the apartheid regime, there were rules, issued by the state itself, which would be the equivalent of the Israeli authorities not allowing Arabs and Jews to marry, to share the same benches in public parks, to use the same pubs, to work in the same lab in the Hebrew University, to sit in the same bus in peacetime (liberal Israel allows Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews to travel in the same buses, even though it is Arabs only that provide the suicide bombers, and in some cases Israeli Arabs are among the perpetrators). One could compare the segregation period in the south of the US to apartheid, but to take preventive measures of security and self-defense, or measures to secure the dominant Jewish nature of Israel, and to label them apartheid, is yet another Orwellian abuse of language. On the other hand, during World War II, the British locked up Jewish refugees from Hitler and exposed them to perilous journeys to Australia and Canada just because they escaped from German-speaking countries, and the US arrested American citizens of Japanese origin.
As to requirement (B) in Part I hereof, every Israeli can verify that his neighbours think that there is something illegal from the point of view of international law in Israeli settlements and therefore, so the conventional wisdom goes, the more Israeli settlements will be dismantled, the more we shall be loved in the world. The Israeli leftist elite that has infiltrated to gain total control of the legal system, the media and many of the government positions (on the principle that a friend brings a friend), and acting as Lenin's "fools" or because it is bribed, has an interest to perpetuate this false belief of the man in the street, so that the uprooting can be accomplished with a semblance of democracy and without public outcry.
A striking example of this involved the Voice of Israel director who was reluctant to provide a counterpoint to Dr. Alon Liel's labeling of the settlements "illegal", saying, many months before the uprooting plan in Gaza and Shomron was raised, that the Voice of Israel cannot comply with this request. "We have to prepare the nation for the uprooting of settlements," he explained to me. Combining this with similar incidents (such as a conversation with Dov Weisglass in 2001 in which he remained unresponsive to my appeal that the legality of the settlements be taught and asserted), it is hard to avoid the conclusion that in Israel the value of objective truth, as a value in itself, and a basis of rational decision-making and hasbara, is non-existent.
The situation is reminiscent of the Soviet Union, where there were various versions of the newspaper Pravda, but only the Communist elite got the real truth. Objective truth was restricted to the elite and concealed from the rest. The effort of the elite and its subservient newspapers and electronic media in the nineties to conceal from the Israeli public the Palestinian infractions of the Oslo Accords and the continuation of Palestinian and other Arab incitement against Jews is another case in point of this approach.
But what is the point of holding periodic elections if the information needed to effect such election is actively concealed from the public, and a policy diametrically opposed to the one declared before the election is implemented immediately after the election? Israel now is only a facade of a democracy, pretending to go through the motions. But then, only in Israel can the editorials and various professional writers of Haaretz, "the newspaper for thinking people", the Israeli Guardian or Le Monde, write in public that Sharon may well be personally corrupt and his conduct undemocratic, but this should be ignored as long as he carries out the uprooting policy. Again, in a world where there is no "objective truth", there is also no "objective justice".
This article has focused on the legitimacy of the Sharon-Olmert uprooting plan in Gaza and northern Shomron. But it should be clear that the "agreement" of the Sharon government to the Road Map (despite the objection to a "Palestine state" in a special vote in the Likud party and that such a state is rejected in the Likud's manifesto) is illegitimate since it suffers from the same lack of fulfillment of the four gifting requirements described above. This lack of legitimacy makes it invalid for the Quartet to ask Israel to fulfill its obligations according to the Road Map. The gifting involved in accepting the Road Map is illegitimate not only because the Jewish public is unaware of its rights and was not consulted in a multistage procedure as described above, but a gifting under duress is invalid.
There should be no doubt that the Road Map involves gifting away Jewish national rights. According to international law as expressed in the Palestine Mandate of the League of Nations, all empty spaces (which are not privately owned) in Judea, Jerusalem, Samaria and Gaza are to be allocated for dense Jewish settlement, and it is the duty of the Israeli government and the international community to encourage and facilitate this Jewish settlement. This is incompatible with the Road Map, unless a proper procedure of gifting away of Jewish national rights has preceded the acceptance of the Road Map.
In the end, however, some, like David Ben-Gurion, take the view that no generation of Jews has the right even to consider giving away Jewish national rights. He said: "No Jew has the right to yield the rights of the Jewish People in Israel. No Jew has the authority to do so. No Jewish body has the authority to do so. Not even the entire Jewish People alive today has the right to yield any part of Israel."