For the past fourteen years, Israeli governmental policy has been governing by adgravophilia.
Adgravophilia comes from the Latin root adgravo, which means making things worse. The whole word means the love of making things deteriorate and worsen. For fourteen years, Israeli government policy has been dominated by a passionate desire to make things worse.
Adgravophilia was adopted in what, we now know, was probably the most successful moment in Israel's history, certainly the most successful moment since 1973. By 1989, the pogroms and anti-Jewish atrocities that have become known as the "First Intifada" had largely been suppressed. Violent incidents were declining by the month. Yasser Arafat and his creatures were off in distant Tunis. Israel's economy was doing phenomenally well and prosperity was growing. A large wave of Jewish immigration from the ex-Soviet states was boosting Israel economically, morally and socially. The PLO leadership were persona non grata, not only for Israel, but also for the US. There was agreement with Washington that the PLO would never be a partner in any future negotiations and that the most Palestinians would ever get would be fully-demilitarized "limited autonomy". In retrospect, it was among the happiest and most secure times in Israel's history.
But by 1992, into this near idyllic situation came the adgravophilia of the Israeli Labor party. It insisted that things were just god-awful bad in the Middle East. After all, there were Palestinian guttersnipes throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip and in some parts of the West Bank, and injuring soldiers. Sometimes other acts of violence would occur, knifings and shootings. "Things could not possibly be worse!" Labor insisted. So children throwing rocks at troops in Gaza were swapped for buses full of Israeli children being blown to bits in Haifa and Jerusalem.
Adgravophilia feeds on human ignorance and on the human weakness that always finds it so difficult to imagine things getting any worse than they already are. But the inability to imagine things far worse than they are is a symptom of the poverty of the human imagination and not a rational way for dealing with the world.
For many years, people have been trying to represent the Middle East conflict as a manifestation of assorted games of strategy, from chess, to "chicken", to Indian wrestling. The Israeli Labor party decided to deal with the situation via Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up. Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up is where a player unhappy with his cards simply throws them all on the floor. The problem, of course, is that there is no reason to think that this improves things. In the case of the Oslo version of the Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up, it turned a near-idyllic situation having some unpleasant wrinkles into the twenty-first century version of the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Now, in 2004, one thousand five hundred Oslo-murdered Israelis later, and Israel's very existence under greater threat than ever, we sit and rub our eyes in disbelief at the astronomical stupidity of Israeli leaders in 1992, thinking that things could not possibly get worse.
Yitzchak Rabin and Shimon Peres tossed all 52 cards onto the floor and launched the greatest round of adgravophilia in Israeli history, and possibly the worst in all of human history. They turned Arafat and his stormtroopers from distant pariahs into legitimized players and holders of an acknowledged claim to statehood. They armed and bankrolled the terrorists and set them up in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They placed PLO missile crews within shooting distance of Ben-Gurion Airport. They rewarded every atrocity by the PLO and its affiliates with new offers of Israeli generosity.
In part, the Laborites persuaded Israelis to play Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up by arguing that it was simply a revocable or reversible experiment. One of the hardest lessons we have all learned over the past 14 years has been that there are no such things in Israel as "experiments". Any "experiment" is in fact an irreversible set of concessions and capitulations, which establishes faits accompli that Israel will be prevented from renouncing.
Adgravophilia invariably produces a ratchet effect, by which things that used to be unthinkable get "tried" in a temporary "experiment" and then can never be recalled. As soon as they are "tested", the United States decrees that no backing off from the "experiment" is permissible. No matter how many times the PLO has violated its Oslo commitments, no matter how many atrocities the PLO rank and file carry out under the direct orders of the PLO leadership, the United States will take the full range of previous Israeli unilateral gestures as the starting point for demands for new Israeli concessions in the next round. And every goodwill measure by Israel, every generous concession or act of Israeli restraint, will immediately trigger European attacks and attempts to delegitimize Israel altogether and undermine Israel's right to exist.
Labor party adgravophilia was accompanied by other political innovations as well. Every act of tomfoolery by the Labor leaders was accompanied by massive media manipulation, large billboards springing up all by themselves, bumper stickers flooding the country, and huge ads by non-existent leftist "peace groups" financed by overseas ill-wishers, all proclaiming that there is no just alternative to adopting the proposal on the table that would, of course, make things worse. Then, as soon as the public was seeing things actually getting worse, the Labor party would insist that this is because their plan had not been fully implemented skillfully enough yet, or that those murderous anti-Oslo inciters were creating obstacles.
If adgravophilia was first introduced as a Labor party innovation in the Oslo game of Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up in 1992, the Likud was not far behind in buying into it, with all 52 of its cards. Now, in late 2004, the Likud under Ariel Sharon is advocating and implementing policies that, 16 years earlier, were solely endorsed by the Israeli Arab-dominated communist party, and unambiguously opposed by the Zionist consensus stretching from Right to Left. Every symptom of the adgravophilic disease has been aggravated, as the Likud has followed the Labor party lead in making things worse.
Resenting this up-staging, the Labor party and the Left keep trying to come up with newer plans, even more dramatically adgravophilic, such as the Beilin "Geneva Plan" or the Ayalon-Nusseibah "Plan". Leftists even more adgravophilic than the Laborites are now touting the "one-state solution", under which a single Arab-dominated state will encompass all of Israel and "Palestine", and the Jews will be invited to experience a second Holocaust.
[Part 1 of 2]
[This article first appeared in Outpost of December 2004, published by Americans For a Safe Israel.]
Adgravophilia comes from the Latin root adgravo, which means making things worse. The whole word means the love of making things deteriorate and worsen. For fourteen years, Israeli government policy has been dominated by a passionate desire to make things worse.
Adgravophilia was adopted in what, we now know, was probably the most successful moment in Israel's history, certainly the most successful moment since 1973. By 1989, the pogroms and anti-Jewish atrocities that have become known as the "First Intifada" had largely been suppressed. Violent incidents were declining by the month. Yasser Arafat and his creatures were off in distant Tunis. Israel's economy was doing phenomenally well and prosperity was growing. A large wave of Jewish immigration from the ex-Soviet states was boosting Israel economically, morally and socially. The PLO leadership were persona non grata, not only for Israel, but also for the US. There was agreement with Washington that the PLO would never be a partner in any future negotiations and that the most Palestinians would ever get would be fully-demilitarized "limited autonomy". In retrospect, it was among the happiest and most secure times in Israel's history.
But by 1992, into this near idyllic situation came the adgravophilia of the Israeli Labor party. It insisted that things were just god-awful bad in the Middle East. After all, there were Palestinian guttersnipes throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip and in some parts of the West Bank, and injuring soldiers. Sometimes other acts of violence would occur, knifings and shootings. "Things could not possibly be worse!" Labor insisted. So children throwing rocks at troops in Gaza were swapped for buses full of Israeli children being blown to bits in Haifa and Jerusalem.
Adgravophilia feeds on human ignorance and on the human weakness that always finds it so difficult to imagine things getting any worse than they already are. But the inability to imagine things far worse than they are is a symptom of the poverty of the human imagination and not a rational way for dealing with the world.
For many years, people have been trying to represent the Middle East conflict as a manifestation of assorted games of strategy, from chess, to "chicken", to Indian wrestling. The Israeli Labor party decided to deal with the situation via Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up. Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up is where a player unhappy with his cards simply throws them all on the floor. The problem, of course, is that there is no reason to think that this improves things. In the case of the Oslo version of the Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up, it turned a near-idyllic situation having some unpleasant wrinkles into the twenty-first century version of the Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Now, in 2004, one thousand five hundred Oslo-murdered Israelis later, and Israel's very existence under greater threat than ever, we sit and rub our eyes in disbelief at the astronomical stupidity of Israeli leaders in 1992, thinking that things could not possibly get worse.
Yitzchak Rabin and Shimon Peres tossed all 52 cards onto the floor and launched the greatest round of adgravophilia in Israeli history, and possibly the worst in all of human history. They turned Arafat and his stormtroopers from distant pariahs into legitimized players and holders of an acknowledged claim to statehood. They armed and bankrolled the terrorists and set them up in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. They placed PLO missile crews within shooting distance of Ben-Gurion Airport. They rewarded every atrocity by the PLO and its affiliates with new offers of Israeli generosity.
In part, the Laborites persuaded Israelis to play Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up by arguing that it was simply a revocable or reversible experiment. One of the hardest lessons we have all learned over the past 14 years has been that there are no such things in Israel as "experiments". Any "experiment" is in fact an irreversible set of concessions and capitulations, which establishes faits accompli that Israel will be prevented from renouncing.
Adgravophilia invariably produces a ratchet effect, by which things that used to be unthinkable get "tried" in a temporary "experiment" and then can never be recalled. As soon as they are "tested", the United States decrees that no backing off from the "experiment" is permissible. No matter how many times the PLO has violated its Oslo commitments, no matter how many atrocities the PLO rank and file carry out under the direct orders of the PLO leadership, the United States will take the full range of previous Israeli unilateral gestures as the starting point for demands for new Israeli concessions in the next round. And every goodwill measure by Israel, every generous concession or act of Israeli restraint, will immediately trigger European attacks and attempts to delegitimize Israel altogether and undermine Israel's right to exist.
Labor party adgravophilia was accompanied by other political innovations as well. Every act of tomfoolery by the Labor leaders was accompanied by massive media manipulation, large billboards springing up all by themselves, bumper stickers flooding the country, and huge ads by non-existent leftist "peace groups" financed by overseas ill-wishers, all proclaiming that there is no just alternative to adopting the proposal on the table that would, of course, make things worse. Then, as soon as the public was seeing things actually getting worse, the Labor party would insist that this is because their plan had not been fully implemented skillfully enough yet, or that those murderous anti-Oslo inciters were creating obstacles.
If adgravophilia was first introduced as a Labor party innovation in the Oslo game of Fifty-Two-Card-Pick-Up in 1992, the Likud was not far behind in buying into it, with all 52 of its cards. Now, in late 2004, the Likud under Ariel Sharon is advocating and implementing policies that, 16 years earlier, were solely endorsed by the Israeli Arab-dominated communist party, and unambiguously opposed by the Zionist consensus stretching from Right to Left. Every symptom of the adgravophilic disease has been aggravated, as the Likud has followed the Labor party lead in making things worse.
Resenting this up-staging, the Labor party and the Left keep trying to come up with newer plans, even more dramatically adgravophilic, such as the Beilin "Geneva Plan" or the Ayalon-Nusseibah "Plan". Leftists even more adgravophilic than the Laborites are now touting the "one-state solution", under which a single Arab-dominated state will encompass all of Israel and "Palestine", and the Jews will be invited to experience a second Holocaust.
[Part 1 of 2]
[This article first appeared in Outpost of December 2004, published by Americans For a Safe Israel.]