It appears that the Left has chosen amnesia as its primary coping strategy and while this is certainly one mechanism for dealing with trauma, it is not advisable if you are aiming to form the next Israeli government.
Nevertheless, under the misnomers of “Change” and “Hope”, the Left is offering the same tired, old formulas of yesterday, seemingly oblivious to the salient fact that what they are offering has already been tested several times over with fatal outcomes. Israelis have already paid dearly for the fatal mistakes of Oslo and Gaza.
To begin with, Herzog has declared that he wants to return to the negotiation table and he has more than indicated – through his recent mouthpiece Meir Dagan – that he wants to pursue the Arab Peace Initiative. Saudi Arabia came up with this old thing over a decade ago, in 2002, as an attempt to deflect world attention from its involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The gist of it is a return to the pre-1967 borders. Forgetting for a moment that the Arab Peace Initiative is untenable, who is there to negotiate it with?
Well, there is Hamas of course, which will probably not be willing to negotiate anyway, since it wishes only to do its Iranian master’s bidding, which is to erase Israel. This is why Hamas is rebuilding the terror tunnels in Gaza and gearing up for a new and inevitable war. No amount of concessions will prevent that. The Egyptians know that and have recently obtained the word of the Egyptian Supreme Court that Hamas is a terrorist organization that it would be within the constitution for them to bomb. One should also not forget that Egypt demolished close to 1000 houses, rendering 10.000 Palestinians homeless in Rafah with the purpose of augmenting Egypt’s security buffer zone with Gaza. Clearly, our Egyptian neighbors disagree both in theory and in practice with the Left’s negotiation approach and they do so with impunity in the international community.
That leaves the Left’s favorite “moderate” Palestinian, Mahmoud Abbas, the terrorist professor of Holocaust denial. Last week, his Palestinian Authority celebrated the anniversary of the Coastal Road Massacre in which Palestinian terrorists murdered 37 Israeli civilians, by dedicating a monument in a square in Ramallah to the terrorist Dalal Mughrabi, who led the bus hijacking in 1978.
Mughrabi Square is now adorned with a large monument in the shape of what the PA tells its people is "Palestine" - a map that includes all of the State of Israel. In the center of the monument, there is an image of terrorist Mughrabi holding a rifle. PA TV news broadcast the message of a cleric from the event, indicating that the lesson that Palestinians take from the Mughrabi attack is that murder is the way to "liberate the homeland": "Dalal, God bless her, this female Martyr, she taught us how we can liberate the homeland... We all see her as a model and as a symbol for us."
Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party then went on to address Israelis on its Facebook page, telling them to collect the body parts of murdered Israelis and leave Israel.
One wonders what exactly Herzog would discuss with Abbas – how fast he could persuade Israelis to pack up and jump into the sea?
Then there is the unavoidable fact of the emerging hegemony of Iran, which so far has extended its reach from Gaza and Lebanon to Syria, Iraq and most recently Yemen. Iran has declared its intention of wiping Israel off the map ad nauseam for far more than a decade. The Left’s dangerous posturing that Netanyahu is “fearmongering” is preposterous considering that then president Rafsanjani bragged already in December 2001, that Israel was “a one bomb country”, referring to the fact that a single nuclear bomb dropped over Tel Aviv would cause unspeakable damage. As late as November 2014 the Iranian regime tweeted a 9 point plan on Twitter for the destruction of Israel.
Herzog and Livni trust Barack Obama’s administration so much that they would outsource Israel’s security to them.
The missiles, which fell over Israel last summer, were Iranian made. Hamas would be nothing, if it were not for the fact that it is the puppet of Iran, its front post for jihad. The war in Gaza is bound to repeat itself every summer like a horrific ground hog day, until the Iranian puppet is removed.
Similarly, Hezbollah on the borders of Lebanon and Syria is an even more obvious Iran proxy, echoing Iran in its open declaration that it hopes all Jews move to Israel, so that they can put an end to the Jewish presence in the world with “one bomb” as they put it.
Yet, Herzog has proudly declared that he trusts Obama to negotiate a “good deal” with the Iranians. In fact, Herzog and Livni trust Barack Obama’s administration so much that they would outsource Israel’s security to them. There would be no question of standing up to them, as Herzog has already made painfully clear during the period leading up to Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to Congress.
Herzog should be aware, then, that Barack Obama now considers Iran one of his closest allies in the Middle East, trusting Iran to take care of ISIS, while propping up Iran as the future hegemon of the Middle East.
Iran has certainly not been deterred and is thriving and forging ahead with full steam. On Saturday, Iran unveiled its new long-range cruise missiles and announced the launch of their mass production. “Today, we are simultaneously witnessing the launch of the mass production line and the delivery of this strategic and effective missile in the domain of defense and marine battle,” stated General Hossein Dehqan, who addressed the media, claiming Iran has successfully tested the cruise missile several times.
Furthermore, a fact which has not received nearly the attention that it deserves, is that at the end of February, The Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization were found liable by a jury in Manhattan for their role in knowingly supporting six terrorist attacks in Israel between 2002 and 2004 in which Americans were killed and injured. The damages are to be $655.5 million, under a special terrorism law that provides for tripling the $218.5 million awarded by the jury in Federal District Court.
The PA declared after the verdict that they did not have the means to pay the damages. Unperturbed by this groundbreaking verdict and the PA’s blunt refusal to honor it, US Secretary of State John Kerry, nevertheless had no qualms about meeting Mahmoud Abbas in Egypt, even telling him that he would put pressure on Israel.
These are the hard facts. Yet, the Left stubbornly closes its eyes to them and hopes that they will go away.
Not learning from the past and refusing to face the present have never been working strategies for anyone. However, applying them to the governance of Israel, while hoping for the best, is a guaranteed recipe for utter disaster. Yet this disaster is avoidable and the Israeli voter holds the key to it: Make sure that Netanyahu becomes the next prime minister of Israel.