The 90`s

Split Personalities and Deviant Behavior

Note: Written by Howard Barbanel, Published August 12th, 1993

The American Heritage Dictionary defines "schizophrenia" the following way: "Any of a group of psychotic reactions characterized by withdrawal from reality with highly variable accompanying affective, behavioral and intellectual disturbances."

What other diagnosis would one arrive at when examining the quirky and quixotic policy meanderings of the Rabin/Peres Labor government in Israel?

Here you have a government that on the one hand unleashes a powerful pulverization of the Hizbullah thugs in southern Lebanon -- blissfully blasting away with the same marked intensity that aroused their own self-righteous indignation when Likud was in power and on the other hand sends its own Yossi Sarid off to chat with Arafat (as reported by the New York Times on August 6th and The Jerusalem Report on July 29th) in the hopes of wooing the perennially bad-shaven PLO maven to make a deal.  It also has Foreign Minister Peres (the Neville Chamberlain of our time) looking to apologize for and seduce Libya's Muamar Khadaffi in a spasm of whitewashing and wishful thinking that has even aroused the consternation of the policy prognosticators and promulgators at the U.S. State Department -- an institution known for Arabist tendencies!

So fixated is Labor on realizing a peace agreement that it is willing to accede to cease fires of dubious value in South Lebanon while concurrently absolving the real culprit in the crisis from responsibility -- that means Syria and Hafez Assad.  You've got Syrian troops in South Lebanon and they're providing safe cover for the smuggling of arms and material from Iran to the "Party of God" (Hizbullah) cadres. Instead of taking the parents to task, Labor scolds the unruly children. In so doing it kindles the wrath of the world media and gets itself portrayed as the heavy as TV crews film "hundreds of thousands" of Lebanese civilians fleeing the fracas.

Labor continues to tease the Syrians (and send Israelis into states of apoplexy) over possible withdrawals from the Golan Heights wile ignoring that Syria has spent billions of Saudi Arabian dollars on a warchest of arms and missile and weapons of mass destruction.  Labor ignores that Syria is heavily involved in producing, refining and distributing cocaine and heroin both in Syria and Syrian-controlled Lebanon. According to the Center for Strategic Policy, some 40 percent of the heroin found today on U.S. streets comes from these sources.  And Syria gets stronger with the development of newly-discovered oil reserves and with Western sanction continues to borrow billions from international financial institutions for ever more arms purchases. Syria is still a brutal dictatorship in the Iraqi mold and still refuses to allow the free emigration of its Jewish community -- a fact again ignored and not pressed by Labor.

Rabin and Peres and their Meretz ministers see a marked distinction between Arafat and Hamas and Hezbullah -- even though the PLO has never recanted on its charter provisions calling for the eradication of Israel and is still calling for Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state.  This policy further ignores that it is the PLO's Fatah wing that is responsible for most of the intifada violence in the territories perpetrated against Jewish and Arab civilians. This ignores that Arafat (and the Palestinian negotiating team in Washington too) have not forsworn the use of "armed struggle against the Zionist entity" while participating in peace talks in Washington.

What is amusing is watching Meretz (Peace Now) cabinet ministers like Shalumit Aloni and Amnon Rubenstein squirm in their chairs while coming up with profound rationalizations for condoning the Israeli army's actions in Lebanon! Ironically, contrary to Labor/Meretz behavior when Likud was in power, Likud refrained from any criticism of the Lebanon action (Not even saying the government should have gone still further) and even participated I quashing an Arab/Communist Party Motion of No Confidence in the government two weeks ago! Had the shoe been on the other foot, given prior habits as a barometer, Labor would have been kicking Yitzhak Shamir from here to tomorrow all over the Israeli and world media for "warmongering" and might have been tempted to capitalize on a No-Confidence motion like the aforementioned one to bring down the government and install themselves in power. 

On another issue that undermines Israeli long-term security, Labor is taking 650 million shekels from the immigration-absorption budget and transferring it into the general fund -- all this while the number of new immigrants from the former Soviet Union dramatically declines for the second year in a row.  Soviet Jewry activists are livid over this -- rightly saying that the 650 million shekels should not only be retained for absorption but that more funds should be added. Many Soviet Jews are writing home saying this government has broken its promises and its faith with the new immigrants and couldn't care one whit whether more Soviet Jews come and whether they integrate successfully into Israeli society.

As a final broadside at Labor, this is a government that is letting John Demjanjuk go free -- scot-free from any punishment for being a guard at the Sobibor Concentration Camp and other SS activities.  When you cull the apologetics for the PLO, Syria and Libya and stir-in the Demjanjuk issue and the Soviet olim, one has to wonder whether this government really has a Jewish agenda or is pursuing a slipshod pastiche of delusional geopolitics.