The 90`s

World sympathy won't be enough for Israel

Note: Written by Howard Barbanel, Published Week of December 29th - January 4th, 1994

Shame as a word has fallen into relative disuse.  Shame as a concept, as an emotion has all but disappeared from the world's psyche.  Everything and anything goes so long as it jibes with one's self-interests.

This is very must the case in geopolitics where hardly any kind of actions or behavior pass as shameful these days.  Like dropping a needle in a silent forest, just as no one may be there to hear it, doesn't mean the needle didn't make a sound.  So too just because most don't want to acknowledge shameful actions doesn't mean they do not take place or that they aren't shameful.

Uppermost among the prevalent cases is that of poor, tragic Bosnia.  Here is a country that was formally recognized by the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and so forth and concurrently blockaded to defend itself against aggression.  The West decided to enforce an arms embargo while simultaneously appeasing every act of Serbian aggression against millions of defenseless Moslems in Bosnia. The West sent in U.N. "peace keepers" who became pitiful pawns for the Serbs.  The West had demonstrated the backbone of jellyfish when it comes to defending the Bosnians and have been willing lately to acquiesce to any absurd Serbian territorial demand that would render Bosnia's borders as porous and indefensible as Swiss cheese is to mice.

American breast-beating, saber-rattling and guarantees for Bosnia have all turned to naught because the administration hasn't the stomach for sending in the Marines for what would surely be a bloody and protracted war.  The American people and newly elected Congress also have little desire to send U.S. forces abroad for lengthy campaigns. The Europeans, most notably the British and French have demonstrated their century-old penchant for appeasing violent dictators and aggressors while striking pseudo-fashionable poses of deep moral conviction.

The New Republic in its Dec. 19 issue says of Bosnia that "the realists will say that Bosnia is only Bosnia, that a quarter of a million people is only a quarter of a million people.  What matters about a stain, though, is not its magnitude. What matters is its debility; and if the conquest of Bosnia really is irreversible, then the stain of Bosnia is indelible."

The U.N. has a resolution up for a vote soon that calls on all states and all parts of the U.N. system to "extend their support to the Palestinian people in their quest for self-determination."  This is expected to pass by a wide margin. Self-determination in U.N. parlance is coextensive with sovereignty and independence. The German sponsors of the revolution are oblivious to the implications of trying to supersede the Rabin-Arafat Accords which set-up a five-year test Period of Palestinian Arab self-rule.

"Independence Now" is the slogan coming from the offices of the Palestinian authority.  "Jerusalem is our Capital" is the cry beginning with Yasser Arafat on down to the Hamas cleric to the man-on-the-Arab-street.  No matter that the PLO has shown a complete inability to live up to its commitments. No mater that terrorism against Jews is running at the speed of light.  No matter that with a peace agreement there is no peace. These things don't matter to an Israeli government who believes the territories must be surrendered to Arafat with all deliberate speed.

In 1984, George Orwell painted a grim picture of future society.  The PLO has a simliar literary work. It is called "1974," and it refers to the "Phased Plan" whereby the PLO will accept Palestine in bits and pieces from the withdrawing Israelis and will work in an evolutionary way to wear down and eventually wear-out the Jewish State.  Arafat and his people talk about it all the time. The Israeli government doesn't want to hear it. Jews die daily and the government doesn't want to see it. Jerusalem is formally on the agenda to have its final status negotiated between Israel and the PLO within the next two years and the Rabin government isn't ashamed of that fact.

Bosnia? Hell's bells, Israeli Arabs now call themselves "Palestinian Israelis" and are actively agitating for autonomy in their areas of the Galilee and Negev.  Arafat calls for the original 1947 partition lines, not the 1948 cease-fire lines. Bihac, Sarajevo and Tuzla have been reduced to indefensible Bosnian ghettoes.  In a future conflict might be we find the city-state of Tel Aviv encircled by hostile Arabs, pleading for U.N. or U.S. protection? How well will our enclaves of Safed and Beersheva fare after being physically cut off from the coastal plain?  We will surely enjoy the world's pity, as do the Bosnians, but what will that get us?

Most Laborites and Peace Now activists are inherently secular, irreligious.  In place of Jewish rituals and beliefs they've deified the peace process and in place of the Torah, peace treaties have accrued their own spirituality.  It is a form of left-wing fundamentalism that is oblivious to facts, realities and one's own self interests. Dogma. Children and the elderly are sacrificed, Molech-like on the altar of peace.  The peace deity knows no satiation, no end to concessions, for without the process, what would fill the lives of its devotees?

This peace extremism is every bit as dangerous an "ism" as was Communism - inflexible, disinterested in public opinion and callous about the lives of its citizens.  Retention of power and the process are paramount and it just doesn't matter how shameful are the consequences of their actions because shame can be removed from one's lexicon if one constructs a new cult where the moral compass operates from wholly different coordinates.