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MIDI Music: "It's All Coming Back to Me [Israel!] Now" In a recent opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post, Sarah Honig, one of the paper’s better columnists, raised the question of whether Israel’s Left should be regarded as stupid or crazy. She raised the question in response to the latest gambit by Yossi Beilin, the Mother Hen of the Oslo debacle, and his friends - the so-called “Geneva Understandings”, which should be better termed the Geneva Misunderstandings. Honig’s question deserves to be taken seriously. The most correct answer to her question is that while many leftists are indeed crazy or stupid or both, increasingly Israel’s Left is composed simply of people who are evil. This third possibility should be taken very seriously. The growth in the weight of the evil amongst the stupid and the crazy in Israel’s Left has a simple explanation. While the Israeli Left at the time when the first Oslo Accords were perpetrated consisted mainly of the naïve and the foolish, these people have in large part disappeared by now from its ranks. In most cases, they simply became less foolish and naïve over time, and consequently abandoned the Left. They were mugged by reality and succumbed to the years of daily empirical demonstrations that the Left’s understanding of the conflict in 1993 was simply wrong, demonstrably wrong, disastrously wrong. These were the people whose
earlier beliefs had remained open to a certain amount of testing and
proving in the pudding, whose minds had not been hermetically locked
closed. When the pudding proved how wrong they had been, they had second
thoughts. They awoke and sniffed the coffee the rest of us had long been
As the naïve abandoned the Left in droves, a process of adverse selection occurred. Those who remained in the Israeli Left despite the past decade of Oslo experiences are today by and large people who are evil. They constitute the Satanic Left. Some used to be foolish leftists who evolved into evil leftists. They remain in the Left because they are motivated by hostility to Israel, animosity towards Jews, by self-hatred. That a political movement like the Israeli Left could be taken over by those motivated by dislike of their own country and hatred of their own people should not come as too much of a surprise. After all, the American campus Left is also today little more than a movement of anti-Americanism. It will support any Third World butcher it thinks is sufficiently hostile to the United States and the West. It supports everything imaginable that can harm the United States. In 1993, most Israeli leftists sincerely believed that if Israel would recognize and legitimize the PLO, if it would just make goodwill gestures towards the Palestinians and release them from Israel “occupation”, if it offered the Palestinians their own state alongside of Israel, if it allowed Arafat and the leadership of the PLO to relocate from Tunis to the West Bank, and if it showed itself somewhat flexible in terms of the status of Jerusalem, then the Palestinians would respond to the generosity with generosity. The Left genuinely expected that demonstrations of Israeli goodwill would trigger outpourings of Palestinian goodwill and moderation, that good sportsmanship would be rewarded with niceness. A decade of goodwill measures later, we now have ample proof. Of course the Left was totally wrong. Israeli niceness did not produce Palestinian niceness but rather Palestinian nazification. Israeli goodwill gestures triggered Palestinian fanaticism. Israeli offers to compromise produced Palestinian digging in of heals and insistence that only Israel’s destruction through some “right of return” was an acceptable solution. When Israel turned over the bulk of the West Bank and Gaza to the PLO, along with perhaps 95 % of the Palestinian population, those areas were not used by the PLO for nation building and economic development. Instead, they were used for nothing except perpetrating endless terrorist attacks, rocket attacks, and mass murders against Jews. It became evident very quickly
that Palestinian terrorism was not being caused by Israeli
“occupation” but rather was skyrocketing as a direct consequence of
the REMOVAL of Israeli occupation. Each and every Israeli concession and
offer to compromise was met with escalating Palestinian savagery and
barbarism, along with blood-curdling screams and demonization
of Jews. It became obvious that the terror bonfire was not being
fanned by any construction of Israeli “settlements” but rather by
Israeli But in fairness, honest people with good intentions could well have believed in 1993 that Oslo was the path to follow. They were motivated by wishful thinking, by a complete misunderstanding of the Middle East conflict, and by exhaustion. Fast forwarding to 2004: Every
single day since the Oslo Accords were implemented has served as new
empirical proof that those Accords were founded on a totally incorrect
concept of what the Middle East conflict was about. The Middle East
conflict was not about any need for Palestinian “self-determination”
but rather about the total refusal by the Arab world to acquiesce in any
form of Jewish self-determination. The problem was not Israeli
unwillingness for territorial compromise but Arab rejection of any
territorial compromise at all as a form of solution, if it were to allow
a rump Jewish state to continue to exist. Oslo proved that the Arabs
would not be satisfied with some form of Palestinian statehood
restricted to the West Bank and Gaza, but rather would demand all of
Israel as well, perhaps in the name of the right of
“self-determination” for the Arabs of Nazareth and the Negev and
Jaffa.
If the years of daily proofs were insufficient, surely the events at Camp David II should have been more than enough to convince even the most diehard idealist and obstinate naif on the Israeli Left of the errors of its ways. At Camp David, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians EVERYTHING: virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza purged of their Jewish settlers, all of East Jerusalem including the Western Wall, swaths of pre-1967 Israel, financial tribute, and admission of tens of thousands of Palestinian “refugees” into the areas that Israel would retain as partial implementation of the Palestinian “right of return”. The PLO response to this
suicidal offer by the leader of Israel’s Left at the time was complete
rejection and the launching of what has now become universally misnamed
the “Al-Aqsa Intifada”, which should in fact more properly be dubbed
the Oslo Pogroms. The
carnage is now about 900 murdered Israelis, just since October 2000, and
counting. The Left’s response to the pogroms was characteristically
revisionism, to deny that Barak had actually made any generous offer at
Camp David at all. . It is said that remarriage is the victory of hope over experience (as well as common sense). Israel’s Leftist politicians continued to court the ugly Palestinian bride [above] who had divorced them over and over and over. To believe after Camp David II that offers of generosity by Israel could ever defuse Palestinian barbarism was simply to divorce oneself from reality and take refuge in fantasy. While the ranks of the Left in
Israel dwindled, it retained much of its powers, including its
near-totalitarian hegemony over Israel’s media and universities. But
who exactly are these people still in the Left? [OSLO REGURGITATED...]
First of all, they are people who insist that Israel continue to pursue the failed Oslo “strategy” as if the past ten years of failure never took place. Beilin’s Geneva Misunderstandings are perhaps the best illustration. Going somewhat beyond even what Barak had offered at Camp David, they are once again based on endless Israeli concessions, appeasements, and capitulations to Arab demands with absolutely no quid pro quo. They are the child of the same “Concept” that has been discredited daily ever since 1993. The only thing the Beilin “accord” offers Israel is a promise of yet another empty rhetorical commitment by the PLO to suppressing the terror, which is the same old used Buick the PLO has been reselling to Israel without ever delivering, over and over for the past decade. The PLO was unwilling to countenance even the duplicitous language in the Beilin Capitulations that made it appear that it might someday maybe agree to some compromise over the Palestinian “Right of Return”, which is the Palestinian demand for unlimited immigration into Israel even AFTER some Palestinian state is established. The Gargoyle of Ramallah rejected Beilin’s Munich offer because of this.
Second, the Op-Eds and the official canon being preached by Israel’s Left today is increasingly one of treason. Increasing numbers of the remnants who are still denizens of the Left openly propose that Israel’s existence be terminated. A growing number of Israeli Leftists are promoting the so-called “One State Solution” or the “Bi-National Solution,” which should more properly be called the Rwanda Solution. This is essentially a No-State Solution. According to it, Israel would cease to exist as a Jewish state. It would be entirely enfolded into a Palestinian state stretching from the Mediterranean to the Jordan with the Arabs the majority and the Jews a minority, tolerated at best like the other non-Arab or non-Moslem minorities in the Arab world.
Third, Israel’s Left has always been fundamentally anti-democratic, opposing the right of free expression for non-leftists, demanding that non-leftists be prosecuted as “inciters”. The Left has long insisted that Yitzhak Rabin was in fact murdered because non-leftists and Oslo opponents were permitted to exercise their right to free speech. But lately the Left’s anti-democratic inclinations have taken a turn towards extremism and outright subversion. The Left has long been of the opinion that Leftists should not be expected to obey the law nor submit to the will of the majority because their motives are so nice and pure. Leftists (and Arab fascists) should be able to call openly for violence with impunity. Leftists should be excused from serving in the army or obeying laws or paying taxes if the policies being implemented by the government or the army are not those advocated by the most extremist leftist 5% of the electorate. The Left has for years been trying to foment mutiny and “resistance” among Israeli soldiers. It has organized groups who refuse to report to duty as long as Israel “occupies” any portion of the West Bank and Gaza. These are people who explicitly refuse to submit themselves to the will of the majority of their fellow citizens. These are not people willing to promote their ideas through persuasion and argument, but rather through subversion and defiance of the rule of law. They seek to impose their minority views on the country through force. Their latest gambit is to organize mutiny among Israeli pilots in the air force, who will refuse to shoot at terrorist mass murderers until Israel ends its “occupation” on those leftist terms opposed by the bulk of the electorate. Polls are showing that Israelis oppose the Beilin-proposed capitulations by at least two to one, and Israeli Jews oppose them by about five to one. In 1993 most Israeli leftists supported the Left because they believed its ideas would benefit Israel and the Jewish people. Today most leftists support those same ideas because they know they will harm Israel and Jews.
In 1993 most Israeli leftists believed in leftist ideas because they thought “Palestine” would pursue peace. Today those remaining on the Left support Palestinian statehood because they know “Palestine” will pursue war.
In 1993 most leftists believed in leftist ideas because they thought Israeli concessions would lead to Arab moderation. Today’s leftists know that these concessions are seen as signs of weakness that catalyze and energize Arab violence and that is why they demand more of them.
In 1993 most leftists believed in Israeli restraint because they thought it would stimulate Palestinian goodwill. Today’s leftists demand endless restraint because they do not want Israel to fight terror at all. They want terror to triumph. In 1993 most leftists believed in leftist ideas because they thought Israel would emerge stronger if Oslo were implemented. Today’s leftists advocate the very same “process” – witness the Beilin-proposed Capitulations – because they desire to see Israel weakened and dismembered.
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