Prof. Paul Eidelberg
VARIOUS Israeli and American commentators wonder why Prime Minister Sharon
does not put an end to the daily suffering inflicted on Jews and Jewish families
by Yasser Arafat and his PLO-Palestinian terrorists. All attribute Sharon’s
policy of restraint to one or more of the following factors: (1) American pressure,
i.e., fear of Washington; (2) fear of UN intervention and sanctions; (3) fear
of a regional war; and (4) fear of Shimon Peres, who could trigger a dissolution
of the so-called national unity government.
This fourth factor is a direct consequence of Israel’s flawed political
institutions, which hardly anyone bothers to expose. But having previously done
so several times, the present writer will here illuminate the ideological causes
of Israel’s enfeeblement.
The four fears mentioned above clearly indicate that a secular prime minister
fears men more than G-d. This is the basic reason why no secular prime minister
of Israel can solve the Arab Palestinian problem, or even defeat and disarm
Arafat or any would-be successor. No matter what he says, a secular prime minister’s
behavior vis-à-vis the gentile world will conform to democratic rather
than to Jewish standards.
The ideological basis for this behavior is enshrined in Israel’s secular
Declaration of Independence of 1948. Although the document proclaims Israel
as a Jewish state, it prescribes “complete equality of … political
rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion …” And since
democracy is the religion of the present age, it takes precedence over Judaism.
Accordingly, our secular prime minister believes that what endows Israel with
legitimacy (and himself with respectability) is Israel’s (and his own)
democratic credentials. Just as his democratic mentality renders it impossible
for him to deny Israel’s Arab inhabitants the equal rights of Jews to
vote in Israeli elections, so he finds it impossible to deny Palestinian Arabs
the equal right of Jews to independent statehood.
It matters not that these so-called Palestinians are committed to Israel’s
destruction, that they have no culture of their own, that they are really part
of the vast Sunni Moslem world. Nor does it matter that there already exist
22 Arab and Islamic states. The point is that, in this utterly egalitarian democratic
era, no secular Israeli prime minister has any transcendental grounds for denying
the political equality of Jews and Arabs, be it in terms of voting rights or
in terms of nationalist aspirations.
It is in this light that we are to understand the fiction Mr. Sharon uttered
about “peaceful coexistence” between Jews and Arabs when he walked
on the Temple Mount last September—a fiction exploded day after day, year
after year, by Arab vilification and murder of Jews. Benjamin Netanyahu voiced
the same fiction when he addressed the American Congress in 1996 and said there
is no “clash of civilizations” in the Middle East.
A secular prime minister will utter this transparent nonsense because he cannot
honestly, and with purpose, face the truth about the implacable nature of the
Arab-Jewish conflict (aggravated by the Jew-hatred now disguised as support
of the Palestinian Arabs by the capitals of the democratic world). Even though
he knows that Egypt, with whom Israel has a peace treaty, violates that treaty
by spewing forth the most obscene anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda, he
is compelled to say (and so to act) that Jews and Arabs can live together in
peace and equality—otherwise, he will be accused of racism, the bette
noire of the democratic world.
Thus, even if Mr. Sharon were to destroy the PLO-Palestinian army and reoccupy
areas turned over to Arafat, Israel would merely return to the status quo ante,
without a solution to the festering “Arab problem,” thanks to the
geographically misplaced democratic mentality of Israel’s political and
intellectual elites.
Is there a solution? Yes, when Israel ceases to be a secular democratic state
and becomes an authentic Jewish state, one that draws upon the Torah, and not
any Western political philosophy, for its democratic principles. Only then will
it have a prime minister who not only fears G-d more than the occupant of the
White House, but who will have the institutional means of fulfilling Israel’s
world-historical purpose. But such a prime minister awaits the time when a majority
of Israel’s Jewish population recognizes that secular prime ministers
cannot solve Israel’s basic problems!