Professor Paul Eidelberg
This article was published in the Jewish Press, April 16, 1993. While reading
this article, the reader should compare Israel’s present plight under
the Sharon-led government of national unity.
Why has Israel’s government tolerated the murder and maiming of Jews during the INTIFADA [which broke out on December 6, 1987]? Why this policy of permissive subversion?
In the mid-1980s, that is, even before the official date of the intifada, ISRAELI Arab violence increased in dramatic fashion, including the kidnapping, murder and rape of Jewish men, women, and children, the planting of bombs on busses and in open-air food markets, and the knifing of Jews, young and old.
This upsurge in Arab violence may be attributed, at least in part, to an unprecedented decision of Israel's cabinet in May 1985, when a government of national unity [headed by Shimon Peres] UNANIMOUSLY agreed to exchange 1,150 Arab terrorists for three Jewish soldiers captured in Lebanon by the PLO, and to allow 600, MANY OF WHOM HAD BEEN CONVICTED OF MURDER, to return to their homes in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza! Future intifada leaders would not be lacking. [A study needs to be made on this matter.]
This flagrant disregard of justice and the rule of law – of course in the name of “saving” Jewish lives – could not but incite contempt for Israel’s government, undermine the deterrent power of its penal system, and encourage Arab violence. Brazen attacks on Jews increased in the heart of the country. To cite only one example, in July 1985, an ISRAELI Arab slashed the faces of five small children in broad daylight in downtown Jerusalem. An early 1986 police report found a 50 per cent increase in ideologically motivated violence by ISRAELI Arabs.
During this period, Yitzhak Rabin was Israel’s defense minister. In defending the exchange of 1,150 Arab terrorists for the three Israeli soldiers, he challenged his critics “to put themselves in the Government’s place” when approached by the parents of these soldiers!
Such a response, the present writer said in THE JERUSALEM POST (June 9, 1985), “is an assault on our emotions as well as an insult to our intelligence. It was the duty of the families of the three Jewish soldiers to seek their release no matter what the cost. But it was the duty of the Government to weigh that cost in terms of the immediate and long range interests of all the people of Israel.”
Rabin was nonetheless confident that the 600 returning Arab terrorists would be kept under strict surveillance. [Yet] some of these Arabs subsequently murdered Jews in Jerusalem….
During its first three years (while Rabin was defense minister, the intifada resulted in 122,218 incidents of rock-throwing, road blocks, demonstrations and rioting in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza; 2,495 firebomb attacks; 157 sniper attacks using live ammunition; 58 grenade attacks; 1,004 cases of arson; close to 4,000 Jews injured and 57 killed.
The killing of Jews by Arabs has become more frequent since Rabin became prime minister and defense minister in July 1992. Why? One reason is this: Rabin has long been committed to Israel’s withdrawal to Israel’s withdrawal to her pre-1967 borders, and the Arabs know that TERRORISM WILL HASTEN THE PROCESS, given Rabin’s anemic Zionism, his lack of ideological commitment. [Emphasis added.]
Is it not obvious that the public is being conditioned to believe that the murder of Jews will continue so long as Israel holds on to … Judea, Samaria, and Gaza? If so, this means that the murder of Jews must be tolerated for the sake of the “peace process”!
But to better understand this grotesque policy, we must go back to January 1989, when Defense Minister Rabin (surely with the approval of then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir [who succeeded Peres in 1988]) released from administrative detention the inifada’s most notorious leader, Faisal Husseini. During that year Rabin also refrained from indicting Sari Nusseibeh and Abu Ayyash [later known as the murderous “Engineer”], despite their prominent role in the intifada. Again, why this policy of permissive subversion?
A clue will be found in a statement Rabin made in February 1989. Addressing a gathering in London, Rabin offered an optimistic prognosis of the intifada. “The Palestinian Arabs,” he declared, “have achieved self-respect.”
Rabin believed that this “newly found” self-respect on the part of the Palestinian Arabs would move them to form their own leadership, that is, to distance themselves from the PLO and negotiate a political settlement with Israel. This is why he allowed Faisal Husseini et al. to roam at large, that is, to carry on the intifada – of course at a “tolerable” level of violence.
Now we can understand the policy of permissive subversion. It is not softness, it is not even fear of adverse world opinion. No, it is Machiavellian statecraft that underlies the government’s toleration of the intifada and the shedding of Jewish blood.
For therein is Rabin’s solution to the “Palestinian” problem: ONLY BY LETTING ARABS MURDER AND MAIM AND DESPISE JEWS CAN THESE ARABS ACHIEVE THE SELF-RESPECT NECESSARY TO FORM THEIR OWN INDEPENDENT LEADERSHIP AND MAKE PEACE WITH ISRAEL.