Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

 

            They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither   liberty nor safety.

 

—Benjamin Franklin

 

I.  Introduction

 

Three fundamental facts concerning Israel and its governing institutions need to be borne in mind to fully comprehend this essay, especially its subtitle.

 

First, what makes politics and politicians so erratic in this country is that Israel lacks a written constitution, one that prescribes the powers of the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of government.[1]  Instead, Israel has a welter of Basic Laws enacted haphazardly over the course of decades, which laws, far from being “basic,” are easily changed and so vague as to allow politicians and judges enormous latitude.[2]  Accordingly, what is called the rule of law in Israel is very much the rule of a few men.[3]   Arbitrary acts on the part of the Government are commonplace, and even the Supreme Court feels free to ignore and overturn laws enacted by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset.[4] This anarchic state of affairs allows a prime minister like Ariel Sharon to pursue his own political agenda regardless of the law and regardless of his party label. 

Second, ever since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, no Labor- or Likud-led Government has ever been toppled by a Knesset vote of no confidence.   The Knesset, sovereign in theory, is in practice subservient to the Government.  Lacking, therefore, are institutional checks and balances.   This fact allows Mr. Sharon to ignore the Knesset even on matters affecting the borders of the State. 

Third, although a large majority of Israel’s Jewish population is either orthodox or traditional, the parliamentary representation of Israel’s two major parties, Labor and Likud, has never remotely reflected the proportion of religious, traditional, and secular Jews in this country.[5]  This is a direct consequence of a very low parliamentary electoral threshold, which has enabled religious and other Jews to form their own parties.  The resulting multiplicity of parties in the Knesset produces a farrago of parties in the cabinet whose rivalry renders it virtually impossible for the Government to pursue, let alone for the public to discern, clear and coherent national policies.  This institutionalized confusion makes it easier for Mr. Sharon to shift left and right, especially in the torturous domain of foreign affairs.  We are now prepared to appreciate what follows.

 

II. The Labor-Sharon Symbiosis and the Regurgitation of Oslo

 

Although the Likud trounced the Labor Party in the January 28, 2003 Knesset elections, Israel’s Government is ruled by Labor via its surrogate, Ariel Sharon.  Let us see why.

 

Despite his reputation as a right-winger, Ariel Sharon and the left-wing Labor Party agree on the three most important and controversial issues confronting Israel.[6]   These issues may be stated as follows: (1) Should Israel’s parliamentary electoral system be reformed so as to shift power from political parties to the people?  (2) Should Israel, in opposition to the establishment of another Arab state in the Holy Land, declare Jewish sovereignty over Judea, Samaria, and Gaza?  (3) Should Israel, described in its Declaration as a “Jewish” state, be transformed into a “state of its citizens”?  (This third and most fundamental issue involves the Arab demographic problem and the huge influx of Russian gentiles into the Land of Israel.)[7]  

 

(1)  Labor and Sharon are committed to preserving the existing parliamentary electoral system, which maximizes the power of the parties, above all those that form the Government.  In this system—contrary to the practice of 74 out of 75 countries having democratic elections for the lower (or only branch) of the legislature—the entire country constitutes a single electoral district.  In this nationwide district, a profusion of parties with fixed lists compete for Knesset seats on the basis of proportional representation.  Since no party has ever won a majority of the popular vote—the electoral threshold is a mere 1.5%—several parties must unite after the election to form the Government.  Until the Government is formed, the public is never quite certain of its composition, which gives a prime minister extraordinary leeway.

 

Under this system, diverse party leaders—those who top the party lists—become cabinet ministers and dominate the Knesset.  Having different agendas, the parties forming the cabinet do so, as David Ben-Gurion said, “not on the basis of a common program but merely to divide up the positions of influence and the national budget.”[8]  Moreover, since Knesset Members are not individually elected by or accountable to the voters, those who become cabinet ministers can ignore public opinion with impunity—and readily do so between elections.   Mr. Sharon, like Labor, wants to perpetuate this seemingly democratic but really oligarchic system of government. 

 

To clarify this iconoclastic statement, suppose Israel had single member, multi-district elections.  This would shift power from the parties to the voters and to their personal representatives in the Knesset.  The Knesset would then cease to be subservient to the Government.  It would also be in a better position to curb the despotic power of the Supreme Court.[9]  By making Knesset members individually accountable to the people in constituency elections, Israel would have, for the first time, the institutional checks and balances essential to democracy and the rule of law.  However, despite his lip service to democracy, Sharon, like Labor, expresses no intention to empower the people and the Knesset by means of constituency elections.  Both are committed to oligarchy under the veneer of democracy. 

 

(2) Both Sharon and Labor originally supported Jewish settlements in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, but primarily for defensive reasons.[10]  Neither advocated Jewish sovereignty over this land or its incorporation into a “Greater Israel.”  However, the 1977 Knesset elections prepared the ground for a bloodless revolution.  For the first time in 29 years, Labor lost control of the Government as well as the alliance of the religious parties, which shifted to the more tradition-oriented Likud.  Labor therefore lost the support of the religious voters, whose birthrate far exceeds that of secularists.

Because of its shrinking electoral base, Labor needed the Arab vote to regain power.  Hence it shifted toward the Left and began to advocate Israel’s withdrawal from Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, claiming that it was undemocratic for Israel to rule the Arabs in these areas.   (Sharon is now echoing Labor’s refrain.)  Then, after the June 1992 Knesset elections, when Labor required the five seats of the Arab parties to form the Government—an unprecedented event—the Oslo or Israel-PLO Declaration of Principles of September 13, 1993 followed like night follows day.  

Here it should be noted that Oslo’s hidden agenda was to eviscerate Jewish national consciousness, which is bonded to Hebron, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the Old City, and the Temple Mount.  This was well understood by Israeli leftists.  Ha’aretz journalist Gidon Samet gleefully saw Oslo’s abandonment of Judea and Samaria as nullifying the century-old effort of Zionists to restore Jewish “national identity.”  Israel’s celebrated author David Grossman cynically described Israel’s military redeployment from Judea and Samaria—prescribed by Oslo—as “a redeployment from entire regions in our soul.” ^[11]   The writer Dorit Rabinian put it more baldly:  “For me the Oslo Agreement means forgetting that you are a Jew.”[12]

(3)  Ariel Sharon may be proud to be a Jew, but, like Labor, he would transform Israel into a secular “state of its citizens” (which would sever Judaism from public law, reduce the Torah to a religion, and relegate it to the home and the synagogue).  Thus, in forming his government after the January 2003 Knesset elections, Sharon shunned the ultra-orthodox Shas Party in favor of the ultra-secular Shinui Party and gave the latter two crucial ministries, Justice and Interior.  These two ministries have the power to secularize and deJudaize the State of Israel. 

 

The Justice Ministry, headed by Shinui chairman Tommy Lapid, can and will safeguard the ultra-secular Supreme Court by opposing any law that would democratize the mode of appointing the court (now controlled by the court’s president and two other active judges).  More ominous is the ultra-secular agenda of Interior Minister Avraham Poraz.  In addition to fostering commercial violation of the Sabbath, Poraz is deJudaizing Israel on a massive scale by facilitating the entry of gentiles into the country by “flexible” interpretation of the conversion and immigration laws.  For example, Poraz would grant citizenship to the children of foreign workers as well as to any non-Jew who can make some contribution to the country, whether financial, artistic, or scientific.  What is even more astonishing, without questioning the validity of conversions performed by Israel’s official Orthodox rabbinate, Poraz has declared that converts whose Judaism is unquestioned should nonetheless be denied Israeli citizenship if their conversion took place in the Jewish state! All this is clearly intended to curb the power of the religious community, whose birth rate, as previously noted, far exceeds that of their secular counterparts.

 

Mr. Sharon raises no objection to this blatant attempt to deJudaize Israel.  If proof is wanted that he is committed to this betrayal of the millions of Jews who have come to this country because they wanted to live in a Jewish state, suffice to mention two facts.  In justifying his choice of Shinui to promote immigration to Israel, the prime minister said:  “I see that [a Jew is] whoever comes, sees himself as part of the Jewish people, serves in the army, and fights” (Jerusalem Post, May 16, 2003).   In addition, Sharon opposes any amendment of the “grandfather clause” of the Law of Return, which has enabled hundreds of thousands of gentiles to enter Israel.[13]  Thus, as regards Israel’s most basic issues, Sharon’s position is indistinguishable from that of Labor.  He is committed to transforming Israel into a “state of its citizens.”

 

This alone would explain why he was so anxious to form a national unity government after the prime ministerial election of February 6, 2001, even though he received an unprecedented 63% of the popular vote against Ehud Barak.  That election occurred a little more than three months after the outbreak of Arafat’s war against Israel on September 29, 2000.  During the interval, scores of Jewish men, women, and children were murdered while the Israel Defense Forces meekly retaliated.  Sharon’s landslide victory was a clear rejection of his predecessor’s military self-restraint and ruinous diplomatic polices, but which Sharon subsequently adopted as his own.   That victory could justly have been construed as a mandate to destroy the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its terrorist network, a mandate that logically entails the abrogation of Oslo.  Yet Sharon formed a national unity government that was bound to regurgitate Oslo and let soak Israel in Jewish blood. 

 

It may be argued, of course, that it would have been difficult for Sharon to form a stable coalition government given the then existing Knesset, in which the Likud had only 19 seats while Labor had 24.   However, given Sharon’s overwhelming victory, a threat to dissolve the Knesset (which would have resulted in a precipitous decline in Shas’ 17 seats) would surely have been sufficient to maintain a government consisting of nationalist and religious parties. 

 

In any event, the Sharon-Labor symbiosis surfaced when Sharon formed a national unity government with Labor after the February 2001 election.  (1) Sharon appointed Shimon Peres, Oslo’s architect, Foreign Minister, and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer Defense Minister—both of the Labor Party.  (2) Together with Peres and Ben-Eliezer, he formed a three-man security cabinet which required a unanimous decision on issues concerning the “Palestinians.”   (Labor therefore controlled the Government on this most important issue.)  (3) He agreed with his Labor colleagues that the Palestinian Authority would not be destroyed, that the PA was needed to negotiate the establishment of an Arab state in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.  From this last item it follows that Sharon rejected, as he has to this day, a policy of zero tolerance for Arab terror.  This means, judging from the 700 Jews that have been murdered during the first 28 months of Sharon’s premiership, that a large number of Jewish lives are expendable.[14]   These expendable Jews have been called “sacrifices for PR.”  The late Yitzhak Rabin called them “sacrifices for peace.”  

 

And so, if we ignore party labels and consider only the substance of things, Sharon may be deemed Labor’s surrogate prime minister.  In other words, Labor, out of power after the January 28, 2003 election, controls the Likud-led government!  

 

III. The “Education” of Ariel Sharon

 

Ariel Sharon harbors a fatal flaw, widespread among Israel’s political, intellectual, and even military elites.  Evidence of this flaw appeared in an interview with Ha’aretz Magazine, April 13, 2001, two months after Sharon first became Israel’s prime minister.  While homicide bombers were reducing Jews to body parts, Sharon said that his son Omri had taught him “not to see things in black and white.”  Hardly an appropriate statement or attitude on the part of a prime minister whose nation is at war with the most savage foes.

 

Apparently, Mr. Sharon has been tainted by the university-bred doctrine of moral relativism, which Israeli universities have imported from the democratic world.   (The present author, having taught many Israeli officers, can testify to its demoralizing influence.)  A prominent purveyor of relativism was the late Professor Yehoshafat Harkabi, the mentor of Shimon Peres.  Harkabi once headed Israel Military Intelligence as well as the Israel Army Staff and Command College.  As a scholar of Islam and the Middle East, Harkabi must surely have influenced the attitudes and policies of Israel’s political and military leaders as to whether genuine peace is possible between Israel and its Arab neighbors.  Judging, however, from his book Arab Attitudes to Israel (first published in 1968), Israeli leaders would have reason to be confused.  On the one hand, the book documents almost 500 pages of Arab vilification of Jews.  On the other hand, it concludes with this dispiriting (and unfounded) remark:  “The study of the conflict [between Jews and Arabs] reveals the relativity of the attitudes of the parties.”[15]  Like others influenced by relativism, Harkabi does not see this conflict as an Arab war against the Jews.  Indeed, to describe this war merely as a “conflict” suggests the moral equivalence of the parties.   In fact, moral equivalence appears in the very dedication of his book:  “To the victims of the conflict—Arabs and Jews.”  Bizarre, since there is not a single reference in that book to any Arab, whether theologian, scholar, journalist, or politician that does not evince the most murderous hatred of Jews and Israel![16]

 

Of course, one does not have to be a philosophically consistent relativist for relativism to influence one’s political attitudes and policy preferences.  I believe this is the case of Ariel Sharon and of other members of Israel’s Establishment.  Nevertheless, relativism cannot but diminish confidence in the justice of Israel’s cause.  It dulls one’s sensitivity to the genocidal intentions of Israel’s enemies and inhibits the only appropriate, ultimate if not immediate response to such enemies:  total conquest. 

 

However, by eroding Jewish pride and Jewish national honor, relativism subtly leads Israeli leaders to hobnob with murderous villains like Yasser Arafat, still very much in charge of the Palestinian Authority.  And were it not for the self-effacing influence of relativism, Israel’s prime ministers would be less inclined to accept Washington’s anything but “even-handed” mediation in the war between Israel and that despotic regime.  Emasculated by relativism, Israel’s ruling elites do not denounce the PA as evil, thus making it easier for Washington to bank-roll Arafat and for the CIA to train his sharpshooters.  Instead of employing Israel’s overwhelming power to destroy the PA and its terrorist network—which could have been rapidly accomplished immediately after if not before 9/11—Mr. Sharon prefers to negotiate with the PA, even though its plainly stated objective is to exterminate Israel and establish an Arab state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.   So long as Israel’s ruling elites are silent about evil, one can hardly expect Washington to transcend moral equivalence or to subordinate America’s economic interests in the Middle East to moral principles.

 

If only because he does not denounce the PA as evil, Mr. Sharon cannot readily pursue a war-winning strategy against that regime.  Instead, his goal is “peaceful coexistence.”   This platitude reflects the moral equivalence we saw in Harkabi’s aforementioned book, its dedication to Arabs and Jews.  Moral equivalence made it easier for Harkabi to advocate a “Palestinian” state despite his bone-chilling documentation of the Arab’s ferocious, Nazi-like attitude toward Jews and Israel—surely a matter for a psychiatrist.[17]  Sharon (like Peres) has succumbed to the permissive logic of moral relativism—permissive because moral relativism “justifies” tyranny as well as democracy.

 

Notwithstanding moral relativism, Mr. Sharon displayed a sense of honor when he refused to shake the bloodstained hands of Yasser Arafat at the Wye River Summit in 1998—although he did sign the Wye Memorandum, which surrenders virtually all of Israel’s heartland, Judea and Samaria, to that arch murderer.  Sharon was then serving as Israel’s foreign minister under the Netanyahu Government.  Apparently, his sense of honor deserted him when he became Israel’s prime minister.  At the Aqaba Summit of June 4, 2003 he shook hands with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. Abu Mazen), a Holocaust denier who, as General Secretary of the PLO, has been complicit in the murder of an untold number of Jews during the past three decades.   While Abu Mazen ingratiated himself with President George W. Bush by denouncing terrorism, he has since made it clear that he will not fight against any terrorist group, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.   Why should he when his Scriptures and his “Palestinian” media describe Jews as “dogs.”

 

Contrast Sharon.  In his Ha’aretz interview, the Jewish prime minister expresses admiration for Israel’s “Palestinian” enemies and even empathizes with their nationalist aspirations!  Ponder, moreover, this remarkable confession: “When Sadat would tell me that for the Arabs land is sacred, that made me envious. And sometimes I am envious of the way the Palestinians take a stand [about this land] without any doubts [that it is theirs].”  Clearly, Mr. Sharon would not have felt envious if he, as a Jew, regarded this land as sacred.   But to admit in Israel’s leading intellectual (and anti-Zionist) newspaper that he does not regard this land as sacred, and that, unlike the Arabs, he would not take a firm stand on Jewish retention of this land, is to the arm the Arabs and disarm the Jews—and this, while a war against the Jews was in progress!   

 

Sharon went on to say in that interview:  "They [the Arab Palestinians] suffer from a lack of [territorial] continuity [in Judea and Samaria] and we have to find a solution for that.”   Tainted by moral obscurantism, it matters not to Sharon that some 70% of these Arabs exalt suicide bombers.  If this were not enough to caution Sharon, a PEW Global Attitudes Project, conducted the month before the Aqaba Summit found that 80% of the “Palestinians,” as well as large majorities in all four Arabs countries surveyed, agree with the statement: “The rights and needs of the Palestinian people cannot be taken care of as long as the state of Israel exists.”  The conviction that no way can be found for Israel and the “Palestinians” to coexist is strongest in Morocco (90%), followed by Jordan (85%), Kuwait (72%), and Lebanon (65%).  Their hatred of Israel aside, the Arabs know there is not enough space between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea for two states.  Despite this simple fact, and despite the Arab’s implacable hostility toward Israel, Mr. Sharon persists in supporting a “Palestinian” state.  

 

By so doing, Sharon has succumbed to the widespread error that the conflict between Jews and Arabs is simply a territorial one, that the hostility of the “Palestinians” can be assuaged by establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.   Had Sharon seen this conflict as an Arab war against the Jews as Jews, he would perceive it as nothing less than a clash of civilizations, which makes nonsense of the policy of “territory for peace” and a two-state solution to the conflict.  

 

Aggravating the conflict is that Arabs perceive Israel as a secular democratic state which threatens the autocratic power structure of Arab-Islamic regimes.  The contradictions between such anragonists, along with Israel’s Jewish aspect, render genuine peace impossible.  Let me enumerate some of these contradictions the better to appreciate the clash of civilizations:[18]

 

(1)  Whereas democracy is based on the primacy of consent, Arab-Islamic regimes are based on the primacy of coercion.

 

(2) Whereas freedom (including freedom of speech) is one of the two cardinal principles of democracy, Arab-Islamic culture is strictly authoritarian (which is why their media are state-controlled).

 

(3) Whereas equality is the other cardinal principle of democracy, Arab-Islamic culture is strictly hierarchical.  (Top-down leadership is a fundamental principle of Islamic theology.)

 

(4) Whereas democracy exalts the individual, even to the extent of abolishing capital punishment, Arab-Islamic culture will sacrifice even children in the name of Allah.

 

(5) Whereas democracy allows individuals to pursue diverse “lifestyles,” Arab-Islamic culture binds everyone to the substantive values prescribed in the Koran.

 

(6)  Whereas democratic societies are preoccupied with the present (Peace Now), Arab-Islamic culture exists under the aspect of eternity (which enables its rulers to pursue objectives extending beyond the present generation).[19]

 

(7) Whereas democracy is steeped in secularism, Arab-Islamic culture is rooted in religion.  (Even Arab rulers who are not devout Moslems identify with the basic goals of Islam.)

 

(8)  Whereas democracies incline toward peace, the ethos of jihad inclines Arab-Islamic regimes toward war.  (Some 40% of the arms sold in the world are purchased by Arab-Islamic states.)

 

Since Prime Minister Sharon does not see things in black and white, he does not see the impossibility of a negotiated settlement of the conflict between Israel and the “Palestinians.” For these Arabs (mostly Sunni Muslims), territorial compromise is out of the question, or can be no more than temporary—an interlude to arm for the next offensive.  As PLO “foreign minister” Farouk Kadoumi stated unequivocally:  “The recovery of but part of our soil will not cause us to forsake our Palestinian land... We will build our tent in those places which our bullets can reach... This tent will then form the base from which we will later pursue the next phase.”[20] 

 

Precisely because Sharon is committed to territorial compromise, he is incapable of acting with decisiveness and consistency against Israel’s uncompromising enemies.  Hence he readily succumbs to American pressure and concocted cease-fires.   The truth is that Sharon, by adopting the Road Map to a Palestinian state has sacrificed Israel’s sovereignty to the American conducted “Quartet” and has therefore made Israel a vassal of the United States.  Ponder his post-Aqaba, American prescribed “confidence-building” measures intended to bolster Abu Mazen (a replay of Yitzhak Rabin’s indulgence of Yasser Arafat).

 

Without the Palestinian Authority making a single decision to fight terrorism, Sharon, sans cabinet approval, released some 100 Arab terrorists, including Ahmed Jbarra, who was serving a life sentence for planting a booby-trapped refrigerator in Jerusalem in 1975 and murdering 14 people.   More Jewish lives have thus been imperiled.  He also curtailed targeted killings of Hamas terrorists, depriving Israel of its most powerful weapon against these murderers.   Moreover, and contrary to his Chief of General Staff, Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, who last year said, “Every evacuation [of Jewish settlements] under terrorism and violence will strengthen the terror and violence [and] endanger us,” Mr. Sharon ordered the IDF to destroy Jewish outposts, which augurs ill for Jewish communities throughout Judea and Samaria.  More Jewish families have been made homeless, and thousands more fear the same fate: that the IDF—Jewish soldiers—under orders from Washington, will be used to make Judea and Samaria Judenrein!

 

Unable to withstand American pressure, Sharon yielded to a temporary cease-fire or “hudna” for three to six weeks to be supervised by the CIA.   So-called illegal terrorist militias were thus given the opportunity to recruit, train, arm, and carry out all the preparations necessary for future attacks against Jewish soldiers and civilians.  Sharon even agreed that Israel would not act to foil terrorist attacks before the terrorists leave PA-controlled areas!

 

And so Israel’s prime minister stumbles along as if he had learned nothing from the suffering Oslo inflicted on Israel during the past ten years: the 1,000 plus deaths, the thousands wounded, the tens of thousands of mourners, the hundreds of thousands traumatized, the economy ruined, the country surrounded by terrorists groups in Judea, Samara, and Gaza aided by many of Israel’s own Arab citizens.  Despite all this, and despite the PA’s countless violations of agreements with Israel and the United States, Sharon foists upon the Jewish people the vain hope—really the deception—that Arafat and his minions will renounce their declared goal of destroying the Jewish state, as if they were not already doing so!  That Sharon should outdo the architects of Oslo is indicative of a desperate man defeated by his own pragmatism or lack of Jewish convictions.  Shimon Peres could hardly be more accommodating to Israel’s enemies if he were prime minister.  Indeed, he would not go as far as Sharon, for a Peres or Labor Government would confront serious opposition from the nationalist camp, including the Likud.  In Ariel Sharon, Labor could not have found a more effective surrogate prime minister.      

 

*  *  *

 

The question arises:  If Sharon were not tainted by moral relativism, would he have destroyed the Palestinian Authority?  Would he not be restrained by Washington and the threat of sanctions?  Perhaps, but this question needs to be viewed within a larger context.

 

In foreign affairs, the general tendency of Israeli prime ministers is to react to events, not to initiate them.  This, they believe, is the plight of small nations like Israel.   To the contrary, only large nations can afford to wait and not take the initiative.   The United States is the prime example of this tendency.  Small nations must try to seize the initiative precisely because they are the more vulnerable.  For Israel’s political elites, however, self-restraint (havlaga) is a well-established policy that even antedates the founding of the State.  The reason?  Fear—Jewish fear of the gentile world.  As Anwar Sadat put it, “Fear is the second layer of skin of every Israeli or Jew.”[21]  This fear shrinks the mentality of Israeli politicians.  One looks in vain for an Israeli prime minister with any grandiose vision.   Although Israel was won major battles in what may thus far be called the Arab’s 50-year war against the Jews, no Israeli prime minister has ever contemplated, let alone pursued, a strategy designed to win this war once and for all!

 

Israeli prime ministers exaggerate the significance of the much larger Arab population surrounding the Jewish state—a population, however, mired in ignorance and poverty.  They also exaggerate Israel’s dependence on the United States.  Sharon seems to dismiss as inconsequential Israel’s enormous contribution to American wealth and well-being.   I have in mind the extraordinary amount of scientific, technological, and medical knowledge that Israel supplies the United States.  To this add Israel’s vital Intelligence information, once estimated by Maj.-Gen, George Keegan, a former head of U.S. Air Force Intelligence, as worth five CIAs.  Also significant is the linkage between major American corporations and Israeli firms, as well as the tens of thousands of jobs in the U.S. which depend on Israel.   The $1.8 billion Israel receives in military aid is a minute fraction of Israel’s Gross Domestic Product, and 85% of that aid is spent in the U.S.  Israel’s contribution to America is incalculable but has yet to be capitalized upon by Israel’s ruling elites.  Israel has powerful political and economic allies in America and need not kowtow to Washington (and certainly not to Europe, which would not want to jeopardize its trade with a high-tech society whose $110 billion GDP far exceeds that of Israel’s Arab neighbors combined).   Here I am reminded of what Joseph Sisco, a former Assistant Secretary of State, once told the renowned Israeli author Shmuel Katz:  “I want to assure you, Mr. Katz, that if we were not getting full value for our money, you would not get a cent from us.”  

 

This being so, why are Israeli prime ministers so timid and so yielding?   Why are they so reluctant to assert themselves?  Sharon has justified his support of a “Palestinian” state by saying it is “impossible” to take back sections of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza that were transferred to the Palestinian Authority.   Why impossible when Israel is at war with that barbaric regime, which has educated a generation of children to hate Jews and emulate suicide bombers?  Why should he or any Israeli government feel bound to implement the Israel-PLO Agreement (and its derivative, the Road Map to a Palestinian state) when that agreement, quite apart from its questionable legality, has been repeatedly violated by the PLO?[22]  There are other questions.

 

Why are Israel’s ruling elites afraid to tell the ugly truth about their country’s enemies, seeing that the Arabs, who constantly malign the Jewish state, are also ideological enemies of America?  Living in a democratic and egalitarian era where moral and cultural relativism thrives, are Israeli politicians afraid that telling the truth about the Arabs would expose them to the canard of “racism”?   Would this be the consequence of seeing things in “black and white,” of calling Israel’s Arab enemies “evil-doers”?   How indeed are we to explain the wretched behavior of Israeli prime ministers, their inability to inspire their own people, to say nothing of gentile nations?   To this question I now turn.

 

*  *  *

 

Since its reestablishment in 1948, the supposed-to-be Jewish state has never had a truly Jewish or Torah-oriented prime minister, one who would see things in black and white, a prime minister who, in dealing with Israel’s enemies and so-called friends, could tap 3,500 years of Jewish wisdom as well as the most varied and recorded experience of any people.  Such a prime minister would understand, first, that the Jewish people have an absolute and God-given right to the Land of Israel.  He would therefore have no doubt whatever about the righteousness of Israel’s cause.  Second, he would be fully aware of the religious motivations of Israel’s Arab enemies and would not succumb to deceptive and dangerous peace overtures.  Admittedly, Ariel Sharon knows, and said in an interview with David Allen Lewis, a well-known Christian Zionist, that even moderate Arabs hate Israel.[23]  Lacking a Torah education, however, Sharon does not grasp the world-historical function of this hatred, which is to remind Jews of their origin, their uniqueness, and their divine purpose.  Without such knowledge, he will not know how to educate and unite the Jewish people, which is all that is necessary for Israel to stand alone and yet inspire mankind. 

 

In his interview with David Allen Lewis, for whom Israel should be the light unto the nations, Prime Minister Sharon meekly remarked that he never believed that Israel should be the teacher of the Islamic Middle East. “There should be reciprocity, each side learning from the other.”[24]  The present writer does not know what Israel, whose intellectual and moral heritage is unequaled, can learn from the Islamic world, long steeped in tyranny, poverty, and ignorance and now the breeding ground of international terrorism.[25]  Of course, Muslims, proud despite Islam’s decadence, do not share Sharon’s cultural egalitarianism.  That egalitarianism, which spawned Oslo, has all but lowered several Israeli prime ministers to the level of Yasser Arafat.   It has cast an appalling cloud of gray over Israel.   Jerusalem, the City of Truth, has become a City of Lies.

 

This is why the people of Israel, as polls indicate, are thoroughly confused about the policies and direction of their Government.  For this confusion we must blame the moral obscurantism of Labor’s surrogate prime minister on the one hand, and the irrationality of Israel’s governing institutions on the other.  Sharon’s failure to think in black and white terms means he is not intellectually qualified to educate the Jewish people and unite them behind a clear, consistent, and resolute national strategy.  Nor is he qualified to defend Israel’s cause before the United States.  As a consequence, Israel will be more exposed to pressure from the Executive branch of the American government.  Contrary to President George W. Bush, 70% of the American people oppose a Palestinian state.  Moreover, an overwhelming majority of American Senators and Congressmen are supportive of Israel, and some control the purse-strings of American foreign policy.  What can they possibly think of a prime minister who releases murderers and is anxious to yield Israel’s patrimony to people who use their children as human bombs?

 

Unlike Sharon, tens of millions of Evangelical Christians in the United States see things in black and white.   Unlike Sharon, these and many other Christians see Israel’s enemies as enemies of God.  They see what any serious thinker will see, that the “God issue” underlies the war being waged against the Jewish state.

 

IV. Enemies of God

 

Having shown that Mr. Sharon is Labor’s surrogate prime minister, I will now project a different Sharon—one who soul harbors “The Warrior” many voters likened to George S. Patton of World War II fame.  Few people know that Patton was probably the most erudite American general in that war. A serious student of history, he knew, as Macaulay once wrote, that “the essence of war is violence, and that moderation in war is imbecility”[26] and can even be cruel.   Thus, had Patten been given a free hand in the Allied invasion of Europe, he would very likely have ended the war in September 1944, rather than in May of 1945.  More than three million Jews would have been saved from the Nazi death camps.[27]  

 

Patton, a believing Christian, hated the Nazis with religious passion.  Ought not a believing Jew—a Jew uncorrupted by moral relativism—hate their successors, the Arab Nazis?

 

In the Kuzari, the poet-philosopher Judah Halevi (1095-1150) quotes King David:  “I hate them, O God, that hate you” (Psalm 129:21).   He explains:  “‘haters’ of God is a reference to those who hate God’s people, God’s covenant, or God’s Torah, because actual hatred has no meaning in terms of God’s essence.”  Hatred, however, is a futile passion if it does not issue in action.  In Psalm 18:38-43, Israel’s greatest king writes:  “I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and returned not until they were destroyed.  I crushed them so that they are not able to rise; …. I pulverized them like dust in the face of the storm …”

 

King David’s hatred of Israel’s enemies should animate Israel’s prime minister.  It should prompt him to crush Israel’s enemies because Israel’s enemies, in hating the Jewish people actually hate the God of Israel.  Israel’s prime minister should understand that hatred of Israel involves envious hatred of the Torah or of God’s Covenant with the Jewish people, which entitles the Jews to the Land of Israel.  That covenant imposes upon Jews the sacred duty not to surrender an inch of that land to the descendants of Ishmael.[28]

 

A prime minister’s hatred of Israel’s enemies will be proportionate to his love of the Jewish people.  If Israel’s enemies murder a single Jew, a prime minister should understand that this is a desecration of God’s Name, that he should therefore wreak swift and terrible vengeance on Israel’s enemies.  This will deter the murder of other Jews and thus render further acts of vengeance unnecessary.   It will save the lives even of one’s foes.

 

It should be obvious from the preceding that to crush Israel’s enemies, Israel’s prime minister must see things in black and white terms.  Absolutely confident in the Jewish people’s God-given right to the Land of Israel, he must speak and act in such a way as never to convey to the world in general, and to Israel’s enemies in particular, the impression that the Arabs have a just claim to any part of the Jewish people’s homeland.  He must never say, as various prime ministers of Israel have said, “everything is negotiable.”  Such words encourage Israel’s enemies and doom Israel to disaster.  Nor should he say Israel will not negotiate under fire.  Israel should not negotiate at all with its Arab enemies!  One does not negotiate with the enemies of God and of His Chosen People! 

 

The naïve will accuse me of fanaticism.  But the policy I am advocating will convey to Israel’s enemies that they are confronting a knowing and determined adversary, that Israel will not be lured into a “land-for-peace” policy, which, from a logical point of view would require Israel to relinquish land whenever its enemies threaten war.   

 

Consider what Israel’s enemies have gained as a result of Israel’s pursuing the same policy that doomed Czechoslovakia.   Whoever thought that a thug, the leader of gang of terrorists ensconced in far away Tunis, would bring Israel to its knees, would have its prime ministers entreating him or his surrogate for peace?  Has not Arafat been animated by the uncompromising policy I am advocating for Israel? 

 

I am well aware of Washington’s unhelpful role and of the hostility of European nations in this tragic-comedy.  But they too have been encouraged by the infirmity of Israel’s leaders.  They despise Israel, and why not?  Here is a Jewish state whose political and intellectual elites proudly display their secularism, their democratic credentials, their remoteness from God.  These elites invite pressure from Washington in proportion to their lack of Jewish pride and Jewish wisdom.  Indeed, having abandoned God and the Torah, they are abandoning the land of their fathers and have succumbed to extraterrestrial stupidity or madness.   (See Isaiah 44:25.)  Only a nation led by fools surrenders part of its homeland which it regained in a war of self-defense.  Only a nation led by madmen releases and arms its unrepentant enemies. 

 

The policy I am advocating is actually based on cool reason and on solid empirical evidence.  Fools and madmen aside, it is incontrovertible that Israel’s policy of “land for peace” is a bloody failure and provokes further bloodshed.   Israel needs an uncompromising prime minister who sees things in black and white if only because Israel’s enemies are uncompromising and see things in black and white.  One does not have to be Jewish to draw this conclusion.  Consider what Anwar Sadat said when he addressed the Knesset on November 20, 1977:  “To speak frankly, our land [sic] does not yield to bargaining … We cannot accept any attempt to take away … one inch of it …”[29] 

 

Does this mean ceaseless war?  But as noted earlier, Mr. Sharon admitted that Israel’s War of Independence has not ended.  The choice confronting Israel is not between war and peace, but between war with victory and war with defeat.  What has yet to be understood is that Israel’s enemies are programmed—I say programmed—not to give Israel peace until Israel makes peace with God.[30]  Israel will therefore need a Torah statesman at the helm.  Such a statesman would first prompt Israel to strive for internal perfection as a proud and Torah-oriented commonwealth. He would understand that the policy of “land for peace” negates the miracle of the Six Day War and constitutes a desecration of God’s Name.  He would then formulate and pursue a Jewish foreign policy that would earn the applause of the Christian world and place the Islamic world on the defensive, politically and metaphysically.  Islam, stagnant since the twelfth century, and steeped in ignorance and poverty, is quite vulnerable, but one must be wise and subtle as well as strong and determined to achieve victory.[31]

 

No thoughtful person expects Ariel Sharon or the presently constituted State of Israel to achieve victory over its enemies.  It may well be, however, that the Jewish people, bloodied and humiliated under Labor’s surrogate prime minister, and having become increasingly aware of their country’s inept and corrupt institutions, may soon regain control of their destiny and achieve their final redemption as foretold by the prophets of Israel.  May we not reasonably expect this redemption, seeing that the Jewish people have survived—as no other people could have survived—the tortures of hell for two thousand years?