The internal paralysis of a leftist country surrounded by deadly enemies

If you’re curious, as I have been, to know why election winners in Israel are given seven weeks to form a government (the Israeli election was held February 10, on February 20 President Perez told Benjamin Netanyahu to try to form a government, and he has until April 3 to do so), read Caroline Glick’s “Israel’s Balance of Delusion.” The article explains Netanyahu’s hideous situation, and Israel’s. Note inter alia that Avigdor Lieberman of the Israel Beiteinu party, supposedly a right-winger and racist, actually wants Israel to give up the Galilee and the Negev, and has also been demanding as a condition of joining Likud that Likud include Kadima in the government, even though Tsipi Livni of Kadima has been demanding as a condition of joining Likud that the peace process leading to a Palestinian state continue full speed ahead. Meanwhile the present Kadima-Labor government plans to release 450 terrorists in order to free one Israeli soldier.

Given the situation as Glick describes it, I am thinking that neither Netanyahu nor Livni will be able to form a government, and that another election will have be called, and that, as I suggested a few days ago, in July 2009 Ehud Olmert, who announced his resignation in July 2008, will still be acting prime minister.

Israel’s many and inexhaustible haters—the Patrick Buchanans, the Charles W. Freemans—excoriate her as a cruel oppressor nation, when in reality she is a country of suicidally deluded leftists. Never in history has there been an indictment more unfair, more the opposite of the truth.

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Howard Sutherland writes:

Sadly, Israel’s Labor government of the day set Israel up for all of this misery by failing to consolidate the Israel Defence Force’s victory in the Six-Day War of June 5-10, 1967 (which, this fighter pilot notes, the Israel Air Force kicked off with some of the most effective airstrikes ever). The Israelis should have declared then that the parts of old Mandate Palestine west of the Jordan River the IDF had just conquered—Judea, Samaria and Gaza—were non-negotiable parts of the State of Israel and that Israel would cede no territory west of the Jordan. There was bargaining leverage available in the form of the Golan Heights, seized from Syria, and the Sinai, seized from Egypt, that should have precluded surrenders of actual Israeli territory.

Instead the Israelis immediately made a gross error that dramatically undercut the strength of the Jewish claim to the entire land of Israel (“from Dan even unto Beersheba,” as the Bible has it). Instead of establishing firm Jewish control over Judaism’s holiest site, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the Israelis allowed the Moslem Waqf to continue in its role of caretaker of the Temple Mount (which, it is true, is the site of two significant mosques), and allowed the Waqf to continue restricting Jewish access to the site. What does it say about a people’s self-confidence and belief in the righteousness of its cause that, in the immediate aftermath of an historic and overwhelming victory over its unappeasable enemy, that people’s government allowed the same unappeasable enemy to remain in such a position? Liberalism trumped sanity, in the form of believing that being nice to the Moslems and allowing them to retain such a symbolic foothold in the very heart of Israel, would appease their fury at the mere existence of a Jewish Israel. Too bad those Israeli politicians hadn’t read the Koran and perused the hadiths—if they had they might have known better. Too bad our politicians won’t look at them either.

In June 1967, responding to a pan-Arab (and Moslem) threat, the Israelis created an historic opportunity to secure Israel. Unfortunately, the Israeli government squandered it. Israelis have been paying for that failure ever since.

March 19

A. Zarkov writes:

Both the Left and the Right in Israel refuse to execute terrorists. As Caroline Glick points out, this inevitably leads to the kidnapping of an Israeli for a prisoner exchange, but she can’t quite bring herself to suggest the obvious—kill captured terrorists and kill them quickly. These Arab terrorists are akin to pirates on the high seas in that they operate outside all the rules of war, and should be summarily executed. At one time, when we English speaking people believed in ourselves, we could deal with evil. Royal Navy First Lieutenant Robert Maynard hunted down the notorious pirate Edward Thatch (Blackbeard) and killed him on the spot. Later Thatch’s head was placed on a pole on the north shore of the Hampton River in Virginia as a warning to would be pirates. In more modern times, lawman Frank Hamer had no problem ambushing Bonnie and Clyde to put an end to their murderous ways. Hamer knew full well that Bonnie and Clyde would fight to the death, and to avoid having his own men killed he gave them no quarter. No Miranda warning for the dynamic duo, just a hail of bullets. The Israelis, like the Americans and the British, have lost their nerve and hide behind legal abstractions to mask their cowardice. Until the Israelis can throw off the yolk of liberalism they will continue in what seems like a permanent state of moral paralysis.

LA replies:

Excellent point, but I don’t remember that she even mentioned the refusal to execute terrorists. I just checked, and the string “exec” does not appear in the article.

A. Zarkov replies to LA:

She did not, and I did not mean to imply that she had explicitly done so. I think it’s axiomatic in Israel that execution is never an option.

A. Zarkov writes:

Israel missed an opportunity after the June 1967 war to increase its security by transferring the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza into Jordan. Let’s recall that Jordan attacked Israel on June 5, 1967, bombing West Jerusalem, Tel Aviv suburbs and targets in Galilee. At the start of the war with Egypt, Israel encouraged Jordan to remain neutral, but King Hussein feared a backlash from the Arab world.

Moreover, Nasser lied to Hussein, telling him that Egypt had destroyed the Israeli Air Force, and Hussein reluctantly put his army under Egyptian control. After Israel defeated Jordan, the Jordanians and the West Bank Palestinians were terrified of what Israel might do to them.

They knew what they had planned for Israel—xtermination. Why did Israel do nothing? Why didn’t it expel the Arabs from Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, giving themselves an Arab-free buffer zone of security?

Two theories. Theory 1: The U.S. government, being compromised by Arab money, forced Israel to do nothing. Theory 2: Being a left-liberal state, Israel simply couldn’t muster the will to do what they needed to do to survive. Already I can hear the liberals gasp: “That’s ethnic cleansing.” You bet it is. But the U.S. and its Allies engaged in ethnic cleaning on a grand scale right after WWII, about the same time the modern state of Israel came into being. Western liberals seem have have a convenient amnesia about what we did to ethnic Germans. The next time you hear someone talk about the “right of return” for Palestinian Arabs, and the restoration of the land and property the Jews “stole” from them, ask them about the right of return for ethnic Germans and the restoration of the property taken from them. Again and again the world seems to have two standards, one for Israel, and another for everyone else.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 18, 2009 10:14 PM | Send