Wanted: A Modern Jabotinsky

This past Saturday, The Wall Street Journal had a shocker of an article by Saeb Erekat on the Editorial Pages. I read it, feeling more and more outraged at every word. So, why, after a few days of reflection, am I glad they printed it? Because, even in its hideous distortion of the truth,  it reveals for us a glimpse into the deeply flawed and dangerously self-delusional misapprehension that fuels the Middle Eastern Conflict. The title of this article alone is enough to warn the reader of the inversion of reality that follows. 

"Where is Israel's de Klerk?"  it asked.

The title itself is a combination of fraud, libel and the venerable rhetorical trick known as “the loaded question fallacy”. It implies by its very asking that:

1. the people of Israel are not, themselves interested in peace
2. That Israel is an apartheid state and 
3. There has never been an Israeli leader who could or would make peace.

All three implications are nonsense and lies. Israel has historically been an entire population of "de Klerks", only wanting to live in peace. Far from an apartheid state Arabs in Israel have more rights and are treated better than the ordinary Arab citizen in any Arab country in the world. What’s more, every Israeli leader, even the reviled “ultra hard liners" Begin and Sharon have proven that they were willing to give concessions and actual land up for the promise of peace “talks”. Not to say that they have ever been close to getting peace in return, mind you, just “talks” the mere charade of peace-making from the likes of Arafat and Abbas. Those two terrorist supporters have never relinquished their publicly declared goal of destruction of the Jewish state even while "talking". 

Where is Israel's de Klerk? is not the right question, there have been too many already. To have a successful “de Klerk” there would have to be a Mandela on the other side. 

No need, then, to read the rest of that article. Erekat marches out the familiar, tired parade of the painted up, whored-out canards, scabrous libels and blind pigs of inverted logic- the entire aim of which is to camouflage his group’s desire (to annihilate Israel) beneath the aggrieved fiction of Israeli “occupation” and. He brazenly bludgeons Israel for the results of every civilized instinct and compassionate gesture she has ever offered.

Is there anyone (Aside, of course, from the “see no evil” trio of Obama, Kerry, Clinton and their sycophants) who cannot connect the dots from this deception with its labyrinth of hidden agendas to the desire of all of the Islamic States (ISIS, Iran et al) to annihilate all of us in the west?  

President Obama, for all the violence and hatred he has fostered in his attempts to “transform” reality, has done us a similar service to the one rendered by The Wall Street Journal and Saeb Erakat. His spectacular failures have proven to anyone who is paying attention that his political theories have blinded him to present realities and that the future he imagines is not possible. The price of not understanding reality is failure, violence and hatred. 

Many Jews both inside Israel and around the world have allowed themselves the same kind of luxurious self-delusion. They want to live in a world where good intentions are all that are needed and all conflicts can be resolved by negotiation and “give and take”. You can want that all you want but reality is not so easily fooled as you are. The Two State Solution would only work if both sides were equally compelled to see it as the only alternative. In 1948 Jews, not for the first time in history, had no where to go. The holocaust was still smoldering in eastern Europe and Jews who tried to return from the camps and hiding places to their pre-war homes were often killed or driven off. Immigration to the US and other western countries was much harder then than now. Arab lands were actively expelling centuries old Jewish communities. Israel had to exist.

The polite, diplomatic and self-deprecating approach has not worked with the Islamic World. They were not interested in allowing Israel to exist then and they have never been convinced that Israel is permanent and unavoidable. So you have one side pretending that all we have to do is talk sincerely enough and the peace will come and the other side believing that they only have to resist long enough and Israel will either be thrown into the sea or fall of her own weight. The Islamic world is coming at Israel with knives, guns, tanks, rockets and soon, thanks to Kerry and Obama, nuclear weapons and still the fantasy of “talks” is alive and, even now, the Two State Solution is seen as the best alternative for Israeli-American policy. There cannot be two states because they would not exist in the same reality.

Israel does not need anymore “de Klerks”! She needs to bring back the intellectual honesty of a Jabotinsky. Vladimir Jabotinsky understood that the Arabs would always reject Israel's right to exist. It is time to stop pretending that everyone can be happy and to face the reality that there will never be peace until the Arabs and their Iranian godfather are defeated decisively. Here is Jabotinsky writing, not just before the re creation of the Jewish state, before The Holocaust:

"The Arabs loved their country as much as the Jews did. Instinctively, they understood Zionist aspirations very well, and their decision to resist them was only natural ..... There was not misunderstanding between Jew and Arab, but a natural conflict. .... No Agreement was possible with the Palestinian Arab; they would accept Zionism only when they found themselves up against an 'iron wall,' when they realize they had no alternative but to accept Jewish settlement.”

Vladimir Jabotinsky

The entire world is responsible for the current mess. The Islamic world is most to blame. The rejection of the 1948 partition and the attempt to “Throw the Jews into the sea” with their military attack has been followed by two major wars and incessant murder, bombardment and prevarication. 

The UN and the security council powers are next in line for allowing the Arabs who obeyed the Mufti and the Arab despots call to leave their homes so the Arab armies could annihilate the Jews unencumbered to attain the status of permanent “refugees” and become an industry of their own. Never before in history has “refugee” status passed down for four generations. It is a corruption of the concept and redefinition of the word. 

Israel, too, must take blame, but only because she never supplied the Arabs with the “iron wall”  needed to bring them to that realization. All the talks and all the concessions of her would-be de Klerks have done nothing but allow the Arabs and the Islamic world to think that there is an alternative to having Jews as neighbors. That belief has to be disproven conclusively or the pretensions, killing, and suffering will continue until Israel is sacrificed on the alter of her own good intentions. By starting every conversation with a plea for peace and only making war incompletely and when it was unavoidable, Israel has gotten the opposite of peace. Only when she wholeheartedly embraces the need for the definitive conflict, will she be in a position to avert it. I only pray that we find our new Jabotinsky soon.