Words of Wisdom from David Basch

Freeman Center Political Philosopher

 It seems that the Israeli people have been treated to another one of their government's famous disguised surrenders. Ariel Sharon was brought on board to sell the surrender and not to prevent it. Now he can freely hug and kiss Arafat. Isn't it ludicrous that Sharon wouldn't shake hands with Arafat but surrendereed to this "international terrorist" as Sharon called him?

To be sure, perhaps there was no alternative for Israel, or that this surrender was necessary for good reasons of state. If so, I am mistaken. But Israel's people are wise enough to respect reason and would probably continue to support their Prime Minister if he can explain himself adequately. However, the fact that Mr. Netanyahu uses manipulation and trickery, uses wall to wall yarmulkas to pretty up his image, shows that his reasons were probably self-serving and would not stand up to scrutiny. While Netanyahu dangled reciprocity as a demand before Israelis, he was really talking about what was required from earlier negotiations which Israel didn't get and which I doubt Israel will get now.

If it turns out that Israelis cannot be convinced that Mr. Netanyau's apparent betrayals were justified and that what has happened was another one of the ill-considered, expedient, artless, political gestures that moves Israel closer to vanishment, Mr. Netanyahu ought to be treated to removal from office, an outcome that he will justly deserve.

Perhaps those who turn him out ought to then vote for him as the lesser of the evils. But they should be prepared to promptly turn him out again if necessary. The process could be repeated (if that is possible) until a true center-right candidate emerges that can be supported. This is the candidate that Israel has waited for for fifty years. Apparently, it was not Netanyahu.

As it looks, nothing worse can be wished on Israel's enemies than that they get negotiators like what the Israelis have always gotten. In each case, Israeli negotiators give away at the table what Israeli blood wins on the battle field. Even when Israel seems to win concessions, these are soon given away to live yet another life as bait for the next surrender. What is so sickening is the idea that the CIA and U.S. officials will really monitor Arab behavior. They have always turned a blind eye to Arab treachery. The Ameriocans "did not see" Egypt's moving up missiles in 1970 in violation of a cease fire and have not seen the consistent Arab violations of Oslo, always explaining these away. And while Netanyahu has agreed to free Arab terrorists and murderers, he does not use his leverage to insist that someone like Pollard actually be set free. If Israel is expected to free thousands of murderers for peace, trhen why should not the U.S. show the way and free a decent man like Pollard.

I just heard the news that Netanyahu backed down. Leave it to him to say that he was promised and was shafted and that now he was secretly promised. I will not believe it or credit him with this until Pollard walks free. In the U.S. we call two opposing parties with the same lousy political philosophy Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Apparently, Tweedledum Netanhayu-Likud is the same as Tweedledee Labor-Peres. No leftist leader would have fought harder or more craftily for withdrawals than Mr. Netanyahu has been doing. He has been fulfilling the Rabin program in the name of Likud, except that Labor probably could not have gotten away with what Netanyahu accomplished for the Arabs in Hebron -- "only Likud could."

Perhaps Mr. Netanyahu thinks that he will do better by trading left wing voters for those of his right wing. But I doubt that he will win many new friends since leftists are what they are because of their sick, delusional character and not for rational reasons. They cannot stand a moderate leftist leader that is also at the center. They will not move toward Mr. Netanyahu when they can have a real leftist leader like Barak to choose and the Arab voters who want to destroy Israel will be backing them up. (Maybe the reversal by the U.S. on Pollard was deliberately done to turn Israeli opinion against Netanyahu so that in a new election a leftist will win. In this way, Netanyahu may have gotten a dose of his own medicine.)

As usual, an Israeli government ends up supporting the savage Arabs who want to destroy Israel and championing Arab propaganda. The image perpetrated is that "dirty Jews" are finally geting out of "occupied territories" and giving back what belongs to the decent Palestinians who are the true owners of all of Palestine-Israel. This message will, in turn, finally lead to the ultimate "justice" of a disappeared Israel, courtesy of Israel's government.

When Israel is finally bereft of her patriots and her friends that her governments do so much to alienate and, as the Arab knife is on her throat, perhaps Israel will reflect on what she does. I hope I am all wrong. Perhaps Mr. Netanyahu already knows something not evident, that for the longest time Israel has been defeated by her enemies and that slow abject surrender is the only path and that he could not have done other than what he did. Maybe Netanyahu plans to pull a rabbit from his hat. But unless he convinces his traditional-security minded supporters, perhaps his deed is as lousy as it looks from here. I can't even bring myself to watch the proceedings on television.

10/23/98

Observing events at Wye, I infer from the negotiations that there was a basis for agreement between Israel and her Arab interlocutors:

Israel desired an agreement, that is, Mr. Netanyahu did since he seems to think that that is what he needs to get reelected since he believes that that is what the Israeli people want. If Israelis want an agreement as an end in itself, it shows that Netanyahu abysmally failed to educate Israel's people after he got into office. He ended up saving the honor of the failed Labor government he replaced and which now would pose a challenge to his reelection. So now getting an agreement was his bottom line in the negotiations -- a sure win for the Arabs.

The Arabs, on the other hand, desire the roll back of Israel so that they can destroy what is left of it. They will accept no agreement that does not enable them to carry out their plan for Israel's destruction. So, as can be seen, there was here a basis for an agreement -- an agreement, which Netanyahu wants, and one that continues the roll back of Israel which the Arabs want. No one can take seriously what Netanyahu says about insuring security. That has obviously been a second order consideration. When the Arabs refuse to cooperate in that, Israel takes what crums she can get, which is an agreement that provides an "image" of security but not security and satisfies Arab goals.

Netanyahu's tactic was designed to give the Israeli people what it says it wants and to mask the surrenders that become necessary to attain it. Otherwise the Israeli people might think differently about their unwise, limited, and self-destructive goals. Netanyahu's postured, "snow job" has fooled no one. He spoke of a phoney "reciprocity" and allows the U.S. to monitor PLO behavior to insure Israeli security is a cover for surrender and a waste. History has shown that since 1948 the U.S. always turns a blind eye to Arab infractions of agreements when "seeing" will have political consequences that the U.S. doesn't want.

Were I one to go in for pronouncing dire curses upon my enemies, I would wish them leaders and negotiators as bad as that to be found on the Israeli side -- a side that consistently bats "0" for Israel while allowing the Arabs to score big every time. All the supposed concessions from the other side which Israel pays dearly for end up being dropped and then being recycled as proposed new Arab concessions for further Israeli surrender. Had the Arab side been plagued by Israeli leaders, they would be thoroughly demoralized and well on their way to obliteration by now instead of this being Israel's fate.

I also noticed the sad letter the other day in the New York Times by a Jewish father who lost a son in Israel through Arab terrorism. He argues that if Israel does not surrender to the Arabs who murdered his son, his son "will have died in vain." When I see that this man has learned nothing from his tragedy, it becomes obvious that his son did indeed die in vain.

Finally, what are Israel's people to do about leaders who betray them? The answer is to remove them from office the way they removed Labor in 1973 and Peres in 1994. If possible, Netanyahu's government should be made to fall for his betrayal of those who put him into office and his failure in coping with Israel's predicament. He has carried out his policies as though he were running to head the Labor party. He actually saved the Laborite "surrender artists" so that they can run again with heads high despite their grievous betrayal of the country that put a new Arab army on their doorstep. He has done little or nothing to face the leftists up to the disaster their Labor party inflicted on their nation, vindicating their ruinous policies as though its lunacies were necessary lunacies.

Clearly, Mr. Netanyahu has been trying to trade the votes of his right wing supporters for that of leftists. His problem is that Laborites will not vote for him since they are characterlogically committed to their lunacies, which have nothing to do with reality but a sick desire to appear as moralists by aping the pseudo-morality that the enemies of Israel invent to defeat Israel. These leftists are irresistibly drawn to leftist extremists who share their own characterlogical flaws and they cannot tolerate the political center that Netanyahu tries to capture.

Therefore, Netanyahu has probably not succeeded in adding to his political strength. What little he gained was through alienating his greater support among traditional Jews. The Israeli majority that put him in office ought to let Mr. Netanyahu know of its displeasure by bringing his government down. They can then vote for him in runoffs and bring him back into office as the lesser of the evils. Afterwards, the traditionalist-security parties ought not to shirk from removing him again and again if he insists on going down betrayal alley. This ought to continue until a true center-right candidate emerges, the one which Israel has been waiting fifty years for, the one Netanyahu posed as but, apparently, failed to be.

 You have got to respect Arafat. He really fights for his imprisoned savages. Through his intense efforts he will get his savage prisoners freed as part of Israeli and U.S. forgiveness. He gets Israel and the U.S. to forgive the most heinous crimes of the Arabs. Meanwhile, Netanyahu lets prisoner Pollard rot in jail -- another thing lately to turn my stomach and to justify advocating his removal from office.

Yes! Arafat is head and shoulders above Netanyahu in this department. Jonathan Pollard rots in jail for having helped Israel be prepared for Syria's poison gas potential, information that the U.S. was obligated to give Israel. Jonathan Pollard was a true American hero since he could not stand by and allow Arab savages hurt the people who had suffered for gassing in the Holocaust, the way other American heroes turned agains ttheir commanders at My Lai in vietnam when U.S. soldiers were ordered to kill civilians. So while Netanyahu agrees to let Arab murderers and terrorists go free, as does the U.S. allow spies for real U.S. enemies go free with a slap on the wrist, Pollard remains a Jewish prisoner -- a grave injustice and blot on the U.S. escutcheon and on that of Netanyahu who, more and more, is disappointing to the n-th degree.

I have always admired Arafat's pride and loyalty to his fighters and cause with which he carries himself, even though I find dispicable what he does and stands for in trying to destroy Israel. You don't have to be for Arafat's savage goals to nevertheless see this admirable trait so absent from Netanyahu and the Israeli governments who regularly abandon their prisoners, except to pay exorbitantly for dead Jewish bodies. So you have to admire Arafat's characteristic of pride and support for his agents, feel as much admiration for this trait as one feels revulsion and shame for its lack in the way Israeli leaders bear themselves when it comes to their own prisoners, failing to go to bat for them, as Netanyahu just demonstrated once again. Israeli leaders act without the pride of an Arafat for their own great cause and these Israelis teach their own people to be ashamed that they dare to fight for their survival.

Since the world pays little attention to the details of news events, the way Arafat comports himself so admirably for his fighters and for his cause and the despicable way the Israelis handle what they are about, the world actually thinks it is Israel that acts without right and that it is the noble Arabs, the ones who are trying to rob and destroy Israel, that are on the right side.

Netanyahu may be a good communicator but he obviously communicates well the wrong message. He ought to learn something from the characteristic of pride and loyalty, at which Arafat and the Arabs show they excel.

Dear Rush:

This noon (10/23/98), I was disappointed with your comment about Pollard giving "super secrets" away to Israel. You know better or ought to know better.

Much of what Pollard was blamed for in passing information was leaked by the many other spies, such as Aldrich Ames, and many more, too many to count, that have in recent years been exposed. Also to be included as a giver away of important U.S. secrets is Casper Weinberger who gave U.S. secrets to Arab nations who promptly passed them on to Russia. Bush had to pardon him in advance.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Pollard was an authentic American hero in the traditions of our great American nation. When he learned that the U.S. was withholding information that, by previous agreement was supposed to go to Israel, information about Syrian or was it Iraqi capacities to use poison gas, he acted to warn Israel. He rightly felt that after all that the Jewish people went through with being gassed with the help of Western inaction about the Nazis, he would not be a party to such a new potential Holocaust. He was not about to repeat what some Americans did to withhold information about the Holocaust years ago.

In fact, he acted in the way the heroes of My Lai in Vietnam did in going against U.S. officers who were ordering the massacre of civilians. I repeat. He was an authentic American hero and has been unjustly punished for his heroic action ever since. His punishment has gone beyond the bounds of propriety and justice for someone who helped a U.S. ally. Pollard is an authentic Jewish prisoner in Israel's war for survival.

A sychophantic black judge (Aubrey) has done this dirty work on behalf of some people in the U.S. government and has failed to agree to change the harsh, unjust sentence. Pollard had accepted a plea bargain which the U.S. shafted him on and sent him up for life -- a despicable act by our government which you now abet.

Apparently, for the U.S., the highest morality now seems to be oil, which it appears you agree with as a loyal, knee jerk, Bush Republican, the kind who let Saddam Hussein off the hook when he was in the U.S. gunsights so that he can live to plague new generations of the world with unconventional weapons.

I now know something more about you Rush. I am disappointed to learn of it. Hereafter your words will truly be taken with a grain of salt as that of another ideologue capable of shirking a real depthful commitment to truth. But you have company. Bob Grant does the same thing when it comes to Israel.

When Israel is urged to free thousdands of Arab murderers for peace, then the U.S. should show the way by freeing a decent man, Jonathan Pollard.