[(Continued from p.11)]
flict. As for a Security Council resolution, it is laughable to think that would prevent the UN from backing future Arab demands."Jeremiah's denunciation of those who cry "peace, peace, when there is no peace" has turned out to be a prophecy for today's Israel, embracing leaders of both left and right, Netanyahu as much as Rabin, Peres, and Barak.
If Israel is destroyed, history is likely to show that the false promise of peace was responsible. Elsewhere in this Outpost, Ruth King contrasts the warnings of Churchill from the early 1930s with the empty promises of peace in our time that Chamberlain offered to an enthusiastic British public. And when he finally assumed office, in his first statement as Prime Minister to the House of Commons, Churchill did not offer "peace around the corner" but declared "I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."
Contrast this with Israel's Prime Ministers since Oslo. Each of them has promised to bring "peace," which has in turn entrapped each of them into an endless series of unilateral concessions, the end of which was to bring Israel to death's door at Camp David. Arafat promises his people "Palestine," not peace, and does not hesitate to promise "war" whenever the momentum of Israeli concessions slows.
The evidence suggests that the only Prime Minister in the last decade who genuinely believed in the peace he promised was Shimon Peres, a buffoon and evil manipulator--former Prime Minister Moshe Shertok long ago warned that it would be a black day for Israel if Peres ever assumed power. Out of power, no one inveighed more eloquently against the mortal peril Oslo constituted for Israel than Benjamin Netanyahu. Barak actually voted against the original Oslo agreeement in the Knesset. It is hard to know what Rabin believed, but he was probably manipulated by Peres into embarking on Oslo and the momentum swept him along.
So why have they all based their election campaigns on promising the public peace? They have done so because they believed that this was what the public wanted to hear and such a promise was necessary to get them elected. And once in power, they fear that only further "peace agreements" can get them reelected.
Would Israelis turn their backs upon a leader who promised them only blood, toil, tears and sweat? After all, even the British turned their backs upon Churchill until war began. Actually, although Ben Gurion and Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir lacked Churchill's eloquence, they rallied the public with their own blunt version in Ein breira, the underpinning of Israel's policy toward the Arabs in the state's first decades. Ein breira means "there is no choice;" as Ben-Gurion saw it, Israel had no choice but to deter by strength and to fight when deterrence failed. When ein breira ceased to be the basis for policy, the country as a whole became mentally ill, substituting hallucinations of peace for rational thought.
By refusing to offer Barak so much as a fig leaf (Barak offered Arafat sovereignty over East Jerusalem in substance while balking at the word), Arafat has given Israel yet another opportunity to rally around the recognition that ein breira. One cannot be sanguine that Israel will come to that recognition. Her leaders continue to talk of violent conflict as "unthinkable," while the Arabs think of little else.
One thing is certain: without a leadership capable of promising only blood, toil, tears and sweat-- the inescapable price of Israel's continued independence--the state is doomed.
Prophetic words in so far as Israel is concerned from the Lebanese-born author of The Prophet: "Pity the nation that raises not its voice/save when it walks in a funeral,/boasts not except among its ruins,/and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block."
Americans For a Safe Israel
1623 Third Ave. (at 92nd St.) - Suite 205
New York, NY 10128
Outpost - 12 - August-September 2000