From the Editor

Who is Demented?

A CIA assessment delivered to Israeli military intelligence says that time is running out for reaching an agreement with Hafez al-Assad, because his health is rapidly deteriorating and he already suffers from "intermittent dementia."

If Mr. Assad is only intermittently demented, he clearly is in better mental health than Mr. Barak. What can one say of a democratically-elected Prime Minister desperate to sign a so-called "peace agreement" with a dying despot who has lost his faculties?

The Chelm-logic behind the rush to a Syrian agreement is clear enough: his successor (who may not have the clout to sign a peace agreement on his own) will honor Assad's signature. But Dr. Aaron Lerner, in the Jerusalem Post of March 8, zeroes in on the stupidity of this reasoning. Once Assad is gone, his successor (Assad is grooming his son) will be challenged by rivals and those rivals will point to whatever elements in the Syria-Israel agreement impinge on Syrian independence, such as even a temporary ground station on Syrian soil, restrictions on the deployment of Syrian troops near Israeli territory, etc. If these "violations" of Syrian sovereignty threaten the stability of the post-Assad regime, Lerner observes, the United States is bound to pressure Israel to accept violations of the agreement in order to bolster the new Damascus regime. Just as with Arafat post-Oslo, Israel will be pressed to ignore Syrian non-compliance, since requiring compliance would undermine a shaky Syrian leadership. In short, says Lerner, "if Israel signs an agreement with Assad now it will be pressured, after his demise, to allow post-Assad Syria to renege on the very security and other concessions that enabled Barak to agree to leave the Golan in the first place." Lerner concludes that "the only part of a 'land for peace' deal signed today that is sure to survive Assad is Israel's withdrawal from the Golan."

By Those They Honor...

In the November 1999 Outpost, we published an article entitled "By Those They Honor Ye Shall Know Them," chronicling the extent to which Israel's prizes for excellence, including the government's high-prestige Israel Prize, were being awarded to those who undermined and denigrated the state. We noted that there were many Israelis who deserved awards, but no one should hold his breath waiting for them to be honored. We mentioned specifically Shmuel Katz as someone richly deserving an Israel Prize for Life Achievement. Well, the Israel Prize for Life Achievement goes this year to...Shulamit Aloni.

If there was an Arab prize for an Israeli who did most to divide her countrymen, Aloni would be a top candidate. The religious parties in the government coalition promptly protested the award, announcing they could not countenance giving the award to Aloni "who simply sowed divisiveness and hatred....A prize for life-works must be awarded to a person who is very close to a role model for the entire society."

Aloni's anti-religious statements and actions were so offensive that even Prime Minister Rabin was impelled to fire her as Minister of Education. She decided to halt the practice of sending high school youth to the sites of Nazi death camps on the grounds it made them too "nationalistic." As columnist Sarah Honig points out in the Jerusalem Post, Aloni was shocked when she accompanied a delegation of Israeli teens to the Majdanek death camps and overheard a schoolgirl express pride in the fact that the Jewish people now have a state and flag of their own -- Aloni chided her sharply for drawing "the wrong, narrow-minded, nationalistic conclusions from the Holocaust."

Aloni also demanded that the phrase "May the Lord remember" be deleted from a prayer for fallen soldiers; she called the Book of Joshua "a book of conquest that should not be studied;" she announced "The religious draw on the same dark forces that fed Fascist Nazism;" she lumped Rachel with the the biblical prostitute Rahav; she referred to Joseph's tomb as the tomb of "Sheikh Yusef." An investigation by State Comptroller Miriam Ben-Porat found that as Education Minister, she showed favoritism to Arab organizations by providing them with funding even when they did not meet the appropriate standards.

Arab terrorism became grounds for assaults on its Jewish victims. Thus during the wave of terror attacks that followed Oslo's signing (and that led directly to Labor's electoral downfall) she expressed outrage at the settlers who initially bore the brunt of the murders. Said

(Continued on p.12)

Outpost               - 2 -               March 2000