As the United States prepares for a long overdue vigorous and prolonged action against the international Islamic terror network, Israel's inaction in the face of terror is thrown into even sharper relief. Ironically, Israel is now being held up as a model for how to counteract terror, when, in sober fact it is a model of how not to act. The lesson Israel holds for the United States is how the failure to act destroys public spirit even as it promotes and encourages terror.

The roots of Israel's current paralysis go back to the Gulf War, and the United States bears much of the blame. In 1991, missiles rained down on Israel from Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Fearful (mistakenly, as it turned out) that they carried chemical warheads, Israelis cowered in their "security rooms" in gas masks or packed the highways, seeking to escape population centers. The government, under enormous pressure from the United States, which feared any Israeli action would be intolerable to the Arab members of its Gulf War coalition, exercised perfect restraint. It did absolutely nothing.

At the time this was a popular decision in Israel: the government had pleased the Americans who were, after all, hurling their full military might against Saddam. Only a few voices--among them that of Jerusalem Post editor David Bar Illan--were raised to say that this was catastrophic policy: the failure of Israel to act in her own defense would prove a critical blow both to public morale and the state's deterrent power in the Arab world. These few protesters turned out to be prophets. The missiles themselves did minimal damage. But it is now widely recognized that they dealt a severe blow to the Israeli spirit. For the first time since the founding of the state, the Jews of Israel found themselves once again passive victims of an evil tyrant dedicated to their destruction. In a crucial dimension, their state had failed them.

There could scarcely have been a more improbable advocate of inaction than Israel's Prime Minister during the Gulf War. Yitzhak Shamir had been the operational head of LECHI, Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, denigrated by its enemies as "the Stern Gang." It had fought the British even as the war against the Nazis was in progress. And now, ironically, Israel has once again embarked on a policy of "restraint" under the leadership of her most famed man of action, Ariel Sharon, the hero of the 1973 war who narrowly snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

Sharon's lack of response to the Palestinian Authority's war on Israel is the more surprising in that he received an overwhelming mandate in the 2001 elections to lead the nation out of the bog of appeasement in which the Labor government of Ehud Barak had mired it. At Camp David, and then at Taba in January 2001, Barak had accepted virtually all Arafat's demands--to no purpose. Offered virtually everything (including a limited "right of return" for refugees from the 1948 war), Arafat chose to go to war.

Unlike the case in the Gulf War, this time the restraint is not perfect. The Israeli government reacts to Arab attacks on its citizenry, but feebly; it does not act in proportion to its power, nor does it act effectively to stem the murders and massacres. The consequences are even more devastating than Shamir's inaction in the Gulf War, because while that war was over in a matter of days, this one drags on endlessly, underscoring the government's impotence. Sharon has repeatedly stated the "principles" upon which his policy of inaction rests: preserving the national unity government and avoiding regional war. But just as Shamir failed to foresee the consequences of his inaction, so the government of Sharon has failed to recognize the calamitous consequences of its own policy of "restraint."

The following is a partial list of those consequences.

l. By far the most important, as in the Gulf War, is public demoralization. As John Adams noted in his Preamble to the Constitution of the State of Massachusetts, "The end of the institution, maintenance, and administration of government is to secure the existence of the body politic; to protect it, and to furnish the individuals who compose it with the power of enjoying, in safety and tranquility, their natural rights and the blessings of life." The Arabs stone, shoot, shell, and murder Israeli citizens on a daily basis. Israel, whose very raison d'etre was to give Jews the dignity and safety of a state of their own, in effect has been telling its citizens they must accustom themselves to daily mini-pogroms--assaults on ordinary Jews for the crime of being Jews.

Israel in effect tells its citizens they must accustom themselves to daily mini-pogroms--assaults on ordinary Jews for the crime of being Jews.

But as Israelis discover that Israel is not merely the most dangerous place for a Jew to live but, far more serious, the place where the government views Jewish life as dispensable, many Israelis will inevitably seek a personal way out. A survey for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz published August 24 found that 28% of those between 28 and 34 years old (i.e. the age-group for whom mobility is easiest) had considered emigrating during the last few months. Equally important, in striking contrast to earlier

September-October 2001               - 3 -               Outpost