(Continued from p.2)
initiative:" Said Shimon: "It is like having a light at the end of the tunnel. This is the first time we have a light and we shall have to build a tunnel." (This from the man who told the Israeli Labor Party convention on March 25, 1996: "By the year 2000, we will overcome Hamas, Islamic Jihad and terrorism. By then we will bring a comprehensive peace to the Middle East.")On July 3, the Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that former Prime Minister Barak likened the period before the Arafat-initiated intifada of 2000 to the maiden voyage of the Titanic and its lethal collision with ice flows in the North Atlantic. Peres objected: "One gets the impression that a few of us are standing on the iceberg and not on the Titanic." (One gets the impression Peres believes standing on the Titanic was a desirable place to be.) Peres, who owes his Nobel Prize and world reputation to running away from reality, and hasn't stopped running for a moment since 1993, continued:"You can't run away from the reality and make life easy on yourself."
And on June 17, in an interview with a journal appropriately entitled Vision, Peres assesses his own stature as a world visionary. "Today I would be very reluctant to teach my children history. What is history, after all? A chain of wars, of bloodshed, of hatred, of generals. The whole history was written with red ink...Today, when your wealth is stemming from ideas, from science and technology, why do you need borders? You cannot afford them anyway. What do you need wars for? And I believe what I'm -- I don't know how to define myself -- I think that I am looking not at the future, I am looking at the present, and I see the call of the future." Peres concluded: "My feeling is, there is spring in town, and we are blind."
Tell that to the families of all the victims of Arab hatred, whose lives ended with the red ink Peres blithely dismisses as irrelevant "history."
Canadian sociologist H. David Kirk is writing a full length biography of Pierre van Paassen, the outstanding Dutch-Canadian journalist who wrote and worked on behalf of the trapped Jews of Europe. He has now issued, with Ed Ephgrave, an evangelical Christian, Chapter 4 of van Paassen's The Forgotten Ally, about the role Jews played during World War II in the fight against Rommel's forces in North Africa, then on the verge of overrunning Palestine and the rest of the Middle East.
The paperback has a preface by Samuel Katz and an introduction by Kirk, who tells us their motivation in reprinting this beautifully written, forgotten story of Jewish heroism: "It is our hope that Pierre's rear-view mirror images of Palestinian Jewry's bravery in war will help to bolster Israel's resolve to stand firm for its rights as a nation." The paperback, entitled Israel: Democracy's Neglected Ally, is available from AFSI (for details, see p.9).
In these pages, we have repeatedly described the folly of the "Wall" which Israel is now building. In the Wall Street Journal of July 2, Michael B. Oren, author of the excellent new book on the 1967 war, Six Days of War, offers additional reasons why the Wall will be much worse than useless -- it will be seriously harmful to Israel's interests. Here are a few excerpts:
"It will certainly frustrate Israel's ability to retaliate. Operations such as those Israel is today conducting in Ramallah and other West Bank cities will become increasingly difficult to mount. On the diplomatic level, the fence will seriously erode Israel's position by granting the Palestinians a semblance of sovereignty without requiring them to pay a price in terms of ending the conflict or even clamping down on terror.
"Israelis would be wise to shift their attention to Lebanon as an example of the hazards of a West Bank fence. For years Israeli forces crossed the Lebanese border with impunity in pursuit of Hezbollah terrorists. But after its hasty retreat from Lebanon in May 2001, Israel marked the border with a fence. Within weeks, Hezbollah had moved an estimated 10,000 Katyusha rockets right up to the base of that fence. All of northern Israel, including Haifa, came within missile range....[W]hen Hezbollah launched dozens of Katyushas into Israel, attempted to shoot down Israeli planes, and even kidnapped and purportedly killed three Israeli soldiers, Mr. Barak could do nothing. In seeking to defend itself with a fence, Israel had created a border that the international community considered inviolate. The fence hemmed in Israel and provided de facto immunity for Hezbollah.
"The Lebanese experience is almost certain to be duplicated on the West Bank....In addition to the security dangers it will generate, the West Bank fence is likely to undercut Israel's negotiating position while substantively strengthening the Palestinians'. Insisting that the fence in no way constitutes its western border, the Palestinian Authority will nevertheless arrogate sovereign rights east of the fence. The Palestinians will acquire the first-stage state promised them by President Bush, but without fulfilling the president's demands for democratic reforms and the total cessation of terror."
And so the Israeli government careens from folly to folly, steadily compounding the Oslo disaster.
July-August 2002 - 11 - Outpost