This interview with IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon I consider the most important newspaper interview and possibly the most important event of the past decade in Jewish history.
The importance of the matter is that for the first time in the past 10 years, a senior leader dares to speak the truth. It is a daring declaration of the simple and the obvious, that very first obligation of all honest men (in Orwell's famous quip). It is important because it represents the first crack in the wall of leftist hegemony in Israel, the first glimmering of a will to survive reasserting itself in Israel.
Over the past decade, Israel has been under the hegemony of a leftist cult. This cult introduced Oslo and led the country on a path of national self-annihilation. Under the control of this cult, which still controls the media, the Supreme Court, and the universities, it has been virtually impossible for any politician or public figure to speak the truth. Despite being a minority pseudo-religion, this cult took over the Israeli media. It also took control of the Israeli Labor Party, which it still controls, and large segments of the Likud.
The courage of the Chief of Staff in blowing apart this regime of censorship and repression -- in stating simply that the emperor has no clothes -- may be the most important event in the past few years of Jewish history.
(The interview appeared in Ha'aretz of August 30 and was conducted by journalist Ari Shavit. For reasons of space, it has been slightly edited.)
Q: Lieutenant General Ya'alon, of all the threats surrounding the State of Israel, which disturbs you the most? Are any of the threats of an existential nature?
A: When I look at the overall map, what dis-turbs me especially is the Palestinian threat and the possibility that a hostile state will acquire nuclear capability. Those are the most worrisome focal points, because both of them have the potential of being an existential threat to Israel. We have good answers for all the other threats.
Q: There is something surprising in the fact that you see the Palestinian threat as an existential threat.
A: The characteristics of that threat are invisible, like cancer. When you are attacked externally, you see the attack, you are wounded. Cancer, on the other hand, is something internal. Therefore, I find it more disturbing, because here the diagnosis is critical. If the diagnosis is wrong and people say it's not cancer but a headache, then the response is irrelevant. But I maintain that it is cancer. My professional diagnosis is that there is a phenomenon here that constitutes an existential threat.
Q: Does that mean that what you are doing now, as chief of staff, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, is applying chemotherapy?
A: There are all kinds of solutions to cancerous manifestations. Some will say it is necessary to amputate organs. But at the moment, I am applying chemotherapy, yes.
Q: Describe for me the present campaign between the Palestinians and us: Who is against whom, and for what, in this campaign?
A: The campaign is between two societies that are competing for territory and, to a certain degree, for existence. I don't think that there is an existential threat to Palestinian society. There is an existential threat to us. In other words, there is asymmetry here, but it is reversed: Everyone thinks we are Goliath and they are David, but I maintain that it is the opposite.
Everyone thinks we are Goliath and the Palestinians are David, but I maintain that it is the opposite.
Q: Are you saying that despite what appears to be a war of the oppressed against the oppressors, of the occupied against the occupiers, the Palestinians actually have a sense of strength and power?
A: Of course. They feel that they have the backing of a quarter-of-a-billion Arabs and they believe that time is on their side and that, with a combination of terrorism and demography, they will tire us out and wear us down. There is also an additional reverse asymmetry here: We do not have intentions to annihilate them and we have also expressed readiness to grant them a state, whereas they are unwilling to recognize our right to exist here as a Jewish state.
Q: Do you not see the war of the Palestinians against us as a campaign to end the occupation?
A: If the term "occupation" had any relevance at all, it lost it, as far as I am concerned, in the year 2000, when the State of Israel put a certain proposal on the table that was supposed to resolve the problem. That proposal was supposed to get the Palestinians off our back, but instead they started to stab us. They stayed
[(Continued on p.8)]
September 2002 - 7 - Outpost