FACING THE APOCALYPSE:
ISRAEL AND THE
"PEACE PROCESS"
Louis Rene Beres
Every act of naming is dense with implication. When a set of political concessions pointing fixedly toward war is called "peace," a process is put into motion that is driven by falsehood. The result, in the case of Israel and the so-called "peace process," can only be identified as a "peaceful" march to disappearance.
Israel, by failing to call things by their correct name, has ignored the essential expectations of memory. Refusing to acknowledge that their state is the individual Jew in macrocosm, that the regional enemies of Israel are animated by genocidal motives because the land is now a Jewish state, the People of Israel march "peacefully" toward extinction. Before this "peace process" could
ever spawn a New Middle East, a gravedigger would have to wield the forceps.
However the Jew might have changed over the centuries (and, indeed, many an individual Jew has always sought more or less desperately to "fit in"), the anti-Semite has stubbornly remained faithful to his hatreds. Whether designed purposefully to minimize hostilities
or merely as a function of different times and different places, such changes have elicited nothing in the way of greater acceptance or generosity of spirit. This is because the anti-Semite, individually or collectively, responds not to the particular qualities of the Jew or of the Jewish State (these qualities are effectively
irrelevant to his hatreds), but to his own personal fears and insecurities. As Jean-Paul Sartre indicates in his Anti-Semite and Jew, "If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him."
What, then, is Israel to do? We must understand that past is prologue, that "Death to Israel" is simply a new phrase for a very old hatred. Hence, leaders of the Jewish state, hoping for a successful "peace process," should not be deceived.
Aware that Israel's future is linked forever to its Jewish past, these leaders must seek safety not in a "civilized" acceptance of weakness (i.e., concessions and diplomatic "compromises" based on the presumption of rational adversaries), but in a judicious commitment to power and, if necessary, to actual armed force.
Recognizing in Israel the historic plight of the individual Jew facing genocidal destruction--the Jew as macrocosm --Jerusalem must always remember that civility among the barbarians, however "peaceful," leads only to disappearance.
Am Yisrael Hai! The People of Israel can prevail. This mighty little state has already demonstrated the unique operational skills with which more than two million Jews were rescued from Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. A variety of immigration successes,
involving an alliance between Shaul Avigur (head of the original Mossad) and Joseph J. Schwartz (leader of the American Joint Distribution Committee) were achieved in the post-World War II pre-state period.
Once Israel was fully established in 1948, the
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rescue challenge shifted from "illegal" immigrations to freeing Jews from countries in distress. Best known of these rescue missions are Operation Magic Carpet, which extricated the Jews of Yemen; the extensive North African Operations Plan,
which assisted hundreds of thousands of Jews in emigrating from Morocco; and the sustained effort to aid Jews -- with the help of the Kurds -- to escape from Iran after Khomeini's Islamic Revolution of 1979. Even more generally recognized, perhaps,
were Operations Moses and Solomon, which freed the Falasha Jews of Ethiopia; the ingathering of over 400,000 Russian Jews in 1991; and the 1992 rescue of 1400 Jews from Bosnia, where "ethnic cleansing" had targeted a broader-than-usual variety of victims.
So the Jews, to the extent possible, have been brought safely to Zion. Now the crucial task demands that safety, indeed, survival, be brought to Israel itself, to the Jewish State that has promised refuge to so many individual persons. Unless the "war" for Jewish safety is fought on both fronts simultaneously, in the endangered Diaspora lands and in Israel proper, "rescue" to Israel
would be an oxymoron, amounting to absurd movement from the frying pan into the fire. Lacking the capacity to fully defend its citizens from the threat of genocidal war, Israel could represent not the solution to the "Jewish problem," but -- in an unutterable irony of history -- a component of the "Final Solution."
I am aware, of course, that the juxtaposition of Israel and Jewish disappearance is so dreadful that it borders on sacrilege. Yet it is a juxtaposition that dare not be ignored. Should we fail to take it seriously, the concentration of millions of post-Holocaust Jews in an area smaller than a large county in California
could prove a distinct blessing to those who would refashion genocide as war. But if we do take seriously the connections between Zionist objectives and Jewish vulnerability in Israel, we will have taken the first critical steps toward ensuring Israel's survival, to making certain that our national liberation does not become our existential misfortune.
In the best of all possible worlds, there would indeed be a New Middle East, and all countries in that unfortunate region would recognize the overriding value of comity and cooperation. Here all states could take for granted Vattel's notion of "mutual aid" as the dominant peremptory expectation:
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Since Nations are bound mutually to
promote the society of the human race,
they owe one another all the duties which
the safety and welfare of that society
require...The end of the natural society
established among men in general is that
they should mutually assist one another to
advance their own perfection and that of
their condition; and Nations, too, since
they may be regarded as so many free
persons living together in a state of nature,
are bound mutually to advance this human
society. Hence, the end of the great society
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(Continued on p.5)
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