ISRAEL'S ELECTION AND
THE INTERNATIONALISTS
Eugene Narrett
An image typifying establishment response to the victory of Benjamin Netanyahu was a cartoon in New England's largest paper. It depicted the Likud leader flanked by grinning, gun-toting Israeli and Hamas thugs who yanked his arms up in a champion gesture. It's a familiar and hateful liberal message: Likud equals terror. It won by exploiting fear.
This judgment, hammered home by networks and major dailies, distorts many core truths about Israeli culture and Middle Eastern politics. Changes there, as in Europe, America and Asia, chart the decay of welfare-socialism and conflicts between internationalist bureaucracies and distinct national cultures.
Globalists painted Likud's win in apocalyptic tones. Liberal pundits all but demanded Netanyahu continue Labor's discredited policies. It was intoned that his margin was "razor-thin," which was superficially true but essentially false. Those reviewing many sources know that Likud won a lion's share (about 56%) of Jewish votes. Beyond his base of leftwingers and atheists, Mr. Peres was preferred by Israeli Arabs who gave him 98% of their votes.
Equally revealing was the Orthodox vote and, noted the New York Times in words buried deeply in its inner pages, "votes of non-observant Jews who share the Orthodox's dismay at Israel's growing hedonism." Among those who want not only Israel but Judaism's moral code to live, 95% voted for Mr. Netanyahu and the parties of the center-right. The three religious parties now have a fifth of the seats in the Knesset.
"We don't understand them," admitted Stanley Ringer, a Labor party spokesman referring to observant Jews. "They are saying religion in society and education has to be seen as a central concern. They are a far more important element than we thought."
That says it all. In Israel as in America, those imprisoned in leftwing dogma "just don't get it" about cultural issues. And they display ample (though rarely headlined) contempt for religion and the religious. Last year, a Labor cabinet minister urged removing from the national anthem the words "a Jewish soul yearning" for Israel. Why? Because the verse "might offend Arab citizens." These are the same politically correct tyrants busy here re-writing Jewish and Christian prayer books, and the Bible itself, to sooth the sensitivities of Barney Frank and Gloria Steinem.
There's more. For years the Orthodox, stymied by Labor, have sought to restrict business and close streets to traffic, at least in their own neighborhoods, on the Sabbath. As in America, they have struggled to require modesty in billboard advertising. For their efforts, Labor and Meretz (socialist) party ministers say, "They need to get their filthy fascist faces slapped." Shulamit Aloni, Israel's version of Patsy Schroeder, boasts "I have more in common with Arabs than with Jews."
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These conflicts recently were summarized by Robert Loewenberg, President of the Institute for Strategic and Political Studies who wrote, "After fifty years of assault upon the basic elements of national life --religion, family, citizenship and freedom-- Labor tied Israeli socialism to the peace process. Now it frankly admits to failing a government's most basic duty, protecting its own citizens."
Alienated from and increasingly hostile to its own people, the Labor party is part of what Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor, calls "the international media-entertainment cartel" which promotes UN and EC interests. Clinging to the UN agenda of abortion, euthanasia, dissolution of national boundaries and discrete cultures, Labor preferred French socialism to American Constitutionalism as its primary model.
But this agenda has foundered on the irrationality of Labor's "peace process" and its incompetent
centralized economy. While Clinton's national health care plan was dying here, in Israel hundreds of millions of dollars were being siphoned from unions and health system accounts to the Labor party. In Middle East Quarterly (Sept. 1995), David Wurmser described how investigation of these scandals was derailed when Rabin's assassination gave Labor a last chance to revive itself with gusts of sentiment and a cult of personality. Increasingly unpopular in life, in death Rabin became a symbol exploited to banish debate and sustain a decrepit centralized economy.
It failed. Labor's longterm decay has been exposed. All the King's horses and all the King's men of the multi-national elite, all the posturing of Bill Clinton, couldn't repair the Humpty-Dumpty of Israeli socialist materialism. That is why mainstream commentary is now, and will likely remain, grim, shrill and accusatory. "There would be better results if Likud was under more pressure from the international community," said a CNN prima donna, and her anchor responded, "What about the $3 billion slated for Israel? Is that going through?"
Such threats foreshadow the tenor of our own fall campaign. Having rejected faith, morality and truth for power, this century's radical materialists will not leave power gracefully. Their wrath is great, because their time is short.
Prof. Eugene Narrett is a weekly columnist for the Middlesex News, a large suburban daily, and contributes to national publications, including Chronicles, Culture Wars, Insight, Human Events, and Fidelity. From 1982-1991, he was the principal critic for Art New England and the Boston critic for New Art Examiner. He is currently Professor of English at Framingham State College.
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