THE NEW ISRAEL (Continued from p.3) by declaring that Holocaust Memorial Day meant nothing to him, and Shulamit Aloni, whose statements about religious Jews would probably have landed her in jail in European countries that have laws against antisemitic provocation, all became cabinet ministers or prominent spokesmen in the government of the late Yitzhak Rabin. It was, moreover, they and not the quiescent members of the traditional Labor Party (a party that had contributed forty percent of the signatories of the Manifesto of the Land of Israel Movement in 1967) who set both tone and policy for the Rabin government and its successor. And the tone and policy were bold and revolutionary, repudiating all the old "red lines" and bearing virtually no resemblance to the platform and principles upon which Rabin and his party ran in 1992. The country which, more than any other in the world, had established a reputation as the scourge of terrorism, suddenly--by embracing, both literally and metaphorically, the head of the world's The new Israel is also a far less democratic country than the one governed by Menachem Begin or Yitzhak Shamir. leading Jew-killing organization--became the chief abettor of terrorism by demonstrating that it brings great rewards, in this case an independent PLO state. One cannot, as Rabin did, and as Peres and President Clinton (who has played Dr. Kevorkian to the Labor-Meretz government) continue to do every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, laud Arafat, one of the major war criminals of the twentieth century, as an esteemed head of state and then, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, express outrage at the killings in Argentina or London or Jerusalem, and expect to be taken seriously. The perpetrators of terror in Israel or the "disputed territories" or New York City or Buenos Aires may be completely wicked, but they are not completely stupid. They have seen how, in the case of Arafat and his PLO, terrorism pays off very handsomely indeed. Awful and bloody have been the practical results of Oslo. Telling the people who murdered pilgrims at Lod and athletes at Munich, smashed infants' heads on rocks in Nahariya, slaughtered mothers and babies in their nurseries in Kiryat Shemona, that their murderous acts have been retroactively justified, has of course encouraged them to do (or have their proxies do) more of the same. But the moral transgression of blessing Arafat will inevitably have even graver results than the periodical creation of abattoirs in the streets of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Ashkelon. Both ancient Hebrews and ancient Greeks, Genesis and Sophocles, tell us that unpunished murder defiles the land. But Israel's current leaders, many of whom like to describe themselves as post-Zionist and think of themselves as post-Jewish, have no patience

with such old-fashioned and impractical notions. What they forget is that all realpolitik attempts to determine expediency are futile. No politician knows, or can know, what will be the ultimate result to himself, or to others, of any given line of conduct; but every human being may know, and most of us do know, the difference between a just and an unjust act, between punishing murderers and rewarding them. Yet the country that once pursued Nazi criminals to the ends of the earth and placed justice above legality now breaks bread with the murderers of Ma'alot, and offers protection to Abu Abbas so that he and others who have dedicated their lives to murdering Jews and destroying the State of Israel can gather in Gaza to assure Israelis that it was all a big mistake; they didn't really mean it. Is it possible that the country whose liberal critics like the sanctimonious Anthony Lewis and the clownish buffoon Michael Lerner used to excoriate it for failing to be a "light unto the nations" is now (much to the delight of these same liberal critics) becoming a darkness unto the nations, or, if not yet that, a spreading taint to Diaspora Jewry? How is it possible for American Jews not to cringe with shame when the Mayor of New York City is criticized by Israel, or at least by its dutiful American Jewish followers, for expelling Yasser Arafat from a United Nations concert? How can they fail to recognize the malignantly infectious influence of Israel upon American Jews when a Jewish journalist declares in the op-ed pages of the New York Times that American Jews should sit down and "talk" with Louis Farrakhan because--as Farrakhan correctly points out--Israel talks with Yasser Arafat, who is not, like himself, merely a conjectural, but an actual, killer of Jews. And was not the admirable A. M. Rosenthal trying to escape the Israeli taint when he wrote earlier this year that Israel could give the Golan to Syria if it wished, but should not expect the U.S. to help strengthen a brutal dictatorship which sponsored terrorism and peddled drugs and murdered thousands of its own citizens? Other American Jews may well ask, too, why super-dove Shimon Peres finds it easier to drive hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians from their homes and kill over a hundred more than to declare that the resumption of negotiations with Syria depends on its eradicating its Hezbollah proxies. (Instead, while Syria basks in the knowledge that Peres has guaranteed the return of the Golan Heights and encourages Hezbollah to keep up the suicide bombings, the Israeli Foreign Minister Ehud Barak expresses his strong admiration for Hafez Assad in an interview for the Egyptian press.) The new Israel is also a far less democratic country than the one governed by Menachem Begin or Yitzhak Shamir. The rule of law had broken down long before the assassination of Rabin. It is a chilling irony that a government whose leading intellectual figures were for years superciliously lecturing everybody in the country about the supreme importance of "demokratia," an importance far exceeding "merely" Jewish principles, should have adopted so many of the measures of a police state to suppress dissent (and remain in power). The egregious Amnon Rubenstein, Minister of Education, is capable of (Continued on p.5)

Outpost               - 4 -               May 1996