From the Editor

(Continued from p.2)

under the title "Shimon Says." Declared Shimon: "Everything that makes money has been privatized and everything that costs money is being phased out." Let future generations sort that one out. While they are at it, our descendants can mull over Peres' vacuities as he presented (along with Leah Rabin) the first Man of Peace Award to President Clinton: "Politics is a business for politicians who seek glory," intoned Peres. "Economy is a business for people who seek food. And every country that goes from glory to food, from trying to make an impression to render a service, is really leading the people to a new era." Cutting through the rhetorical muddle, arch-politician Peres is apparently calling for an end to politics.

Adding an especially comic note to the Peres Center's proceedings, Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa threatened to walk out of the Peres Center's inauguration ceremony (this according to the Egyptian weekly Al Ahram of October 23-30, 1997). The offense? Danny Abraham, an American who serves as one of the

Center's chief financial backers, asserted that all the Arab states, with the exception of Iraq and Libya, were ready to make peace with Israel. You see, according to Moussa, Iraq and Libya should not have been singled out as enemies of peace --they are as eager to make peace with Israel as the rest of the Arab world. To be sure, Moussa has a good point. The Arab world is as prepared to make peace with Israel as are Iraq and Libya.

With Jews Like These...

Meanwhile former Knesset member Uri Avnery, another peace proponent, is busy organizing a boycott within Israel of Israeli products made in those wicked "settlements" in Judea, Samaria, the Golan, and Gaza. He showed up to receive Arafat's blessing for his campaign to have European Community members implement the boycott as well. As Norman Birnberg points out, can one imagine the reaction on the Israeli left if the Likud were to instigate a boycott of products made by Arafat's Palestinian Authority enterprises?

Maps and Truth

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these beneficiaries of his misplaced largesse may soon dance merrily upon tens of thousands of fresh Israeli graves, the blood-dimmed tide of Jews will have been loosed by Jerusalem's invitation to murder.

Israel should not be a dying country, but it is only by recognizing that death is possible that it can sidestep death. To accept such recognition, Israelis must first understand that their current leaders still think as if by accident. Listening to such accidental thought, it is apparent that a single human indigestion is richer in ideas than the goverment's entire parade of "strategic" concepts. The odor of incompetence clings to its appeals, to its promises, to its exhortations, to its violence. Its "thinkers" are theoreticians for the adolescent and for the senile. Obsessed with cliches that stop the serious mind's progress --an unfortunate borrowing from the President of the United States--it can only disregard its depressing intellectual impotence.

For Israel, the time has finally come to believe in a future of the terrible. The People of Israel must be able to believe in a future of their most terrible regrets. With such a belief in the prospect of genocidal war, Israel could abandon its bizarre enchantment with impotence and prepare instead to endure. By acknowledging that endurance is not assured, that nowhere has it been recorded that the Third Temple Commonwealth is necessarily forever, Israel could wisely choose wisdom over unwisdom and life over death.

Louis Rene Beres is professor of Political Science at Purdue University, and the author of 14 books.

Rehavam Ze'evi...

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does not apply to Nablus until we sit down and investigate the behavior of the Palestinian police. And if they did not readily hand over their weapons and disarm we should have given them such a hit on the head that it would be a lesson for twenty years.

But the Arabs, when they aren't hit, see that their methods succeed. Their modus operandi worked. Bore fruit. And they continue with the same method. Now if Mr. Barak said this --I am hearing it first from you--it is as if he is in the service of the enemy. I am saying something harsh but it is what I think. If he says this consideration as a consideration then he is acting against us in the service of the enemy.

It is very serious. I don't think that we should panic by the threat of guerrilla attacks. We have been here for a hundred years facing various methods of war --riots, disturbances, open warfare, intifada, etc. So if someone today wants to scare the Jews with talk of guerrilla warfare he is serving the Arabs since if the tactic scares us then why not Lod and Ramleh? Why not Beersheva and Beit Shean? Haifa and Acre? And in the end it will be Shenkin Street.