and I believe we should be here."

But while he formulates "the idea" so eloquently,

Netanyahu creates a "reality" totally at variance with it.

For if the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people by

"inalienable right" and if the Jewish presence anywhere in Israel is considered an unendurable provocation by the Arabs, why is Netanyahu in the process of agreeing to freeze Jewish settlements and to make further withdrawals? Why is he resuscitating the corpse of Oslo? In a letter to Netanyahu, the Council of Settlements (Yesha) summed it up: "We recognize the difficulties and pressures that you face, but it was exactly in order to rescue your nation from them that you ascended to power."

The Peres Peace Center

Chelm's President-for-Life Shimon Peres has opened his long awaited Peace Center. Its follies should be a rich source of future entertainment (and/or tears). It has elicited one sane response -- a press release from something called the "Institute for Peace Education" which declares "The key to the success of the new Peres Center for Peace remains whether or not any parallel institute for peace education in the Arabic language will be founded inside the new Palestine Authority."

If an institution for "peace education" is established in PA controlled territory, rest assured its definition of "peace" will not precisely match that of the Peres Center. Interviewed by Dr. Aaron Lerner in October, a Hamas spokesman --who might serve as an ideal candidate for heading such an institute-- declared: "I will tell you something. I feel that it is justice for us to do with Jews as they did with us...In the same way that they dispossessed our people. They killed thousands of Palestinians in tens of massacres and they destroyed homes. So I think it is just to do with them as they did with us."

From the Editor

(Continued from p.2)

"Forgetting" What

It Is To Be Jewish

Netanyahu sent Israeli leftists into orbit by saying that they had "forgotten what it is to be Jewish."

What he said was absolutely true. And what his

comments should rightly have precipitated were uncomfortable questions of a very different sort from what they in fact elicited. For Netanyahu has forgotten virtually every tenet he once held and promise he once made. These are only a few of the questions that should rightfully have been asked.

l. How could you "forget" reciprocity?

2. How could you "forget" your repeated statements that it is absurd to expect Arafat to be Israel's subcontractor to fight terror?

3. How could you "forget" your promise never to

relinquish Hebron?

4. How could you "forget" your one-time insistence that giving in to terror only encourages terror?

Falls the Shadow

The gap between Netanyahu's words and deeds reminds us of T.S. Eliot's famous line, "Between the idea and the reality...Falls the shadow." Addressing thousands of Christian visitors at the annual Feast of Tabernacles gathering organized by the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem, Netanyahu spoke so well he deserves quoting. After stating that Israel was accused of provoking terrorism but the real provocation as far as the Arabs was concerned was not a tunnel or a housing project, he went on:

"This is our country; this is the Land of Israel; it

is the country which belongs to the People of Israel, and we have an inalienable right to this land. We didn't invent it here, we didn't create it in the last 20 years, or in the last two years. This was a right recognized by the entire world, by all the great leaders of the international

community, by Jewish and Christian Zionists throughout

history. Above all it is the Land of Israel, because the Bible, the most basic document of western civilization, says so. It says so not merely as a declaration of moral entitlement, which it is --but also it is a description of a historical fact. No other people had this enduring relationship and commitment and attachment to this land for

millennia. No people formed their national life here and built their national sovereignty here, except the Jewish people. No other people, when deprived of this land, sought to return here, and did return here, in the face of all historical odds, and beat those historical odds, except the Jewish people. No other people built their state here. We did. That is why we are here, and that is why you