Yasser Arafat at Anne Frank House

In February's "From the Editor," we quoted Gamaliel Isaac's letter to the U.S. Holocaust Museum director, after the museum apologized to Yasser Arafat for its first, correct decision not to offer him "a state visit" to the museum. His letter concluded: "I guarantee you he [Arafat] will use this as a propaganda opportunity to talk about the Holocaust of the Palestinians. You are idiots." Well, it seems we didn't have to wait long for that letter to prove prophetic. Arafat has not yet made his "state visit" to the Holocaust Museum in Washington but he did visit Anne Frank House in Amsterdam at the end of March. His response? It came from an aide who said that many of Arafat's men have been killed and he is therefore sensitive to the pain of families whose loved ones have been murdered. In fact, Arafat has outdone the prediction. He compares Holocaust victims not to Palestinian Arab civilians but to his Fatah brigands--the band of terrorist murderers whose specialty was killing helpless civilians, from the disabled Leon Klinghoffer to the kindergarten children of Maalot.

Why Israel Loses the Peace

David Wurmser, research fellow in the Middle East studies program at the American Enterprise Institute, has written a research paper, "Why Israel Wins Battles But Loses the Peace," that deserves to be widely read. (It is available from the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, 1010 Sixteenth St. NW, Washington D.C. 20036.) Wurmser describes the ideological and moral failures of Israel's elite which have led them to squander each military victory. As recently as 1991 the Middle East's superpower, Israel today, Wurmser points out, is treated "with derision and dismissiveness by all its neighbors." Wurmser focuses especially on Labor Zionists "who have lost the will to live as a Jewish nation" and traces the roots of their debacle to the universalist socialist ideology with which Labor Zionism was imbued from the outset. (It now finds expression in such off the wall utopias as Shimon Peres's The New Middle East.)

In 1977, with Labor's electoral downfall, Menachem Begin sought to provide Israel with the strategic approach it had lacked but, says Wurmser, the Laborites "used their near complete control of Israel's establishment (cultural, economic, governmental and military) which they had cultivated under 60 years of socialism to subvert the Revisionists' security policy." In the end, Wurmser notes,
"Revisionist Zionists simply lacked the assets to effect a fundamental change within Israel's cultural, military, political and economic elite."

It is interesting that Wurmser never mentions the Likud's resumption of power in 1996 or the name "Netanyahu." This is doubtless because this time, the Likud's resumption of power was in name only--there was not even an attempt to halt the process of Israel's destruction known as Oslo.

Wurmser's conclusions are bleak. "Having largely divested Israel of its Judaism, having reduced Jewish identity strictly to the level of personal survival, Labor Zionism has left a political body without spiritual purpose. But without such purpose, why fight at all? Flight is preferable....The failure of Labor Zionism and its socialist political objectives has left a political void in Israel. Without a replacement, without a foundation for establishing any political objectives, Israel has no basis to formulate a strategy to employ force or diplomacy. It will remain resigned, defending itself ultimately through evasion and flight."

Arab MKs Show Their Contempt

The new spirit of contempt for Israel of which Davd Wurmser writes is not confined to her neighbors. Israeli Arab leaders now do not hesitate to spit in her eye. Abdel Wahab Daroushewas, until a few years ago, a Labor Knesset member and a leader in the party. He left of his own accord to head the so-called "Arab Democratic Party," a break-off from the former Hadash Stalinist Communist Party, and, as Steven Plaut points out, "democratic in the same sense as the German Democratic Republic of East Germany was."

Plaut quotes from a speech Daroushe made at

(Continued on p.8)

Outpost               - 2 -               May 1998