...Calling themselves "Partners for Peace," two Arab women from Jerusalem, Nahla Asali and Claudette Habesch, recently toured the United States together with Michal Shohat, who is a member of the Jerusalem City Council representing the radical-left Meretz Party. Their 10-city tour was financed by the Foundation for Middle East Peace, an anti-Israel activist group. Asked by the Baltimore Jewish Times about Arab terrorist murders of Israelis, Mrs. Asali said that Arab terrorism was a response to "acts of provocation" by Israelis. "Injustice," she said, is what "breeds anger and violence"...
...The March/April issue of Michael Lerner's Tikkun magazine features an article by Rashid Khalidi --professor, Arab activist, and president of the American Committee on Jerusalem--asserting that "in 1948, the birth of Israel necessarily involved the bloody infanticide of Palestine." Khalidi demanded that Israel refrain from holding celebrations of its 50th anniversary, which he said would constitute "triumphalist crowing which rubs more salt into the wounds of the Palestinians"...
...James Zogby, president of the
Arab-American Institute, has a new demand. Writing in the
Jordan Times, Zogby declared that instead of asking the PLO
to change its charter, Israel should change "its racist law of
return," which grants citizenship to Jewish
immigrants...
...Meanwhile, Zogby has been joined by Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League in opposing attempts by Congress to cut off U.S. aid to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation. Congress may take action against the PBC because of its broadcasts of programs urging children to take part in suicide attacks against Israel. Foxman said cutting off the PBC's funding is "too drastic" because the network can still be "used as an instrument for good"...
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Israel-Czechoslovakia
(Continued from p.5)
defense mechanisms that thwart rational, thorough
consideration of the situation. What remains is
cognitive dissonance that basically means: the more you
make mistakes, the more you keep digging in behind them.
Thus, Israel's behavior is clear testimony to a structural failure which thwarts the principle of the learning process: Deducting lessons and applying them. For this reason, Santayana's well-known aphorism, "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it," more than being a cry of alarm, is a kind of lugubrious summary, after-the-fact, of peoples who strenuously refuse to learn the lessons of history.
Let it be said to the credit of the Czechs that
they at least had no one to learn from. Their tragedy was
a kind of historical precedent. Indeed, the defeatism
of politicians and the treachery of allies have been part
of the world order since the dawn of written history, but
we must admit that the Czech case should be
considered classic, since it combined all the ingredients that
together brought about the greatest disaster in human
history, the Second World War, which caused nearly 50
million dead, more than all the wars in the history of the human
race combined.
No nation lost more in the war than the Jewish people. Six million, more than two thirds of all the Jews in Europe, were massacred in an orgy of lust for industrial murder for its own sake. Thus it might have been expected that the Jews, more than any other nation, would learn the lessons of history and would engrave them with an iron stylus in their hearts and minds.
Nevertheless, Israel, under the Orwellian guise of the "peace process," persists in running amok into the death trap of the 1967 borders. Israel is the expression of the Jewish anomaly, comprised at one and the same time of anti-Semitism and self-hatred, a deadly hybrid which contributes to creating a mechanism of self-destruction, a phenomenon that has no counterpart among other nations.
The principles of comparison relate to that stage in which the state loses its purposes for physical and spiritual existence, its very raison d'etre. In this situation, it is hard to judge what came first, the loss of defensible borders which transforms the struggle against the enemy into a heroic but hopeless struggle, or the heedless shedding of defensible borders because of spiritual demoralization that strikes at the nation's survival instinct.
May 1998 - 9 - Outpost