Dr. Irving Moskowitz
Four years ago, the focus of public debate was whether or not the United States should station its troops on the Golan Heights to "guarantee" Israel's safety after a withdrawal from that territory. I authored a monograph, entitled Should America "Guarantee" Israel's Safety?, in which I reviewed the unfortunate U.S. record of "guaranteeing" the safety of its allies and then backing away from those "guarantees" in moments of crisis.
Today, American personnel are once again
poised to assume a prominent role in Mideast
"peacekeeping." The Central Intelligence Agency is slated
to serve as official judge of whether or not Yasir Arafat
is cracking down on terrorists.
Such a role for the CIA will be a catastrophe. President Clinton is determined to prove to the world that the Wye Accord was a success. For the CIA to admit that Arafat is violating the agreement would ruin Clinton's political glory-grabbing. You can bet Clinton will make it clear to the CIA that it must give Arafat a passing grade, no matter what.
The concepts of truth and justice will lie in ruins, terrorists will roam free in Arafat's territory, but Clinton will have his "foreign policy success," courtesy of the CIA's Mideast monitors.
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amalgam of peace-messianism, pseudo-environmentalism and assorted PC doctrines, which can only be described as a religious faith, since it is impervious to all merely mundane evidence to the emptiness of its tenets.Dr. Eidelberg's second objection to what I wrote is that I offer no "solution." That is true, because the only solution can come from a new spirit within Israel's leaders and public alike, an abandonment of delusional thinking, a willingness once again to implement and sacrifice for the dream preserved through millennia for a Jewish state for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel. Holding out hope that there is a relatively simple way of achieving thisthrough constituency electionswhen there is no such simple remedy, is not, to my mind, especially helpful.
It is because Israel's Jewish population in
the wake of Oslo has become so riven on core issues of
identity and survival that the ever-larger Arab vote now
assumes so much importance, for it can tip the balance.
And the majority of Arabs, pieties by Israeli officials to
the contrary, identify with the PLO's challenge to
Israel's legitimacy, not with Israel as a homeland for Jews.
But if Dr. Eidelberg is right in pointing to the importance
of this widely-ignored problem, can one believe, as a
practical matter, that given international pressures, not
to mention that large proportion of Israelis to whom
Arab rights are far more important than Jewish rights to
the land, that the Israeli Knesset will disenfranchise
Israeli Arabs? The Americans, including American Jewish
organizations (can one imagine their hysteria?), the
Europeans, the Arab world will not even have to weigh in.
It will be over the dead bodies of Labor and Meretz.
In short, Dr. Eidelberg provides trenchant criticisms of Israel's current electoral system and many of his suggestions for change would in all probability prove beneficial. But the fire consuming the state is burning out of control now, and Dr. Eidelberg's call for altering institutional arrangements is akin to coming up with a plan for improved hoses while the house burns down. They might help next time round, but the house is gone.
Rael Jean Isaac is editor of Outpost.
Americans For a Safe Israel
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Outpost - 12 - November 1998