"Yet the Palestinian leadership continues to categorically reject the idea of any Jews living anywhere near them. Not only did they want Maon torn downthey continue to loudly demand that all 144 Jewish communities in the territories be torn down, and their residents expelled en masse. And lest anyone forget, the Palestinians regard the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem--home to the Temple Mount, the Western Wall, and a large Jewish community-- as an 'illegal Israeli settlement on Arab land.'

"A real peace means people of different faiths and nationalities living side by side. The Palestinian vision of peace, however, is one in which Jews have been removed completely from what they consider Arab territory. Palestinian ethnic cleansing should be no more acceptable to the international community than ethnic cleansing in any other part of the world."

What the editor fails to tell us is the greatest shame of all. The brave Jews of Maon were evicted by fellow Jews and fellow Israeli citizens in yet another effort to appease Israel's relentless enemies. For shame.

Ruth King is a member of the Executive Committee of Americans For a Safe Israel.

Clinton's Toy

(Continued from p.7)

dreams and extols "the leadership in the Arab world, in Israel [himself] and the free world led by the United States under President Clinton."

Listening to Israel's self-glorifying Prime Minister, one is put in mind of comments by Professor Steven Plaut about the deflation of Israeli political culture. "In the late '60s and early '70s," Plaut observes, "the worst and most dangerous thing about Israel was its intolerable hubris, the self-congratulatory assurance that its leaders were infallible. That hubris produced the debacle of the 1973 war. Now the dominant tone is defeatism, Jewish self-hatred, obsessive self-abasement and cowardice as the road to 'peace.'" Embodying this illness, Mr. Barak has miraculously combined boasting and defeatism, hubris and self-abasement. Following the dark path of Rabin and Peres, under his misrule Israeli soldiers operate under firing orders so complicated and restrictive that, Plaut notes, they are asking that lawyers be attached to each unit to protect them from prosecution for defending Jewish lives. Such is life as Israel approaches the end of the end game, birthed by the unflagging diplomatic efforts of its American friends.

Those who followed the Rabin memorial ceremony in Oslo, in early November, expected these absurdities. At that insidious venue, Israel's 'friend' Clinton, posing as the ghost of Rabin told Barak, "This is all very nice, but if you really want to honor me, finish the job." The overtones of a "solution" in that phrase, as in the entire Oslo "process," get darker every month. As for Barak, he demonstrated his resolution by toasting a portrait of Rabin and telling the image, "Together with my partner Chairman Arafat, I pledge to travel the course you charted and to finish the journey." Finish indeed.

It is clear from his performance in New York that Dadaist Barak is a dyed in the wool clone of his spiritual godfather Peres, "Chief Visionary of the Empty Tomorrow" as Noam Arnon termed him. Barak, too is a prophet of "a worldwide culture of blue jeans, tee shirts and the Internet" in worship of which politicians in Jerusalem build highways and sea ports for enemies whose age-old goal is itbach al yahud, "slaughter the Jews." Momentum, simultaneity and the spurning of Israel's birthright are to be the keystone of a world of clarity and grace. No wonder Mr. Clinton loves his "new toy."

Eugene Narrett, Ph.D., teaches at Boston University.

December 1999               - 11 -               Outpost