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collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a huge wave of immigration of Jews from Russia and the other former Soviet republics. Once again, despite the initial difficulties, Israel absorbed the newcomers, by and large a highly educated and talented group of people who made a major contribution to Israel's newly flourishing high-tech economy. Israel's security was also enhanced in so far as at least temporarily Russia was no longer in a position to arm and back the Arabs in wars against Israel.
1990 - The Gulf War: The PLO was at last on the ropes, and seemed headed for oblivion. Arafat had backed the wrong horse in Saddam Hussein and alienated not only his Western supporters but his chief Arab patrons -- Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. The Gulf War, however, had a symbolically extremely important negative impact on Israel. For the first time Israel, succumbing to United States pressure, allowed itself to be attacked without defending itself. Psychologically devastating, as missiles rained down from Iraq, Jews retreated into gas masks.
1993 - The Oslo Surrender: Incredibly, Israel's new Labor government rescued Arafat from the oblivion into which the Gulf War threatened to deliver him. In an act of historic infamy (and idiocy), Israel's Prime Minister Rabin made the arch-terrorist Arafat his "partner in peace." Labor's surrender at Oslo was followed by the Likud's surrender, first of Hebron, and then of much of the rest of Judea and Samaria in the Wye accord. Now, with Labor back in power, the withdrawal from the Golan Heights looms. The hallucination of peace leads to further hemorrhaging of support for Israel among American Jewry.
1999 - Israel in Full Retreat: The twilight of the century, the twilight of Zionism.
Ruth King is a member of the Executive Committee of Americans for a Safe Israel.
In one of the great commentaries on war, Napoleon once said that in conducting war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.
After Israel no longer exists, historians will note that a major cause for its demise was the unwillingness of the Jews to fight on the moral plane. Israeli Jews have abandoned any claim to the moral superiority of their cause, are refusing to attack the Arab fascists on moral terms. In part this is a function of exhaustion. In part it is because Israelis think that if you strip problems of their moral aspects, they become more easily solved. The Arabs have no such delusions. Any Arab speaking anywhere in the world on TV or radio will launch into an assault on the brutality and moral ugliness of the Jews. Israelis will yawn and talk about strategic considerations, defense lines, etc.
One manifestation of this is that the Israeli government has never really had any interest in "hasbara", in public relations, in representing its side of the case to world opinion. Ben-Gurion said "forget the UN", and "It does not matter what gentiles say but what Jews do." Israelis have for generations believed that the best way to make friends with the Arab world is to stand by silently while Arabs rant on about the immorality of Jews and Zionism and Israel, rather than assault Arab fascism on moral grounds.
In the early years, perhaps it was so obvious to Israelis that their moral position was superior that they found it an insult to their intelligence to expect them to debate Arabs on moral grounds.
But the unwillingness to defend their moral position is what has now brought Israel to the brink of crisis and danger of extinction. It is what produced Oslo. When was the last time an Israeli leader stated that Israel has a moral right to keep the Golan regardless of whether or not it has strategic value, regardless of what the United Nations and the European Union say, regardless of whether or not Syria pretends to offer peace in exchange for it? When was the last time that an Israeli politician said quite simply the Palestinians have no moral right to statehood or even autonomy?
Interestingly, the anti-Semites understand quite clearly that the path to destroying Israel lies in assaulting its moral validity. A good example is the group of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic "intellectuals" calling themselves the "New Historians," the "Post-Zionists," the Israeli Far Left, and the anti-Zionist far Left in the American Jewish community (the "Renewal" hippies, the "Aleph" potheads, the New Israel Fund types, the Tikkun pagans, etc.). These exert their efforts in assaulting the moral underpinnings of Israel and Zionism. They do so because they understand Napoleon's rule and they seek to end Israel's existence in the most effective manner possible. It is not coincidental that the main thrust of anti-Zionist efforts within Israel is to teach the Arab moral version of events in the schools. To teach Israeli children that Israel was born in sin and has no real moral justification for its existence.
Israel has now been flooded with the same assimilationist leftist self-hatred that has long dominated the American Jewish community. It is a self-hatred that
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December 1999 - 5 - Outpost