The Israeli Death Wish

(Continued from p.5)

Strategic abuse transpires when a nation collapses under the critical mass of a threat from an implacable enemy. In this condition, the raison d'etat physical and spiritual -- gradually disintegrates. At a certain point, a process of self-destruction commences which finds expression in collaboration with the enemy.

If perceptive enough, the enemy takes no radical action, that is, war, but rather takes full advantage of the strategic abuse to minimize its risk until all that remains of the threatened nation is an empty shell. At that point, exertion of force is usually unnecessary; the exhausted entity, which has lost its survival instinct, is ripe for the picking.

This description, designed to call up in the reader memories of the eradication of Czechoslovakia from the map in March 1939, is transpiring before our very eyes in the Jewish state, albeit in a more gradual manner under the same semantic pretext of "land for peace" -- a phrase which Hitler continually repeated until he received all the territories he demanded. An illustration is Arafat's endless threats (this one to a student gathering at Palestine College in Gaza on June 25, 1998): "The bloodbath, next to which the intifada will seem like child's play,which will ensue if Israel does not fulfill the Oslo agreements...whoever does not believe me, I say to him, drink Gaza's seawater." The well-orchestrated declarations of Hafez el-Assad on the one hand, and Hosni Mubarak on the other, concerning the rapidly approaching war unless "peace is achieved" and if Israel does not withdraw from the last grain of holy Arab soil, are an exact replica of Hitler's threats against Czechoslovakia in 1938.

The strategic abuse in which Israel has been floundering since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War is designed to lead Israel to withdraw to that "last grain of holy Arab soil," that is, to the cease-fire lines of 1949, or adjacent to them, in order to crowd Israel into the partition borders in anticipation of its physical liquidation. Israel's reaction to the existential challenge has been a long line of failures, together forming a reality of systems collapse.

There is a systems collapse when the state, subject to strategic abuse, reacts to the existential threat with a series of actions clearly contrary to its own interests and its very existence. The term "systems collapse" is chosen to distinguish it from the more conventional "political blunder" in describing a failure in foreign or internal policy. A "political blunder," disastrous as its results may be, is nonetheless the result of balance of power, historical context, a politician's folly, opportunism, short-sightedness, political foolishness, poor judgment and innumerable other factors which together form the historical mosaic.

However, in viewing the entire system of deception called "the peace process," one is forced to conclude that we are not discussing an unfortunate combination of political blunders, severe as they may be (of the sort listed by Barbara Tuchman in The March of Folly), but rather a type of deterministic process of national suicide (following policies the very Prime Ministers who acted on them had, as we have seen, characterized as suicidal).

(Next month: The projected results of the "peace process.")

Outpost               - 6 -               July-August 1999