Israeli Left: Love Your Enemy, Hate Your Brother

Ariel Natan Pasko, Sierra Times, September 28, 2003

There they go again. The air has just cleared, people have just calmed down after the last wave of terrorist bombings, and Israel's lemmings are driving toward the precipice again. After recently going to meet Yasser Arafat at his Ramallah compound, to show solidarity with him and act as "human shields" to protect him from any Israeli action; the Israeli far-left has begun what they call the opening of a "street campaign" in the coming months. Peace Now (why not peace last Thursday?), and a few thousand protestors gathered on a Saturday night at "ground-zero", Rabin Square in Tel-Aviv, to call for Israel to uproot the Jewish settlements in Yesha, Judea and Samaria - the West Bank - and Gaza, and for an end to the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

The Peace Now demonstrators also denounced the Sharon government's policy of "Targeted Killings", assassinating leaders from Hamas and the other terrorist groups, saying the policy creates an endless cycle of violence. All blood is red, and I guess Israel's lemmings can't tell the difference between the blood of innocent Israelis cut-down in the "act" of living their lives, and the blood of socio-pathic murderers, who Israel liquidates - in self-defense - before they can plan or kill again

Returning to the darkest day's of the Left's slander campaign - initiated by Yitzhak Rabin himself - against the pro-Land of Israel forces, former Labor Party Member of Knesset - Israel's parliament - Yael Dayan revived the theme of "settlements vs. the poor". She emphasized the economic cost of the settlements, saying that the government was still pumping huge amounts of money into them, while other Israelis were going hungry. She pointed out that each year, 5,000 children in the country slipped below the poverty line. What has she done to help them? Other than to try to impoverish other Israelis and their children - of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza - by forcing them out of their homes and into the street?

Why didn't she suggest cutting government monies spent on the museums, theaters, concert halls, dance companies, sports contests, and other secular-western cultural activities that the elites of the Left, labor's worker committees, and kibbutzes benefit from in disproportionate numbers, receiving tickets at government subsidized prices? Has she ever suggested that the Kibbutz Movement - about 110,000 people - repay the Israeli government the 10's of billions of shekels the government has laid out over the years to cover the Kibbutz Movement's debts. Why did the Israeli taxpayer have to help the economically inefficient darling of the Left? Most of that debt was incurred, to keep up the Kibbutz Movement's - above the Israeli average - standard of living, while failing economically. Where's the Left's outrage about that, while other Israelis were going hungry?

The left-wing Haaretz newspaper just released a "special report" about the amount of money - some 45 billion shekels - Israeli governments - from the Left & Right - have spent on "settlements" since 1967. But whereas most of the money spent on the Kibbutzes, was simply for "creature comforts"; money spent on Jewish communities in Yesha was for basic infrastucture; much of it would have had to be spent anyway, developing areas for Jews to live in, even within the "Green Line" pre-1967 Israel. But don't worry, you can count on the Israeli Left to obfuscate that also and try to "prove" how expensive "settlements" have been.

Has anyone seriously contemplated the costs of moving "settlers" - i.e. the almost 250,000 Jewish citizens in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza - back within the pre-1967 Auschwitz borders? Forget the housing costs, a sizable figure itself. What about the other infrastructure costs, including education -you need school space for their children - the costs of economic dislocation - unemployment will go up - and health care -already overburdened - for example? Who says that it will save the government money to move Jews back into the 1967 borders? Has anyone seen a serious study and real policy analytic data to back up the Left's utopian claims?

It's not much different than the Left's original claim that "peace" was just around the corner, if we all accept the Oslo dream. Israel just needed to revive Arafat from the politically "dead", bring him and his terror crew into the country, reward him with a base of operations, and the messiah would be coming soon. We've all seen how well the Left's claims "worked" there.

It just never quite worked out the way they imagined, and it won't this time either. The Left in Israel is hell-bent on squashing the settlement enterprise and ending Jewish control over it's historic heartland in Yesha, whether it brings "peace" or not, whether it saves the government money, or drives it further into the red and dependent on an American bailout. So it doesn't matter if facts aren't on their side, anything to divert the attention of the masses away from their failed "peace" policies and against the Jews of Judea and Samaria.

Their demagogic behavior reminds me of last October (2002), during the height of the Left's previous hysteria campaign against settlements, when far-left Meretz MK Yossi Sarid said, "All of the settlements were created by law-breaking and violence and I hope the spread of this cancer will end quickly. The outposts are worse than suicide bomb belts." Similar to MK Sarid's remarks, then Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg (Labor) called the people at the Gilad Farm in Samaria, "Jewish Hamas." Just because they were protesting the expulsion of people from their homes on legally owned Jewish land, that for political - i.e. Leftist - purposes, the Sharon government found convenient to expropriate, they're called "Jewish Hamas"? They are "Worse than suicide bomb belts"?

MK Avraham Burg (Labor) - no longer Knesset speaker - is up to it again. He recently turned to Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein with the intention of filing criminal charges against the "Forum of Rabbis for the Jewish People & the Land of Israel", numbering 500 religious leaders. The rabbinical organization has released a statement, that the Israeli government does not enjoy popular support for its policies vis-a-vis the Quartet's - US, EU, UN & Russia - Road Map plan or to take any steps towards the establishment of an independent Palestinian state. The Road Map negates Torah law explained the rabbis, and as such, anyone contributing to advancing the Road Map agenda is guilty of violating the Torah commandment of "You must not stand idly by your brother’s blood", because of all the terrorism that has taken almost 1,200 lives during the "peace process".

Rubinstein stated that the written proclamation does not constitute a violation of Israeli law. He then added that following the release of the proclamation by the rabbinical organization; he met with some of the more "influential" rabbis in the organization, warning them that they must tread carefully since their words may spark civil disobedience or violence. But Burg prefers to continue to try and suffocate any opposition to the Left's "peace dreams".

In a similar vein, ultra-leftist Meretz MK Zahava Gal-On just asked the Attorney General to look into a recent Jerusalem Post editorial she says had "words of incitement to murder" in it. The Jerusalem Post editorial said, "The world will not help us; we must help ourselves. We must kill as many of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders as possible, as quickly as possible, while minimizing collateral damage, but not letting that damage stop us. And we must kill Yasser Arafat, because the world leaves us no alternative." Where is Freedom of the Speech? Where is Freedom of the Press? When was it ever "incitement to murder", to call for the death of the enemy in wartime? Only in Israel, only on the Bolshevik Left, only to shut people up and divert attention from discussing the real issues!

Labor Party leader MK Shimon Peres has been celebrating his 80th birthday recently. Peres told an international peace symposium held as part of his 80th birthday celebrations, "I believe it was right to give [Yasser Arafat] the Nobel Peace Prize because he did three things that no other Palestinian leader did," Peres told a round-table discussion which featured three other Nobel laureates. "He declared publicly that he recognized the State of Israel, no other Palestinian leader dared do that so publicly. Second, he said he would abandon terrorism, and third he agreed that peace would be based on the borders of 1967 and not 1948." At the peace symposium, Peres said that Arafat made a mistake by failing to dismantle terrorist groups opposed to peace with the Jewish state. "He spoke against [them], but did not act against them," Peres said.

There, you have it. Peres's total whitewash of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority; ignoring Arafat's involvement in illegal arms smuggling, such as the Karine A arms boat affair; Arafat's funding - as head of Fatah - Marwan Barghouti's Fatah-Tanzim and Al-Aksa Brigades terrorist activities; and Arafat's general incitement to violence, regularly calling for "Jihad, Jihad, Jihad" i.e. killing Jews & martyrdom. According to Peres, Yasser "spoke against [them], but did not act against them". Lies, lies, lies...

During the Left's slander campaign against "settlers" last October/November, just before the Labor Party created an excuse to walk out of Sharon's National Unity Government and call for new elections - which Sharon and Likud later won - MK Yossi Sarid said the settlers had started a revolt that the government had to destroy. "If the settlers' revolt is not crushed, it will be the end of democracy," he said.

Similarly, then Agricultural Minister Shalom Simchon (Labor) said that the actions of the right wing, in reference to the protests against expelling people from Gilad Farms, "endanger the existence of the State of Israel." Really? Over 850 people killed and thousands injured from terrorist attacks in the last three-years alone, don't endanger the existence of the State of Israel? Arafat's War, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hizbollah, Syria, Iran, they don't endanger the existence of the State of Israel? Only a bunch of idealistic kids on a barren hilltop somewhere in the middle of the historic Jewish homeland endangers the existence of the State of Israel?

A telltale sign of how sick the Left in Israel has gotten, can be seen in this more recent example, some participants at the Saturday night rally reported that a number of people in the crowd booed when the Israeli national anthem, "Hatikvah", was played at the close of the demonstration.

So much for their intellectual consistency, honesty, and concern about the Israeli Right and Jewish settlers "destroying" the State of Israel...

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Ariel Natan Pasko is an independent analyst & consultant. He has a Master's Degree in International Relations & Policy Analysis. His articles appear regularly on numerous news/views and think-tank websites, in newspapers, and can be read at: www.geocities.com/ariel_natan_pasko