Questions about Israel’s situation
Rick R. writes:
While I haven’t been terribly informed about Israel, and admittedly I haven’t in the past been terribly interested either, I do have a question for you concerning Israel and your beliefs.
You’ve suggested that the proper course of action for the West and the Islamic world is a divorce and segregation. I include Israel in the West. But Hezbollah’s presence in southern Lebanon, and their ability to attack the country from without shows that it’s not just the Arabs from within (i.e. from Gaza, the West Bank, and even Israeli Arabs) that pose a threat. Even if all the Arabs were expelled from Israel proper, Gaza, and the West Bank, resulting in total segregation, they still face problems from neighbors. Is Israel doomed to a permanent state of war with its neighbors? Segregation alone is not the answer. Must it occupy an unpopulated buffer zone with each country it borders?
LA replies:
I think you’re asking the right questions.
> Is Israel doomed to a permanent state of war with its neighbors?
Yes. I believe that this is the very condition of Israel’s long-term survival. It doesn’t need to be active war, but Israel must establish conditions in which it cannot be threatened. That means having enough territory, and always being a fortress state. But if it did those things, its enemies would have fewer hopes of defeating it and fewer opportunities to attack it, and it would be substantially less threatened and vulnerable than it is now, and there would be much less violence than there is now. So, in accord with the saying, “The Jews are just like everyone else, only more so,” the saying, “Constant preparedness for war is the way to assure peace,” applies even more to Israel than to other countries. So in that sense Israel’s situation is not different in kind from that of other countries in history, just different in degree. But to grasp all this, the Israelis must absolutely and forever reject their liberal world view and the hope that the Arabs will be their friends. Yet, paradoxically, if Israel did put itself in an unassailable position, that would push the Arabs into (grudgingly) accepting its existence. It was Israel’s continual hopes of making friends with the Arabs that renewed the Arabs’s hopes of destroying Israel. So, good fences make good neighbors is true for everyone, and for the Israelis vis à vis the Arabs, even more so.
Also, it may not be so terrible. Toynbee said that societies need challenges to achieve and grow and be creative. Israel needs to look on its eternally threatened situation as a tremendous challenge. But what it must not do is imagine that it can ever be in a state in which it can relax and cease to be on guard.
> Segregation alone is not the answer. Must it occupy an unpopulated buffer zone with each country it borders?
Very possibly. Though one could imagine the complete defeat of Hezbollah, followed by a Lebanese government that lives in peace with Israel. But one could never count on something like this.
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Julian writes:
Lawrence, you always make my day.
The vulnerability of Israel is not a matter of the Arab’s hostility or material advantages, just as our own vulnerability has hardly anything to do with Al Qaeda & Co. The mortal danger comes from the hollowing-from-within, by liberals.
Israel’s PM and his closest ministers are liberals. It was Olmert who in June 2005 said in a speech: “We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies.” This is heavenly music for Israel’s enemies’ ears, and it’s astonishing that a Prime Minister of a country at war since its founding 58 years ago did not realize this. It may well be this very speech that gave the terrorists incentive to escalate their attacks.
It is Olmert’s liberal elite that’s micro-managing Israel’s war, hampering its own military (sounds familiar?). According to a recent report by the always excellent Israeli defense-oriented http://www.debka.com:
Olmert government is stunned by the IDF’s setbacks in South Lebanon and the rising casualty figures. Senior ministers cannot agree whether to send in more troops to reinforce the units battling the Hizballah.
Army chiefs complain that the government is hampering the military performance by setting impossible conditions: The war’s objectives have not been clearly set out to IDF leaders and the prime minister and defense minister are holding back permission to raise the level of fire power and troop numbers in line with campaign requirements.
Again, does this ring a bell for the American reader?
Lawyer friends who follow these things tell me that the Israeli Supreme Court is even more liberal than ours is, and has put various blocks preventing the country from implementing more effective security measures. Can you conceive of a court in Iran, Syria, or Lebanon that would hamper the war against the infidel crusaders and Zionists?
So this is the essence of asymmetrical warfare. We, and the Israelis, defend ourselves while heavily shackled by our own liberals. Our enemies are not so handicapped in their offense.
Robert C. writes from Nashville:
This site has a world of great Israeli links on it.
It is so good, the way you are standing for Israeli, amid CNN, Fox and the rest, and getting real insights out to people.
I have a friend, a retired high school teacher from Chicago who moved to Israel the week before this all began. To him and to me, Israel is a part of and connected to the West. Sadly, many American Jews do not even feel this connection—a curiosity that I am unable to understand.
I have recently read a book by Kevin Levin, “The Oslo Syndrome.” He describes how Israelis and Jews too often accept the oppressors’ charges and identify with the oppressor. Rejecting their own identity, they become universalists and leftist and some, even anti-Semites! A psychiatric phenomenon perhaps (the author is a psychiatrist) but moral cowardice as well. The book also rings familiar as with the refusal of Americans to stand against the invasion of their own country by aliens.
Howard Sutherland writes:
Israel’s Lebanon war is going to be a turning point. Here’s hoping their lame-brained government (ours, too) doesn’t screw it up. Even if it isn’t possible to eradicate Hezbollah altogether, any result short of their destruction as an effective fighting force will be (and seen by Moslems to be) a disastrous defeat for the Jews and Crusaders. To survive over the long run the Israelis will have to quit kidding themselves about the nature of their neighborhood, as you have said. Accordingly, Israel will have to reoccupy Gaza, Judea and Samaria completely, announce that those lands are irrevocably territories of the State of Israel, wire and mine those frontiers, and begin the transfer (as humanely as the transferees’ reactions allow) of their intransigent Arab populations to Jordan. That is a very tall order, but it is a minimum, not a maximum. Arabs living within the 1948 cease-fire line (Israeli Arabs) who subvert Israel should be transferred along with their co-ethnics living in Gaza, Judea and Samaria.
All of this will be far easier for the Israelis to accomplish if they hold to a Biblical, religious belief in the justice and truth of the Jews’ claim to the land of Israel. Also, ideally, Israel should accomplish all of the above without additional U.S. assistance. Israel standing fully on her own feet and not looking to the Americans for assistance and approval will be a healthier state of affairs for both nations.
Amen, and amen.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 26, 2006 06:06 PM | Send