It would appear
that a part of the “old normal” has finally returned.
Unfortunately, it is not the part where we all go about living our lives, being
real families and neighbourhoods and communities and societies again instead of
a pack of pathetic cowards so terrified by relentless media propaganda about a
viral bogeyman that we willingly surrender all of this, along with the basic
rights and freedoms of our friends and neighbours, and meekly accept massive
government overreach in the hopes that the state, by preventing us from living
our lives, might save them. No, instead it is the part where Jews
and Arabs are killing each other in the Middle East and the newsmedia is
obsessing about this again.
Even though
Israel, the Gaza Strip and West Bank, and the Arab nations are a continent and
an ocean removed from us, it has long seemed that we in North America are for
some reason required to pick a side in this conflict. This is most
likely a result of our unhealthy dependence on the new communications technology
that, as Marshall McLuhan could see as far back as 1962, have turned the world
into one big “global village”. It makes everybody’s business
our own even when it ought not to be and it would be for the best of all
involved if it were not. Consequently, everybody you speak to seems
to believe either that Israel has the right to do whatever she wants and
therefore is and always has been perfectly justified in everything she has done
in her conflict with the Palestinians and her Arab neighbours or that
Palestinian terrorists are all warm and fuzzy, cuddly innocents whose sole
desire is to live in peace except the Big Bad Israel keeps huffing and puffing
and blowing their houses down. Both positions are, of course,
utterly ridiculous.
While some make
the argument that the Israeli-Arab conflict goes back to Genesis, to the
rivalries between Isaac and Ishmael and later between Jacob and Esau, there
seems to be more of reading current events into the text of Scripture in this
than sound exegesis. The personal and bitter rivalry between Jacob
and Esau, while resolved upon the former’s return from Padan-aram, foreshadowed
the later conflict between the post-Exodus Israelites and the Edomites.
What was left of the Edomites were forcibly converted to Second Temple Judaism
in the Maccabean period. Anyone descended from Esau today is far more likely to be a Jew than an Arab.
The Arabs are traditionally regarded as having descended from Ishmael and there
is simply no support in the Scriptures for the idea of a perpetual conflict
between the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael that would outlast that between
Jacob and Esau and extend to the present day.
In actuality, the
roots of the Israeli-Arab conflict can be found in the so-called Enlightenment
in the early period of the Modern Age. Advocates of the
“Enlightenment” characterize it as a revolt against superstition and embrace of
reason but it was nothing of the sort. In actuality, it was the birth of
a new superstition – a superstitious confidence in human ability to understand
and explain the world through his own rational powers and to use that
understanding to re-fashion the world into a Paradise of his own
making. What was embraced in the “Enlightenment” was not reason but
rationalism, which is itself fundamentally superstitious. Closely
related to rationalism as a child of the “Enlightenment” was its twin
superstition of scientism.
No, I have not
forgotten my topic. The reason the “Enlightenment” was the source
of the Israeli-Arab conflict is because of the influence of its pernicious
superstitions, especially scientism, on both Jews and the adherents of the
dominant religions of the societies in which Jews lived.
Between the fall
of Jerusalem in AD 70 and the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948,
Jews, adherents of the religion Judaism, lived entirely as a minority religious
and ethnic group in the larger civilizations of other people and other
religions. For the vast majority of Jews, the civilizations in
which they lived were the two that belonged to the other two religions that
claim descent from the Abrahamic faith. Christendom was the
civilization that was the successor to the old Roman Empire and which has in
recent centuries, due to the influence of the “Enlightenment” and modernity in
general, degenerated into what we know call Western Civilization.
Its dominant religion, obviously, was Christianity. In the
civilization of the Turkish or Ottoman Empire, Islam was the dominant
religion. The relationship between the Jews and the adherents
of the majority religions in these civilizations was marked by tension and
often overt hostility that periodically erupted into violence.
While historically a large degree of mistrust has been the unfortunate norm
between people living in this sort of diaspora and those of the larger
societies hosting them, in the case of the Jews in Christendom the nature of
the theological and religious disagreement between the two greatly exacerbated
the situation. The basic disagreement
was one about which there could be no compromise. Either Jesus of Narazeth is the Christ or He
was not. You cannot have it both
ways. If Christians are right, and we
are, that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, then to reject Him as such is the
ultimate rejection of God. If Jews are
right, and they are not, that Jesus of Nazareth was not the Christ, then we who
accept Him as such commit blasphemy.
There is no middle ground here.
Those of a
progressive bent, that is to say true believers in the “Enlightenment”
superstitions of rationalism and scientism, who have all of the
“Enlightenment”’s prejudices against orthodox religion, its authoritative texts
and interpretive traditions of the same, would be inclined to seize upon
everything I have just said as vindicating their cause. The
traditional religious beliefs of Jews and Christians, they would say, caused
the historical enmity between the two groups, so if you get rid of these and
replace them with reason and science, the enmity will vanish and the two will
finally establish peace and get along. History, however, tells a
different story.
By the nineteenth
century, while former Christendom remained churchgoing for the most part, faith
in the teachings and beliefs of orthodox Christianity was in serious
decline. Similarly, the spread of “Enlightenment” superstition had broken
the virtually absolute authority that the Talmud and its rabbinic interpreters
had held over Jewish communities since the destruction of the Second Temple.
While many of the new non-believing “Christians” and secular “Jews” were
willing to take a more liberal, in the better sense of open-minded and
generous, attitude towards the other, many others sought new “rational” and
“scientific” arguments to support their dislike of the other.
Inevitably, those seeking such arguments turned to a concept then prominent in
the biological and anthropological sciences, that of race, that is to say,
groups distinguishable within mankind by shared characteristics passed down
from common ancestral stock. When this concept is used
to explain the hostility between Jews and Gentiles, however, it becomes an
argument that they are natural enemies, biologically predetermined to hate each
other, neither of which can ever trust the other, and who are incapable of
peacefully co-existing within the same territory and under the same
government. Clearly this kind of argument carried with it the
potential for generating a conflict between Jews and Gentiles that would be far
greater and more destructive than the old conflict between Jews and Christians
over religious doctrine ever had been. Indeed, with the development
of these arguments came a tide of publications purporting to document the
undesirable and inferior racial traits of either Jews or Gentiles depending
upon who was doing the writing and publishing.
Towards the end
of the nineteenth century two new political movements arose, Zionism and
anti-Semitism. Counter-intuitive as this will no doubt seem to
those only familiar with the post-World War II usage of these terms, these
movements were often allies rather than enemies, sharing many of the same ideas
and even in some cases the same members. The goal of the Zionist
movement was to establish a sovereign Jewish nation-state in a Jewish homeland.
The goal of the anti-Semitic movement was to free Gentile countries
from Jewish influence. It hardly takes a genius to see how these
two ends coincide. At their best, both movements wished to avoid
the ugly outcome to which the racialization of Jewish-Gentile conflict was leading.
At their worst they were expressions of that very racialization. While
pre-Zionist discussions had taken place earlier in the century, the Dreyfus
Affair of 1894 was the immediate motivation that turned the discussion into
active organization. Alfred Dreyfus, a
Captain in the French artillery, had been accused of treason. He was arrested, convicted, and sent to
Devil’s Island. The question of his guilt or innocence became
a matter of hot dispute. There was evidence pointing to another officer
named Esterhazy as having committed the crime but those who had convicted
Dreyfus were reluctant to reverse their decision. Those who were convinced of his innocence long
before it was generally acknowledged maintained that he had been railroaded
because of his Jewish ancestry. There
is little to no evidence that this was the case, although prejudices of this nature
were incorporated into some of the commentary of those who took the “Dreyfus is
guilty” side in the dispute. The advocates
of Dreyfus’ innocence who made this accusation of anti-Jewish prejudice against
the French military authorities and who would find their prophet in the
novelist and playwright Émile Zola, themselves had the ulterior motive
of driving from the Third Republic the last vestiges of the old, pre-Revolutionary, Catholic and
royalist, regime, whose remaining base of strength was in French military. Whether intended or not, the controversy
shaped the next generation of French literature. It is, for example, the single most
important event in the historical background of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927), in
which it emerges from time to time into the forefront of the main story. It was very early in the controversy that
Theodor Herzl and his colleagues seized the opportunity it had created to
organize their movement. For a good
history of all of this see Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the
Unresolved Jewish Dilemma, Perseus Books, 1996.
The formation of
the Zionist movement, obviously, eventually led to the creation of the modern
state of Israel. It would never have been formed apart from the
intellectual history starting from the “Enlightenment” summarized
above. Apart from the dependence of Zionism upon
post-“Enlightenment” thought for most of its ideas, the movement was primarily
one among secular Jews and, indeed, was always opposed by the strictest of
religious Jews on the grounds that it was an attempt to do what only the
Messiah could rightly accomplish. This was why the movement was
originally open to other options for the location of the Jewish homeland than
the Holy Land and, indeed, when the movement finally settled on Palestine it
was more for practical than theological reasons. The timing,
however, while right for the ultimate success of the project, was completely
off for establishing healthy, peaceful co-existence with their new neighbours.
When the Zionist
movement began, Palestine had been part of the Ottoman Empire for
centuries. Jews had always been present as a religious minority in
the Ottoman Empire. Their relations with the Muslim majority of
that Empire had historically been less marked by mutual animosity than their
relations with Christians in Christendom. There are obvious
theological and historical reasons why this would be the case.
Islam and rabbinic Judaism had not started out together in first century
Palestine, late in the Second Temple period, both claiming to be the true heirs
of the faith of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the Sinaitic religion of Moses,
but dividing from each other over the crucial question of whether Jesus of
Nazareth is the Messiah promised by God through the prophets of ancient Israel
or not, with the Christians rightly taking the affirmative and the Jews wrongly
taking the negative, but neither being much inclined to a civil "lets
agree to disagree" approach. Prior
to Zionism, the most tense moment between Jews and Muslims was when Islam was
just getting started. Muhammad, having been rejected and ridiculed in his
own home town of Mecca, had fled to Yathrib which accepted him, and which he
turned into his base of Medina. At the time, he expected that
Jews and Christians would be more accepting of his self-proclaimed status as
Prophet than the pagans of his home town, which is why the earliest verses in
the Koran are generally positive towards the "peoples of the book".
He was disillusioned when he discovered that the three most
prominent Jewish clans in Yathrib rejected him. He ordered them
expelled, and in the case of one of them later chased them down and slaughtered
all the males. Apart from this nastiness, however, the relationship
between the Jews and Muslims had been historically rather irenic. Another
important reason for this, and the one which is most relevant for our purposes,
is that the Islamic world for a large part of this period had been under the
rule of the Ottoman sultan who had the civil interest of maintaining domestic
peace between the Muslim majority and the religious minorities of his
empire. When Zionism was born, Sultan
Abdul Hamid II was still on the throne. He refrained from giving
his support for the Zionist cause on the reasonable grounds that it would
divide his empire but the First Aliyah still took place in his reign. In
1909, the revolutionary Young Turks who deposed him embraced the Zionist
cause. However, as is often the case with revolutionary movements
that overturn long established dynasties, the Young Turks split into rival
factions, one of which seized total power over the Empire and formed a
one-party state that was short-lived due to its disastrous policies which
brought the Empire into the First World War, which led to the Empire being
defeated and broken up.
The fall of the
Ottoman Empire removed the power that, belligerent as it often had been to its
neighbours, especially Christendom, had maintained order, domestic peace, unity
and civilization in the region of the Levant for centuries. This created a vacuum. The
conquering Allied powers, while they wanted order, peace, and civilization for
the region, were unable to fill that vacuum. After the Armistice, the
region was temporarily put under military government jointly administered by
the British, the French, and the Arab armies that had rebelled against the
Turks and fought alongside the Allies, and following the Paris Peace Conference
and the formation of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, the region was
divided, with Britain and France each holding mandates from the League to
govern portions of it temporarily as they prepared the peoples of the region
for self-government, while the old Arab dynasties that had long been regional
powers such as the House of Saud and the House of Hashim consolidated their
strength in preparation for independence. This may be beside
the point, but I will point out here that the House of Saud proved more
successful at this over the long run than the older Hashemite dynasty,
successfully bringing more regions, including the Hejaz that had been the
original realm of the Hashemites into its kingdom, whereas the House of Hashim
began the post-World War I period reigning over several Arab kingdoms, but has
long since been reduced to that of Jordan, the others having been turned into strong-man
dictatorships that call themselves republics through the pernicious meddling of
both the Americans and the Communists. Since the House of Saud
began its rise to power centuries ago by forging an alliance with the Wahhabi
movement within the Sunni sect of Islam, a movement that could be very roughly
said to be the equivalent of the Puritan movement within Protestant
Christianity and which is believed by many to be far more prone to waging jihad
than other branches of Islam, and retained that alliance ever since, while the
Kingdom of Jordan has long been one of the safest, most stable, and peaceful of
the Arab countries, this is perhaps not that irrelevant after
all. More importantly, however, the presence of the new Arab
nationalism that had sparked the rebellion against the Ottomans in the absence
of a single, long-established, power over the entire region, ensured that as
the Zionist movement set about establishing an independent Jewish state it
would meet a hostile reception from its would-be neighbours. The
basic idea of Arab nationalism was that Arab peoples in Arab lands should be
governed by Arab rulers instead of by others. Initially the target
of Arab nationalism was Turkish rule, but free of this after centuries, nationalist
Arabs were not about to accept the creation of a state in their own backyard in
which Arabs would be governed by Jews.
All of this
became Britain’s problem because it was to the United Kingdom that the League
mandate to govern Palestine fell. Complicating matters was the fact
that the United Kingdom had formally expressed its support to both the Zionist
movement and the Arab nationalists during the war and was now expected to try
and live up to her commitments to both. In the interwar period the
Zionist movement kicked into high gear building the civil infrastructure of
what would become the state of Israel. The Haganah, for example,
was formed in 1920 to defend the Jewish settlements of the Yishuv against Arab
attacks and it became the Israeli Defence Force after 1948. As the
Zionists were preparing for statehood they naturally wanted and needed more
people and asked the British authorities to open wide the door for massive
Jewish immigration to Palestine. Britain, however, recognizing that this
would be like striking a flint within a warehouse of gunpowder, slammed the
door shut instead. The timing could hardly have been worse as far
as ex post facto optics goes. It was the spring of 1939, the eve of
the Second World War, a time in which the Jews of Europe, in anticipation of
the conquests of Adolf Hitler who preached the most extreme form of
anti-Semitism conceivable, were seeking to flee for their lives in droves
(although most preferred the United States as a destination over settling in
Palestine).
The Zionists in
Palestine were understandably perturbed about this. The response of
some of them, however, set an example that would come back to bite them decades
later. Zionism, it needs to be noted here, was not a monolithic movement.
While the goal of establishing a sovereign Jewish homeland was common to them
all, Zionism consisted of several factions with radically different ideas as to
what the Jewish state should look like, and, in some cases, the means acceptable
to achieving it. The mainstream of Zionism in the period of the
British Mandate wanted a Western European style liberal democracy, with some
wanting American style capitalism, others, who would have been the majority at
the time, preferring social democracy or even outright socialism.
The revisionist Zionists, however, led by Vladamir or Ze’ev Jabotinksy, a
Russian-born Zionist who in addition to being an activist was also a brilliant
man of letters, being an accomplished journalist, translator, novelist and
poet, wanted to establish Israel as an ethno-state, and to extend its
boundaries well beyond what mainstream Zionists wanted, and even beyond the
limits of the territory controlled by both kingdoms in the Old
Testament. Like the mainstream Zionists, Jabotinsky was furious
when the British restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine in 1939, but he
took it much further, calling for the Jews of Palestine to take up arms against
Britain and seize their independence by force. He even had a
private army at his disposal with which he made serious plans to put this into
practice. His follower Avraham Tehomi, originally a member of the
Jerusalem Hagenah, had grown disillusioned with what he saw as that
organization’s half-measures to protect the Jewish settlers from Arab violence,
and had formed an alternative, underground, paramilitary group that he
originally called Hagenah Beta, but soon renamed Irgun Tzeva’i Le’umi (National
Military Organzation), more commonly called just the Irgun or “Etzel” (from the
acronym IZL) that had far fewer compunctions about the kind of violence to
which it was willing to stoop. To put it bluntly, it was a
terrorist organization.
When World War II
broke out, Jabotinksy, who had been named Supreme Commander of the Irgun in
1937 following a re-organization after half the group had defected back to the
Haganah, set aside his plans for an insurgence against the British because he
believed that the war against the Nazis took priority. The more
extreme among his followers thought differently. Around the time
that Jabotinksy died in 1940, Avraham Stern founded a splinter organization
that he called the Lohamei Herut Israel (Fighters for Israeli Freedom), which
like the parent organization was better known by the acronymic Lehi or simply
“the Stern Gang”. The two terrorist groups divided precisely over
Jabotinsky’s policy, continued by the Irgun after his death, of prioritizing
the war with the Third Reich over the war with independence. Stern
of the exact opposite opinion. I mean that quite
literally. He insisted that the British were the only real enemy,
and in early 1941 sent emissaries to Hitler offering the German dictator his
friendship, alliance, and support in his war against the British Commonwealth
if he, that is Hitler, would assist in repatriating the Jews to Palestine and
support Israeli independence there. In this alliance proposal from
the most extreme of Zionists to the most extreme of anti-Semites, the original
convergence of these two movements became the ultimate caricature of
itself! What, exactly, the German tyrant thought of this, we don’t
know. There is no record of any response.
When the war
ended, of course, with the defeat of the Third Reich and the Axis and the
Pyrrhic victory of the British (the real victor was what Evelyn Waugh dubbed
“the Modern Age at arms”, which originally looked like the Nazi-Soviet
alliance, but ended up being the American-Soviet alliance) the source of the
disagreement between the two organizations was eliminated and the Irgun joined
the Lehi in waging a war of terror against the British, consisting of high
profile assassinations and bombings, that ultimately proved successful when the
United Kingdom declared that its mandate had come to an end and handed the
matter over to the United Nations, which portioned the land into Israel and
Palestine, most of the latter of which ended up being absorbed into the former
when the league of Arab nations, most of which had attained their own
independence only a few years earlier, teamed up to invade Israel upon her day
of independence, and had their arses dramatically handed to them.
The Arab
countries were slow to learn the lesson of 1948, which was, of course, that
they could not win in a direct war against Israel. They fought
against Israel again in the Six-Days War of 1967 – although in this case Israel
had begun the hostilities with a pre-emptive airstrike that took out the Egyptian
air force – and in 1973 when the Syrian-Egyptian alliance attacked Israel on
Yom Kippur. No such war was ever attempted again, probably because
the Americans made it clear in the 1973 war that they would intervene on
Israel’s behalf should anything of the sort happen again. The Arabs
should have been able to guess that things were heading in that direction as
far back as 1967, for in the course of the Six-Days War Israel deliberately
attacked an American naval research ship, the USS Liberty, and got away with it
because the American government refused to conduct a proper inquiry into the
incident. See James M. Ennes
Jr., Assault on the Liberty, Random
House, 1979. Anyone wishing to understand why need look no
further than the remarks of Barry M. Goldwater, the long-serving Republican
Senator for Arizona, in his second autobiography co-written with Jack
Casserly. He said that as an American Senator he “was never put
under greater pressure than by the Israeli lobby” and that said lobby “is the
most influential crowd in Congress and America by far.” (Goldwater,
1988, p. 21) As he described the pressure, the lobbyists would
bring old Jewish friends of his from Arizona to Washington, whenever a vote
that somehow affected Israel came up, in order to pressure him to vote in what
they saw to be Israel's interest. According to Goldwater, who
despite his last name was not Jewish himself (his father was Jewish but he was
raised in his mother’s Episcopalian faith), he always firmly told them that he
would vote what he believed to be in the interest of America and her constitution,
which were the things that he lay awake worrying about at night, rather than
Israel’s. Other American Congressmen and Senators have testified to
having put under a lot more intense pressure than this by the same lobby,
including tactics that most people would call bullying or
intimidation. Plenty of examples can be found in They Dare to Speak Out: People and
Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, Lawrence Hill, 1985, by former Republican
Congressman for Illinois, Paul Findley.
Long before the
Arab countries learned this lesson, they had learned a different lesson from
the experience of the Irgun and Lehi. When, therefore, the initial
Arab-Israeli War of 1948 ended in their being routed, most of the territory
allotted to the Palestinian Arabs being annexed by Israel, and thousands of
Palestinian Arabs being driven into exile, rather than comfortably re-settle
the refugees in their own countries, they kept them in miserable refugee camps
in order to turn them into embittered radicals willing to wage a proxy war on
behalf of the Arab powers conducted by means of terrorism against
Israel. In 1964, the Arab League formed the Palestinian Liberation
Organization, which would wage just such a war against Israel for
decades. The tactic worked for them as it had for the Zionist
terrorists in the 1940s. In 1993, Israel signed the
American-brokered Oslo Accords with this organization, in which they granted it
official recognition and the foundation for establishing the Palestinian
Authority was laid.
Before that
happened, however, the Israeli government had committed the most boneheaded
move in all of its history. The PLO was a secular
organization. Its ideology was informed by the secular Arab nationalism
discussed earlier. Its commitment to the destruction of
Israel, therefore, had no underlying basis in immutable religious dogma, and
therefore was open to negotiation, as history bore out when the organization
acknowledged Israel’s right to exist. The Israeli government, however,
latched on to the idea that the influence of the PLO among Palestinian Arabs
could be countered by promoting an Islamic revival among the same.
So, after the Yom Kippur War it began supporting and funding the charity that
Ahmed Yassin had founded on behalf of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood which had
already begun a mosque-building campaign throughout the Occupied Territories,
especially Gaza. They realized their mistake in 1987, when Sheik
Yassin organized the large following he had developed into Hamas, and declared
the First Intifada. Hamas’s war against Israel is built upon
Islamic doctrine. To weaken a foe that it would soon thereafter
negotiate a sort of peace with, Israel had assisted in the creation of a much
more enduring enemy.
Had Israel been
governed by people who took theology, their own and that of others, seriously
they would have been less likely to make this mistake. They would
have informed themselves about Islamic theology and perhaps learned that to
allow territory that had been part of Dar al-Islam, as all of Palestine
including Israel had been under Ottoman rule, to fall under non-Muslim control
and leave it that way is completely unacceptable to the orthodox of all Muslim
sects. The leadership of Israel, however, like that of the Zionist
movement that created her has been hopelessly secular right from the
beginning. The only difference from the days of David Ben-Gurion
to today, is that Israel has shifted from the left-secularism,
committed to liberal democracy and socialism, that was dominant in the three
decades that the Labour Party controlled the Knesset to a form of
right-secularism in the decades since in which the Knesset has most often been
controlled by the Likud. While under almost any other circumstances
I would call that an improvement the situation in Israel is far from
normal.
The Likud was founded by Menachem Begin who served as the party’s
first Prime Minister in Israel. Begin was the unrepentant former
terrorist – he led the Irgun in the period in which it joined the Lehi in
waging terrorist war against Britain – who as Prime Minister persecuted
Christians in Israel, began to institute the “Greater Israel” expansionist
policies of his mentor Jabotinsky, and ordered the brutal invasion of Lebanon
in 1982. Margaret Thatcher, whose premiership in the United Kingdom
began shortly after Begin’s in Israel, told the French president of those days,
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, that she “never had a more difficult man to
deal with.”
When you consider that Captain Airhead’s father, Pierre Trudeau, was the Prime
Minister of the Dominion of Canada at the time, this was saying a
lot. Begin’s successor, both as leader of the Likud and Prime
Minister of Israel was Yitzhak Shamir, another unrepentant former
terrorist. He was one of the triumvirate who had taken over the
leadership of the Lehi after the death of Avraham Stern and who led it in the
same period in which Begin led the Irgun and in which most of its crimes and
atrocities were committed.
When Shamir was defeated by the Labour Party in 1992 and Yitzhak
Rabin returned to the premiership, Shamir resigned the leadership of the Likud
which was then taken up by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Since Netanyahu is the current leader and the current Prime Minister of
Israel I shall postpone saying anything about him until I have discussed the
fourth Likud leader and Israeli Prime Minister. This was Ariel Sharon who took over the
party leadership in 1999 and became Prime Minister in 2001, resigning the
leadership in 2005 to form the Kadima party, shortly before a stroke ended his premiership
in 2006. Before entering politics,
Sharon had been a career military man.
He had served in the Haganah in 1948, rather than the terrorist groups,
and had fought with the IDF in all of Israel’s major wars. In his controversial military career he
early earned a reputation for slaughtering civilians. The most notorious atrocities associated
with his name, however, are from 1982 when he was Begin’s Defence
Minister. In that capacity, he had been the mastermind
behind the bombing of Beirut and invasion of Lebanon, in which the IDF laid
waste to civilian neighbourhoods in the name of taking out PLO based. The biggest atrocity of that conflict was
not directly perpetrated by the IDF but the Phalange, a milita of Lebanon’s
Maronite Christians, who slaughtered the residents of the Sabra neighbourhood of
West Beirut and the refugee camp of Shatila that was located nearby. While the Phalange committed the massacre
they had been trained and armed by the IDF, which had surrounded the
neighbourhood, allowed the militia in, were fully aware of what they were
doing, and prevented the victims from escaping.
The Israeli commission that investigated the incident, found Sharon
responsible, and insisted that he be removed from office (in 1983 he was
shifted to a different portfolio). In his memoir, An American Life, Ronald Reagan, who had been president of the
United States when all of this was occurring, gave his impression of Sharon as “a
bellicose man who seemed to be chomping at the bit to start a war”. It is very rare, by the way, that Reagan
mentions anyone in his autobiography about whom he could not find anything
positive to say.
It ought to be observed, at this point, that it took thirty years
after Israel achieved independence, before they became so fed up with their
neighbours’ refusal to accept their existence, periodic attacks, and constant
funding of terrorist harassment against them, that they started electing a
party led by terrorists and war criminals because it promised to be ruthless
with their enemies. By contrast, the
moment the Palestinian Arabs were able to vote for their own government they
elected Hamas. If anybody really feels
the necessity for picking a side in this ridiculous conflict, that is something
to consider.
As leader and Prime Minister Sharon was initially embraced
by the hard core support base of the Likud and they remained confident in his
leadership as he ordered the IDF to crush the Second Intifida in 2002 and began
erecting a spite fence around the West Bank, but by the end of his premiership
they regarded him as a traitor for ordering the unilateral disengagement of
Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip and voiced his support for a Palestinian
state. What they had apparently
overlooked was that unlike Begin and Shamir, he had never been an ideological
follower of Jabotinsky. He was a
military man, and military men, even ruthless and nasty types like Sharon, tend
to be practical.
Which makes it very interesting that the Likud opted to
return the leadership to Netanyahu after Sharon resigned. Netanyahu, who had begun his first term as
Israeli Prime Minister around the time that Bill Clinton was seeking refuge
from the hen-pecking of his harpy and harridan wife Hilary in the mouth of
White House intern Monika Lewinsky, was no more of a Revisionist Zionist
ideologue than Sharon had been. Too
young to have served in either the Haganah or its terrorist rivals – he was
born the year after Israel attained independence – Netanyahu had by the time he
was thirty, established a reputation for himself as an intellectual expert on anti-terrorism. It was around the same time that he first
became involved in diplomacy and politics.
What he actually is, if truth be told, is the first real politician to
lead the Likud party. His vices are not
those of ideological terrorists or hardened military war criminals but the
old-fashioned vices of the ordinary politician. Early in his fourth term as Prime Minister –
he is now in his fifth – the Israeli police began to investigate charges of corruption
against him and in 2019 he was formally indicted for the same.
That he has managed to remain in power seems almost miraculous. Shortly after he has formally charged with
corruption, the World Health Organization handed him what must have seemed like
a dying man’s reprieve. They declared
the Wuhan bat flu to be a pandemic and recommended that the countries of the
world prevent its spread by putting into practice Red China’s experimental new
universal quarantine, which has since been dubbed “lockdown”. Netanyahu, seizing the opportunity, locked
down Israel faster and harder than most if not all other countries. Indeed, he earned himself the dubious
distinction of being the world leader who has done the most to suppress Jewish
observation, practice, and religious freedom since Adolf Hitler. He imposed the second wave of extreme
lockdown right before the Jewish New Year of Rosh Hashanah and timed it to
extend through Yom Kippur, the festival of Sukkot, and basically all the
holiest days on the Jewish calendar. In
one bizarre incident that would almost seem to suggest a novel reinterpretation
of the Greater Israel concept along the lines of Germany’s arrogant claim to
the right to boss Germans around even in other countries, his top health
official called up the president of the Ukraine and asked him to close his
borders to Jews seeking to make their annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to the
tomb of Rabbi Nachman in Uman. For what
it is worth, when angrily confronted about this by non-Israeli Jews who were refused
their pilgrimage, Netanyahu later denied being behind this strange act on the
part of his health commissar.
If the idea had been to use the lockdown to escape from the
bad publicity of the corruption charges it failed. Netanyahu’s popularity began to tank and
the anti-Netanyahu demonstrations over the corruption charges grew as their numbers
were swelled by the addition of defiant Orthodox Jews who did not take kindly
to having their synagogues shut down and their festivals cancelled and by an
Israeli government no less. Kudos to
them. The Orthodox Jews similarly stood
up for their rights against the Governor of New York, holding a non-socially
distanced street party where they embraced and burned their masks. I was reminded of this the other week when I
watched a news show in which members of the Muslim community here in Winnipeg
were being interviewed about the end of Ramadan. They expressed sadness that they could not
have the usual big family gatherings but took a “what can you do” attitude
towards it and talked about how they had adjusted the celebration to accommodate
the fascist health restrictions. I
guess they just don’t make Muslims the way they used to. Where were all the fatwas? Sir Salman Rushdie had one pronounced over
him for less than this. Somebody owes
him a big apology.
Had Israel been a religious Jewish country rather than a
secular Jewish country Netanyahu would be long gone by now. As it was, Operation Save My Arse With a
Lockdown had proven to be a total failure.
As he was faced with the imminent collapse of his government, his fall
from power, disgrace, and quite probably a long prison sentence, the fairy
godmother of Likud Prime Ministers, Hamas, came to Bibis rescue. From their base in Gaza they resumed their
favourite pastime, hurtling primitive rockets at Israel. It is a mostly harmless pastime as far as the
Israelis are concerned. On the rare occasion
that a rocket makes it past the Iron Dome defence system it can do some damage,
depending upon where it lands, but for the most part it is mainly a fireworks display. For the Israelis, however, it is a casus
belli, and a goldmine for Likud Prime Ministers because there is nothing more
guaranteed to boost their popularity then when they hammer down hard on the
Palestinians in retaliation. The most
ill-kept secret of the Middle East is that Likud Israeli governments and Hamas each
rely upon the other to maintain their popular support among their own people. The Palestinians expect Hamas to keep on harassing
Israel. The Israelis expect their
government to brutally punish the Palestinians.
Each, therefore, provides the other with the excuse to do what they need
to do to play to their own crowds. So
we come to May of this year. On the
sixth the Palestinians hold a protest in East Jerusalem, on the seventh the
Israelis crack down and storm the al-Aqsa mosque, on the tenth Hamas issues an
ultimatum which Israel naturally ignores and the rockets start flying, on the
eleventh the Israeli Air Force begin several days of bombing the hell out of
Gaza. On the twentieth, having given
their fans the show they were looking for, Netanyahu and Hamas agree to a
ceasefire. Bada bing, bada boom, it is
all over in a fortnight, mission accomplished, everyone is happy, high fives
all around. Too bad about all the
people who had to die, but didn’t someone somewhere at sometime say something
about an omelet and eggs?
Remind me again why we are expected to pick one side or
another in this deranged circus?
