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1995-10-29
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Why The Leaders of Israel Are Aggressively Pursuing Peace^15
Many long-standing observers of the Middle East scene have been
puzzled by the haste and urgency with which Mr. Rabin, Israel's Prime
Minister, and Mr. Peres, Israel's Foreign Minister, have moved
towards peace. Certain voices of caution have been concerned with the
abandon with which Israel's leaders have overlooked breaches of faith
by their negotiating partners and charged ahead in the quest for
peace. Among the most glaring of these breaches are repeated signals
that the PLO has not given up its goal of the destruction of Israel:
(1) The Palestine National Council of the PLO has not amended its
Charter which calls for Israel's destruction. The dropping of this
item in its Charter was one of the original conditions in the
"Declaration of Principles" for Israel's agreement to deal with the
PLO.
(2) Mr. Arafat's speech in May, 1994 in a mosque in Johannesburg in
which he explicitly called for a jihad, the Arabic term for holy war,
to liberate Jerusalem. Although when pressed for an explanation by
Israel Mr. Arafat backtracked, and tried to pass off his reference to
jihad as simply indicative of a political struggle, his speech
contained another reference which reveals his approach. He referred
to a truce agreement which the prophet Mohammed had reached with the
Kuraish tribe in 628 A.D. Two years later the truce was "torn down."
His allusion to Mohammed's treachery indicates that his true intention
is not a permanent peace but one that only continues as long as it
serves his purpose. His purpose - to establish the state of Palestine
on all of eretz Israel - has never been renounced.
(3) Mr. Farouk Kaddoumi, the Foreign Minister equivalent of the PLO
and head of its political department, made a speech on the occasion of
the closing of the PLO's radio operation in North Africa in mid-August
in which he is reported to have said, "There is a state which was
established through historical force and it must be destroyed. This
is the Palestinian way."
Representative of these cautionary voices within Israeli society is
Aharon Megged, an Israeli author:
Hundreds of our society's leading writers, intellectuals, academics,
authors, and journalists, joined by painters, photographers, and
actors, have been unceasingly and diligently preaching that our cause
is not just. And this, they say, is true not only since the Six Day
War, nor just since the establishment of our state in 1948, which as
one prominent scholar put it, "was born in sin," but since the
beginning of Zionist settlement at the end of the last century. What
is happening before our very eyes is the rewriting of Zionist history,
a rewriting in the spirit of its adversaries and foes... The
(rewriters') conclusion is almost uniform: that in practice Zionism
amounts to an evil, colonialist conspiracy to exploit the people
dwelling in Palestine, enslave them, and steal their land.
This approach of the intelligentsia is providing the philosophical
underpinning of the drive towards peace, a need within the Israeli
psyche to correct the growing sense of Jewish injustice in their
dispossession of Arabs from the land. This attitudinal rethinking is
only possible for a generation that is increasingly remote from the
pogroms, ghettos, and atrocities to which their ancestors were
subjected in Europe. Mr. Megged went further in his assessment of the
new views promulgated by Israel's left-wing establishment:
Another assault on Zionist legitimacy is the denial of the historic
link of our people with the land of our forefathers. The right of
Israel to exist at all is thus based purely on the right of need...
Many (academics) regard religious, cultural, and emotional affinity to
the land - the most important rationale for our existence here - with
sheer contempt... Some years ago, a book called "States for the Jews"
by Eliahu Binyamini enumerated 34 territorial plans for settling Jews
in various parts of the world. The best known are Uganda,
Birobidzhan, Argentina, the Kimberleys zone in Australia, New
Caledonia, and Madagascar. They were meant, according to the
territorialists, autonomists, communists, and others, to Land the
problem of Jewish "need." They all came to naught.
The Zionist idea is the only one which came alive, in a wondrous way
no historian could have foretold. In the Land of Israel, there arose
a Jewish nation in a Jewish state. It revived the Hebrew language,
created a Hebrew culture, and ingathered millions of Jews...
But since the Six Day War, and at an increasing pace, we have
witnessed a phenomenon which probably has no parallel in history: an
emotional and moral identification by the majority intelligentsia with
people openly committed to our annihilation...
(Aharon Megged, The Jerusalem Post International Edition, The Israeli
Suicide Drive, July 2, 1994, p. 15)
Mr. Megged struggles to explain this "pathological phenomenon" that is
at the root of the drive to rethink Zionism. In our view, its primary
explanation lies in the desire to extinguish any connection beyond
modern Israel and God. It is the distinctively Israeli manifestation
of a drive that is evident among the intelligentsia in western society
generally. In the name of "social justice," the push for recognition
of homosexual unions, for example, is motivated by a desire to make a
public declaration which denies any legitimacy to Judeo-Christian
morality. In Israel at the present time, this same inclination is not
so much evident in a thrust to re-engineer social policy as it is in
changes to the political agenda vis-a-vis the Arab states. If Israel
can cede land back to the Arab states, give their governments
effective control over the holy places in Jerusalem, and make peace,
does it not set back the religious opposition that believes in a
God-given right to the land? How does Israel, now that it has
embarked on a course that is in defiance of God and His pronouncements
concerning Israel's attachment to the land, fit with Bible prophecy?