Lest We Forget
Paul Eidelberg
July 1999
With the ... ascendancy of Binyamin Netanyahu as Israel’s first nationally elected Prime Minister, it would be well to recall certain salient points of Ben Hecht’s book Perfidy, one of the most powerful books of the twentieth century.
The book documents not only the deeds of Rudolf Kastner, who collaborated with Eichmann’s plan to exterminate 800,000 Hungarian Jews, but also the complicity of the most prominent founders of the State of Israel. I mention this lest we forget that Jewish politicians have betrayed the Jewish people while other Jewish politicians remained silent.
“In my own time,” writes Hecht, “governments have taken the place of people. They have also taken the place of God. Governments speak for people … and determine, absurdly, their lives and deaths.” This was not so of the Jewish people in days of old, when our Prophets admonished kings and kingdoms, or when our Sages taught us the laws of piety and of public morality. In those days, “in the soul of the Jews, in his tabernacle and kitchen, there was only one Kingdom—that of God. There was only one set of laws—the exercise of humanity.”
Hecht asks: “What happened to this fine heritage when Jews finally fashioned a government of their own in Israel; what happened to Jews when they became politicians, what happened to a piety, a sense of honor, and a brotherly love that 2,500 years of anti-Semitism were unable to disturb in the Jewish soul?”
What happened is that egoism and impersonal authority arose and removed piety and honor and brotherly love from public life. "There is no devilish or disgraceful deed," writes Hecht, “that cannot be shined up into a patriotic necessity by the right propaganda [as witness the 'peace process']. All that is needed is for people to believe in their duly elected leaders.”
Gentiles have also been guilty of perfidious deeds. But in view of the centuries of torture to which the Jews have been subjected by the gentile world, it is doubly disturbing when Jews betray their own people, or remain silent in the face of perfidy.
Again Hecht: “The Jews have of necessity been good traders and bright salesmen, although they never before sold what a government clique has been selling to the Germans [and more recently to Arab Jew-killers]—their loyalty to their dead, their moral judgment of their enemies. If their ancestral Jews had asked a price for these things, Jews would long ago have passed out of history. And Israel would not have come into existence.”
But now that Israel has joined the powers of the world, says Hecht, perhaps “Six million dead Jews are not as important a political factor as 60 million live Germans …” And today? Surely four or five million Jews in Israel are not as important an economic factor as 250 million Arabs. Is this why Yasir Arafat could win a Nobel Peace Prize despite his having committed crimes which, according to the principles of the Nuremberg trials, are crimes against humanity—Arafat, the honored guest of politicians in Oslo and Washington, to say nothing of certain Jewish politicians in Israel?
Hecht reminds us that “The ancient Greeks believed that unpunished crimes brought plagues to the people who harbored them. They sought out and punished the evil doers in order to purify human life.” Today (contrary to international law) criminals like Arafat are rewarded. He and his Jew-killers have been armed by Israeli politicians with the “moral” support and financial assistance of the United States. All this in the name of “peace,” the soporific of Israel’s former [Labor] government—and it seems of its [Likud] successor.
I hear the objection: “How dare you question the Authority or Good Intentions of a Jewish government committed to peace?” I ask in response: What does this soporific of peace blot out from the consciousness of so many Jews? Hecht would answer: Their sense of honor, their loyalty to their dead, their moral judgment of their enemies [with whom Netanyahu wants to make peace, utterly forgetful of their genocidal or theologically inspired objectives].
A Challenge to Prime Minister Netanyahu* Paul Eidelberg It is absolutely self-demeaning as well as an insult to the 5,726,000 Jews for Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to demand that terrorist chief Mahmoud Abbas recognize Israel as a Jewish state. Was there no one in the Knesset with enough Jewish pride to submit a vote of no-confidence in Netanyahu's ignominious government? Can any person who has not been deceived and degraded by seventeen years—nay, thirty-three years—of the official mendacity conveyed in the "peace process" fail to see the demoralization and emasculation of Israel? Ponder this statement of Winston Churchill: "The worst thing a leader can do is arouse false hopes, soon to be dashed." Has this not been the soporific of one Israeli prime minister after another since Menachem Begin, but brought to its apogee by Mr. Netanyahu? Aren't you tired and disgusted with his drivel about an economic solution to Israel's conflict with the Muslim Palestinians? What an insult to Islam! Isn't there a single person in the Knesset with enough courage and enough understanding of Islam to say that Islamic theology makes peace impossible? I say impossible because Islam posits a deity of pure will or absolute power in contradistinction to the Jewish and Christian theology that God is reason. Islamic theology that inevitably leads to the primacy of force, hence to the murder of "infidels." I say Impossible because Islamic theology necessarily regards the Genesis conception of man's creation in the image of God as sheer blasphemy—because reason limit Allah's absolute power. Isn't it obvious, Mr. Netanyahu, that, given Islam's irrational theology, which induces Muslims to love death more than life—isn't it obvious, Mr. Netanyahu, that negotiations with Mahmoud Abbas is futile as well as fatal? I challenge you to address this theological dilemma. I challenge you to recognize that, given the irrationality of Islamic theology, genuine and abiding peace between Jews and Muslims is impossible.
*This article is indebted to Robert R. Reilly’s The Closing of the Muslim Mind , but I alone am responsible for its content.
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Vintage Netanyahu—a “politically correct” speech.
But let’s be honest or “politically incorrect.”
For Netanyahu to state that the “Palestinians have to say ‘The Conflict Is Over,’” is to tell the Palestinians: “Forget your Quran and your 1,400-year Islamic heritage and cease being Muslims!”
Daniel Pipes dispensed with “political correctness” when he belatedly admitted in his New York Sun article of November 21, 2006: "Time To Recognize Failure Of Israel-Egypt Treaty."
| Paul Eidelberg - Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
After meeting with President Obama, Prime Minister Netanyahu told the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in New York on July 7:
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Advice to Bibi from Paul Eidelberg
Of the many mistakes Israeli prime ministers have made vis-a-vis Hezbollah, Hamas, and Fatah, the most conspicuous—and most costly in Jewish blood—could have been avoided if these prime ministers had the courage to heed the advice of Machiavelli:
"If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared."
Paul Eidelberg
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