Beyond Osloporosis and Mendacity
"Lots of bad editorials are better than a beautiful obituary."
— An old Israeli saying from the times before "Osloporosis" struck the country.
"Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense.
If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other."
— George Orwell, Partisan Review, 1942
"He who is merciful to the cruel, will end up being cruel to the merciful"
— Kohelet Rabbah
"The strength of the prophets of Israel lay in the fact that they proclaimed the Truth
when everything was against it."
— Andre Malraux
Courage and Honor
Prof. Paul Eidelberg
Is it a Jewish flaw or merely human frailty that spawned Israel’s policy of “land for peace,” a policy which has soaked the land of Israel in Jewish blood?
Some say this policy is animated by a Jewish death wish or by Jewish self-hatred. But “land for peace,” as a policy of appeasement, is not a Jewish idea. President Eduard Benes of Czechoslovakia was not Jewish; yet, despite the heavily fortified—some experts say impregnable—Sudetenland, he succumbed to that spineless policy at Munich.
The truth is unpleasant: “land for peace”—the policy of Israel’s ruling elites—signifies little more than cowardice, a human frailty. This frailty may be more prevalent among modern Jews whose psyche, tainted by democratic egalitarianism, is oblivious of the aristocratic virtue Nietzsche called the “pathos of distance.”
Israel’s ruling elites therefore lack not only courage, but also its cousin, the sense of honor. It is this dual deficiency that produced the policy of “land for peace,” which translates into the inane policy of “land for nothing,” otherwise known as “unilateral disengagement.” The “policy of the brave” is in truth the “policy of cowards.”
A word about courage. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates teaches us that courage is a precondition of wisdom. The coward, rather than stand up for truth, prefers to be “politically correct.” His self-abasement, his lack of honor, makes him a liar.
A word about honor. Honor is not “prestige.” Honor depends more on self-respect than on the favorable opinion of others. The source of honor is respect for truth (so lacking among Israel’s ruling elites). Honor demands more than truthfulness. Alfred North Whitehead saw that “truthfulness as an element of one’s own self-respect issues from a reverence for Reason in its own right”—hence for Truth in its own right.
In Israel, politicians devoid of honor readily succumb to imbecility: releasing and arming Arab terrorists—Jew-killers—to protect Jews! The Oslo Agreement will go down in history as the pinnacle of diplomatic fatuity. This mindless agreement has murdered 1,600 Jews and shattered the lives of tens of thousands more. And there is no end in sight!
Leaving aside the complicity of Israel’s ruling elites in the criminal consequences of Oslo, here I only want to expose the principal vice of these elites—for I am fed up with the obscurantism of “post-Zionism,” which tells us nothing of the character of those elites.
Those who have foisted the policy of “land for peace” on the people of Israel are not mere ignoramuses. They are not simply mindless of Islamic history—a history punctuated by the plunder and destruction of so many Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Hindu communities and the slaughter of perhaps more than 200 million “infidels”!
They know that Israel is surrounded by a “culture of hate.” Day after day, year after year, the people of this satanic culture have shed Jewish blood. Israel’s ruling elites are not simply living in denial. They know what is being taught in Muslim schools and mosques, that a generation of Arab children has been trained to emulate suicide bombers. They know that the successors of the Nazis are dedicated to Israel’s annihilation.
And yet, despite their country’s awesome military power, Israel’s ruling elites lack the courage—and therefore the wisdom—to do what the Arabs’ genocidal intentions require them to do: conquer Israel’s enemies. Pursue a policy of expansion, not contraction!!
Steeped in cowardice, Israel’s ruling elites succumb to the absurdity of surrendering Jewish land to a gang of murderous scoundrels.
This cowardice applies not only to the parties of willful appeasement, whose leader know nothing of honor. It also applies to the parties of reluctant appeasement, to all parties in the Knesset—secular and religious—whose poltroons advocate “reciprocity” or territorial compromise, with or without a national referendum. They too lack honor.
We are dealing here with utterly flawed human beings, secular as well as religious. It’s not their minds that have gone astray as much as their hearts. They are “men without chests.”
Desperately needed, therefore, are men of valor and honor, above all, men who love the God of Israel and who therefore hate—as the psalmist hated—His enemies.
Only let such men unite on behalf of Israel’s sacred cause and the future will be ours.
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