"By a Prophet I mean a courageous speaker of the truth,
a man who by virtue of a higher, divine authority dares to tell
the mighty of the earth in concrete cases and in specific circumstances
"Thou Shalt!" or "Non licet!" (Pierre
Van Paassen, The Forgotten Ally)
The Jewish state is in a dire need of a Prophet. It desperately needs a leader who will put aside all political calculations and will lead a struggle for Zionist principles. She needs a person who will guide the ship of Zionism with a steady hand through the ensuing chaos of Israeli and international politics. She needs a leader who can directly appeal to the soul of the Jewish people, touch its most intimate strings and, like Mattathias, call the people to follow him.
This leader will stop Israel's "flight from reality,"
the same flight from reality that was characteristic of the world
superpowers in the preWorld War II world and that was described
by the Dutch born Pierre Van Paassen in his book The Forgotten
Ally, published in 1943. Van Paassen wrote that:
"Nowhere does there seem to have been sufficient moral
strength and clarity of vision to appreciate the true nature of
the powers of chaos. On the contrary, there was again and again
a diligent search for a modus vivendi with these powers. All sorts
of excuses and justifications for their appearance and growth
were discovered and advanced. They were approached for possible
collaboration. They were offered compromise after compromise.
They were offered one sacrifice after another."
It is Israel today which is looking for all sorts of excuses and
justifications to help the PLO in their construction of a second
Palestinian state and eventual destruction of the one and only
Jewish state. It is Israel which offers compromise after compromise
trying to satisfy the appetites of the Arabs. It is Israel which
is sacrificing piece after piece of Eretz Yisrael hoping to appease
her enemies. Van Paassen characterized this kind of behavior.
He called it an "inner paralysis of society by a secret poison."
He explained that:
"that poison has its seat and origin in our own unacknowledged
guilt, our own failure to assume responsibility for the rise of
evil. It is this guilt whose secret poison influences our political
action in that it disarms us morally and renders us obtuse and
impotent in the presence of political injustice and crime."
Our tragedy, the tragedy of the Jewish people, is in our unwillingness to admit that the world has not really changed in its attitude toward the Jews. The hatred of the Jews has been converted into hatred of their state. It is true that the blood libels are not cited as often as they were a century ago but they are still repeated, particularly in Islamic and Arab countries. The antiJewish sentiments reappear time and again whenever they are needed. The recent rise of antiSemitic rhetoric in Russia easily proves this. While many Arab and Islamic countries loudly call for Israel's destruction, America, Russia and the Western countries pretend that they do not hear, and modern weaponry keeps pouring into the hands of those very nations, who have declared holy war against the Jewish state.
Only fifty years ago, the world witnessed the unprecedented tragedy
of the Holocaust the extermination of European Jewry. Today, by
brandishing the slogans of the necessity of creating "a Palestinian
state" and achieve "peace" in the Middle East it
opens the gates to another catastrophe. This time, it is the catastrophe
of the Israeli Jews. In the midst of Hitlers extermination of
the Jewish people Van Paassen quoted Dr. Gaspar Daubanton, a Walloon
Huguenot Minister, who said that:
"There is a mystery about the people of the Jews. The
mystery resides in the fact that they, unconsciously perhaps,
as a people, are the bearers of Gods word We know they are We
feel they are. And deep down in our hearts we hate them for it.
For we hate God and do not want to follow His law. In their mere
presence there lies always a subtle, often unavowed and undefinable
challenge to us, something of a reproof, an accusation. They remind
us of something of which we do not like to be reminded there sits
the core of the secret of Jewish persecution"
It does not matter to the Arabs that Yossi Beilin prefers that his children marry nonJews and that Leah Rabin would rather her grandchildren be Arabs than religious Jews. What is important in this situation is that both Beilin and Rabin belong to the Jewish state. They belong to the state where there are still very many people who believe in Judaism and in the Jewish destiny. Therefore no matter how small the state is, it will not be accepted by the Arabs as long as they feel that it is a Jewish state.
But it is a Jewish state and it will remain a Jewish state. It makes sense on this tiny strip of land only as a Jewish state. "And I will give unto you and to your seed after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession." (Gen. 17:8). Now, when we have this land after countless sufferings, wanderings and wars we must do everything to protect and keep it. We do not have to look for any other proof for our possession of this land. No other country in the world is required to prove that its territory belongs to it. Even if we can use the Balfour declaration, or the SanRemo Conference decision, or the United Nations resolutions to support our presence in Eretz Yisrael, we should not have to, since no other nations need any special reasons to have permission for their existence. Professor Paul Eidelberg wrote in Judaic Man:
" the truth is and this will offend moralists that
conquest of territory is the basis of possession, and the power
to maintain such possession is the only solid title to land in
the present world. Indeed, according to the doctrine of legal
positivism, which dominates virtually every law school in the
West, a law is such only if it is enforceable. This means that
law is ultimately based on the primacy of force."
It is because of this primacy of force that the Palestinian Authority (PA) has established a military force more than 50,000 people strong, it is because of this primacy of force that it tries to snatch every single inch of territory that Israel transfers to its control, since, as Israeli spokesmen Moshe Fogel admitted on December 12, the "transfer of territory is irreversible." On December 22, Ugo Tramballi wrote in the Internet version of Milan Il Sole24 Ore that "the important thing is not the reality but what the majority of Arabs believe." This is an axiom of the Middle Eastern paradigm. The Israeli Jews must accept it if they want to survive as an independent state. Reality does not matter to the Arabs. They have their own vision which defies any and all European, American or the Jewish logic. The Arabs believe that the Jews are occupiers, usurpers and aggressors. It is useless to try to change their beliefs through concessions, compromises, sacrifices and appeasement.
The only way for Israel to exist in its hostile Arab surroundings
is through the primacy of force. Primacy of force in Israel's
circumstances means immediately spreading her sovereignty to the
territory of Judea, Samaria and Gaza. It means immediate abrogation
of the Oslo agreement. It means a categorical and loud NO
to the establishment of a second Palestinian state. It means the
establishment of new settlements. Israel is in dire need
of a Prophet. She needs a leader who will tell the whole world
that the Jewish state is not a sacrifice to be placed on the altar
of Arab desires. If the Palestinian Arabs want to live in a Palestinian
state, they can move to Jordan. If other countries are
ready to cut off a chunk of their own territory for humanistic
purposes and satisfy somebodys ambitions, they can do this freely,
but they cannot demand this from a sovereign state. Israel needs
a leader who will tell Israelis the truth. Who will unite the
nationalist Zionist camp by exposing the true intentions of the
Palestinian Arabs. Nothing special needs to be done for this.
Just direct exposure of the interviews and the speeches of the
Palestinian leaders in the Arab media will suffice. It would be
enough to broadcast the November 9 interview with the Cairo agency
MENA by Dr, Nabil Shath, PA Minister of Planning and International
Cooperation. He said that Israel "will not be allowed to
keep one square inch of the land occupied in 1967" since
this was the "way of implementation of the Resolution 242
in Israel's agreements with Egypt and Jordan." In regard
to negotiation of the status of settlements he explained that
"We will negotiate on the status of the settlements in the
sense of compensating the settlers who have purchased land. We
will negotiate on who will pay the compensation or on a formula
for transferring 165,000 settlers from the West Bank and 130,000
settlers from East Jerusalem." He also said, "We
are not negotiating on the return of the refugees to the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip because that is their right. We are negotiating
on the return of the refugees to their homes and lands in Israel."
The eyes of many Israelis would be opened if they were told of
the words of Sakhr Habash, a member of the Fatah Central Committee,
who, on October 6, in an interview with the London AlQuds
AlArabi, said, "Fatah agreed to mount the PLOs peace
assault in 1988 by setting up the Palestinian state according
to Security Council Resolution 181." Putting it in plain
English, Fatah looks much further then the territory "occupied"
by Israel in 1967.
Fortunately there are many Israeli leaders who are ready to fight for Zionist principles. It is enough to mention Benny Begin, Uzi Landau, Michael Kleiner, Rehavam Zeevi, Moshe Peled, Limor Livnat, Eliakim Haetzni, Moshe Leshem. The list can go on. However, the question remains who will dare to try on the mantle of the new Prophet? Who will become the one to put both the holiness and wholeness of Eretz Yisrael above all the other issues? Who will attempt to unite the Jewish people while holding high the banner of Judaism?
[12/26/98]
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Boris Shusteff is an engineer in upstate New York. He is
also a research associate with the Freeman Center for Strategic
Studies.