March 3, 2005
Dear
Friend of FLAME:
The author of the brief article below, Herb Zweibon, is president
of Americans for a Safe Israel (AFSI). His piece, about current U.S.
and European efforts to pressure Israel into territorial concessions,
appears in the current issue of Outpost, the monthly publication
of AFSI. We share Mr. Zweibon's alarm about this matter and refer
you also to our hasbarah message #85 ("Abandoning Gaza"),
which we published a few months ago in major national media and which
you may wish to review on our website in connection with this article
(please go to http://www.factsandlogic.org/ad_85.html).
Best regards,
Gerardo Joffe
President, FLAME
by Herb Zweibon, Outpost, March, 2005
As Yogi Berra would put it, it’s déjà
vu all over again. The Oslo “peace process” is on course
as if it had never been tried and failed.
The needle of U.S. policy is once again caught in the groove of “territories
for peace”— the broken record U.S. administrations have
played since Israel’s birth. The result has produced Nobel peace
prizes—but not peace. And this is inevitable, for what no U.S.
administration has been willing to face, although the evidence mounts
as high as Everest, is that the Arabs are not interested in a slice
of Israeli territory, but are determined to wipe out the Jewish state.
In the 1950s there was Secretary of State Dulles’s suggestion
that Israel give up the Negev on the theory that peace would come
once Egypt and Jordan no longer had a frustrating geographic barrier
between them.
Two years after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War of 1967,
Secretary of State Rogers advanced the so-called Rogers Plan, calling
for Israel to withdraw more or less to its prewar armistice lines.
In the 1970s there was a new wrinkle as President Carter, in March
1977, called for a Palestinian “homeland” (up until then
the so-called “West Bank” was to be returned to Jordan).
In 1982 the Reagan Plan once again called for Israel to go back to
the old armistice lines. Now Condoleeza Rice joins the long line of
Secretaries of State promoting doomed-to-fail plans to bring peace
through Israel’s territorial amputation.
And so President Bush gears up -– along with the EU, Russia and
the UN, all sworn enemies of Israel -- to implement the “Road
Map” for a Palestinian state. As writer P. David Hornik notes,
the conservative Bush administration should surely realize “that
there is no reason why the inversion of all its principles —
not to compromise, deal with, or capitulate to terrorists, fighting
evil, distinguishing between attacker and defender—should produce
good results uniquely in the Israeli-Palestinian case.”
Indeed the results are likely to be uniquely terrible. Turning
points are rarely recognized when they occur but this is likely to
be one. The moral scandal of Israel uprooting Jewish communities and
establishing a Palestinian Arab state in the historical homeland of
the Jewish people is likely to presage the end of Israel. We have
the irony of a President of the United States, supposedly intent on
bringing democracy to the Middle East, pursuing policies that will
destroy the only democracy that exists there. It may deeply wound
that democracy even before a renewed Arab jihad. As the Sharon government,
in its efforts to accommodate pressures from the West, pursues its
ethically and strategically indefensible actions, it is producing
internal turmoil, and the government’s reaction may well be massive
detention of Jews without trial, undermining the state’s democratic
foundations.
While Israel is clearly the primary victim, the implications go well
beyond Israel. Israeli retreat, the creation of a Palestinian state,
the dissolution of internal Israeli cohesion, the snowballing assault
on Israel’s existence that all this is bound to produce, represent
the triumph of the most evil forces in the world. It is the triumph
of the bin Ladens, the al-Zarqawis, the Arafats, those imams who preach
hatred each Friday from their mosques, the suicide bombers, Hezbollah,
Hamas, those burning with hatred of the West and its civilization,
who would, if they could, bring a new Dark Age upon the world.
And the triumph over Israel will energize those forces, not appease
them, any more than Czechoslovakia’s abandonment appeased Hitler.
For the abandonment of Israel, far from persuading the Moslem world
that the Christian world is their friend, tells the Islamists that
the West has lost the will to defend its civilization, not merely
the Europeans (that they already knew), but also the United States.
