1. . You cannot understand Israeli politics unless you understand one fundamental formula of life about the country:

   "Settlers" are to Leftist Jews as Jews are to anti-Semites.

   Simple.

   For many years, the entire Israeli Left has devoted its every waking hour (the term "waking" being used loosely) to demonization of "settlers".

   Indeed, every traditional anti-Semitic stereotype is applied by the Israeli Left to these people. They are described as unhygienic, clannish, money-grubbing, greedy, backwards, primitive, violent, scheming, irrational, bloodthirsty, murderers of gentile children, etc. These settlers of course have long been the targets of first choice for the PLO nazis, and the Israeli Left has never been able to control its joy when "settlers" are killed by the palestinians. They are simply getting their comeuppance, and are being killed because they are on the "lands of palestinians" illegally and where they do not belong.

   SO what happens when the streets of Israel-within-the-Green-Line become the Killing Fields of Oslo? The answer - figure out a way to blame THAT on the settlers as well.

   It did not take more than 24 hours for Israel’s Left to revert to caricature. It is insisting that none of the Kishinevs perpetrated this week would have occurred if Israel had followed the sage advice of the Left and had ethnically cleansed the West Bank and Gaza of settler Jews. If it HAD, then Arafat and his stormtroopers would not now be attacking innocent non-settlers in Jerusalem and Haifa. You see, it is all THEIR fault. The palestinians are simply expressing their legitimate feelings of FRUSTRATION at being occupied, and never mind that they are not occupied.

   Take for example the latest debutante among the Tenure Reds of the country, Dr. Eden Lando, a linguist from Ben-Gurion University, an institution increasingly serving as the PLO’s mouthpiece of the Negev. Lando writes an Op-Ed in Haaretz today about how all the bloodshed this week is all the settlers’ fault. Really.

   The rest of Haaretz is not a lot better. The official editorial calls, you guessed it, for pacifism and restraint and return to negotiations. Baruch Kimmerling, the Treason-Chic professor of sociology from the Hebrew University, the school’s proud champion of Jew hatred now that Israel Shahak is with the great taxidermist of the sky, is also back, with his usual theory about how all violence in the Middle East is because Ehud Barak is a closet Rightist and did not go anywhere near far enough in seeking peace through the destruction of Israel.

   Oh, and the BBC has a new resident expert on the conflict: Uri Avnery, the Lord Haw-Haw of Israel, the father of Israeli Leftist anti-Zionism, the John Phillip Walker Lindh of the country.

2. Meanwhile, George W. Bush is practically ordering Ariel Sharon to go fricassee the PLO, and for the first time in recent history the US is NOT beginning each waking day with a call for Israeli "restraint" while the US bombs the Afghans to smithereens.

   Does it help?

   No, grasshopper. Sharon still is content to "signal" the PLO by blowing up empty buildings as he plays the role of the NBL = New Barak of the Likud, and to threaten the PLO that if it does not take action against the terrorists he will hit it Really Really Hard.

   Which shows us that Sharon is still trying to defeat the PLO by causing it to laugh itself to death.

3. How is this for a new slogan: Collective Punishment for Collective Guilt!!

4. You will be happy to hear that in the midst of the current crisis, the Knesset is right smack on top of things and dealing with the emergency in its normal manner: The Knesset will this week be debating a bill proposed by the Likud together with Meretz (increasingly, natural political bedfellows) making matchmaking (shidduch making) a licensed profession in Israel and subject to state regulation. Can’t have any unlicensed Yentl’s matching up Israeli men with Israeli women or Meretz men with sheep, now can we?

5. I have a new theory. Maybe everything that has happened in Israel over the past decade occurred as a result of Mikey Lerner from Tikkun and Arthur Woodstock spiking the drinking water with LSD?

6. In the midst of the Kishinevs this week, a guard at a building in Jerusalem shot and killed a palestinian who was trying to steal his gun.

   In the new spirit of combat, Sharon’s police department, headed by super-hawk Uzi Landau, plan to try the guard for manslaughter instead of giving him a medal.

7. Who is really to blame? See http://www.townhall.com/columnists/donfeder/df20011204.shtml

8. Subject: Ruth Wisse in Harvard Crimson--N.B.

   Confronting Antisemitism

   Ruth R. Wisse

   Even more important than the actions to be taken by the American government in response to the attack of September 11, is understanding the nature of the undeclared enemy. Most wars carry the signature of their belligerents. The present attack was launched by enemies who deny their involvement and try to conceal their identity. Fighting such a war requires, above all, intelligence but intelligence in every sense of the word: not only a better network of informers and operatives, but also a sounder grasp of the political nature of the adversary. All clues lead to the Middle East, which is also where our understanding would have to begin.

   The apologists for the attack on America supply one overriding motive for Arab rage: they say America is being punished for its support of Israel, which is held responsible for the conflict in the Middle East. Human intelligence cannot take this claim at face value. How can Israel, which occupies one-sixth of one percent of the lands called Arab, be responsible for the political dissatisfaction of 21 Arab countries? How can the 13 million Jews in the world (almost 5 million fewer than they were in 1939!) be blamed for the problems of the 250 million Arabs, who have brotherly ties to one billion Muslims worldwide?

   And yet there is a measure of truth to the Arab allegation that the Jews are responsible for their misery: their obsession with the Jews and with Israel indeed retards their progress and poisons their life. The original refusal of the Arab countries to accept the partition of Palestine as voted by the United Nations on November 29, 1947 became the cement of a politics of denial, rejection, and blame that has held together the Arab world, and exemplified its attitude toward the democratic West. The Arabs denied Jews their right to their ancestral homeland, a right many times more obvious than, say, that of the Hashemite King to Jordan and then blamed the Jews for denying the Palestinians their homeland. Arab governments sacrificed the Palestinian Arabs to a fate of refugees so that they could hold Israel responsible for their displacement and misery. The politics of blame is incompatible with any mature assumption of political responsibility, and the pursuit of such politics over the past 54 years has created the infrastructure for terrorism unleashed.

   We have seen a version of this same political scenario before. Antisemitism was the common coin of Europe from the end of the 19th century to the end of World War II, reaching from France in the west, through Germany and Central Europe, to Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Hannah Arendt identified antisemitism as the common denominator of fascism and communism, but it also inspired many nationalist parties, until Hitler channeled its energy to consolidate the Third Reich. The use of the Jews as a political target was symptomatic of a fear of democracy in all its aspects: individual rights, a competitive economy, and the freedoms of an open society. Because antisemitism was directed against the Jews, it didn’t overly concern most other people. Some even thought that letting off steam against the Jews might alleviate frustration, or organize protest, or serve some other positive aim. But blaming the Jews was only a symptom of the refusal to adapt to enlightenment and emancipation. The relative ease and success in attacking the Jews turned antisemitism into the most popular ideology of modern Europe.

   Of all the European political ideologies, antisemitism is the only one to have taken root in the Middle East. (Hitler succeeded in destroying the Jews of Europe, even though he failed in all his other ambitions.) Arab leaders rule autocratically, claiming to know what is best for their peoples, and to stay in power they must try to explain why they do not bring about the improvements that they promise. Whereas rulers could once control their populations without communicating directly to the masses, the modern world requires telling the people why they should accept the regime that is being imposed upon them. Israel, a tiny polity with a magnified image, is the answer to an autocrat’s political predicament. Problems with public health? Israel is polluting the water supply. Homeless refugees? Israel usurps Arab lands. Restless youth? Israel’s democracy is a satanic influence. The deflection of so much political dissatisfaction and so many real and escalating social problems into aggression against Israel eventually reaches fanatical proportions, fueling apocalyptic scenarios of destroying the Satan, and the protector of Satan, the United States.

   But as Benjamin Netanyahu pointed out in his book on terrorism of 1995, the United States is the larger agency of change, the most powerful democracy in the world, and the real target for which Israel is but a practice range. There are those who believe that if the United States were less supportive of the state of Israel, the aggression of Arab and Muslim extremists would evaporate. Quite the contrary. Israel has been the front line of democracy’s defense, and its perceived weakening quickens their ambition. It is highly probable that the daring attack on America was inspired by Israel’s appeasement of terrorism in 1993, when it rewarded Arafat, until then the world’s leading terrorist, by placing him in charge of the Palestine Authority. The terrorists calculated that if terror tactics could persuade Israelis to make such unheard-of concessions, then America will surely also lose its nerve if terror is brought within its shores. If the Arabs cite Israel as the main cause of their extremism, it means that their extremism can only be halted once they change their attitude to Israel. The present threat will not diminish until the Arab world begins to adapt to the process of democratization that the West has been undergoing for a few hundred years. The first requirement of such adaptation is self-accountability, and the essential sign of such self-accountability will be the ability to accept the reality of a Jewish state. The fuel of antisemitism is more explosive even than the jet fuel that brought down the World Trade Center. The longer it is accommodated or encouraged, the greater the danger to the world’s leading democracy. Once we understand that, we will better know what is to be done and what isn’t. The example of Europe in the 1930s is a blueprint of what happens when antisemitism is ignored.

   Ruth Wisse is Professor of Yiddish Literature and of Comparative Literature at Harvard and is author of the book, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews. This article was originally published in The Harvard Crimson.

Steven Plaut

Copyright © 2001 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission