There are a number of unpleasant facts about the current situation in Israel, facts that must be faced.

1. It is NOT true that Israel is incapable of stopping PLO terror. It IS true that the Israeli government is unwilling to use those means that would be effective in stopping terror. It is unwilling to fight terror because it is cowardly and it is still dominated by the Oslo Cult. This includes the Likud.

2. It is NOT true that Israel’s government refuses to fight terror because it is being bullied by the United States. Indeed, last week, the US openly gave Israel carte blanche to fight terror effectively. Israel declined. Sharon is still wedded to the Barak Doctrine that Israel must never kill real terrorists, merely bomb some empty PLO buildings as "signals", and occasionally kill some mid-level PLO-Hamas squad leaders in firefights.

3. Israel refuses to fight terror because the government of Ariel Sharon still believes in Oslo. It makes angry faces, as did Netanyahu when he was Prime Minister, unlike the Elmer Fudd smiles of Ehud Barak, but it essentially is still wedded to the underlying governing principles of the Oslo cult, namely that sufficient Israeli niceness will produce peace with the Palestinians.

4. Israel is also still ruled by the Catharsis Doctrine. This holds that Palestinian crimes and terror ultimately serve a good cause, because they allow the Palestinians to "let off steam" and so eventually they will calm down and make peace. Ever since 1993, the Catharsis Doctrine dictated that Israel do nothing to stop Palestinians from stealing tens of thousands of Israeli cars each year. The idea was that after they get all those nice cars, they will feel better and want to make peace. Every time Israel strikes empty PLO police buildings, it also damages groups of stolen Israeli cars with Israeli plates driven by these PLO "police", parked outside. The Catharsis Doctrine similarly holds that Israel must never do anything to prevent mortars from being fired at civilian "settlers" in Gush Katif and elsewhere because they help the Palestinians "let off steam". Finally, Israel must never take real military action to stop suicide bombers, for the same reason.

5. The purpose of the bombing of empty buildings is to provide the Israeli public with the facade of retaliation, while showing the Palestinians that Israel is not REALLY trying to kill any PLO leaders and would like to return to the "negotiations". Bombing empty buildings is all Potemkin show for the Israeli public, and for the media, whereas the absence of dead PLO terrorists thanks to the buildings being empty is the REAL message Israel is sending Arafat.

   Israel’s political leaders do not really care if Jewish civilians are butchered because they and their own families do not ride buses, do not shop in Mahane Yehuda, and do not hang out on pedestrian malls in Jerusalem.

6. Arafat is leaving for a junket tomorrow. Israel will not solve the problems of the country by refusing to allow him back in.

7. Sharon actually believes in Oslo Lite.

8. The Israeli Radical Left no longer consists of naifs and fools. Today it consists of people who want to see Israel destroyed. The moderate Left still consists largely of naifs and fools. Haaretz belongs to the radical Left.

9. Israeli politicians still believe in socialism and Soviet-era doctrines of central planning in the name of "equality". If they have failed to keep the country in Third-World poverty, it is because they have failed to control the high-tech sector, which has produced Israeli growth in spite of the "planners". Ariel Sharon believes in central planning more passionately than do the Labor Party leaders.

10. Israeli Leftists approve of PLO terrorism. They think it will help force Israel to surrender.

11. The Israeli Left, both the moderate Left and the radical Left, are fundamentally anti-democratic and oppose free speech for those with whom they disagree. The head of the left-wing "Israel Institute of Democracy", Dr. Arie Carmon, funded by the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon and by the New Israel Fund, is in Haaretz today proposing that those who put "Prosecute Oslo Criminals" stickers on their cars and billboards should themselves be prosecuted and jailed. There is a permanent danger in Israel that the Israeli Left will use undemocratic means to hold power.

12. There are NO Palestinians who remain un-nazified.

13. There are few Israeli Arabs who remain un-nazified.

14. The Western media would like to see Israel destroyed. They approve of murdering Jews.

15. Oslo is not a political ideology. It is a pagan religious cult. That is why the Israeli elite cling onto it in spite of eight years of daily proof that the world really is round and not peacefully flat. The Likud is part of the cult.

The Washington Post

Sharon Flinches

By Charles Krauthammer

Friday, December 7, 2001

You would think that the right to self-defense is elementary, a minimal decency one nation accords another. France has it. We have it. (See Afghanistan.) Yet when President Bush’s spokesman declared on Dec. 3 that "Israel has a right to defend herself," it was news. Indeed, it was a thunderclap. To anyone who follows the baroquely nuanced language of Middle East diplomacy, it constituted something wholly new.

For eight years, under the tutelage of a president hungry for a Nobel Prize, the American position had been that when attacked, Israel should exercise "restraint" and not contribute to the "cycle of violence." Everyone knew that this was no cycle; it was elementary self-defense in the face of an openly declared campaign of Palestinian terror. But truth could not be allowed to stand in the way of "peace."

The Bush administration embarrassed itself too. After invoking the solemn right to hunt down the terrorists who perpetrated Sept. 11, State Department spokesman Philip Reeker was asked (Oct. 15) why he was criticizing Israel for doing precisely the same in hunting down Hamas terrorists. Answer: "I can’t really draw a parallel between the two."

Now he can. Now he will. The scale, coordination and sheer horror of the four bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa in 12 hours on Dec. 1-2 finally moved the Bush administration to dispel the fog and mendacity of American policy during eight years of the Oslo "peace process." Yes, Israel may defend itself.

When Israel began retaliating for Dec. 1-2 -- Israel’s Sept. 11 -- the State Department issued no criticism. In part, this was anger. State had just been pushing a campaign of greater American "engagement" in the Middle East. The president declared his support for a Palestinian state. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a speech in Louisville calling for an end to "occupation" and the establishment of "Palestine." Bowing to pressure from Arab leaders (and to mindless criticism from American editorialists and columnists attributing the rising violence to Bush administration "unilateralism" and "neglect"), Powell sent his first personal representative to the region, Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni. Zinni’s mission is to get a cease-fire. He arrives, and is greeted with a mass murder of innocent Jews carried out by terrorists operating freely under Yasser Arafat. Zinni looks helpless; Powell looks the fool. Even the State Department is moved by such humiliations.

The administration is also moved by simple truth: The parallel between America’s right to respond to terrorism and Israel’s right is no longer deniable.

The window thus opens for Israel finally to act. Here is the opportunity to do as America is doing to the Taliban: destroy the Arafat regime that harbors and protects Hamas terrorists. Here is the opportunity to root out Arafat’s infrastructure -- training camps, arms depots, propaganda organs and eight personal "security" agencies. Here is the opportunity to detain and deport the Palestinian Authority leadership that brought Israel more terrorism in the eight years of the "peace process" than in all of its previous history.

What does Prime Minister Sharon do? He flinches. He temporizes. He attacks symbolic targets -- destroys two of Arafat’s helicopters, tears up his Gaza airport runway, flattens a few police stations, blasts the office next door to Arafat’s. The intent is to "send a message," namely, "we can get you." But the effect is precisely the opposite. It tells Arafat, "We can, but we dare not." The message is clear. Israel does not (yet) have the will -- or the government -- to fight its own war.

Instead, Sharon is hoping that his restraint will encourage the international community -- the United States -- to finally acknowledge that Arafat cynically and consistently uses terrorism, and to therefore take him down diplomatically by delegitimizing him, derecognizing him and cutting off relations.

It is a wan hope. There will be no outside rescue. The shock of Dec. 1-2 will soon wear off. Media attention will wander. Normalcy, i.e., dead Jews daily, will return. Soon you will once again be hearing evenhanded laments about the "cycle of violence."

There has already been another suicide bombing, on Dec. 5. But the detonation was premature. No dead Jews, just injured ones. The world hardly noticed. True, the bomber’s head was blown into a second-floor suite in a nearby hotel. But that’s old news.

THE MOMENT IS PASSING. THE WINDOW IS CLOSING. SHARON’S POLICY OF SYMBOLIC WAR AND SYMPATHETIC WORDS IS NOT A STRATEGY. IT IS THE MUDDLING THROUGH OF A HOPELESSLY MUDDLED ISRAELI GOVERNMENT, A GOVERNMENT OF NATIONAL DISUNITY.

AND YET, THERE WILL BE AN ISRAELI MILITARY CAMPAIGN TO DO TO THE PALESTINIAN AUTHORITY WHAT THE UNITED STATES HAS DONE TO THE TALIBAN. SOONER OR LATER, THE WAR IS COMING. IT IS INEVITABLE. ISRAEL CANNOT BLEED FOREVER. AUTHORITY WHAT THE UNITED STATES HAS DONE TO THE TALIBAN. SOONER OR LATER, THE WAR IS COMING. IT IS INEVITABLE. ISRAEL CANNOT BLEED FOREVER.

Steven Plaut

Copyright © 2001 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission