While the Middle East conflict has always crawled with tautologies (circular and false logic) and non sequiturs, there is no doubt that the biggest tautoloy of all regards Arab violence and its "causes".

Whenever any self-respecting nation faces an adversary, it offers that adversary two and only two choices. The adversary may choose complete non-belligerence, where there is no shooting whatsoever on both sides. The two may dislike one another but there must occur not the slightest hint of an act of violence amongst them. (China-Taiwan comes to mind.) The second choice is total war. There are no third choices.

Since the 1950s, Israel has refused to follow the rules of nations and has refused to restrict the policy options for the Arabs to these two. Israel has always offered the Arabs a third choice, one that should be called "controlled carnage". Under controlled carnage, the Arabs are permitted to murder Israelis and engage in violence, perhaps due to its presumed cathartic value and the mistaken belief that it somehow proves Israel’s humaneness to the nations. Israel does not force the Arabs to choose between total absence of violence or total violence. As a result, the Arabs attack Israel and Israel does nothing or very little, all in the name of "restraint". The official name for controlled carnage beginning in the 1950s was "havlaga", Hebrew for restraint.

More recently Israel offered the Hizbollah in Lebanon this Third Option and continues to offer it even after the kidnapping of three soldiers earlier this week and the shelling by the Hizbollah of Israel. Israel has responded with absolute nothing. Since the Hizbollah is essentially a wing of Syria, Israel is effectively allowing Syria to choose a Third Option between total lack of violence and total violence.

And it goes without saying that the "third option" has long been the basis of Oslo. Indeed, even as Israel launches its Operation Limp Wrist after the events today, the retaliation only goes to show how clearly Israel is wedded to the Third Option of controlled carnage. The official statements of the Israeli government all speak about Arafat finally going too far. Finally? By forcing Israel into a violent confrontation. And what has been going on for the past 7 years if not a violent confrontation?

By sending in helicopters to launch a Clinton-style retaliation on buildings (you know, the sort where the building structure is punished but no people get killed), Israel was not merely demonstrating its lack of backbone but also re-declaring the legitimacy of the Third Way of controlled carnage. Ok, so lynching and mutilating three Israeli reserves soldiers is "too far"? But that just means that launching pogroms, lynching Rabbis, fire-bombing cars with babies inside, desecrating synagogues and destroying Joseph’s Tomb, violently attacking Jews at the Western Wall, releasing all the Hamas bombers to attack the Jews, violating every comma in Oslo, denying the Holocaust, firing daily at Israeli troops, etc etc etc were all NOT going too far!! THEY were all legitimate parts of the Third Way.

And what has the Labor Party learned from all this? Have they really abandoned the Third Way of controlled carnage? Here we see Shlomo Ben-Ami and other Labor Party leaders tonight insisting that after Israel gets finished "punishing" the PLO, OF COURSE Israel still wants to pow-wow with Arafat and get back to the serious business of creating a Palestinian fascist state in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. And, if anything, Operation Limp Wrist shows Arafat Israel is afraid to hit back. So on goes the Third Way.

Barak this evening once again exhibited for all his notion of democracy and responsible government. It seems that lots of Arabs and others were taking camcorder shots of the Arab lynch mob and PLO Gestapo murdering the three reservists in Ramallah today, and also of their mutilating their bodies. You know, to show at birthday parties in schools and all that. One copy somehow came into the possession of Barak’s government. Barak offered to allow the responsible representatives of friendly governments to come and see it, but under no circumstances would he allow it to be aired to the Israeli public.

Now think about this. Everyone in the Arab world gets to see how the Gestapo mutilates the three Jews while munching popcorn. All the "responsible" diplomats would get to see it and say Tsk Tsk. The only people who are to be censored and not permitted to see the results of seven years of appeasement would be the citizens of Israel. I suspect Barak would have pulled out the "military censor" to keep the press from showing photos as well.

Ah but then, Israel’s Channel Two decides to pull down Barak’s knickers. An Italian TV channel broadcasts the film of the atrocity and Channel Two tapes it and decides to show parts of it (not all of it) to Israeli viewers. SO why was Barak trying to censor this? Was he really so controlled about the psychic impact on sensitive Israeli viewers? Or was he trying to prevent the Israeli public from seeing his naked posterior and the results of Oslo appeasement?

Barak’s boys of course are still clueless about what to do. Well, here is a suggestion: Liberate the occupied territories. That is, the PLO-occupied territories.

And instead of Operation Limp Wrist, try Operation Leveling. Where entire Palestinian villages and cities are leveled.

There is litttle doubt that Arafat and his Wehrmacht have missiles that can knock down helicopters. After all, Israel has allowed tunnels from Egypt into Gaza to operate freely for years. And even in the midst of the pogrom, Israel still allows the "secure corridor" in which PLO terrorists may move freely from Gaza to the West Bank. Arafat himself made the move today with no attempt to stop him, just as there was no attempt to prevent his return from Tunis in the midst of the pogroms a few days ago. Would have been simple as pie - just refuse to allow any plane with Arafat on board to land.

SO when the Wehrmacht of Arafat starts shooting down Israeli choppers, what do you suppose Barak will be left with? I mean, besides calling for more talks on peace with Arafat...

Labor honchos ARE STILL, even tonight, whining about how Israel better not retaliate "too hard" against the Reichlet, lest it cause "instability" and result in the toppling of Arafat.

Earth to Jerusalem. HELLO!

The year was 1993. Much as it has been forgotten, the simple fact is that the intifada was essentially over. Sure, it could have been ended even earlier had Yitzhak Shamir not been wedded to the "Third Option" approach and been too pusillanimous to end it decisively. But dwindling it was.

The Palestinians were using rocks because they found it almost impossible to get rifles and even harder to get ammo. They often tried home-made zip-guns that tended to backfire. Arafat was rotting in Tunis. Israel had pretty much convinced the world, or at least the US, that the PLO could not be part of any peace talks, that Palestinian statehood was a nonstarter, and at most Israel would reach some on-the-ground accommodations with the West Bank and Gaza locals to let them flex their muscles a bit.

But 15 years of Likud incompetence in power brought back to power the Labor Party, this time under the bungling half-witted Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin allowed himself to be led about by his snout by Shimon Peres and Yossi Beilin. It is now only a matter of time before the post-Oslo reality produces a Museum of Folly, no doubt located near Yad Vashem, and devoted to the careers of these buffoons. All because Peres and Beiling caught Rabin one morning and said, "Wouldn’t it be nice to import tens of thousand of stormtroopers and create a nice fascist Arab terrorist state in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem?"

But it should always be remembered that the Likud bears as much responsibility for what happened as Labor. Labor would never have returned after its Yom Kippur War fiasco had the Likud not misgoverned with Third World standards of incompetence for 15 years. And then when Oslo produced the Netanyahu victory, Netanyahu proved the Likud was really still just the Me-Too-Labor-Party and continued Oslo at the same pace as Peres would have.

Now of course everyone is suddenly asking how all this could have happened. The answer is that much of the impetus for Oslo is the same as the impetus for Israel’s radically secularist post-Jewish far-Left PC movement. Jewish lack of self-respect. Jewish self-hatred. A Jewish complex of moral inferiority. Jewish unwillingness to act decisively in the framework of realpolitik. Jewish preference for moral posturing. The same shallow moral posturing that has replaced Judaism for the "Political Liberalism as Judaism" form of pseudo-religious for the American Jewish establishment.

I am often struck by the wisdom of Biblical writers and the applicability of Biblical themes to modern Israel. In a sense, the main theme in the Bible is the battle against the infection of paganism in the early Israelites. In some ways it is a more important theme than the exodus from Israel. Certainly it occupies far more pages.

Jewish leftism, from the Diaspora liberal posturing to the Oslo movement of national suicide, has all the marks of paganism. It is a pseudo-religion, anti-rational, based on shallow mystic belief and denial of reality, and fundamentally threatening to eliminate Jewish existence. If you have any doubts, just look at the stubborn, stiff-necked attempt of these pagans to hold onto their "religion" even in the midst of a PLO war against the Jews. Just read the columns in leftist newspaper Haaretz, listen to the self-righteous politicians, to the Tenured Reds, and to the court Jews for the Israeli communist front organizations financed liberally by the New Israel Fund in the US, with their large ads and long petitions.

For 33 years every anti-Semitic vermin in the world has been drumming up the USS Liberty as proof of the perfidiousness of the Jews. So will be fun to see how many of these same rodents will suddenly demand that everyone remember and avenge the US ship attacked by Arab peace partners in Aden today.

Arafat decided to wish the Jews a Happy Succos by torching the Jericho ancient synagogue.

Anyone know if the Reconstructionists will be holding Succos ceremonies with a Lulav that includes a large cannabis leaf this year?

Copyright © 2000 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission