Those of us who think that Israeli national suicide might just be a non-smart idea are now faced with a dilemma. How do we explain to the Israeli Hellenists that abandoning the Old City of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount to the PLO fascists is a less than smart idea?

Obviously we cannot use the argument that there are sacred places and objects for Judaism in these areas, that for millenia Jews dreamed every day and prayed three times each day to restore Jewish control of Jerusalem. After all, for Israel’s Hellenists these are no considerations at all. If anything, for them these are reasons to ABANDON Jerusalem. The leftist Hellenists WANT Jews to be stripped of their holy places. That is because they want Jews to abandon Judaism, which is an obstacle to peace, and they want Jews to embrace cosmopolitan Hellenism in its place. Jewish roots are reactionary and archaic, nothing any progressive Hellenist wants to have anything with which to do.

Led by the Chief Hellenist, Ehud Barak, their goal is to distance Jews as much as possible from anything Jewish. They have stripped the school curriculum in Israel of any Jewish content and have filled it with poems written by Palestinian terrorists. Most Jewish Israeli children cannot complete the sentence, "Shma Yisrael" They teach that Jews are evil racist people and Israel a colonialist enterprise that oppresses the po’ Arabs. That the very creation of Israel was a catastrophe ("naqba") for the Arabs. They seek to strip the country of its Jewish symbols, to replace the flag and national anthem, to strip them of Jewish symbols. After two thousand years in which Jews were victims of anti-Jewish quotas and discrimination, these same people are currently seeking to introduce into the State of Israel similar anti-Jewish preferences and quotas, all in the name of affirmative action of course.

There is only one argument to which perhaps they can relate. You see, it is now apparent to everyone on the planet outside of the Israeli government and the Israeli Left (essentially one and the same institution) that Israel will one day soon have to invade and re-take militarily the "territories", the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

When this happens, the worst bloodshed of all will be spilled if Israel has to retake the Old City. The Old City is - after all - a fortress made from stone walls. The Palestinianized Old City would be armed to the teeth and defended by the best of the PLO’s Wehrmacht with all the Iraqi and Iranian and Afghan volunteers they can muster. Now it is true that the walls of Jerusalem are no match for modern weapons, but only the most naive believe Israel would be able to use modern weapons in reconquering the Old City and evicting the PLO. No one thinks Israel could use concussion bombs and napalm and a neutron bomb. It would be reconquered only through house-to-house and hand-to-hand fighting, exactly the sort in which the Israeli military is not particularly good. This fighting will extract hundreds, probably thousands, of Israeli deaths. Just to conquer the Old City. In the 1982 Lebanon campaign, most of the Israeli deaths were caused by house-to-house street fighting there, not in the clash of armies.

This is something so elementary that perhaps even Ehud Barak, Israel’s "most decorated general", can understand it.

Which means that Israel should reject Clinton’s "last stain" proposal of capitulation even though it proposes the abandoning of all of Jewish heritage and turning over Judaism’s holy places to the PLO fascists.

Copyright © 2000 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission