So let us sum up the end of Ariel Sharon’s "grace period":

Oslo continues to strike success after success under the Sharon government, as the PLO escalates its campaign of daily atrocities, not only murdering Jewish passersby and shooting rifles into Jewish neighborhoods, but now also firing daily mortar shells into Jewish civilian areas. After which Sharon’s Foreign Minister SHimon Peres tells the world the PLO is still israel’s peace partner. Each and every attack is then greeted by the BBC and the CNN with reporting of how "Israel SAYS (sure they do) that the Palestinians who are of course not controlled by Arafat have fired shells into Jewish settlements sitting on Palestinian lands," the last part of that description applying to Jerusalem neighborhoods as well as to settlements in the Gaza strip, a "narrative" with which Ariel Sharon’s leftist Foreign Ministry heartily agrees. Israel then occasionally launches weak half-hearted responses, immediately denounced by the Israeli Left and its world-media amen chorus as aggression. What, helicopters shooting at po’ innocent Palestinian buildings? The demons!

The Left always reverses cause and effect in politics, you know - like Hiroshima having caused Pearl Harbor, and so the new political Orthodoxy holds that the PLO fires mortars and murders Jewish passersby daily in RESPONSE to these weak limp-wristed Israeli "retaliations".

The Israeli Left and its captive media continue to advocate national suicide and insist that Jewish racism and cussedness lie at the heart of the conflict, that it is all because Israel mistreats Arabs, and that evicting all those Jewish "settlements" will induce the Arabs to wish to make peace, the same Arabs who insist that there was never any Holocaust and that if there was, the Jews certainly deserved it. The Egyptian press continues to criticize Hitler for having failed to complete the good work he began. Israel of course is at peace with Egypt and continues to suck up to Mubarak.

Meanwhile it was only a question of time before Jewish Leftist Holocaust Denial emerged in Israel. The first budding of this springtime of self-hatred emerged last week in the column by Tom Segev in Haaretz, friend of Edward Said, a "Post-Zionist" New Historian. Segev came out against the "Holocaust Myth". Yep, right there in Haaretz. Well, technically he was not denying that there was ever a Holocaust, unlike our friend Norman Finkelstein of the political science department at Hunter College. Segev just says that the six million number is NOT sacrosanct, that we do not know the true number, that it could be less or more.

But his niceties about the demography of the Holocaust are not what will be repeated, and I am quite sure that as we speak the neonazi crackpots have already filled their web sites with the news that a leading Israeli commentator has come out against the "Holocaust Myth".

Then we have the junior Asad, head of the Syria to which Ehud Barak was within whiskers of turning over all of the Golan Heights and parts of pre-1967 Israel and granting access to the empty Sea of Galilee (empty thanks to decades of socialist folly in water policy). The junior Asad, hailed daily for his progress and moderation thanks to his allowing some Syrians to have internet services, is hosting the Pope. Junior decided to commemorate the visit of the Pontiff by lecturing the Pope on how the Jews betrayed Christ and are a nation of murderers, this from the non-elected head of a totalitarian Third World kleptocracy. The Pope did not speak out against Junior’s ramblings, although he did issue an apology to Greek Orthodox Christians (for?). Had Ehud Barak gotten his way, Junior Asad could have conducted his own Sermon on the Mount next to the Sea of Galilee from whence he could denounce the Jews for drinking gentile blood during Passover.

Meanwhile the "Mitchell report" of the US State Department under Uncle Remus Powell has issued its report, after investigating how on earth that Reichstag fire ever got started, and it is so biased and anti-Israel that the PLO has hailed it as being "fundamentally positive". All this thanks to Barak and Sharon failing to give the Mitchell committee people the bum’s rush.

Sharon continues to demonstrate his courage by ordering (yesterday) the evacuation of Jews praying - once again - from the Western Wall plaza when PLO stormtroopers started throwing rocks and sundry down upon them, rather than order the police to denazify the Temple Mount.

And the Israeli Left continues to attack free speech in its nonstop campaign of McCarthyism, this time triggered by some people on the Right suggesting that Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres are "traitors". Beilin and Peres continue to insist that Israel must refrain from retaliating against the Palestinians for atrocities. The Israeli Left agrees that yes Israel should strike a deal suggested by Friend Mubarak and others whereby it agrees to remove all settlements in exchange for the PLO halting the mortar shelling, thus rewarding the PLO yet again for its atrocities. And also proving that unlike Pavlov’s puppies, the Israeli Left never ever learns ANYTHING. If there is one absolute certainty in the Middle East, it is that were such a deal to be implemented and Israel to ethnically cleanse the "territories" of Jewish "settlers", the mortar shelling by the PLO would continue until the settlement of Tel Aviv is turned over to them. Barak’s comrade and ally Generalissimo Yitzhak Mordecai got a year and a half on probation for nearly raping teenage women soldiers under his command, in contrast with, say, Tatiana Susskind, who got two years in the klink under the Netanyahu regime for drawing an insulting cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. A new law against "incitement to violence" will be voted upon in the Knesset next week, and if it passes you may be sure that people suggesting the current crisis and violence is all the fault of Peres and Rabin and Barak will be hauled off to jail. Meanwhile, Arik Sharon’s son seems to be playing the same role for Israel as did all those leftists under the Carter regime in 1979 who spent their days running from the US to Iran to meet with the "students" holding the US embassy staff hostage.

The Eva Braun of the PLO, Suha Ellie Mae Arafat, insists that she despises Israel. The Labor Party Minister of Defense under Sharon, "Fuad" Ben-Eliezer, is under investigation by the police for financial "irregularities". And Haaretz’ TV critic, the troglodyte Rogel Alper, is upset that Israel TV is broadcasting the old documentary "Birth of a Nation", featuring Abba Eban before he turned lemming, telling about Israel’s creation. You see, Israel TV just does not "get it". It continues to promote the "Zionist narrative", not realizing that post-Jewish post-survivalist post-modernist deconstructionist Israel is beyond such narrow backwardness. No doubt the entire Haaretz staff will be participating in Naqba Day on May 15 in which Israeli Arabs once again demonstrate their determination to see Israel cease from existing.

Haaretz’ Zvi Barel, a regular pink flamingo there, suggests getting the Hizbollah to stop attacking Israel in that other great success leftover from the Barak regime through turning over the "Saba" area on the Golan Heights, which the Hizbollah insists is Lebanon, to Asad of Syria in a unilateral appeasement and then let Lebanon and Syria argue over it. And for those under the impression that Bar-Illan University is the one exception to Israeli academic Far-Leftism (cause it is nominally Orthodox), allow us to introduce you to Dr. Menahem Klein of Bar-Illan’s poli sci department. Who writes in Haaretz May 6 that all Israel needs to do to make peace is acknowledge that the Palestinians are fighting a legitimate morally-just war of liberation, that Israel then remove all the settlements and move back inside its nice Green Line 1949 borders, abandoning all the "settlers" to the fate they deserve. Is not originality on the Left refreshing? After all, he insists, the only reason Israel is involved in conflict right now is because it is fighting on behalf of those crazy "settlers" in the territories. That the ONLY reason the PLO is engaged in violence within Green-Line Israel is cause Israelis are involved in violence ACROSS the Green Line in Palestine.

And Sharon pursues Oslo Lite, almost as if Bibi is calling his shots..

Copyright © 2001 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission