1. At the time of the Bible there operated Canaanite cults worshipping pagan gods requiring human sacrifices, specifically Baal and Moloch. The Prophets of Israel were never angrier than when speaking about how some Jews were joining these cults and practicing human sacrifice of their own children. Those who think the Prophets were engaged in rhetorical hyperbole should know that independent archeological evidence has confirmed that these cults did indeed practice human sacrifice, such as the Baalists in Carthage.

   Here in the 21st century of course such cults are long gone and archaic.

   Instead, they have been replaced by the cult of Oslo. Like the cults of Baal and Moloch, the Oslo pagan god also requires regular human sacrifices, such as the five murdered by the peace process in Netanya this past Friday (several were new immigrants to israel from Ukraine).

   And as part of the popularity of the cult, half of the Israeli public (and nearly all Israeli journalists) continue to believe that the way to prevent such murders is through total unconditional capitulation to PLO demands. Where every atrocity by the PLO and its Hamas wing is a protest against the Jews’ unfeeling indifference to the Other and a response to Israeli inequality. Where every act of savagery by Arabs must be rewarded with concessions.

   Which means that the murders will continue until the blind half of the Israeli public is forced to open its eyes. How much bloodshed will that take? You tell me! And the Israeli government of Oslo Lite of Ariel Sharon will respond to the human sacrifices to the Oslo god in the timeless fashion of Israeli politicians: closing off the town of Tulkarm, whence came the bomber, for three or four days to really really send them a message and then reopening the access roads from Tulkarm to Israel as a goodwill gesture for peace.

   No the fields around Tulkarm will NOT be mined and no the Israeli police under Uzi Landau will NOT take any real steps to seal off Tulkarm once and for all or pulverize its buildings.

   And Israel will continue to be the Valley of the Shadow of Death, in which the Oslo pagan god is never fully satisfied.

2. Of all the commentary about the current situation, the very best by far was in Meir Uziel’s weekend Maariv column (May 18). He responds to the worldwide campaign, led by the Israeli Oslo cult, demanding that Israel abandon its senseless incomprehensible refusal to resume making concessions to the PLO as long as the PLO is launching daily atrocities. (Haaretz this morning called for Israel to stop assassinating the leaders of the terrorists and instead fight terror by removing all settlements from the "territories" and otherwise capitulating to all PLO demands. Nearly all Haaretz Op-Ed commentators say Amen.)

   Anyway, here is Uziel (my translation):

   "Negotiations under Fire"

   "Why should we NOT conduct negotiations under fire? Why not? Let’s DO so!

   "We will converse while firing on them. We will go into Area A of the PLO zone and liberate territories handed to the PLO, all the while conducting dialogue.

   "We will sit at the negotiations table and talk and talk. Many say that the only solution can come at the negotiations table and I fully concur. It is always essential to sit at the negotiations table and talk. What does talking have to do with shooting? We will talk while continuing to blow up the Palestinian police positions and strongpoints. Why not? Why should we not conduct negotiations while our shooting at them continues?

   "We must shoot them while talking: to talk, for example, first of all about their immediately restoring to us Joseph’s Tomb, which you recall we abandoned temporarily.

   "But of course there is no sense in returning to Joseph’s Tomb without first talking about it, since this time we need to create an emptied cordon zone with a radius of a half-kilometer around it, in order to prevent a replay of the siege and helpless surrender of the site, and any evacuation of any territory should be done with full cooperation and coordination with the Palestinians.

   "But that is only the start of the negotiations because there is so much more to discuss. We need to continue with these negotiations, no matter how much we are shooting at them.

   "We need to negotiate with the Palestinians about disarming them, stripping them of their arms, in entirety. Leaving them not even a single gun, not even Arafat’s pistol. We need to negotiate the return of Palestinian territories to us…. Leaving territory in Palestinian hands will never end the violence.

   "Yes we need to negotiate and there is no justification for the demand that while we talk we should refrain from shooting them from tanks, choppers and any other way.

   "The mantra ’No Talks Under Fire’ must be abandoned for the nonsense it is!"

3. A recent poll in Austria shows that 24% of Austrians prefer to have a country in which there are no Jews present. Interestingly, that is about the same proportion as the number of Israelis who would like to see a West Bank and Gaza Strip in which there are no Jews living.

4. Amira Hass, the Stalinist Monica Lewinsky of Yassir Arafat who writes regularly her opinion as news in Haaretz, has an explanation for the Netanya bomber. You see, it is - as expected - all Israel’s fault. (This on the news page, not an Op-Ed.) Under Rabin and Netanyahu Israel regular blocked access roads to Israel from Tulkarm temporarily and so this led the po’ innocent terrorists to discover roundabout routes to sneak into Israel, which they surely would have never otherwise discovered. (Haaretz May 20). Last summer Hass spoke in the San Francisco Bay Area and urged that Israel cease to exist.

5. Oren Yiftachel is one of the regular Haaretz guest columnists and a Tenured Red. He is a geographer at the Ben Gurion University fortress of Post-Zionism and anti-Jewish agitprop. He and his Haifa University Arab sidekick Asad Gannem have a column in Haaretz May 20 in which they demand that the Left delegitimize the Sharon government and act to topple it because, after all, the Palestinians did not vote in favor of it. This makes Sharon’s government a minority anti-democratic one, never mind the landslide vote he got in Israel.

6. Washington Post ----- Friday, May 18, 2001
   Why Arafat will not stop his war.
   By Charles Krauthammer

   On May 6, the Israeli navy intercepted a Lebanese ship headed for Gaza. It carried a full cargo of weapons, including Katyusha rockets and Strella antiaircraft missiles. These are not weapons of protest. These are not weapons for demonstrations. These are weapons for all-out war. The Katyushas can reach the most densely populated parts of Israel. The Strellas can bring down airplanes, military or civilian.

   According to the ship’s captain, two similar shipments had already made it through to Gaza. Yasser Arafat’s war on Israel, begun eight months ago, is about to escalate dramatically.

   Arafat has released all Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists from his jails. Many of them are working in his security forces. His own Fatah movement sports a guerrilla army called the Tanzim whose specialty is drive-by shootings of Jewish motorists and shooting into Jewish neighborhoods that border on Palestinian territory.

   The next escalation will involve mortars. The Palestinians have been launching them from the sanctuary of their own territory in Gaza, both against Israeli settlements and against towns in Israel proper. They have now smuggled mortars into the West Bank. Soon the suburbs of Tel Aviv will be in range.

   Thus far Israel has responded by sending its tanks into Gaza to suppress the mortars -- and then withdrawing. Palestinian spokesmen have denounced these cross-border Israeli raids. "They’re not only designed to blur [boundaries]," said Nabil Shaath, Palestinian international planning minister. "They’re designed to blur the whole prospect of peace."

   Boundaries? Peace? This would be comical if it were not so tragic. Israel gave Palestinians this territory under the Oslo peace accords in return for the solemn Palestinian pledge to renounce violence and to settle all outstanding disputes through negotiations. Last October, Arafat decided to tear up Oslo and start his guerrilla war against Israel; now he complains that according to the piece of paper he has torn up, his territory is inviolable. Even Hitler did not have the audacity to complain about Britain’s declaring war on him (after he invaded Poland) on the grounds that Britain had pledged peace at Munich.

   Why did Arafat start the war? The Palestinian Authority’s various rationales are becoming baroque.

   First, violence ostensibly broke out because of Palestinian anger over Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount on Sept. 28. Palestinian post and telecommunications minister Imad Falouji thinks not. "Whoever thinks that the intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa Mosque, is wrong," he said in a speech to Palestinians in Lebanon. "This intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat’s return from the Camp David negotiations, where he turned the table upside down on President Clinton" by rejecting Israel’s peace proposal and thus incurring blame from the president of the United States for the failure of the talks.

   (Falouji, reportedly under pressure from Arafat, has subsequently denied that he said this. Unfortunately for Falouji, a similar statement of his at a Gaza symposium was reported in the Palestinian-affiliated daily al-Ayyam.)

   Recognizing that it is a little much to expect the world to believe that Sharon’s visit spawned not one or two or three but 230 days of shooting, rioting, bombing and murder, the Palestinians adopted another tack. They’re fighting, they now say, because of the expansion of settlements.

   That rationale -- which has found its way into the report by the Mitchell Commission, set up to adjudicate the causes of the fighting -- is equally absurd. At Camp David and then at Taba in the dying days of the Clinton presidency, Israel offered the Palestinians their own state and Israeli withdrawal from 95 percent of the disputed territories. The vast majority of settlements would have been uprooted. The remaining ones (grouped on a tiny 5 percent of the West Bank, an area smaller than one of Ted Turner’s four Montana ranches) would revert to Israel. And Israel would give Palestine an equivalent 5 percent of its own territory to make up the difference.

   Result? A Palestinian state on land amounting to 100 percent of the West Bank -- with no settlements, no Jews. Arafat turned that peace offer down. Yet now he pretends he is fighting to get rid of settlements.

   Why is he fighting? Read the speech he gave May 15, "Catastrophe Day," as the Palestinians commemorate the date of Israel’s birth. He is fighting because the Jew-free Palestinian state is hardly his only goal. There will be no peace, he pledged, until the millions of Palestinians living abroad are returned to Israel -- and thus extinguish it as a Jewish state.

   Palestine first, then Israel. For decades the West assured Israel that its security depended on "land for peace." Arafat, it turns out, is fighting for land without peace.

Copyright © 2001 by Steven Plaut.
All Rights Reserved.

-Published with permission