byYonoson Rosenblum

Rabbi Rosenblum, who lives in Jerusalem, is a contributing editor to The Jewish Observer. He is also director of the Israeli division of Am Echad, the Agudath Israel-inspired educational outreach effort and media resource.

A Dispirited Country

March was not a good month for the Jews of Eretz Yisroel. In the face of eleven suicide bombings during one month, national morale plummeted to its lowest point since the Yom Kippur War.

For some time already, doubts about the very future of the state had gripped the population. The mass circulation daily Ma’ariv devoted an entire weekend supplement in February to interviews with leading public figures on the topic, “Does Israel have a future?’’ And a recent survey of Jewish high school students showed that only 54% are sure that Israel will still exist in 50 years.

A friend raising money for a think tank on issues related to Israeli democracy was told by one potential donor after another, “Why are you worrying about this? Who knows if we will even have a country in a few years.’’ Anecdotal evidence abounds of well-to-do Israelis purchasing homes in Paris, New York, and Toronto, and moving their factories and businesses abroad.

The once familiar proclamations of Israel’s might and ability to defend its citizens from any and all enemies are no longer heard.1 When Prime Minister Sharon made a rare national address in late February to shore up the spirits of the nation, he achieved the opposite result. Elected on the promise, “I know how to deal with terror,” nothing in his speech even hinted at a plan to do so, and when he spoke of the nation’s determination, he sounded like someone whistling past the graveyard.

The Oslo bubble has burst for all but a few die-hards.2 Few believe that peace with the Palestinians is anywhere on the horizon, or can even envision how the Arab-Israeli conflict will ever end so long as Palestinians continue to harbor dreams of a Middle East without Israel. Yet the thought of another 54 years of ceaseless fighting is too depressing to entertain.

No nation can endure over an extended period of time the levels of terrorism with which the Jews of Israel have been living. The more than 100 civilians killed in terrorist actions in March alone are the equivalent, in American terms, of two World Trade Centers. Jews in Israel cannot shake the feeling that the country has become one large barrel and that they are fish within being picked off by Palestinian suicide bombers.

Terrorists choose their targets with a certain diabolical precision to deny every Jew in Israel the semblance of a normal life. The Palestinians view their rapid population growth as one of their greatest weapons against Israel. To speed their demographic triumph, they appear to have targeted women and children. A disproportionate number of the motorists killed by snipers or in drive-by shootings are women. The Beit Yisrael massacre in early March, in which a suicide bomber walked into a group of women with infants in strollers, was the ultimate expression of that demographic calculus.

Little by little, the suicide bombings have deprived the Jewish population of its public space and private time. Downtown Jerusalem is largely a ghost town after a series of suicide bombings. Attacks on restaurants and cafes convey the message that there will be no relaxation for Jews.

The Seder Night Massacre and Operation Defensive Shield

The Seder night massacre in Netanya, in which 27 Jews were killed and dozens of others seriously wounded or traumatized for life, was yet a further milestone in the terror campaign. Every Israeli Jew intuitively understood the attack to be, in Yossi Klein Halevi’s words, “a taunt – a reminder [on the Festival of Freedom] that we are no longer free in our land.’

The Seder night suicide bombings came two weeks after American envoy General Anthony Zinni arrived in Israel to broker a ceasefire. To facilitate that mission, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had made a number of concessions. Prior to Zinni’s arrival, Sharon announced that he would no longer insist on seven days of quiet before negotiating with the Palestinian Authority over implementation of the Tenet Plan, a move that caused one right-wing party to leave his coalition. On March 14, Israeli troops who had surrounded Arafat’s compound in Ramallah after three suicide bombings were withdrawn.

Despite these steps, the Palestinian response was the same as it was to Zinni’s previous mission in January: a rash of four more suicide bombings. The Seder night attack was the final straw that left Israel with no choice but to strike dramatically at the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure. Within two days, 20,000 reservists received their call-up notices for Operation Defensive Shield.

The reservists’ response was overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Normally the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is pleased if 60% of those summoned report for reserve duty. The response to this emergency call up was 95-100%. In fact, 4,500 more Israelis volunteered for service than were called up.

Operation Defensive Shield was, in Yossi Klein Halevi’s apt description, “a collective response to the assault on our collective being.’’ The eagerness of reservists, most of them husbands and fathers, to go to battle was itself the greatest achievement of the operation. It provided an unmistakeable message to the Palestinians, and, no less important, to ourselves: the Jews of Israel have not yet lost the will to fight. Precisely that point had been very much in doubt among the Palestinians and among Israelis as well.

The Palestinians have repeatedly cited the Israel Defense Forces’ hasty flight from Lebanon as proof that Israel cannot endure any casualties. The highest-ranking Moslem cleric in the Palestinian Authority boasted in a sermon on PA television: “The Muslim loves death and [strives for] martyrdom,’’ whereas the Jews love life. Suicide bombings are fiendishly designed to exploit the perceived weakness of the Jews – their love of life.

The Palestinian hypothesis that Israel has no more will has now been put to the test and refuted. Operation Defensive Shield chalked up other impressive achievements as well. Hundreds of wanted terrorists, with Jewish blood on their hands, were arrested or killed, vast stores of weaponry seized, and Marwan Barghouti, leader of the Fatah-Tanzim, the most frequent perpetrators of terrorist attacks in recent months, captured. Israel also seized documents that provided the smoking gun linking Arafat and the entire Palestinian security service to the terror.3

World Reaction

Given the magnitude of the horror directed at her citizens, Israel could be forgiven for believing that this time, surely, the world would recognize her right and duty to wipe out the terrorists’ nests. If so, Israel was in for a rude shock. As Mark Steyn put it sardonically in the National Post of Canada, “All civilized people can agree that killing Jews is wrong. Well, killing six million of them 60 years ago is wrong. Killing a couple dozen every 48 hours or so, that’s a different matter.’’

Eager to absolve Europe of the stain of the Holocaust, the European press blasted Israel with inflammatory headlines like “Genocide’’ (La Prensa) and “The March of the Storm Troopers” (Le Monde). Pope John Paul II, whose predecessors knew something about extermination, fretted about the “extermination’’ of the Palestinian people. Quickly forgotten were the suicide bombings that had triggered Israel’s military action.

Much of the world media, with the Europeans in the lead, quickly adopted the role of advocates for the Palestinians, simply repeating Palestinian allegations of Israeli atrocities as if they were proven fact. An April 15 piece in the Los Angeles Times, for instance, led with five paragraphs describing how “Israeli soldiers shot unarmed civilians, bulldozed people alive and blocked access to medical care,” before mentioning, in a single phrase, that the Palestinian accounts upon which the allegations were based “could not be independently confirmed.”

The world press treated Israel’s anti-terrorism campaign as an extended human-interest story told exclusively from the Palestinian point of view. James Bennet’s April 8 dispatch from Nablus in the New York Times – a portrait of grim, determined fighters waiting to meet their fate at the hands of the Israel army – could have been written about the Taliban in the caves of Tora Bora. But it never would have been.

Few comparable stories appeared illustrating the human consequences of every terrorist attack or depicting what it is like for Israeli children to grow up in a country where people are blown to smithereens around the Seder table, or buying a pizza, or walking down the street. Michael Gelber, the Washington Post ombudsman, admitted in print his paper’s failure in this regard. Few others, however, followed his lead.

For once, Jews would have been happy for the tiresome moral equivalence between suicide bombings aimed at innocent civilians and military retaliation against the perpetrators of those bombings. Even that much was denied them. Jewish victims simply disappeared from the story.

In its eagerness to condemn Israel, the media, following the Palestinian lead, often contradicted itself. At the outset of fighting in the Jenin refugee camp, the Palestinians boasted of their fighters’ determination to fight to the last man. But when those fighters were vanquished, the Palestinians found that it better suited their propaganda to portray the battle as the massacre of innocent civilians. And the media followed suit.

The depiction of Israel’s “staggering brutality and callous murder’’ in the Evening Standard of London, for instance, was untenable on its face. In stark contrast to the United States in Afghanistan, Israel repeatedly placed her own soldiers in mortal danger in order to minimize civilian casualties. Thirteen Israeli reservists were killed in Jenin when they were trapped in an ambush in a booby-trapped house. Had Israel simply destroyed the few remaining buildings from which the terrorists were fighting, with a few helicopter-fired missiles, those thirteen would still be alive. The only reason Israel did not do so was a degree of concern with loss of civilian life that no other army would have shown.

Absent From the Media: A Context For Comparisons

Absent from media reporting was all context or points of comparison. U.N. peacekeepers killed hundreds of Somali civilians in the space of hours when fired upon by armed men hiding behind human shields, and American bombing in Afghanistan is estimated to have left up to 3,000 civilians dead. By what standard, then, was the world media condemning Israeli brutality and measuring disregard for innocent civilians?

The media has reduced the entire conflict to one box score: Palestinian dead vs. Jewish dead. Omitted are such questions and distinctions as: Who initiated the violence and why? Were those who died innocent civilians, deliberately targeted, or were they killed while perpetrating terrorist acts? All irrelevant.

The press rarely mentions that every Israeli relaxation of the closure on Palestinian territory is rewarded with fresh Jewish bodies within 24 hours. Similarly unmentioned is that there would not be a single Israeli soldier in Area “A’’ if Jews had not become daily targets of suicide bombers.

Western governments were not far behind the media in their condemnations of Israel. The European Parliament voted to impose trade sanctions. Six European governments – France, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, Spain, and Portugal – voted for a resolution by the misnamed U.N Commission on Human Rights that affirmed the legitimacy of “all available means, including armed struggle,’’ by nations fighting occupation, and accused Israel of “mass killings.’’ As Michael Rubin pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, much of Europe had effectively condoned suicide bombings directed at Jews in Israel.

The Belgian government warned members of the Antwerp diamond exchange that it was considering banning exports to Israel, Belgium’s largest customer for uncut diamonds, a step that would destroy one of Israel’s few remaining export industries. The Norwegian parliament considered removing the Nobel Peace Prize not from the unrepentant terrorist Arafat, but from Shimon Peres, for being a minister in the criminal Israeli government.

Once again, the double standard applied to Israel is breathtaking in its hypocrisy. Syria, which murdered over 20,000 of its own citizens in Homa in 1982, sits on the U.N. Security Council, while Israel is the only country in the world not eligible for membership. China, in which citizens are routinely executed for minor “economic’’ crimes, religion is brutally suppressed, and couples are forcibly sterilized after one child, is awarded the 2008 Summer Olympics, while Israel is threatened with trade boycotts.

More than 30 years ago, Eric Hoffer wrote: “The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. But in the case of Israel, the Arabs have become eternal refugees. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield, dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious, it must sue for peace.’’ What was clear in 1968 is ten times more so today.

No Western government explicitly denies Israel the right to defend her citizens from terror attacks. Yet every Israeli response – with the possible exception of an immediate unilateral withdrawal to the 1949 Armistice Line – is invariably deemed disproportionate. One suspects that they are only disproportionate because Jewish lives continue to be so devalued in world currency

Mark Steyn noted, with his characteristic bite, that one undeniably proportionate Israeli response would not be likely to command wide approbation in the world’s foreign ministries. What would that be? Prime Minister Sharon should fish some eighteen-year-old girl out of a Tel Aviv home economics class, load her up with Semtex, and send her to a Ramallah pizzeria to blow the legs off of Palestinian grandmothers.

Anti-Semitism Resurgent

There is a name for the double standard applied to Israel, and as, Norman Podhoretz has pointed out, that name is anti-Semitism. Age-old hatred of Jews has transmogrified today into hatred of the idea of the Jews as a nation. No matter how imperfect Israel is as a model of Jewish nationhood, Israel signifies to the world the assertion of Jewish peoplehood.

The world’s obsession with the Palestinians is so out of proportion to the actual degree of their suffering — especially when compared to tens of millions of other impoverished and downtrodden people around the world, who have had far less a hand in their own fate — as to defy any rational explanation. It can only be understood as a function of the millennial obsession with the Jews.

To judge from the deliberations of the United Nations, the Palestinians are the most oppressed people on the face of the earth, if not the only ones with any claim to the world’s concern. Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda slaughter one another in the tens of thousands with fewer calls for intervention than are heard after one Israeli retaliatory strike on an empty building. While Pol Pot murdered two million of his own people, the international community devoted more time and energy to the status of Palestinians.

Whatever the subject tackled by the U.N. – aging, childhood, communicable diseases decimating the population of Africa, the status of women in Afghanistan – the majority of the discussion and often the only resolutions passed concern the Palestinians. Tens of millions of people have become refugees since the end of World War II, including 600,000 Jews thrown out of Arab lands after Israel’s independence, but only the Palestinians have a U.N. agency, UNRWA, devoted solely to them. With respect to all the rest of those refugees, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees has a mandate to “seek permanent solutions.’’ Not so with respect to the Palestinians. They have been maintained for 54 years as perpetual refugees in fetid camps, where they constitute an ever-ready strike force against Israel.

There are “hundreds of murderous border disputes over lost lands going on between Indians and Pakistanis, Chinese and Tibetans, Colombians, Congolese, Irish, Rwandans, Kurds and Turks,’’ observes Victor Davis Hanson in the March 15, National Review, and the world only sighs. No one cares, he continues, about millions of innocents butchered all over the globe every year, but instead “focus on what the Palestinians lost while attempting to destroy their neighbors.’’

No Time For Another Obsession

We Jews could be forgiven for wishing from time to time that the world would find another obsession. We should not. As long as the world’s attention remains focused on the sliver of land Hashem promised to the Jews, we have further proof that we are His Chosen People. The very irrationality of that obsession is proof that something deeper, beyond the normal realms of causality, is taking place. There were those – Christians as well as Jews – who found the dedication of the most “civilized’’ nation in Europe to the total eradication of the Jewish people during the Holocaust to be the most powerful evidence of Jewish chosenness. And we are witnessing something similar, though thankfully on a vastly smaller scale, today.

The “new’’ anti-Semitism still performs the traditional function of reminding Jews that they are different. For Western Jews never exposed to anything more than the odd epithet, the spasmodic eruption of fury directed at Jews everywhere has come as a shock. Synagogues have been torched, cemeteries desecrated, and Jews beaten by mobs in France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Russia, and Tunisia. Virtually every European capital has witnessed mass demonstrations against Israel, at which those dressed as suicide bombers have an honored place.

Jews who thought that they were fully accepted members of society must now ask themselves: Who am I? Why am I hated? Precisely in those places where Jews have mixed most freely – academia and the media – is hatred of Israel the most intense. Stephen Pollard described recently in the Sunday Telegraph his shock to discover that close friends from university, comrades in every left-wing cause for twenty years, make no distinction between Jews and Israelis, and are equally repulsed by both. One old friend told him, “The Jews need to be taught, terrible as the Holocaust was, you can’t rely on that excuse forever, and certainly not to justify what you are doing to the Palestinians.’’ When Pollard protested the substitution of Jew for Israeli, the friend replied, “Israelis, Jews, come on, it’s the same thing.’’

Our Sages knew that anti-Semitism might wax and wane, but it would never disappear. It would remain protean, ever lurking beneath the surface, ready to explode in new forms. That is what they meant when they said, “It is a fixed principle: Esav hates Yaakov.’’

As Hillel Halkin observed in the February Commentary, “Traditionally, Jews were not bewildered by anti-Semitism. [T]hey understood not only that it existed, but must exist; that hatred of them was hatred of the G-d Who chose them….Anti-Semitism was sometimes devastating. It was never surprising or demoralizing.’’

Zionism, in contrast to our Sages, maintained that Jew hatred was a transitory phenomenon, rooted in the particular circumstances of the Jews, and when those circumstances changed anti-Semitism would disappear. The eradication of anti-Semitism was one of Zionism’s shining hopes.

Zionists attributed anti-Semitism to the degraded state of the Jews living among the nations. They reasoned that when the Jews achieved a state of their own, like all other peoples, they would cease to be objects of contempt.

Quite the opposite has occurred. Israel, the Zionist state, has become the lightning rod for hatred of Jews. If anything, it has served as a catalyst for new expressions of anti-Semitism. For every anti-Semitic incident anywhere in the world, there is always the same pretext: Israel.

The United States:   Israel’s Only Ally

The opprobrium of the world barely touched Israel in the opening days of Operation Defensive Shield because the United States did not join in the chorus demanding Israel’s immediate withdrawal. President George W. Bush seemed truly moved by the enormity of the evil involved in sending a suicide bomber to blow up people gathered for a religious ceremony. He and his proxies reiterated several times in the opening days of the campaign that Israel has a right to defend herself.

All that changed, however, in the President’s surprise April 4 speech from the Rose Garden. The speech began perfectly from Israel’s point of view. Once again, the President demonstrated an intuitive understanding of the connection between the terror threat facing Israel and that experienced by the United States on September 11. “No nation can negotiate with terrorists. For there is no way to make peace with those whose only goal is death,’’ he said.

The President made clear his low regard for Arafat by mentioning him only once in his speech, and then only in the context of having failed to control terrorists.4 Nor did the President spare the Palestinian Authority his sting. He charged the PA had devoted itself to feeding its people’s resentments rather than improving their lives.

Just when Israeli government officials had settled comfortably into their chairs to savor the President’s words, he dropped a bombshell: Israel should begin withdrawing – subsequently amended to “immediately withdraw’’ — from Palestinian cities and towns. In effect, the President’s speech turned into an extended non-sequitur: (1) Israel is faced with terror on an unprecedented scale, against which she has the right and duty to defend herself; (2) Therefore Israel should withdraw its troops from the Palestinian cities in which those terrorists are sheltered.

As of the President’s speech, the American military action in Afghanistan was already in its seventh month, while Israel’s military action to destroy the terrorist infrastructure within the Palestinian Authority was still in its first week. Moreover, the Israeli operation was of necessity a slow, house-by-house affair, precisely because of Israel’s willingness to do what America had refused to do in Afghanistan: place its own troops in danger in order to minimize civilian casualties.

A Disparity Between Advice and Actions

The disparity between American actions and the course being dictated to Israel prompted some of the strongest supporters of the war on terrorism to assail the President’s speech. Most of the Criticism in Congress came primarily from conservative Republican senators from states with small Jewish populations. Among national pundits, the flack came primarily from conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Cal Thomas, William Safire, Norman Podhoretz, William Bennett, and Jeff Jacoby.5

The President’s critics accused him of having drained the moral clarity from his war on terror. The killing of innocent human beings to further political ends is always wrong, the President had declared. By now demanding that Israel withdraw in the first week of a complicated campaign, the critics argued, the President appeared to be making an exception for terror against Israel. In addition, the critics charged, by pushing a political process leading to a Palestinian state, while the carnage in Israel was still fresh, the President was rewarding terrorism.

To give Arafat “one more chance,’’ in the face of the magnitude of the terror in Israel over the preceeding month, they argued, would only convince him that whatever he did, or failed to do, there would always be absolution. The critics might also have noted that Israel had just two weeks earlier provided Arafat one more chance at the behest of the President, and the result was 50 more dead Jews. The price of American forbearance is paid in Jewish lives. The President spoke as, in his words, “a committed friend’’ of Israel. And that is doubtless true. No president in recent memory has shown such a keen appreciation of the difficulty of Israel’s situation or such a grasp of the nature of her enemies.

“Acquire for yourself a friend,’’ our Sages teach us in Pirkei Avos (1:6). And the Maharal explains that a friend need not even be on a higher level than oneself to render excellent advice. It is sufficient that with respect to the question at hand he does not have one’s own negios (vested interests).

In this case, however, the United States is not without negios of its own, and the advice being urged on Israel was hardly disinterested. Perceived American interests explain the apparent disconnect between the two parts of the President’s speech. The speech reflected an internal struggle for his soul. In the first half of the speech, President Bush’s most deeply felt intuitions and instincts were ascendant; in the second half, the message coming from the State Department seemed to gain control.6

Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted as much. When challenged about the apparent inconsistency between how the United States is conducting its war on terrorism and how it wants Israel to conducts its war on terrorism, the Secretary never answers directly. Rather he reiterates that Israel has the right to defend her citizens and then goes on to note the regional context within which the Arab-Israeli conflict takes place.

“Regional context’’ is a code word for American interests. In the eyes of the State Department, it is crucial that there be quiet on the Israeli-Palestinian front in order to secure Arab support for the impending American effort to oust Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. In addition, the State Department fears that the “Arab street’’ in Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia could become so inflamed by images of the destruction in Palestinian cities and towns as to threaten the entrenched autocracies in those countries. Finally, the State Department is sensitive to the criticism of those who blame a lack of American involvement for the current war between Israel and the Palestinians.

Whatever the weight of the American concerns – and there are a number of strong reasons to believe they are overblown7 — Israel could not allow them to determine its own actions on a matter of vital national interest without assuming the role of Czechoslovakia circa 1938. Then, too, a small country was forced to take great risks to serve the interests of larger and more powerful friends. In the end, however, all concerned – Czechoslovakia, Britain, and France – were ill-served by the deal struck at Munich. Czechoslovakia was rendered indefensible by the sacrifice of its primary defensive assets, and France and Britain were rendered vulnerable to attack by German perception of their weakness. A similar dynamic is at work today. American pressure on Israel out of fear of what the Arabs might do would only embolden terrorist states by suggesting a lack of American resolve.

Abundant experience shows that Arafat will never act to restrain Palestinian terror directed at Israel. Experience demonstrates as well that reliance on intercepting suicide bombers once they are loaded up and on their way is foolhardy. Israel therefore had no choice but to strike directly at the terrorist infrastructure. To withdraw while that operation was still in its first stages would have been tantamount to taking half a course of antibiotics: the bacteria would have only come back again in a far more virulent state.

Prime Minister Sharon was right to have shown great solicitude for American interests and to have expedited the Israeli action as much as possible. Yet rushing to do President Bush’s bidding would have placed Israel in new danger (and have been fatal to his political career.) Clear proof that the United States holds Israel on a very short leash could only have emboldened Palestinian terrorists. Nor would American interests have been ultimately served by the appearance of absolute control over Israel, for then every Israeli action would become directly attributable to the United States.

Distinguishing between “innocent Palestinians’’ and terrorists

“It is crucial [for Israel] to distinguish between terrorists and ordinary Palestinians seeking to provide for their families,” President Bush advised Israel in his April 4 address. “The Israeli government should be compassionate at checkpoints and border crossings, sparing innocent Palestinians daily humiliation.”

Nothing would bring Israel greater pleasure than being able to make precisely the distinction suggested by the President. Unfortunately, he neglected to provide any advice on how to discern who is a terrorist and who is an innocent party seeking work. When a pregnant woman carries a “baby’’ of 10 kilograms of explosives, as was the case of the 17-year-old girl who blew herself up April 12 in Jerusalem’s Machaneh Yehuda market – and a six-year-old Palestinian boy being taken by an ambulance to a hospital is found with an explosive belt underneath him, no person or vehicle can be above suspicion.

As long as that is true, security checkpoints are inevitable. And those checkpoints will be slow-moving, humiliating affairs.

Nor is it altogether clear what the President means by “innocent.” According to every Palestinian poll, the war launched just before Rosh Hashana 5760 commands huge popular support, and the same is true of suicide bombings. Support for the latter consistently runs between 70% to 85% in polls. Spontaneous celebrations invariably break out in Palestinian towns after every “successful” suicide bombing. Parents of suicide bombers rejoice in their offsprings’ heroic actions, and tell the eager Palestinian media of their hopes that their remaining children will follow a similar path. While not every Palestinian is yet ready to strap an explosive belt to his or her body, even the enthusiastic support of the population encourages suicide bombers.

The Palestinian media and schools have whipped the population into paroxysms of hatred. Moslem clergy appointed and supported by the PA regularly broadcast sermons extolling martyrdom. The April 12 sermon on PA television was typical. The preacher castigated “whoever has not achieved martyrdom in these times,’’ calling on them to rise up in the night and call out, “My L-rd, why have you denied me martyrdom?’’

Arafat himself has famously called for a million martyrs marching on Jerusalem, and after the Seder night massacre was quoted in the Washington Post expressing his desire for “martyrdom like this.’’ Three days after publishing a ghost written op-ed in the New York Times in which he condemned suicide bombings against Israeli civilians, his Fatah movement sponsored a demonstration of elementary school girls caring posters of Wafa Idris, the first woman suicide bomber.

When President Bush condemns Arafat for not having done more to restrain terrorism, he implicitly assumes that Arafat and the official organs are on one side and the terrorists are on the other. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast network of laboratories for the manufacture of bombs and missiles and the large stockpile of arms uncovered by Israeli forces could never have existed without the active complicity of the security apparatus loyal to Arafat.

Arafat’s involvement, however, goes far beyond moral support and benign neglect of the terrorist network. According to a graph in The New York Times, one-third of the terror attacks in the past 15 months and nearly half the recent suicide bombings have been carried out by the Fatah-Tanzim and the Al-Aksa Martyrs Bridage, both of which are directly under Arafat’s authority. A leader of the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade told New York Times correspondent Joel Brinkley that Arafat had never discouraged the group’s suicide bombings in any way.

Documents seized from Arafat’s compound in Ramallah show Arafat’s personally approving funding of well-known terrorists. A General Intelligence Service report filed by the Tulkarm district commander speaks of close cooperation between the GIS and a terrorist cell that murdered six Jews at a bat mitzvah celebration. Other documents reveal the PA actively involved in the procurement of explosives and other armaments.

Given the Palestinian population’s overwhelming support for the war launched against Israel 18 months ago, in all its forms, and the full involvement of all organs of the Palestinian Authority in the terror directed at Israel, to speak of “innocent’’ Palestinians is to fail to understand the true nature of the threat facing Israel.

“Peace’’ is blowing in the wind again

Perhaps the most ominous aspect of the President’s speech were the indications that the Bush administration may be returning to the failed diplomacy of the Clinton years. The President’s warm praise for the Saudi proposal⁸ which envisions an Israeli return to the 1967 borders (as well as the Palestinian right of return, though this is less frequently noted), and the United States’ sponsorship of Security Council Resolution 1054 calling for the establishment of a Palestinian state both point in that direction.

If the State Department believes, however, that it is possible to return to proposals put on the table by then Prime Minister Ehud Barak at Camp David, as soon as a temporary respite in the violence is achieved, it is badly mistaken. The entire Oslo process was predicated on what might be termed the rationalist folly. Those who subscribe to this folly imagine that all human beings want basically the same things and will seek to maximize their share of the desired goods.

Invariably, those goods are assumed to be economic in nature. In speech after speech, Bill Clinton and Shimon Peres described the beautiful New Middle East that would be ushered in by peace. Always, the vision offered was one of material plenty for all peoples of the region.

Rationalists tend to be optimistic. They believe that there is a solution for every conflict – the point of compromise determined by economists’ game theory. Since they recognize the irrationality of war – dead people cannot enjoy life’s material delights – they assume everyone does.

They also tend to put enormous stock in written agreements and to pay little attention to issues like the trustworthiness of the parties and the enforceability of the agreements. Because those agreements embody eminently rational compromises, in their eyes, they anticipate nothing more than a little cheating around the edges at the most. Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak gave the ultimate expression to this tendency by continually downplaying Palestinian incitement and expressing interest only in the content of written agreements.

Suicide bombers are refutation of the rationalist folly. The suicide bomber reveals that human beings around the world differ greatly from one another in their assumptions about the proper views of life, or even about the value of life itself. The rationalists’ economic reductionism is further refuted by the eagerness of the Palestinians to pursue a war against Israel that has resulted in the destruction of their economy.

To dream of returning to where matters left off at Camp David is to ignore the crucial lesson of Camp David: the Palestinians have not accepted Israel’s right to exist. Arafat himself acknowledged as much when he told President Clinton that he would be assassinated if he tried to sell Barak’s Camp David proposals to his people.

In the eight years preceding Camp David, Arafat failed to educate his people that no resolution of the conflict was possible without compromise and the renunciation of cherished ambitions, including the right of return. Rather, the Palestinian Authority media continually justified the Oslo Accords as the first stage towards recapturing all of Palestine. No map or textbook produced by the Palestinian Authority ever showed Israel, within any borders.

The Oslo Accords envisioned a staged process that would make it easier in the end for both sides to make the requisite compromises. Over seven years, Israel handed over to the Palestinian Authority complete control of the daily life of 98% of the Palestinian population. In addition, Israel armed a Palestinian security apparatus that was supposed to prevent terrorism against Israel. Over that period, the vast majority of Israelis accepted the idea of territory for peace. The Likud position today is indistinguishable from that of Peace Now in 1993.

Nothing reciprocal took place on the Palestinian side. The Palestinian positions at Camp David remained exactly what they had been in 1993. In return for each concrete Israeli territorial withdrawal, Israel received the same promises previously given.

As Dennis Ross, the negotiator most closely associated with the Oslo process, concluded in his valedictory summation: Arafat is a revolutionary leader, who has completely defined himself by the armed struggle for Palestine. He cannot make peace.

Instead of educating his people for peace, Arafat used the Palestinian Authority media and educational system to whip them into a frenzy of hatred. PA summer camps teach eight-year olds how to kill Jews. And PA television broadcasts Chairman Arafat kissing the heads of charming little girls dressed in white, chanting songs of redeeming Jerusalem with daggers dripping with Jewish blood.

The entire Palestinian educational apparatus has been devoted to creating a cult of death and killing. Today’s suicide bombers are the result. That seething cauldron of hatred, which today boils hotter today than ever, after 18 months of warfare, cannot be cooled by forcing Arafat to mumble some formula about recognizing Israel’s right to exist and promising to let bygones be bygones. Changing the attitudes of an entire population will take years, if it is possible at all. Yet until that is done, any “peace treaty” would do nothing more than set the starting point for the next stage of war.

American Jewry’s Moment of Truth

The most direct impact of events in Eretz Yisroel has, of course, been on the Jews living there. At the same time, American Jewry has not been a disinterested spectator to the unfolding warfare. Indeed Operation Defensive Shield constitutes a defining moment for American Jewry.

Israel has long been central to the self-identity of America Jews. Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky, l”xz, once said at a convention of Agudath Israel of America that the vast majority of non-observant Jews in the world would have lost all self-identification as Jews but for the creation of the state. Israel served for many as the only antidote to the extreme despair caused by the Holocaust.

In recent decades, however, as American Jewish identity has waned, so has identification with Israel. While Israel remains a source of identity for American Jews, its ability to do so has declined dramatically. Since 1967, support for Israel has ceased to be part of the liberal consensus to which most American Jews subscribe. The prestige press, particularly The New York Times, read by most American Jews, tends to be highly critical of the Israeli government.

On the elite campuses, Israel is more likely to be a source of embarrassment than a source of pride. That is one reason why Jewish students, despite their greater numbers, often find themselves unable or unwilling to defend Israel against Arab students. The latter feel much more intensely about what is going on in the Middle East and stick to a uniform message. Jews were heavily represented in a recent pro-Palestinian demonstration of Harvard women – half dressed as pregnant Palestinians and half dressed as Israeli soldiers busy kicking them.

Operation Defensive Shield has put American Jews to the test. Israel stands condemned by every country in the world (with the partial exception of the United States). The prestige press has criticized the Israeli operation as both futile and brutal. And the images of war being broadcast on CNN are designed to put the worst possible cast on Israeli actions. How does one stand against the entire world? On the other hand, does one really believe that one’s fellow Jews have suddenly developed a lust for the blood of Palestinian children and are eager to once again assume control of the daily lives of 3 million Palestinians? That was the choice facing American Jews.9

The mass demonstration in Washington D.C. on April 15 provides a ray of hope for American Jewry. Over 100,000 Jews, and by some estimates twice that number, chose to be on the side of the Jews of Israel against the whole world. They recognized that Israel had no choice, and expressed their confidence that Israeli soldiers have shown greater sensitivity to civilian casualties than would any other country fighting in similar circumstances.10

The unity of the Jewish people is itself an important goal. There were times when the Hashem favored the Jewish people with military strength even under wicked kings, like Achav, just because of their unity. That unity is also a precondition for the receipt of the Torah – rhh dgn larsy Ms Nuyv. But it is not the receipt of the Torah itself. For that we have to turn towards Hashem as one.

The massive prayer gathering six days after the rally in Washington D.C. – 50,000 Jews filling Lower Manhattan and another 30,000 participating around the country – was, then, the second stage of a process. Yet we must not forget that the Jews gathered to recite Tehillim represent a small percentage of American Jewry, and that most American Jews have never beseeched Hashem through Tehillim.

We can only hope that what we witnessed in Washington D.C. did indeed represent a moment of profound Jewish identification that will lead to more and more Jews joining us in turning to Hashem. For surely we have reached the stage where all the masks are off, and it is possible to feel, in an almost tactile fashion, that we have none other upon whom to rely than Our Father in Heaven.

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