A TIME TO SPEAK

Vol. V:1 (No. 49)

January 2005 - Tevet-Shevet 5765

RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT -- Part I

"The doctrine [of peace at any price] . . . has caused more wars than

any of the most ruthless conquerors." -- Benjamin Disraeli

"Reckless Endangerment" is deliberate performance of an act that can create hazard and cause damage, without regard for consequences and common prudence. It carries the burden of guilt for whatever damage it does cause. When the damage is grievous, the act of reckless endangerment is morally and often legally criminal.

For more than a decade, those at the highest level of responsibility in Israel have been recklessly endangering the well-being and the very survival of the people and the nation. They bring on one disaster after another. The likelihood -- indeed the near certainty -- that their acts would lead to disaster was obvious, and they were implored to pay heed to consequences. When the predictable disasters occur, they do not try to find some remedy for the harm they caused, or to make some kind of mends, or even to refrain from even more and worse reckless endangerment.

They ignore the lessons of experience, and show arrogant contempt for all criticism and warnings. When they resort to ruthless tactics to quash all dissent, they compound recklessness with arrogance and tyranny.

They profess to be acting in the cause of "peace" while adopting policies and taking actions that can only lead to war. Recklessness, arrogance and tyranny is then lethal.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

They neither know nor understand. They go about in darkness.

-- Psalm. 82:5

Listen you rulers of Jacob

You chiefs of the House of Israel!

For you ought to know what is right.

-- Micah 3:1

O, my people,

Your leaders are misleaders

They have confused the course of your paths.

-- Isaiah 3:12

It is commonly reported that "Israel" does this or that, or "Israel" says this or that. What the reports usually mean is that government officeholders of the moment do this or say that. Often, however, officeholders and their staffs of yes-persons are acting contrary to the wishes of the people who elected them. Their views, words and deeds are then not those of "Israel".

There are politicians and parties who avow their commitment to appeasement, surrender, retreat, and contempt for obsolete Jewish tradition and beliefs. They garner votes and win seats in the Knesset, but never enough votes or seats to produce a prime minister and form a parliamentary government. The plurality of votes and seats go to parties that profess themselves committed to the dignity, the honor, the rights, and the defense of Israel. Too often, especially since the election of 1992, those who win power on such a platform then use it to diametrically opposite ends. They switch from the policies the voters favored to those the voters rejected, a cynical political fraud that double-crosses the electorate and destroys the bond of trust between people and government that is indispensable to a true democracy.

This pattern of political deceit has been almost unbroken since 1992, when the Labor Party scraped into office by promising the electorate that there would never be recognition of or dealings with the PLO. High-ranking members of the party were already at work on the Oslo Accords that sold Israel out to that same PLO. Subsequently, the public was disappointed by the unreliable Binyamin Netanyahu of the rival Likud Party, and flagrantly betrayed by the calamitously silly Ehud Barak of Labor and the shamelessly treacherous Ariel Sharon of Likud.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

They are clever at doing wrong

But unable to do right.

-- Jeremiah 4:22

Such a sequence of serial-catastrophe cannot be accomplished by one individual alone, but there is one who bears heavier guilt than any other for setting it off.

The Hebrew name "Shimon" -- transliterated in Western languages as Simeon or Simon -- was first borne by the eponymous ancestor of one of the Tribes of Israel. Shimon Peres is an Israelite whose affinity is with a man of different but uncannily similar name: Sinon. It was Sinon who, full knowing what he did, used crafty wiles to induce the Trojans to bring the Wooden Horse into the city. So Shimon, full knowing what he did, used crafty wiles to induce Yitzhak Rabin to bring the Wooden Horse of Oslo into the country.

Shimon Peres has thus far managed to become Prime Minister of Israel three times without ever being elected. He has also been Foreign Minister three times, and held sundry other ministries. He is default leader of the Labor Party, whenever it cannot agree any other choice. He is off-and-on Leader of the Opposition.

Yitzhak Rabin described him as "a relentless intriguer". Golda Meir so despised him that she would not let him ride in the same elevator with her. Moshe Sharett, a Founding Father and Prime Minister in the 1950s, observed the young Peres in action and dreaded the consequences if he should ever gain power in Israel. Peres did gain power, and in pursuit of a private fantasy that he calls New Middle East has inflicted more injury on Israel than have all of its foreign enemies combined.

In 1992, the Labor Party scraped into office after an election in which Yitzhak Rabin swore never to recognize of deal with the PLO. Even before the election, Foreign-Minister-in-Waiting Peres and a few co-conspirators were secretly cobbling together the Oslo Accords. They did this with the connivance of European politicians, but without the knowledge of then Prime Minister Rabin. When his concoction was ready, he foisted it on a reluctant but weak Rabin. The Peres-Rabin government pushed approval through the Knesset by a margin of one single vote, obtained only with the support of the anti-Jewish Meretz Party and anti-Israel Arab parties.

The PLO had been founded in 1964 (when there were no so-called "occupied territories"). Its charter defines its sole purpose as the total destruction of Israel. By 1992 it had achieved nothing beyond wanton bloodshed, had been driven out of Jordan and out of Lebanon, and was decaying in Tunis. Peres revived it and empowered it, and gave it an illicit legitimacy, thrust it into the heart of the Land of Israel, and even furnished it with weapons. For this accomplishment, Peres can bill himself as a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate.

As Foreign Minister and subsequently as Prime Minister, his policy was to refrain from expecting the PLO to comply with its commitments and promises, while Israel must make more and more unilateral concessions and sacrifices. This, by his reasoning, was the only way to continue to have a Peace Process. without any reciprocity from its "partner in peace". He even issued false statements that the PLO charter no longer called for the destruction of Israel. His political career was not advanced by photographs of him affectionately clasping his "partner in peace" Yasser Arafat.

Peres has always been held in high esteem in some circles outside of Israel, especially at the Socialist International and at international conferences in plush Swiss resorts. His gaudy taxpayer-funded 80th Birthday Party in 2003 was attended by scores of low-level foreign notables. He is so useful to the Judeophobic European Union that it subsidizes his Peres Center for Peace and Peace and Technology Fund whose finances are non-transparent. [See Issue No. 26] His personal financial dealings in PLO-land are currently under investigation in Israel.

While Peres was out of office, Ariel Sharon of the Likud Party was elected Prime Minister of Israel because the people of Israel voted, by the largest majority in any election in any democracy, to get rid of Ehud Barak before Ehud Barak could get rid of Israel.

Sharon, theretofore a vociferous opponent of Oslo and the Osloid Labor Party, promptly appointed Shimon Peres as Foreign Minister. This gave him a high official status when he wandered the globe to inform the world that Israel has no moral or legal rights to Judea and Samaria or the Golan, or to anything else that holds it back from sinking into non-nationhood in his New Middle East.

Sharon has now broken his own Likud Party, banished cabinet ministers who do not vote according to his commands, and several other parties have withdrawn from his coalition government. He can only stay in power with the support of the Labor Party that the voters massively rejected. So Shimon Peres rides again, this time as a Deputy Premier, giving life-support to Sharon's demented Disengagement.

Peres is still insisting that the Oslo Accords were the right thing to do, and their principles will yet prevail. And true to form, he states that new PLO chief Abu Mazen "should not be judged on what he accomplishes".

* * * * * * * * * * * *

In 1991, U.S. President George H.W. Bush made an unequivocal commitment in writing: "In accordance with the United States traditional policy, we do not support the creation of an independent Palestinian state." In 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush discovered a U.S. policy "vision of long standing" to create just such a state and pursues that goal with fervor. The recently invented "Palestinians" insist that they would accept such a state only to use it as a base of operations to pursue their unalterable goal of destroying Israel. [See further, Twelve Bad Arguments for a State of Palestine]

There was an interval of ten years during which one "United States traditional policy" was morphed into an exactly opposite "vision of long standing". Not by coincidence, the Oslo Accords were perpetrated during that interval. Until then, Israel had shown itself a resolute nation able and willing to defend itself against repeated attacks on all sides, by vastly larger and more numerous enemy. The Osloids made Israel appear to be country that without any need to do so, surrendered to the terrorists and cast away its hard-won heritage. Such a show of self-defeating weakness led "friends" as well as foes to suppose that it had lost its resolve, and would not resist pressure for more and more concessions. The successive governments of Israel since then have not disappointed them.

The Oslo Accords were designed to give domestic autonomy to a "Arab Palestinian" entity, though in fact the notion of an "Arab Palestinian" identity was entirely fictitious. [See Issue No. 2] This autonomy was conditional on PLO fulfillment of certain commitments; "experiment" that could be stopped if it did not work. The experiment did not work, but no Israeli government has had the will to stop it.

As was clearly foreseeable, any city or region where the PLO was permitted provisional administration came to be considered "Palestinian territory", on which Israel had relinquished authority, claims, and rights. Any effort to control terrorist activity within those areas became "Israeli incursion into Palestinian territory".

The criminal folly of the Oslo Accords and the failure to annul them led to the invention of "Arab Palestine" and on to the sudden discovery that the United States had a "long-term vision" of creating the state it had pledged to eschew. The failure to resist this anti-historical and pernicious reversal opened the way for the Quartet's Roadmap, that should it ever come into effect will compromise Israel's sovereignty and leave it an impotent vassal dependent for mere survival on the whims of a consortium composed of the U.S. Department of State, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia. [See Issues Nos. 23 and 28]

The incumbent government of Israel submitted without a peep of protest to this lethal insult. As if perpetuating Oslo and submitting to the Roadmap were not reckless endangerment enough for one small besieged country, it then proceeded to Disengagement.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Those who opposed the Oslo Accords argued that they would do vast damage to Israel, and events since then have proved that they were right. But the lessons of experience are ignored by the Disengagers, who are bent on repeating all the mistakes of Oslo and adding some new ones.

1] The anti-Osloids correctly predicted that land given over to the control of the PLO would become bases for murderous terrorism and eventual war on Israel.

Furthermore, a PLO in control not only of territory but also of schools and media taught a generation of children and youngsters that the greatest glory in life is to kill Jews, even -- or especially -- if they sacrifice their own lives to do it.

The Disengagers, rather than undoing the deadly mistakes of the Osloids, are bent on even more reckless and dangerous adventures. They would endow the PLO with more land and power, with promises of still more to come, along with freedom to misuse them without fear of interference or consequences. The terrorists are naturally exhilarated by this Israeli surrender, thrilled and encouraged by their own victory.

2] Scorning all pleas for common sense, the Rabin-Peres Government insisted on giving weapons to the PLO, to be used to "keep order". Inevitably, those weapons were used to murder Israelis.

Under Oslo, the American CIA took on the mission of training PLO gunmen in the arts of sniping, again "to keep order". Inevitably, the snipers used their new skills to murder, men, women, children, babies. Under Disengagement, the CIA is to resume training more snipers to keep more order.

In the past, feckless Israeli authorities made deals with the enemy to release hundreds and even thousands of terrorists who had been captured by Israeli soldiers and border police who risked and sometimes lost their lives in depriving these terrorist of the freedom to carry on their trade. Many of them went used their freedom to perpetrate more terrorism and murder.

Now, the Disengagement Government is planning to release hundreds or even thousands more terrorists, as a goodwill gesture to the recently installed Terror Chief Mahmoud Abbas alias Abu Mazen -- the instigator and financier of the PLO massacre of Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Olympic Games.

The Disengagement Government is not a mere copycat, imitating the stupidities of Oslo. It has added innovations of its own.

1] It has extended the scope of danger because enemy arsenals are no longer just guns but also rockets and missiles with ever-increasing ranges. Residents of Israeli towns near to the present PLO bases have already been murdered with these missiles. Under the terms of Disengagement, the PLO will be given more bases for unrestricted mischief, and the range of carnage will be extended to many more towns and cities. Even Ariel Sharon's vast cucumber farm in the Negev will be within range, but ut seems that he patriotically willing to put his property at risk.

The enemy will also be able to cut off much of Israel's water supply, and sabotage power stations and fuel depots, and civilian and military aircraft. In the event of all out military attack or foreign invasion, it can cut the roads and lines of communication.

2] When Egypt attacked Israel in 1948, it managed to seize and hold on to the Gaza Strip. The Egyptians used it as a base for both military and terrorist assaults on Israeli civilians. During the Sinai Campaign of 1956, the Egyptian troops fled from Gaza, but the U.S. Eisenhower-Dulles Administration forced Israel to restore the Egyptians to power there. It was again made into a base for military and terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, until the Six-Day War of 1967 when the Egyptian troops again fled. Israel and Egypt signed a formal peace treaty in 1978, but there has since been no break in Egypt's passionate hostility to Israel, its plots and incitements against it.

As its contribution to the Oslo War, Egypt smuggles weapons and explosives to the PLO terrorists in Gaza, via underground tunnels from the Sinai. Soldiers of the IDF are repeatedly sent to risk and too often lose their lives to find and seal off the tunnels. If Disengagement is actually carried out, however, there will be no need to dig or to seal off tunnels, for weapons and explosives can be openly carried in from the Sinai, and in far greater loads then was possible through the tunnels.

Now the Disengagers intend to out-source Israel's security to Egypt, entrusting it with guarding the crossing points. To make sure the Egyptians have enough power on the spot, the Disengagers will suspend the terms of the 1978 treaty that limit the size of Egyptian military forces in the Sinai.

3] Israel has been kept alive by the men and women of the Israel Defense Forces. Outside of Israel, the IDF's extraordinary valor and capability are admired in some quarters, grudgingly recognized in others, and bitterly resented in still others.. [See Issue No. 43].

These young men and women give up years of their lives and too often their very lives, knowing that the survival of their people and their nation depend upon them. Never before has a politician tried to use the IDF as to force his will on their fellow Israelis. Never before has a politician set out to purge the IDF of officers who will not agree with his political agenda.

This will cause soldiers agonizing dilemmas of conscience, and instill doubts whether they are defenders of Israel or tools of a transient officeholder. To use the soldiers of Israel against the people of Israel would be an unbearable disgrace. To inflict such damage on the spirit, the morale, and the integrity of the IDF would be a despicable act of reckless endangerment of Israel the nation.

Even if the assault on Israelis is assigned to police rather than soldiers, they do serve to defend their fellow citizens, and they too must not be misused for any political end.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

It is reasonable to ask why Sharon finds Disengagement so imperative that it must be perpetrated even at the cost of tearing the country apart body and soul.

It is a question that he himself will not answer. Occasionally a henchman alleges that the Disengagement will relieve foreign pressure on Israel and forestall the need for any more alienations of the Land of Israel. This argument never had credibility. It will be simply absurd to invoke it again, now that Madam Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice has literally given Israel its marching orders: Start Marching Out and Keep On Marching Out . . .

* * * * * * * * * * * *

The public opposition to the Oslo Accords was vast and passionate, and subsumed all classes and elements of society. It was tragically ineffectual.

Prime Minister Rabin gave no consideration to the pleas and arguments of the opposition. Rather, he responded only with coarse insults. He opined that those who opposed the Oslo Accords were equivalent to the terrorists of Hamas as "enemies of piece". He told those who pleaded for his attention that they "could spin like ballbearings".

Sharon uses the word "rebels" for members of the Likud Party who do not support Disengagement, while in fact he is the one who rebelled against the Party Platform on which he was elected, and rebelled against the results of a party referendum that he himself devised.

He and his minions go far beyond verbal abuse. Those who speak out against the Disengagement are subject to investigation for "criminal incitement". Sharon wants -- but the Knesset has thus far refused -- a law making passive resistance punishable by three-to-five-year prison terms. There are plans for detention camps to incarcerate entire families.

There are calls for criminal charges against anyone who -- wisely or unwisely ---urges IDF soldiers not to attack fellow Israelis. Some of the calls come from politicians who themselves urged IDF soldiers to disobey orders that said politicians did not approve. There are no such calls for charges against the far-left pro-PLO groups that urge soldiers to refuse service or desert rather than defend their country against its enemies.

Some Disengagers want to withdraw protection from whole communities of Israelis and abandon them to the terrorists who mean to slaughter them. Some call for inflicting physical violence on the uncooperative, which may or may not be figurative. Some seem actually to relish the prospect. Their blatant hatred of their fellow Jews would rightly be called by its proper name if it popped up in any other country.

One of the leaders of the movement to stop this rush toward the abyss is Brigidier-General Ephraim [Effie} Eitan, now retired from the IDF and a leading figure in the NRP [National Religious Party] He addresses himself to a Sharon who will not listen, as quoted by IsraelNationalNews.com, 11 January 2005:

[. . . . ] I must tell you, Mr. Prime Minister . . . that I have served the country for many years on the battlefield, and during difficult and tense moments, but I have never heard from government elements in the State of Israel such unrestrained incitement as that which was heard from your confidantes and coalition partners this week. 'Break their bones!' your confidantes whispered, and the headlines blared it. Whose bones precisely do you intend to break, Mr. Prime Minister? Those of little children? Pregnant women? Civilian protestors? [. . . . ]

Your new partners in the government are, unfortunately, joining up with you. I was astonished to read of late an article by [Labor MK and former minister] Ephraim Sneh, a doctor bound by the Hippocratic Oath. He writes that it won't be so bad if we have a little civil war and some blood will be spilt.. [. . . . ]

You, Mr. Prime Minister, are a refuser of democracy. You refuse to go to a referendum or elections. There is no country that makes a decision of this type without specific elections or a precise referendum on the question. But what do you do? You destroy the entire political framework, and turn everyone into confused marionettes. Look at the new opposition head [Shinui leader Tommy Lapid], how he is almost weeping that you left him behind. Look at your partners from United Torah Judaism who tell you that they won't support you on the disengagement.

Is this the way to approach this type of move?! With an opposition that is a coalition and a coalition that is an opposition and by switching and replacing parties and coalitions as if they were socks? And then by firing ministers, and by deceiving and reneging on promises to adhere to the results of the Likud referendum?

You can continue to barrel through one red light after another, you might run over some children on the way, maybe some houses or pregnant women – but we will stop you. We will not give in to your corruption and obtuseness.

As a Brigadier General in the reserves, I call upon you to take the army out of this story. Firing and dismissing officers who said they object to refusal and will carry out all legal orders, but also said that it's not the function of the army to expel citizens from their homes. They said a simple truth. Why did you dismiss them? Now a witch hunt will start and you will throw out every officer who thinks differently, who wants to say something. This won't strengthen the army, it will only weaken it. It won't make the army more ethical, but will rather confuse it and divide it, and the responsibility will be upon you! [. . . .]

The cynicism, cruelty and obtuseness you show us in return will yet boomerang back at you – and you will be remembered, on the last page of your political history, as the man who destroyed the IDF, and the one who is liable, Heaven forbid, to destroy the State of Israel. You have many merits, but you have no right to come and burn everything merely because you were once a partner in the construction!

We won't respond in kind to your maliciousness, and we won't respond to your violence with violence, and not to your incitement with incitement. But we will say to you clearly: If you don't listen to our call to return this decision [regarding the disengagement] to this healthy and strong nation, we will send you home, and it will be painful and shameful, erasing all your previous accomplishments.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Disengagers may sneer that only religious fanatics have a notion that the Land of Israel is a sacred trust that cannot be annulled by any clutch of ephemeral officeholders. But a strong warning against Disengagement comes from a distinctly secular source, as reported in "Old-Time Pioneers Against Sharon's Plan", IsraelNationalNews.com:

Moshav Nahalal in the Galilee, one of the most prominent of the secular moshav movement, will host the first of a series of gatherings protesting Prime Minister Sharon's expulsion plan. [. . . .] The announcement of the gathering states,

This is our historic land. Our enemies who waged war on us since the beginning of Zionism will not be satisfied with one piece of land or another. Their ultimate goal is to uproot and banish us from the entire Land'.

We know about the plans being cooked-up in smoke-filled room calling to abandon and expel the residents of the Jordan Valley and Golan as well. Far from the spotlights, an international border crossing is being built in the northern Jordan Valley near Mehola – and this is clear proof of the dark storm about to come upon the Zionist enterprise.

[. . . .]

Facing obtuse powers of evil, facing people with no Zionist or settlement values, and facing a mad dictator who is dragging the country to a civil war – we will establish anew the scale of Zionist and settlement values that built the State of Israel, the national home of the Jewish People. [. . . .]

* * * * * * * * * * * *

There is a deep nationwide distress that Sharon's tactics are wrecking the structure of government and the social contract that underlie any healthy democracy. The distress is not shared by much of the left-wing clique that dominates the news media.

Radio Israel newscaster/Ayala Chason explained to her audience that when Sharon breaks his campaign promises and his post-election promises about unilateral withdrawal "that is 'politics' and has no bearing on 'democracy' and the 'democratic process'".

END

INDEX OF TEXTS