'Realism'

by Prof. Paul Eidelberg

(IsraelNN.com) Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's candor in his "maiden speech" was indeed refreshing. He said, inter alia, that the Palestinian Authority must fulfill all the requirements of the "Road Map" to a Palestinian state; which means there will be no Palestinian state. This is "realism." It means no end to the conflict - not if one takes Islam or Arab-Islamic culture seriously.

It is plain that the Obama administration and the European Union do not take Islam seriously, which is why they are demanding a Palestinian state immediately. Unconditional acceptance of a Palestinian state was the objective of the Annapolis Conference, which Mr. Lieberman rejected in his speech. In other words, he rejected unconditional surrender to Israel's enemy, the Fatah-Hamas Palestinian Authority.

Turn now, however, to President Barack Obama's visit to Saudi Arabia. That the President of the United States should genuflect from the waist down to Saudi King Abdullah signifies the (ignominious) unconditional surrender of the United States to Islam.

Mr. Obama's father was a Muslim (which makes him a Muslim). His mother, a secular Christian. Obama's bowing to King Abdullah signifies an alliance of Islam and the secularized Christian West against Judaism and the Jewish State of Israel.

This alliance may be said to have begun in 1975, when the United Nations declared Zionism a form of racism and subsequently endowed the Yasser Arafat-led PLO with "observer status". Thereafter, both the US and the EU rolled out the red carpet to Arafat. In violation of its agreement with Israel concerning the PLO, President Jimmy Carter allowed the PLO to establish an office in Washington, DC. PLO offices were also established in various European capitals. The two offspring of Judaism again bit the breasts that had suckled them.

All this is beyond the "realism" of Foreign Minister Lieberman. His realism merely elaborates Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's oft-repeated slogan of "reciprocity" (a term foreign to the Islamic mind). What Lieberman and Netanyahu fail to see is that their affirmation of a Palestinian state makes their realism impossible.

This affirmation has pernicious consequences. First, to say "yes" to an Arab-Islamic state in Judea and Samaria cannot but shrink and stultify the national identity of the Jewish people, as well as their confidence in the justice and nobility of Israel's cause. Acknowledging an Arab-Islamic state in Judea and Samaria - the heartland of the Jewish people - constitutes a public teaching to Jews and Gentiles alike that the Land of Israel does not belong exclusively to the Jewish people. This makes a mockery of the Torah and the teachings of the prophets and sages of Israel.

This teaching cannot but erode the historical memory of the Jewish people, since the teachings of their prophets and sages are intimately bound up with Judea and Samaria.

Second, nothing encourages the Arabs to persist in their genocidal objectives as much as the Jewish people's renunciation of their God-given and exclusive right to the Land of Israel. Affirming a Palestinian state not only arms Israel's Islamic enemies, it also undermines American and European support of Israel vis-a-vis the demands of those enemies. It is a confession of weakness. This weakness leads to almost irreversible errors.

For example, at the Likud central committee meeting that elected him as the party's chairman a few months before the June 1992 election, Mr. Netanyahu rejected a resolution to the effect that a Likud government would not be bound by any agreement that compromised Israel's security. He rejected this resolution on the fallacious grounds that a democracy must abide by its agreements. This is precisely the position of the present government coalition agreement.

What irony! For Great Britain violated the San Remo international agreement, which incorporated the Balfour Declaration and which affirmed exclusive Jewish sovereignty over what is now called the "West Bank".

Quite apart from attorney Howard Grief's scholarly argument that the Oslo Accords, or the Israel-PLO Agreement of 1993, is itself a violation of international law (as well as of Israeli law), common sense tells us that no nation can be bound by an agreement which subsequently proves dangerous to its existence. It is not international law - nor is it simply economic interests - that prompts democratic America and democratic Europe to unite with Islamic despots against the Jewish State of Israel. More significant is the age-old hatred of Judaism, the greatest enemy of paganism, which still animates the nations of mankind.

Here, political science or the reform of Israel's flawed system of multiparty cabinet government is of limited value. Israel's needs a rebirth of freedom - the freedom Abraham initiated when he turned away from paganism and became a servant of God. This is the freedom Jews exalt on Passover.

At this crucial moment of history, in which the West is capitulating to Islam, I can only pray that God will endow Israel's new government with the wisdom and courage to hold the fort against the barbarians and their timid allies in the democratic world.

Prayer by the Jewish people and by their political leaders may well be the only authentic "realism".