Beyond Chutzpah

David Isaac

U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta visited Israel earlier this month. En route he laid the onus on Israel to improve its ties with neighboring countries.

“[T]he question you have to ask: Is it enough to maintain a military edge if you're isolating yourself in the diplomatic arena? ... that is not a good situation for Israel to become increasingly isolated,” Secretary Panetta said. It takes real chutzpah to blame Israel for 'isolating itself' from its neighbors when its neighbors are the ones doing the isolating. It is like suggesting during World War II that the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto stop 'isolating themselves' from the German invaders. Yet, even as the Arab Ummah slides into Islamism under the badly misnamed ‘Arab Spring’, Israel gets the blame.

Beyond chutzpah is Mr. Panetta’s solution, which is to tell Israel to make peace with its neighbors. "So my main message is, to both sides, you don't lose anything by going into negotiations and trying to pursue a peace process everyone in the world is hopeful can begin," he said.

What on earth does Mr. Panetta think Israel has been doing for the last 30-odd years? Israel has made peace with her neighbors. And she has paid a bloody price for it.

Most recently, a man and his pregnant wife who was in labor were attacked by Arab stone throwers as they drove to the delivery room. They narrowly escaped death. This comes on the heels of the murder of a young man and his baby near Hebron when Arabs hurled a large rock through his windshield. And in another incident, a 20-month-old baby girl was bloodied when Arabs threw rocks at her face. (Will Panetta chastise the parents of the young girl pictured above to be more neighborly next time?)

Time and again Israel has made ‘peace’. In 1978, Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. In protest, Shmuel resigned from Mr. Begin’s government. In “What Peace” (The Jerusalem Post, June 12, 1992), Shmuel wrote:

[T]he moment Egypt had fulfilled her primary obligation under the peace treaty (to receive the territory of Sinai, appropriately free of Jews) its leading diplomat, Abdel Maguid, announced his government's agenda for Israel. In a speech in Kuwait on April 8, 1982, he laid down afresh all the Arab demands, beginning with the Israeli withdrawal from all the territories including Jerusalem which would become the capital of the Palestinian State, and ending with the implementation of the "right of return" for the refugees to their former homes in Haifa and Jaffa, Ramle and Jerusalem et al. As for the peace treaty itself, and indeed the dozen subsidiary agreements, nearly all their provisions have remained dead letters for lack of Egyptian cooperation, or in direct Egyptian contravention.

Notably, there is no trade nor Egyptian tourism and, what is most significant, the vicious antisemitic propaganda war against Israel in the Egyptian media – controlled by the government – goes on merrily, in style and content reminiscent of German Nazi propaganda. Egypt too remains a full partner in the continuous diplomatic campaign against Israel. It even opposed the cancellation of the UN Zionism is racism decision. Now it is one of the initiators of the latest drive to promote the "right of return" – the proclaimed prescription first enunciated by Nasser for destroying Israel "from within." Never once have the Arabs diminished their demands.

Despite that experience, Israel tried again, this time with a Labor government in the lead and with Yasser Arafat cast in the role of Arab peacemaker. The negotiations led to the infamous 1993 Oslo Accords. This mad act by Israel was met with fulsome praise by a credulous world. But as Shmuel wrote in “An Education in Violence” (The Jerusalem Post, August 9, 1996):

In every one of his speeches (some public, some "leaked"), Arafat has demonstrated how he is discouraging violence. In a mosque in Johannesburg, South Africa, he proclaimed (or envisaged) the jihad; in Stockholm early this year, at a dinner with 40 Arab diplomats he described (expansively) what would be done to the State of Israel (dismantlement) and its Jewish inhabitants (only dispersal). What do all these pronouncements amount to if not a deliberate education campaign not against but in favor of terror? Who can gauge the number of Jews who are likely to be killed by enthusiastic young Arabs thus encouraged and influenced by the rhetoric of their leader, and by the force of the "heroic" example of [Hamas killer Yihye] Ayyash and his like?

We have seen what the education campaign has led to – a population radicalized from birth to hate Jews – a hatred that has sunk so deep that an 18-year-old Arab expresses no remorse for slashing the throat of a 3-month-old baby girl. (The killer didn’t face the death penalty because, under Israeli law, he was underage.)

So much for the peace of Oslo. But wait, didn’t Israel also make peace with Jordan? Surely, that peace has held. In October, 1994, Israel signed an agreement declaring, “Peace is hereby established between the State of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.”

In 2010, Jordan’s King Abdullah II called on the international community to take over Jerusalem’s holy sites. He rebuked Israel for including Rachel’s Tomb and the Cave of the Patriarchs on its list of national heritage sites. His father, it may be recalled, destroyed Jewish holy sites in the half of Jerusalem in his hands after 1948. The Jewish Virtual Library provides a particularly poignant description of Jordan’s pillage of Jerusalem.

“It is the story of hundreds of Torah scrolls, reverently preserved for generations, plundered and burned to ashes; of thousands of holy books committed to the flames; of synagogues razed to the ground or converted into hollow shells of their glorious former selves, their interiors used as hen houses and stables, filled with dung-heaps, garbage and carcasses, or as sites for latrines and sewage canals; of tens of thousands of tombstones broken into pieces or used as flagstones, steps and building materials; of large areas of the cemetery leveled and converted into parking lots and a filling station; of graves ripped up and skeletal bones scattered, and an asphalt short-cut through the pitiful remains … to a new hotel built incongruously upon the Mount of Olives.”

Most recently, the King of Jordan warned Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas not to go through with a unilateral declaration of statehood lest it jeopardize the Palestinian Arab ‘right of return’, the oft-repeated Arab demand that millions of Arab ‘refugees’ be allowed to inundate Israeli cities in a demographic tidal wave, destroying the country from within – just the sort of friendly, kingly, pat-on-the-back advice one would expect from one peace partner to another.

In the face of all this experience, Mr. Panetta says, “Back to the ‘peace process’”. “You don't lose anything by going into negotiations,” are the sweetest words the defense secretary can muster. Together with the upside-down argument that Israel is “isolating itself”. Mr. Panetta, you are a poor salesman.

Israel’s leaders should remind Mr. Panetta, and by extension his masters in Washington, that Israel has already made peace with her neighbors. They just wish someone would remind the neighbors.