Steven Plaut On May 2, 2012
I
was recently challenged by a polite academic who claimed to be
dumbfounded by the fact that I rejected as absurd his use of the term
“Apartheid Wall” to refer to Israel’s security barrier fence. He
demanded to know why I objected to the term, and what I thought was a
more appropriate name for it.
I responded that the more appropriate and correct name for Israel’s
security fence is the “Leftists are Idiots Fence.” Indeed, I would urge
everyone to adopt that name for it and insist that no other be used in
polite company.
The security barrier should be dubbed the “Leftists are Idiots
Fence” because the very need for its construction was as a
countermeasure to the countless acts of murder and other violence
triggered by the imposition upon Israel of the Left’s political agenda
with regard to making “peace” with the “Palestinians.” The building of
the “Leftists are Idiots Fence” became necessary because of the
“recognition” of the PLO by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and all the
fruits of that poisonous tree that followed. The consequential series
of agreements to allow the PLO to import its army of assassins and
terrorists into the West Bank and Gaza (never mind that the Hamas later
evicted the PLO from Gaza) produced so many massacres of Israelis that
the only way to reduce the level of violence was with large fences and
barriers that prevented “Palestinians” from getting close enough to Jews
to murder them.
The “Leftists are Idiots Fence” was only the latest bi-product of the
long-time theology of the Left concerning how to make peace with
Arabs. The Left believes that Israel can appease its way to peace by
making endless concessions to the Arabs. The fact that every single
round of appeasements and concessions to date has produced escalation of
terror never persuades the Left that something is flawed with its
approach to peace or in its political theology. The universal
explanation by the Left for the utter and complete failure of its
“ideas” has always been to insist in totalitarian unison that they fail
because Israel does not make enough appeasements and concessions.
The Israeli Left has been wrong about absolutely everything for at
least 20 years, and it would be very difficult to uncover anything about
which it was not wrong going back even 60 years. The Israeli Left of
the 1950s believed in Soviet-style economic central planning. Under
David Ben Gurion, it built and then preserved a command-and-control
economic mechanism that resembled that of Soviet regimes in many ways.
It was designed to place near totalitarian control of the economy in the
hands of the MAPAI socialist party (later renamed the Labor Party).
Israel was essentially a one-party state until 1978, and that single
ruling party was MAPAI.
Thanks to that command-and-control structure, Israel remained an
impoverished, underdeveloped Third World country until well into the
1980s, complete with Third World levels of corruption, primitive
technology, and tax rates sometimes exceeding 100% of earnings. By the
late 1980s, the command-and-control regime was largely although not
completely dismantled, this thanks to a complex set of causes, and
Israel quickly morphed into a developed wealthy First World country, to
the chagrin of its socialists. The Far Left yearns to restore the
semi-bolshevik planning and control structure, and has now managed to
co-opt much of the “Social Justice” protests in Israel and recruit those
protesters behind this goal.
But in the long term, the more harmful segment of leftist ideology
was the belief that the bulk of Arabs are good and decent people who
truly want peace and co-existence. That belief happens to be false.
The vast majority of Arabs want a genocidal resolution to the “problem”
of the existence of Israel and its Jewish population.
But the Left is so passionately wedded to this part of its political
theology that it has dominated everything the Left has done or said for
decades. And since the Left has been in office in Israel more often
than it has not been (while the Likud has itself often behaved in many
ways like a party of the Israeli Left), most of the most destructive
decisions and errors Israel has made stem directly from this theology.
The Israeli Left believes that most Arabs are peaceful people and
that they can best be won over by implementing a nice form of socialism
(one that unfortunately does not work anywhere and cannot possibly
“work”).
When Israel became independent in 1948-49, the new state under the leadership of David Ben Gurion went to great efforts to prevent
the emigration of the Arab population of what became Israel. (Never
mind that the anti-Semites later invented a pseudo-history in which
Israel carried out “ethnic cleansing.” The entire War of Independence
was an attempt by the Arab world to conduct a genocidal ethnic cleansing
of Jews!) This is because the Israeli government believed that most
Arabs are peaceful people and that they can best be won over by
implementing a nice form of socialism.
The early Israeli governments of the 1950s and 1960s, all led by the
MAPAI party, allowed many tens of thousands of Arab “refugees” quietly
to return to the territory of Israel. This is because the government
believed that most Arabs are peaceful people and that they can best be
won over by implementing a nice form of socialism.
The Israeli government of 1967 went out of its way to prevent
the emigration of the Arab populations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip
during and after the Six Day War. This is because the government
believed that most Arabs are peaceful people and that they can best be
won over by implementing a nice form of socialism.
The Israeli government has never responded to pogroms and
mob violence by Israeli Arabs or West Bank and Gaza Arabs with serious
retribution. This is because the government believes that most Arabs
are peaceful people and that they can best be won over by implementing a
nice form of socialism.
The Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin, again a Labor Party
government, signed the Oslo Accords. It converted Gaza and most of the
West Bank into large terrorist bases and launching pads for mortars and
rockets. It did so because the government believed that most Arabs are
peaceful people and that they can best be won over by implementing a
nice form of socialism.
When it became clear that the only reason “Palestinians” even wanted
“independence” from Israel was so they could launch terrorist
aggression, nothing changed. This is because the government believed
that most Arabs are peaceful people and that they can best be won over
by implementing a nice form of socialism.
Israel has been bludgeoned into agreeing to the creation of a
“Palestinian” state in the West Bank and Gaza. This would be the 23rd
Arab state. The Arabs already have more states than any other ethnic
group on earth and control territory nearly twice that of the United
States (including Alaska). Those who imagine that such a “Palestinian”
state would pursue peace and stability are captives of the political
theology of the Left. They believe that most “Palestinian” Arabs are
peaceful people who can best be won over by implementing a nice form of
appeasement and socialism.
And over the past year the “social justice” protest movement in
Israel was largely co-opted by the Israeli communist party and other
groups within the radical Left, effectively making further appeasements
and concessions to the “Palestinians” the central plank of their agenda
of “social justice.” This is because they believe that most Arabs are
peaceful people and that they can best be won over by implementing a
nice form of socialism.
Now since every single round of concessions and appeasements by
Israel has produced escalated Arab violence, the security fence was
proposed, originally as an innovation conceived by and endorsed by the
Left. But the Left quickly recovered from its momentary transient
common sense, after realizing that the security fence was a departure
from its decades-old agenda of achieving peace via appeasement. And
within weeks of the commencement of the construction, the Left was
denouncing the fence as Israel’s “Apartheid Wall.” It also denounces as
“apartheid roads” any parallel pairs of roads, one for “Palestinians”
and the other for Israelis, made necessary so that Palestinians would
not get close enough to Israelis to murder them.
The irony is that no other country on earth would have responded to
the atrocities and murders coming from a hostile population located at
the fringes of its cities by building such a wall or such parallel pairs
of roads. Every other country on earth would have bombed the attackers
into the Stone Age and then driven them out en masse. Consider what happened to the ethnic German minorities of Eastern Europe.
But sauce for the Euro-goose is never sauce for the Jewish gander.
So, instead, Israel retaliated against the genocidal mass murderers of
its civilians by constructing a fence that makes it more difficult for
them to carry out their atrocities.
And that is why the correct name for what the anti-Semites have been
calling Israel’s “Apartheid Fence” should in fact be the “Leftists are
Idiots Fence.”
No comments:
Post a Comment