Sharon has therefore accepted underneath a submission to Islam. He has accepted terms of humiliation. He has acted with subservience. He has acquiesced in the terrorists’ agenda and said violence can make life untenable. In moral terms what has happened is that a Jewish government has agreed that others’ anger at the existence of Jews living alongside them is a force to be agreed with and when others who only 68 years before lifted not a finger to save Jews from the Holocaust and since have lifted not a finger to save Jews from Arab extermination, say that Jews living near Arabs are indeed ‘illegal’ and a source of provocation, so Israel’s government agrees.
The dispute is not about ‘occupied land’ but about Arab acceptance of Israeli Jews’ living where they choose. It is about the Arab right to dispossess and uproot. And the Jews who defeated them in a defensive war, agree. There cannot be peace when Jews live with Arabs in any area claimed by Muslim Arabs. The Arab cry was ‘Yaffo, Haifa…’ and it is no different now. But the area of legitimacy, the Pale of settlement, this is shifting. The government of Ariel Sharon thinks that concessions make defence easier and peace can more easily be secured by buying it at the expense of principles which are negotiable and disposable.
This is a bad illusion and a sad one. What constitutes legitimacy? The truth is that for the religious the Bible reveals a Divine Mandate. For the secular, then human rights theory dictates that people should have freedom to choose where they live according to respect for their rights regardless of race colour or creed. Either way, the issue is simple: the Jews of Gaza cannot legitimately be removed from their homes in order to serve any racist, genocidal cause and cannot also be removed in order to prevent terror by accepting their existence causes it, without a kind of near auto-genocide. These are serious matters because the Islamic case is discriminatory. It is also against the roots of Zionism and equal rights f! or Jews. And it speaks volumes about who says where Jews may live and flourish.
In any other context it would be axiomatic that the world would denounce not simply the ethnic cleansing but the human rights’ abuse of racially motivated or religiously motivated forced repatriation. This is what does not happen in the case of Jewish banishment from areas in which they have chosen to live. By the same token, the question remains how it can be surmised that peaceful and friendly relations across a frontier can be expected when the desire to live with a neighbour has been so willfully and cruelly demonstrated to be entirely absent as in the case of the Palestinians.
There is no fundamental acknowledgement of enmity as an attitude prevalent in the PA and in Palestinian society in the arguments put forward either by the international forces (EU, Russia, USA, UN) or by the Israeli government such that fleeing before terror or appeasing it become moral and ethical issues, never mind legal ones. In short Jewish human rights appear submerged absolutely. Where is the justice and honesty in all of this? Compliance with the dictates of a rogue regime seems a poor basis for serious peace aspirations on anyone’s part.
If to Islam the proximity to Jews, the sovereignty exercised by Jews, and the state existing for Jews, is in each case obnoxious, then how does retreat from Gaza or anywhere else, perish the thought, represent a policy for security or a basis for peace, not least since all land for peace so far has a built in multiplier of ever more land for no serious proof of peace.
How does leaving anywhere mean less propaganda and hate in school books and less territorial ambition for Palestinians being urged in the imminent summer camps? The Lebanon example and the methods of Hisb’allah are now being echoed again as Israel is to be seen evacuating, its tail between its legs, if terror action can make it appear so.
The gainful fruits of war are surely in evidence as the Arab creation of an existential threat to Israel, social, cultural and strategic, is the product of reversal of defeat in every war since the state of Israel was created, as territorial integrity and congruity for a Palestinian terror state are being created in Israel’s midst. Rewarding the vanquished aggressor is a strange way to attempt to inculcate respect for regime change and international law. Punishing the voters and victims is unjust and wicked to. Doing it to one’s own signals a failure of government, policy and integrity. And things still more sinister and bizarre.
Whether civil resistance can prevent a tragedy remains to be seen but liberal democratic values are at stake not to mention spiritual principles. In the days when Protestant Ulster might have been taken by Catholic Eire a cry went up ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’. It remains to be seen in what sense the people of Israel the people of elsewhere are a forlorn hope may cry ‘the Jews of Gaza will fight and they will be right’ but their weapons have to be civic, peaceful and moral. Will Ariel Sharon’s brutal determination permit them to use moral force and reasoned argument. So far the results are appalling.
Christopher Barder is political/military analyst and a member of the Advisory Board of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies.
A POLICY OF BANKRUPTCY AND EVIL
By Christopher Barder
Ariel Sharon has made commitments to withdraw all Jews from a place where Jews chose to live and governments encouraged them to do so. He has said effectively that it is wrong for them to live there, not because they have chosen not to, after a period of time, or agreed it is wrong, but because it upsets the Arab Muslims around them and protecting them is inappropriate for various (non) reasons which are hard to fathom but easy to mouth apparently.
Sharon has therefore accepted underneath a submission to Islam. He has accepted terms of humiliation. He has acted with subservience. He has acquiesced in the terrorists’ agenda and said violence can make life untenable. In moral terms what has happened is that a Jewish government has agreed that others’ anger at the existence of Jews living alongside them is a force to be agreed with and when others who only 68 years before lifted not a finger to save Jews from the Holocaust and since have lifted not a finger to save Jews from Arab extermination, say that Jews living near Arabs are indeed ‘illegal’ and a source of provocation, so Israel’s government agrees.
The dispute is not about ‘occupied land’ but about Arab acceptance of Israeli Jews’ living where they choose. It is about the Arab right to dispossess and uproot. And the Jews who defeated them in a defensive war, agree. There cannot be peace when Jews live with Arabs in any area claimed by Muslim Arabs. The Arab cry was ‘Yaffo, Haifa…’ and it is no different now. But the area of legitimacy, the Pale of settlement, this is shifting. The government of Ariel Sharon thinks that concessions make defence easier and peace can more easily be secured by buying it at the expense of principles which are negotiable and disposable.
This is a bad illusion and a sad one. What constitutes legitimacy? The truth is that for the religious the Bible reveals a Divine Mandate. For the secular, then human rights theory dictates that people should have freedom to choose where they live according to respect for their rights regardless of race colour or creed. Either way, the issue is simple: the Jews of Gaza cannot legitimately be removed from their homes in order to serve any racist, genocidal cause and cannot also be removed in order to prevent terror by accepting their existence causes it, without a kind of near auto-genocide. These are serious matters because the Islamic case is discriminatory. It is also against the roots of Zionism and equal rights f! or Jews. And it speaks volumes about who says where Jews may live and flourish.
In any other context it would be axiomatic that the world would denounce not simply the ethnic cleansing but the human rights’ abuse of racially motivated or religiously motivated forced repatriation. This is what does not happen in the case of Jewish banishment from areas in which they have chosen to live. By the same token, the question remains how it can be surmised that peaceful and friendly relations across a frontier can be expected when the desire to live with a neighbour has been so willfully and cruelly demonstrated to be entirely absent as in the case of the Palestinians.
There is no fundamental acknowledgement of enmity as an attitude prevalent in the PA and in Palestinian society in the arguments put forward either by the international forces (EU, Russia, USA, UN) or by the Israeli government such that fleeing before terror or appeasing it become moral and ethical issues, never mind legal ones. In short Jewish human rights appear submerged absolutely. Where is the justice and honesty in all of this? Compliance with the dictates of a rogue regime seems a poor basis for serious peace aspirations on anyone’s part.
If to Islam the proximity to Jews, the sovereignty exercised by Jews, and the state existing for Jews, is in each case obnoxious, then how does retreat from Gaza or anywhere else, perish the thought, represent a policy for security or a basis for peace, not least since all land for peace so far has a built in multiplier of ever more land for no serious proof of peace.
How does leaving anywhere mean less propaganda and hate in school books and less territorial ambition for Palestinians being urged in the imminent summer camps? The Lebanon example and the methods of Hisb’allah are now being echoed again as Israel is to be seen evacuating, its tail between its legs, if terror action can make it appear so.
The gainful fruits of war are surely in evidence as the Arab creation of an existential threat to Israel, social, cultural and strategic, is the product of reversal of defeat in every war since the state of Israel was created, as territorial integrity and congruity for a Palestinian terror state are being created in Israel’s midst. Rewarding the vanquished aggressor is a strange way to attempt to inculcate respect for regime change and international law. Punishing the voters and victims is unjust and wicked to. Doing it to one’s own signals a failure of government, policy and integrity. And things still more sinister and bizarre.
Whether civil resistance can prevent a tragedy remains to be seen but liberal democratic values are at stake not to mention spiritual principles. In the days when Protestant Ulster might have been taken by Catholic Eire a cry went up ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’. It remains to be seen in what sense the people of Israel the people of elsewhere are a forlorn hope may cry ‘the Jews of Gaza will fight and they will be right’ but their weapons have to be civic, peaceful and moral. Will Ariel Sharon’s brutal determination permit them to use moral force and reasoned argument. So far the results are appalling.
Christopher Barder is political/military analyst and a member of the Advisory Board of the Freeman Center For Strategic Studies.
Posted by Ted Belman at June 8, 2005 09:48 AM