ISRAEL IS IN BIG TROUBLE with nearly the whole enlightened world–European “peace activists” and Arab diplomats and Zbigniew Brzezinski and all sorts of mainstream American journalists–for not allowing Palestinian terrorists to kill its citizens with impunity. The Europeans rushed to the West Bank town of Ramallah to surround and protect the world’s best-loved terrorist–that kindly old grump Yasser Arafat, hero of his people, idol of Europe, Nobel laureate, ripper-up of Jewish children. No Israeli would dare shoot Arafat if there were any risk of harming a European in the process; that was the premise. Luckily for the Europeans, it was never put to the test, because the Israelis (as they had repeatedly demonstrated) had no intention of killing Arafat. Meanwhile, trivia experts were trying to remember the last time European “activists” had ever rushed anywhere to protect Israeli lives. Brzezinski explained, on the “Lehrer News Hour,” that Israelis were treating Palestinians the way white South Africans used to treat blacks–a vintage lie from the 1970s, which was a great decade for lying. Brzezinski no doubt had in mind that, while diversity-loving Palestinians eagerly welcome Jewish settlers to the West Bank, the apartheid-crazed Israelis refuse to allow Arabs to live in Israel. American journalists sigh with their famous superior weariness about the “cycle of violence”–a phrase that serves in this context as a substitute (or sometimes antidote) for thought. One day we will hear a network news-show reporter say something like, “Here in the United States, the aimless cycle of violence continues. Criminals murder people, and the police chase them down and arrest them. But does that end the violence? Brand new criminals murder more people, and the police arrest them, whereupon new criminals murder more people, tit for tat; where will it all end?” If only the average Israeli cabinet minister had one tenth the wisdom and moral probity of the lowliest office temp at NBC, we would all have it made. And then there is “rage.” Naturally as the death toll from the vicious suicide attacks rose, Israeli rage mounted. But somehow it is always the rage of the Palestinians that is under discussion. Evidently the more Jews they murder, the angrier they get. But never mind, Palestinian rage is noble. Jewish rage is racist, or perhaps invisible. You might conclude they are all lunatics, these deep thinkers; but they are not. Their statements make perfect sense once you understand the two premises on which they are based. First, history began this morning. Second, dead Jews don’t count. The deep thinkers are outraged because the Israeli Army has inflicted “humiliation” on Palestinians in terrorist breeding grounds. That is the word they keep using: “humiliation.” Evidently the Israeli army awoke one morning with nothing better to do than mobilize, strike off into dangerous West Bank villages, and humiliate Palestinians. Listening to the deep thinkers, you ask yourself: Is it not the case that over recent months, terrorists have murdered in cold blood hundreds of Jews (and some Israeli Arabs), smashing them against walls and crushing them under falling roofs, tearing mothers and fathers to pieces alongside their children, lacerating their bodies with shattered glass and jagged metal until blood ran in the streets and body parts were plastered all over the landscape? Did this happen on some other planet? But these murders make no impression on European “peace activists” or suave Arab diplomats or their friends, because the murder of Jews is invisible. The state of Israel (vicious unprincipled institution that it is) has this unwritten law: If you murder Jews, there will be consequences. It is a law that strikes many Europeans and Arabs as so outrageous as to be literally incomprehensible. Even Israel’s good friends (and for that matter many Israelis) have warned the Israel Defense Force against humiliating Palestinians. Palestinians must be treated with dignity. Agreed. But I cannot join the chorus. The words won’t come. I am looking at a copy of the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv from a few days ago, with four Israeli soldiers smiling at me from the front page in that awkward, camera-crooked way young men have. All four were killed in one day in the territories. A small death toll by recent Palestinian-atrocity standards; who can even remember? Yet their faces are so familiar I can almost recall their names. The 30-year-old, Patrick Pereg, who left a wife and small baby. Nissim Ben-David, 22, whose father states that he was a good soul, never complained, and was loved by all the neighbors. What can a father say? “He too has been changed in his turn,” Yeats wrote, “transformed utterly.” I picture them as students sprawled on sofas, junior businessmen chattering importantly into cell phones. Fathers with small children on their shoulders, surreptitiously patting their wives and looking guilty, arriving on schedule with their noisy families at their parents’ door on the first night of Passover, smiling their camera smiles. They had better things to do than go to war and struggle and sweat and ache, their minds blank with strained concentration, and then to be knocked over by a casual bullet and only then, dying, to have the images of their wives and children flood back as they bloodied the streets and curled up in pain. But murderers were stalking their families, and someone had to do something. So we should all scold the Israeli army for not treating the Palestinians better, but I find I am not up to it. Those were my children they died for. I imagine interviewing one of the deep thinkers. Q. Listen, Europe: How should Israel react to the murder of a dozen Jews a week, or maybe two dozen or three? What do you suggest? A. You can’t end terror by killing and arresting terrorists, confiscating their weapons, and humiliating their Supreme Leader. Perish the thought. Imbecile. The only way Israel can stop terrorist murder is by tendering a generous peace offer. Q. But this wave of terrorism started when Prime Minister Barak tendered a generous peace offer, at the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000. If a generous peace offer created this wave of terrorism, what makes you believe that a generous peace offer can stop it? If stepping on the gas makes the car go, why should it also make the car stop? A. Do you want to end the violence? Then Israel must return to its ’67 borders, period, end of discussion. Q. Do you recall the peace plan proposed by the U.N.’s mediator in June 1948? That Jordan should get Jerusalem and the Negev, that the city of Haifa and Lod airport should be internationalized, that after a two-year grace period all Jewish immigration should be subject to U.N. approval? . . . And the Arab League rejected it! And you believe that Israel could get peace today by returning to its ’67 borders? A. That was 1948! Irrelevant. Q. And you think that, compared with 1948, Palestinians today are wiser, more reasonable, more peace-loving? A. Boundaries are irrelevant. The real moral issue is this: Palestinians who fled during the 1948 war must be allowed to return. Q. After inviting a huge, murderously hostile Arab population to settle within its borders, could Israel continue to be a Jewish state? Or a free, democratic state? Or a state at all? A. Jewish states are irrelevant. This is Israel’s moral obligation! Q. But the Jews who poured into Israel by the hundreds of thousands in the first years of the new state, who occupied and took over (yes, it’s a fact, they did) homes and lands abandoned by fleeing Palestinians during the ’48 War of Independence . . . those Jewish immigrants came from Displaced Persons camps in occupied Germany, from Eastern Europe, from Muslim nations where they feared (with good reason) for their lives. When Israel welcomes back the ’48 refugees, will Iraq and Yemen and Germany and Poland and Lithuania and Hungary cheerfully make room for their former Jewish populations? And then will displaced Germans move back into Poland and former Czechoslovakia? And will Poles return to once-Polish lands along the western border of the former Soviet Union? And will Belorussians move east to make room for them? And will the whole world eventually return to September 1939? Why do you propose such a lunatic plan? Can’t you understand the vast historical wheel whose slow revolving created Israel? Do you think Israel came to be because the world is eager to do things for Jews? A. After all, you are only a morally obtuse Zionist. So ends the interview. In the spring of 1938, after the Nazi occupation of Austria, Anna Freud had a chat with her aged father that was overheard and recorded by Freud’s physician. She was battling with the Gestapo (with the indispensable help of supporters around the world) to win permission for her family to escape. It was a grim business. After one long day, she said to her father: “Wouldn’t it be better if we all killed ourselves?” (Many Austrian Jews had already done so.) Freud said: “Why? Because they would like us to?” David Gelernter is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
