Posted on 09/22/2005 7:20:52 PM PDT by SmithL
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's opponents in the Likud who seek to move the party primaries up act as if they are willing to burn the whole house down in order to remove the fleas. So great is their hatred for Sharon and so burning their desire to succeed him that they are willing to sit among the ruins of the Likud as long as they do not have to see Sharon there.
Among the Likud pretenders to the crown there are of course those who are doing it for ideological reasons. But they are pass since prime minister Menachem Begin recognized the "legitimate rights" of the Arabs of the Land of Israel at Camp David in 1978. That was the original sin, when Begin, pressured by a foolish and irresponsible American president, Jimmy Carter ("Jimmy who?"), accepted that commitment.
At that time, defense minister Ezer Weizman, foreign minister Moshe Dayan, and especially the attorney-general, Aharon Barak, urged Begin to recognize those rights in order to reach a peace agreement with Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.
From the moment Begin recognized the "rights of the Arabs of the Land of Israel" in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, the dam burst and rivers of blood began to flow on the Palestinians' way to establishing a state of their own.
The entire struggle over Eretz Yisrael rightly became a pragmatic one that boiled down to how to delay the establishment of a Palestinian state so that the Jewish one could continue to establish itself within borders that guaranteed its maximum security – while on the Palestinian side, there was absolutely no partner for peace, only Hamas and others like it.
WHEN YITZHAK Rabin and Shimon Peres abandoned this pragmatism, when they rushed ahead to find shortcuts and believed that we had a partner, Yasser Arafat, and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with him, the Palestinian terror turned into a tsunami of blood.
Only Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was able, with superhuman effort, to rebuild the dam and stem the tide of Palestinian terrorism. Yasser Arafat, in the war he launched against us in October 2000, brought Sharon to power in 2001.
Because the Israeli people were looking for someone to save them from the terrible war that Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, without intending to of course, brought upon them. It was not the election slogan of "Peace with Security" that the Jews were looking for in 2001; they wanted Sharon as their proven and successful leader of war, like numerous times in the past, from his days when he was an officer in the paratroopers, the reprisal attacks against Palestinian terror in the 1950s up to the expulsion of Arafat from Beirut in 1982, when he was defense minister.
Sharon himself will not say so, but with all due respect to the devoted chief of staff and industrious Shin Bet chief, if Sharon had not himself personally directed and run the war against Palestinian terror, in particular the suicide terror, the Palestinians would still be blowing themselves up among the Israeli population.
The war is not over. At present, there is a cease-fire that Sharon forced on the Palestinians. With the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, Sharon decided to shorten Israel's military and political borders in order to cruelly separate from the Palestinians, this in light of the principal battle still facing the Jews in determining the final borders of their state.
That is why now, more than ever, the nation needs a national camp as large and united as possible – because only the Likud can lead.
Those that want to advance the primaries in the Likud are playing into the hands of the Labor Party, Shinui and the Left in general, which in light of their political declarations are waiting for the Likud to crash and disintegrate in order to introduce "peace plans" far worse than the Oslo agreements.
Then, the dam that Sharon built will collapse and shatter into smithereens in the face of a new onslaught of Arab terror.
Excellent editorial, and one I thoroughly agree with.
"Those that want to advance the primaries in the Likud are playing into the hands of the Labor Party, Shinui and the Left in general, which in light of their political declarations are waiting for the Likud to crash and disintegrate in order to introduce "peace plans" far worse than the Oslo agreements. "
The above is accurate.
Don't sacrifice the country for political ambition (Netanyahu) or anger at disengagement (Landau).
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