Posted on 06/10/2002 4:33:07 PM PDT by What Is Ain't
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres's vision of a "new Middle East," as espoused over the last decade, is a lethal form of secular messianism that has led to the worst bloodletting in Israel's history, internationally acclaimed American columnist Charles Krauthammer said last night.
"Israel has at long last awoken from the most devastating messianic reverie the Oslo Agreements," Krauthammer said last night at a Jerusalem lecture, where he was presented with Bar-Ilan University's annual Guardian of Zion Award.
Calling the 1993 Oslo Accords "the most catastrophic and self-inflicted wound by any state in modern history," which was based on "an extreme expression of post-Zionistic messianism," Krauthammer said that the secular messianism espoused by Peres was more dangerous than the religious messianism of Gush Emunim or certain followers of the Lubavitcher Rebbe because of its impact on shaping contemporary Jewish history.
"For the messianic Israeli left, Oslo was more than a deal, it was a ratification [in their minds] of a new era in modern history, a new era in human relations and a radical break in history which they declared was occurring not at some point in the future, but now," he said.
"In the 1990's America slept and Israel dreamed," said the New York-born and Montreal-raised Krauthammer, whose weekly syndicated column for The Washington Post Writers Group which now appears in over 100 newspapers, including The Jerusalem Post won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for distinguished commentary. "The US awoke [after the terror attacks on America] in September 2001 and Israel awoke [after the start of Palestinian violence] in September 2000," he said.
"Like the Israeli Left, the US in the 1990s was intoxicated with the idea that history had changed from military conflict to a world of markets and technology. September 11 abolished that illusion and taught us that there are ideological enemies who care nothing about economics, and like in the old history of war of one God against another, will use all military means to attain their goals," he said.
Krauthammer, one of the few American columnists to warn from the start that the Oslo peace accords were a fraud and deception that were doomed to failure, said that talk of Israeli-Palestinian economic and technological cooperation as espoused in Oslo was an "insane" idea which was based on a "dangerous mirage" of those who sought to transpose the entirely different idea of EU cooperation on the Middle East.
"Israel labored seven long years until reality declared itself with former prime minister Barak's astonishing conciliatory offer at Camp David [in July 2000], which was met by Arafat with suicide bombings and terrorism," he said.
Declaring that peace is "not impossible," but contingent on an Arab willingness to live in coexistence with the Jewish state, Krauthammer said: "The idea that one can strike a real peace agreement with [Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser] Arafat without a Sadat-like acceptance of the Jewish state is an illusion."
In contrast to what he saw as the secular messianism espoused by Peres, Krauthammer said Zionism was the very antithesis to messianism, in that it was against Jews waiting in the Diaspora for a last-minute miracle to occur.
In contrast to the Oslo Accords, which were dependent on the will of Arafat, Krauthammer said "Zionism was a movement based on self-reliance, self-realization, and a refusal to depend on others. Zionism accepted the world precisely as it is and because of that Jews saw that they had no future in the Diaspora and that they must go and build a state for themselves in Zion."
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The Distinguished Rennert Lecture for 2002
delivered by
Dr. Charles Krauthammer
upon the awarding to Dr. Krauthammer of
Bar-Ilan University's
Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies
Guardian of Zion Award
June 10, 2002, King David Hotel, Jerusalem
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
© Bar-Ilan University
Permission is granted to circulate and republish this lecture on the condition that it is clearly labeled as follows:
"He Tarries: Jewish Messianism and the Oslo Peace. The Distinguished Rennert Lecture for 2002, delivered upon the awarding to Dr. Charles Krauthammer of Bar-Ilan University's Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies 'Guardian of Zion' Award, in Jerusalem, June 10, 2002. The address can be heard (audio) via the Internet at www.biu.ac.il"
Further inquiries to biuspoke@mail.biu.ac.il
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"He Tarries: Jewish Messianism and the Oslo Peace"
by Charles Krauthammer
The Distinguished Rennert Lecture for 2002, delivered upon the awarding to Dr. Charles Krauthammer of Bar-Ilan University's Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies 'Guardian of Zion' Award, in Jerusalem, June 10, 2002. The address can be heard (audio) via the Internet at www.biu.ac.il
Thank you, Rabbi Rackman, for that very kind introduction. It is truly an honor to be introduced by Rabbi Rackman. It is an honor to be honored by Bar-Ilan University, which is such an important institution in the life of the Jewish people, and to be honored by the Ingeborg Rennert Center, which has been such an important element in bringing the sacredness, the importance, and the permanence of Jerusalem, to the consciousness of Jews everywhere in the world. I can't think of a more important enterprise, and I commend Inge and Ira for their extraordinary work as real defenders and guardians of Zion.
Some of you may know that I used to be a psychiatrist, but I want to assure you tonight that I am a psychiatrist in remission. I haven't had a relapse in twenty years, I have been doing very well. I am sometimes asked what is the difference between my career today as a legal observer of governments and politicians in Washington and a psychiatrist. And I tell people that in both professions, in Washington where I observe political actors, and in psychiatry where I used to work in an asylum, I see people every day who suffer from delusions of grander and paranoia, with the exception that today those people have access to nuclear weapons, so it makes it a little bit of a more interesting game.
I want to talk to you tonight about an important, and I think neglected, aspect of Jewish consciousness, namely Jewish Messianism. Thirty-five years ago today the Six-Day war ended. It seemed like a new era, and I remember some months afterward my rabbi questioned whether we should continue to celebrate Tisha Be'av. Jerusalem had been reunited, the Temple Mount was ours, Israel. The land had been retaken, perhaps we had entered a new age.
The cruel lesson of the last thirty-five years is that we will always have Tisha Be'av and we will always need to have Tisha Be'av.
It is true that according to Maimonides, one of the fundamental beliefs of Judaism is belief in the coming of the Messiah, but that does not mean that we have to believe in the imminent coming of the Messiah. In fact, the rabbis long discouraged the belief in the imminent coming of the Messiah as almost a form of impiety. Messianic speculation has not been good for the Jews.
My thesis tonight is that many of our troubles today, as a people and as a Jewish state, are rooted precisely in this new Messianic enthusiasm.
The Jewish experience with Messianic speculation is long and sad. We have not had very good luck with Messiahs, and I am not referring here to the most famous claim to the title. I am thinking not of Jesus of Nazareth, but of two subsequent episodes in Jewish history.
The first of Bar Kochva, rebellion of the 2nd century. It was not just a rebellion against Rome, it was a rebellion against history. It is well known that the greatest rabbinic authority of the time, Rabbi Akiva, proclaimed Bar Kochva the Messiah, and we know the rest of the story. We know how that Messianic adventure ended in catastrophe, the destruction of the Jewish State and exile for eighteen centuries.
A millennium and a half later we had an even more remarkable eruption of Messianic speculation - Shabtai Zvi. He acquired hundreds of thousands of followers in the Jewish world, promising return, redemption, and the imminent end of days. This episode ended, I would argue, even more tragically than Bar Kochva. Shabtai Zvi was captured by the Turks, became a convert to Islam, not only destroying but humiliating the movement that had believed in him. And yet, so deep was the belief and the need for the Messiah, that his portrayal was somehow seen by some of his followers as part of an even greater, more mystical, more mysterious Messianic plan, and Shabatiism lasted for centuries after his death.
This led the rabbis to discourage Messianic speculation, and as we know, there is rabbinic injunction against hastening the end, lo lidchok et haketz, presuming by human agency to bring about what only God can. And yet, the Messianic hunger never dies, but it often goes unnoticed.
There are today at least three of these strains worth noticing. The first, and the one that has received the most attention, is the religious Messianism of the more extreme and radical elements of the Gush Emunim, and the purist culture of which, which is the Temple Mount faithful, who spend their waking hours learning Leviticus so that they will be ready to offer sacrifices in the new temple.
The settler movement is often caricatured as a Messianic, I believe this is unfair. There is only a small minority that believe that settling the territories is not for reasons of security, not for reasons of national glory and power, not even to fulfill biblical injunctions. Only a small minority of the settlers believe that their settling of the land is the necessary instrument to a kind of apocalyptic Messianic restoration.
Now, some might argue that the entire Zionist enterprise is Messianic, that the entire religious Zionist enterprise is. And indeed, the prayer for the Jewish State that we recite every Sabbath refers to Israel as "reishit tzmichat geulateinu". But note the qualifiers and the distancing here, it refers to Israel as "the beginning of the flower of the redemption". Twice removed from redemption. A promise, but hardly a promise of imminence.
There is a second instance of religious Judaism that has dabbled in Messianic speculation, a more bizarre and even more interesting one. It erupted with scandalous intensity a few years ago with the death of the Lubavitch Rabbi. During his lifetime, as you know, and particularly towards the end, Rabbi Shneurson was surrounded by a Messianic aura. It was whispered among the faithful that he was the Messiah and he would declare himself. And although he never did declare himself, he never discouraged speculation that he might be.
And then of course disaster struck. The rabbi died. And that is a disaster, because in the Jewish tradition the Messiah must be a living person. Nonetheless, so powerful was the feeling, that many of his followers remained undaunted. Some even danced at his funeral procession, believing that he was not really dead, but would immensely arise and proclaim his kingdom. Sound familiar?
It was a rather astonishing, and I would say even scandalous event, that one of the most Orthodox and successful Jewish sects in modern history should have adopted an essentially Christilogical interpretation of the end of days. Of course most Jews, and in fact most of the Lubavitch Movement, were aghast of this development. And yet the very fact that it occurred even in a minority testifies to the power of the Messianic idea.
Now, these two forms in Messianism, the religious Zionism of the extreme Gush Emunim and the Lubavitch, while worlds apart and different in content, still fit the tradition or notion of Messianism as being particularly and peculiarly expressions of extreme eschatological religiosity.
But I would argue that you don't have to be religious to be a Messianist, you don't have to believe in God to believe in the end of days. And indeed, I would argue that the secularist temptation is the strongest of all; and is surely exerting an influence far more important and powerful than its religious counterparts in shaping contemporary Jewish history and bringing us to the terrible crossroads at which Israel finds itself today.
Consider the following quotations: "The hunting season in history is over", "War as a method of conducting human affairs is in its death road", "The conflict shaping up, as our century nears its close, will be over the content of civilization, not of territory", and finally, "The Trojan Horse of war is obsolete."
These worries were not uttered by a religious fanatic under the spell of prophetic visions, nor were they uttered by an inhabitant of a lunatic asylum -- although as a former psychiatrist it wouldn't have surprised me to hear this coming from one of my former patients.
Many of you will recognize these words, the words said and written by the current Foreign Minister of Israel, Shimon Peres.
There is no way to characterize the vision he enunciated of the New Middle East, a vision which underlay, powered, and indeed beguiled the entire Oslo Peace Process as indeed Messianic.
He (Peres) was talking about a radical break in history, occurring not in the future, but occurring now. He was talking about a new era in human relations.
At the Sharem-A-Sheik Summit he said, "We are at a watershed. Our region is going through a period of transition. The dark days are at an end, the shadows of its path are lengthening. The twilight of wars is still red with blood, yet its sunset is inevitable and imminent."
They are words of Isaiah -- they could have been the words of Isaiah -- which were a prophecy about the far future. This was a man speaking about what he saw happening before his eyes. And I must say, to reread these words is to experience real heartbreak.
Many statesmen speak in grandiose terms about changes in history and the dawn of new ages, but these are usually meant as rhetoric, and they are always presented as a possible future. What is so astonishing about the words I read to you is the secular messianism it represents. He was speaking not about the future but of the present as imminent and inevitable, whose reality was upon us and could not be denied.
It reminds me of the story that they tell about the secret chapter in Henry Kissinger's life. Henry Kissinger, the most un-messianic political leader of our time. Unknown to most of you, he spent his lost years in the political wilderness as the Head of the Biblical Zoo. As with everything, Henry had turned out to be a fantastic success. A newspaper editor in America heard about this, so he sent a young reporter to find out why thousands of people were streaming to Kissinger's zoo. The young man arrived, he walked up to the gate, and he saw thousands of people all struck before the main exhibit, a lion and a lamb lying down together. The young reporter was astonished, he burst into tears, he burst into Kissinger's office and said, "Dr. Kissinger, for 2000 years people have dreamt, they have prayed, they have wept for the lion to lie down with the lamb, and you have done it. How did you do it?" And Kissinger said, "Every day, a new lamb."
Here we are today in the midst of the worst bloodletting in Israeli history. Every day, a new lamb.
Most poignant to me was the observation that Peres made: "The Trojan Horse of war is obsolete." The turn of phrase is particularly ironic and painful, because 'Trojan Horse' is precisely the term used by Faisel Husseini to describe the PLO's objective in signing the Oslo Peace Process. Shortly before his death, Husseini said explicitly that the intent in the signing of Oslo was not peace, but to establish a Palestinian entity from the river to the sea. Oslo was the 'Trojan Horse' that would give the Palestinian the foothold from which to carry on the struggle. And like the Trojan Horse, the catastrophe would erupt upon the Israelis the same way it erupted upon the Trojans, in a reverie of self-satisfied and ultimately self-delusional victory.
I remember when I first heard about the Oslo peace accords, when the news first broke. I immediately called an Israeli friend, whom I won't mention, who was editor of a prominent publication. And I said to him, "What happened?" And he said to me, "We won, we finally won. They have accepted us."
I was shocked by his response. And yet, that was the view not only of him, but of many Israelis and of many Americans.
Now, it is important to understand that this view of the end of days, this view of the imminence of a new history, is not unique to the Israeli left. In fact, it is not unique to Israel; it was something that swept the West in the 1990's.
In the early 1990's, the idea that history had turned became a very current and very prevalent one. When the Berlin Wall came down, Francis Fukuyama wrote a most famous article at the time called "The End of History". It was a sensation. I would note, by the way, that in the manuscript it appeared in National Interest with a question mark at the end. That question mark was added by the editor, who was a prudent man. But Fukuyama had no question mark in his original title.
Fukuyama did not of course mean that history itself had ended, but what he meant was that political and ideological history had indeed ended. A century that began with the great battle against Nazism, Fascism, Communism, and ended with the triumph of liberal democracy, and that this triumph was irreversible and it was a permanent change in the human condition. We had reached, he argued, the end of the ideological evolution of mankind. The history that occurred from now on would be different. It would be more narrow, more constrained, more purely commercial and economic, and more boring. Hallevai - how I wish this would be true.
Now, some people would say, "Well, it was just intellectuals who went for this." That is not so. The idea of the end of history was prevalent in the West and in the United States, in particular among the people and among the government. It is very interesting that in the three elections of the 1990's in the United States - in '92, in '96, and 2000 - these were the three elections that in all of American history had less discussion of foreign affairs than any other election, and that is because we had a feeling that we had a achieved a kind of county and permanent peace.
And among the government, the Clinton Administration for eight years made the '90s a holiday from history. It made the work of foreign policy the work of accumulating and signing treaties -- on buying weapons and chemical weapons, on disarm of it, on nonproliferation, on landmines, on everything -- with absolutely no effect on the real world. And yet, it treated the attack on the World Trade Center, the Attack on the Khobar Towers, the attack on the embassies in Tanzania and Uganda -- as a form of crime and not as a form of war.
In the 1990's, America slept and Israel dreamed.
The United States awoke on September 2001. Israel awoke in September 2000.
Like the left and like the reverie that we had in the United States, the secular Messianism was intoxicated with the idea that history had changed from a history based on military and political conflict to one in which the ground rules were set by markets and technology. This was the infatuation with globalization as the great leveler and the abolisher of things like politics, war, and international conflict. This kind of geo-economics was widely accepted in the early post-cold era.
It was September 11th that abolished that illusion. It taught us in America there are enemies, they are ideological, they care nothing for economics, and they will use whatever military power they have as a means to achieve their ideological ends. This is the old history, perhaps the oldest history of all, the war of one god against another. No new history, no break in history, no redemption from history.
The other source of this secular Messianism in the Israeli context was the success of the European Union, which was seen as a model for peace in the Middle East. There was talk of the Israel, Palestinian, and Jordan becoming a new Benelux, with common markets, open borders, friendship, and harmony.
Indeed, if you look at the Oslo, of course there is page upon page of all of these ideas of cooperation on economics, on technology, on environment, all which in retrospect appear absurd. And indeed, this entire idea of the Benelux on the Jordan looks insane in retrospect, but I believe that it was insane from the very beginning, when it was first proposed ten years ago.
There are such obvious differences between the European situation and the Middle Eastern one. First is that the period of harmony, integration, and commodity among the Europeans happened only after the utter and total defeat of one party. It did not come from long negotiations between France and Germany at Camp David, compromising their differences over the 20th century. It came from the utter destruction of Germany and the rebuilding of a new Europe after that surrender and accommodation.
These conditions do not apply in the Middle East. The only way that that kind of peace will come definitely is the peace not of the brave but of the grave, and that means a peace that would be established with the defeat of Israel and its eradication. There is no way that Israel can utterly defeat the Arabs the way the allies defeated Germany and Japan in the 2nd World War. So that the idea of some kind of harmonious Middle Eastern Union drawing on the European mantle is drawn from a totally false historical analogy, one that is based on surrender and accommodation that could not happen in this Middle Eastern context, unless we are looking at the world through the eyes of Hamas and Hizballah.
Secondly, the Middle East is still a collagen of religious fanaticism, economic backwards, and political tyranny. It is nothing more than a mirage to transpose the situation in Europe with the harmony that came after half a millennium of conflict and in conditions of modernity to transpose those conditions to the Middle East, with a conflict as much younger and the political culture infinitely less mature. In this context, to look at the savage religious and secular conflicts going on throughout the Middle East and to believe that the most virulent of these, the conflict with Israel, can find the kind of harmonious coexistence that exists in Europe, can only be called Messianic.
Now, this is not to say that the only impulse underlying Oslo was Messianic. There was a Messianic left and there was a realistic left, if you like. The realists saw Oslo as a pragmatic way out of Israel dilemma. I believe in retrospect, as I believed at the time, that they were utterly mistaken, but at least they were not dreaming.
I think Rabin had a fairly coherent logic behind Oslo. He saw three basic changes in the world having occurred in the '90s, and he thought they would give Israel an opportunity to quickly settle the Palestinian dispute and to concentrate on the larger disputes coming in the longer run from periphery, from the missiles and the weapons of mass destruction that would soon be in the hands of Iran, Iraq, Libya, and others.
And the three events he saw were: First, the collapse of the Soviet Union, which deprived the rejectionist Arabs of the great superpower sponsor and source of economic, military, and diplomatic assistance. Second, was the victory of the United States in the Gulf War and the establishment of American hegemony in the region. Third, was the terminal condition of the PLO. Arafat had again, as always, chosen the wrong side in war, was cut off by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, ostracized by the United States, lost all of his financial and diplomatic support. The PLO was on at last legs.
Rabin thought he was cleverly exploiting the weakness of the PLO by reviving it, he imagined, just enough so it could make peace with him. With the Soviets gone, with Iraq defeated, with the US ascended, with the PLO weakened, he thought he could make a deal on this basis. He turned out to be hopelessly mistaken, both on the intentions and on the recuperative powers of the PLO once Israel had helped it out of its abyss.
It was one of the great miscalculations in diplomatic history.
Indeed, I believe Oslo will stand as perhaps the most catastrophic, self-inflicted wound by any state in modern history.
But at least in Rabin's mind, as I understood it, it was a calculation. For Peres and his counterpart on the Israeli left, it was a leap of faith. And I mean the word literally, faith.
Chesterton once said that when a man stops believing in God he doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything. In the ideologically fevered 20th century, this belief in anything often turned out to be a belief in history, history with a capital H. For the messianic left, Oslo was more than a deal. It was a realization, a ratification of a new era in history.
Rabin's Oslo was pessimistic, peace with fences, separation, divorce wearing its tenuousness. Peres' Oslo was eschatological: Benelux, geo-economics, the abolition of power politics.
Interestingly, this kind of Messianic mistiness often occurs to otherwise reasonable people, who are caught deep in the weariness of war. In 1943, upon returning from the Moscow Conference, Cordell Hull, Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of State, was similarly rhapsodic when he said, quote, "There will no longer be the need for spheres of influence, reliances on balances of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which in the unhappy past the nation throve to safeguard their security." Roosevelt himself was caught up with this vision of the UN as a kind of super session of the very idea of power politics and of the advent of a new era of the regulation of international conflict by norms and by committee.
The irony is that the United States took only a couple of years to understand the fallacy of the vision and to awake to reality. By 1947, President Truman summoned America back to the dirty, unpleasant, seemingly endless existential struggle with the new enemy, Soviet Communism.
Israel, on the other hand, labored under its illusion, did not awake to its reality for seven long years, until reality declared itself in the summer of 2000 at Camp David, when Barak's astonishingly conciliatory peace offer elicited a Palestinian counter offer of terrorism and suicide bombing.
This is not to say that peace is impossible, it is only to say that peace will always be contingent. And even that contingent peace will require the demonstration by the Arab side of its willingness, its genuine willingness, to live in acceptance of a Jewish state.
Again, that is not impossible. That is what Sadat offered, and he meant it. It is not clear that post-Sadat Egypt means it, although it has lived within the Sadatian parameters at least for reasons of prudence ever since.
But there has never been a Sadat among the Palestinians. And the idea that one can strike a real peace deal with Arafat, in the absence of a Sadat-like acceptance of the Jewish State, is indeed delusional. Until there is a genuine Arab, a genuine Palestinian acceptance of a Jewish state within whatever borders, there will be no end to history, there will only be more and more history.
Bismarck once said of the Balkans that they produce more history than they can consume, and that will be the fate of the Middle East for the foreseeable future.
Let me conclude by dealing with one objection to my characterization of the secular Messianism of the Israeli, and I might say American, left. One might ask, "Was not the original Zionist dream itself Messianic?" After all, a hundred years ago Zionism itself appeared to be a crazy dream. The idea of the ingathering of the exiles, the reestablishment of the Hebrew language, of Hebrew culture, the settling of the land, the achievement of political independence, appeared all to be, well, Messianic.
I would argue precisely the opposite. Zionism is the antithesis of Messianism. Zionism argued against waiting in the Diaspora with prayer and fervency for some Deus Ex Machina to come and to rescue the Jews. Zionism rejected the idea of waiting for an outside agent, for a Shabtai Zvi and a Bar Kochva. Zionism is supremely an ideology of self-reliance, of self-realization. It refuses to depend on others, it postulates no sudden change in the psychology of enemies, it postulates no change in human nature, it postulates no discontinuity in history.
Zionism accepted the world precisely as it was, and decided that precisely because the world was as it was, the Jews had no future in the Diaspora and would have to build their future in Zion. Most of all, they understood that the building of Zion would depend on Jewish action, Jewish initiative, Jewish courage. They had to go out and to build a state themselves, and they did.
Oslo, on the other hand, a supreme expression of post-Zionist Messianism, was entirely contrary to that spirit. Why? Because of its passivity, its reliance on an almost quasi-religious change of heart among Israel's enemies. It is an acceptance of Israel by people who daily in their propaganda, in their sermons, in their pedagogies, anatomize the very idea of the Jewish State. It expected a renunciation of terrorism by people who practice, support, and fund and glorify it, and who had been doing that for twenty years, thirty years. It believed in entrusting the security, the safety, perhaps even the very existence of the Jewish state into the hands of sworn enemies.
We have now learned, to our sadness and horror, that one cannot contract out the safety of the Zionist experiment to others, most especially to Arafat and the PLO. That was the premise of Oslo and it has proven to be catastrophic.
I repeat, in the 1990's America slept, and Israel dreamt.
The only good news is that Israel has awoken from that reverie, the most disastrous Messianic seduction since Shabtai Zvi. Shabatianism survived nonetheless for centuries; Osloism still has its cultic adherence. But the body of the Jewish people have awoken, let us hope not too late, and once and for all determined never again to succumb to the Messianic temptation.
Thank you very much.
Oslo was a clear and obvious fraud from the start, serving only to draw the battle lines in the next war.
The massive delusion necessary to convince anyone in 1993 that it was possible for Israel to make peace with the bloody little Egyptian terrorist and pathological liar, Yasser Arafat (a supporter of Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War in 1991), is almost supernatural in its darkness.
For Oslo and 9/11 Israel took 39 SCUDs without response. For Oslo and 9/11 the US failed to go to Baghdad. For Oslo and 9/11 the civilized West embraced the lie of a "new world order."
And we still have a jihad to destroy.
the Clinton Administration for eight years made the '90s a holiday from history. It made the work of foreign policy the work of accumulating and signing treaties -- on buying weapons and chemical weapons, on disarm of it, on nonproliferation, on landmines, on everything -- with absolutely no effect on the real world. And yet, it treated the attack on the World Trade Center, the Attack on the Khobar Towers, the attack on the embassies in Tanzania and Uganda -- as a form of crime and not as a form of war.In the 1990's, America slept and Israel dreamed.
The United States awoke on September 2001. Israel awoke in September 2000.
To me Oslo was a fraud, sham, and delusion from the beginning, and I was somewhat amazed that more people did not see it as such.
Land- won by blood and iron- in exchange for promises from a known terrorist?
Seemed almost criminally insane to me...
As for treaties? Just look at the history of WWII- the road to that was littered with treaties, and "protocols" and all sorts of agreeents... and just how much good did they do? Zilch.
Shimon say... Read it and weep
I read an Asia Africa article today from the Newsstand, and apparently the Nobel peace prize judges of Sweden are now regretting they gave Peres the prize with Arafat, because Peres, while in government, did not stop Sharon or attempt hard enough to stop Sharon in Jenin. Their scoobidooesque Mystery machine imagination lead them to the following comment: "it would be deplorable if one Nobel Peace prize winner ended up killing Arafat, the other co-winner"
Well, I guess, as a Jew, Peres better wake up and smell the coffee. Antisemitism runs high enough that even him is now hated in the European intellectual circles he has spent his entire lifetime courting... and he does not realize it...
Read Shimon and weep indeed, I guess he is not socialist and proletarian underdog enough compared to Arafat, he is just another rich successful Jew who won't share and will only spread his arrogance (sarcasm) ... those rag heads and red hair punks of Sweden are now the popular vulgarity of the day ... even Marx would be rejected by these people today...
oh and who is this advisor of CLinton, Simon Malley. His articles in there were full of hatred in a mixture of irrational NaziFascistSocialistCommunist vulgar picturesque characterisation of the situation, calling Bush and Sharon guilty.
All believing Jews, Chassidic or their opponants, Modern Orthodox or Hesder believe in the coming of Moshiach. Non observant Jews, or secularists consistantly point to the great leaders of Judaism and the hope of the masses that that leader might be Moshiach and use it to claim that this tenet of Judaism is somehow extreme.
If the belief in a Moshiach is extreme, than so is the belief that manna fell from heaven.
Joshua 1:1 Now after the death of Moses the servant of the LORD it came to pass, that the LORD spake unto Joshua the son of Nun, Moses' minister, saying, 2 Moses my servant is dead; now therefore arise, go over this Jordan, thou, and all this people, unto the land which I do give to them, [even] to the children of Israel. 3 Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses. 4 From the wilderness and this Lebanon even unto the great river, the river Euphrates , all the land of the Hittites, and unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun, shall be your coast. 5 There shall not any man be able to stand before thee all the days of thy life: as I was with Moses, [so] I will be with thee: I will not fail thee, nor forsake thee. 6 Be strong and of a good courage: for unto this people shalt thou divide for an inheritance the land, which I sware unto their fathers to give them.
Numbers 33:50 And the LORD spake unto Moses in the plains of Moab by Jordan [near] Jericho, saying, 51 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye are passed over Jordan into the land of Canaan; 52 Then ye shall drive out all the inhabitants of the land from before you, and destroy all their pictures, and destroy all their molten images, and quite pluck down all their high places: 53 And ye shall dispossess [the inhabitants] of the land, and dwell therein: for I have given you the land to possess it. 54 And ye shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance among your families: [and] to the more ye shall give the more inheritance, and to the fewer ye shall give the less inheritance: every man's [inheritance] shall be in the place where his lot falleth; according to the tribes of your fathers ye shall inherit. {give the more...: Heb. multiply his inheritance} {give the less...: Heb. diminish his inheritance} 55 But if ye will not drive out the inhabitants of the land from before you; then it shall come to pass, that those which ye let remain of them [shall be] pricks in your eyes, and thorns in your sides, and shall vex you in the land wherein ye dwell.
Krauthammer, one of the few American columnists to warn from the start that the Oslo peace accords were a fraud and deception that were doomed to failure, said that talk of Israeli-Palestinian economic and technological cooperation as espoused in Oslo was an "insane" idea which was based on a "dangerous mirage" of those who sought to transpose the entirely different idea of EU cooperation on the Middle East.
Well said. I agree with that.
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