Not for the spineless........

Not For The Spineless

By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Israel is at war, a war for its very survival. One would hardly know this judging from Israel’s Neronian Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. Like Nero, Sharon fiddles while his country burns, but unlike Nero, Sharon doesn’t know he’s fiddling.

Moral cowardice permeates the Sharon government. No outrage by Likud ministers when Sharon reneged on his pledge to abide by his party’s referendum on unilateral disengagement—the policy he campaigned against in the January 2003 election.

And of course no public denunciation of Sharon’s electoral thievery and political skullduggery. But what can one expect from people that have been conditioned by Israeli governments to tolerate the murder and maiming even of Jewish women and children? What can one expect from ordinary citizens given the spineless character of Israeli prime ministers?

And what about the Israel’s general staff? Not a single general resigned from the Israel Defense Forces in protest against Sharon’s indefensible disengagement policy, or to the sacrificing of Jewish soldiers to avoid killing anything but innocent Arab civilians.

So I write for another day. Perhaps men will yet rise to take the helm of state. With them in mind I offer, or rather adapt, some guidelines which another author penned for America in its war against an enemy related to Israel’s.

I. Accept the fact that Israel is hated, not misunderstood.

A. Israel is hated because

1. Jews inhabit land which Muslims claim, rightly or wrongly, as theirs.
2. Israel is a sovereign and independent state, whereas Jews, according to Islam, are supposed to be dhimmies.
3. A Jewish majority in Israel rules an Arab minority, overturning Islam’s moral universe.
4. Israel has defeated Arab armies, thereby assaulting Arab pride—for which affront Arabs must wreak vengeance on the Jewish state.
5. Israel is an outpost of American cultural imperialism, of materialism and hedonism, which may infect and corrupt Islam.
6. Israel is a democracy, a threat to the power structure of Islamic autocracies.
7. Israel’s existence places Islam in question as well as Allah.

B. Hasbara—information programs—will not endear Jews to Arabs or Muslims.

1. Better to be feared than loved, for fear depends on you, whereas love depends on the other.
2. Truth has never been the currency of nations.

II. Israel’s security depends on its ability to kill its enemies.

A. Daintily applying military power—such as targeted killings and brief incursions into Arab-held territory—only prolongs the war.

1. Moderation or self-restraint in war arouses Arab contempt for Israel
2. Moderation in war undermines martial virtue and undermines the soldier’s confidence in the justice of Israel’s cause.

B. To secure its way of life, Israel will have to use military force in the way the U.S. used military force in France and on the Pacific Islands, and from skies over Dresden and Tokyo.

1. Progress in war must be measured by the pace of killing and, sorry to say, by body counts.
2. Among Israel’s enemies the dead will include as many or more civilians as combatants because most of Israel’s enemies wear no uniforms or provide havens for those who do.
3. This bloody-mindedness may not be admirable, but it will shorten the war and reduce casualties on both sides.

III. Cant will kill more and more Jews

A. Cease trying to make war civilized.

1. Enough of this deadly nonsense that “self-restraint is strength”!
2. Stop the moral clap trap about “purity of arms.”

B. Israel, to repeat, is in a war for survival.

1. Stop moralizing by saying “we do not want to stoop to the level of our enemies”—which is sheer cant, the language of moral cowardice and defeat.
2. War is hell, hell, hell. American ferocity in World War II did not damage the nation’s moral fiber.
3. Don’t worry about world opinion. Israel is condemned for killing one terrorist. Kill as many as possible in the shortest possible time, but do not stop until the enemy is completely disarmed and utterly incapable of waging war another day.

No doubt some readers will be outraged by these guidelines. Would that such rage would erupt among Jews whose fellow-citizens were reduced to human debris.