Europeanization of Israel

[Yahoshua]

The Europeanization of Israel
Sarah Honig, THE JERUSALEM POST
September 7, 2006

Wherever we tune in these days, we hear somber-voiced pundits expound
on how Israel can't defeat Hizbullah. Some self-professed omniscients
- who keep prattling despite having never missed an opportunity to get
everything thoroughly wrong - go as far as to suggest we now sacrifice
the Golan to appease Hizbullah's Syrian masters and mollify Assad Jr.
a tad, just enough to tamper with his fixation on the bogeys from
Teheran.

Wonders never cease. The wishful-thinkers who brought us Oslo,
followed it up with May 2000's midnight escape from Lebanon and topped
everything off with their disengagement folly apparently will never
say die.

You can count on them to revive the threat to Israel's heartland via
Olmert's only temporarily suspended convergence/realignment that would
turn Judea and Samaria into an Iranian outpost, incomparably deadlier
than southern Lebanon and Gaza. But while they're momentarily stymied
on Israel's central flank, they have discovered a new outlet for their
zeal - the Golan.

They note that everything is so idyllically pastoral there -
demonstrating how flawlessly Syria oversees its territory. Ergo - we
can relocate the border closer to home. The only missing element of
this assertion is the cause for Syrian caution precisely on this front
(not in Lebanon). While Israel controls the Heights and Damascus is at
our mercy, terror sponsor Assad is less likely to provoke us. When
Syria was on top, life in Israel below was hell. How easy and
convenient to forget.

The fact these presumptuous kibitzers omit dwelling upon is that it's
quite possible to combat Hizbullah aggression, and in a manner far
less costly than sending ill-equipped soldiers on ill-considered hikes
through Hizbullah strongholds.

Any normal country - and Israel most categorically isn't normal -
would simply destroy towns and villages that serve as rocket bases
against its civilians. Bint Jbail and Maroun el-Ras shouldn't have
been left standing. That's what America would do, or Russia, Britain
and most undoubtedly duplicitous France. One would shudder to think
how China would react. But Israel is different.
The agent of our malady - that potent pathogen undermining our
continued survival - is our excessive care about the world's opinion
of us, while the world doesn't give a hoot about Israel's fate (and
that's resorting to gross understatement).

It's a chronic Jewish syndrome now turned into a full-blown
existential hazard to the state and its people. Until we recognize,
admit and address what can only be defined as a suicidal aberration,
our self-preservation is most definitely not guaranteed.

WE IMPERATIVELY need to reset our mind-set. It's not irrelevant to
recall (and inculcate in our youth) how displeased the world has
always been with us, long before we impudently dared in 1967 not to be
annihilated, but even to actually defeat genocidal would-be
terminators and retake parts of our homeland which were under their
rule for 19 years. That was the abhorrent "occupation" on which the
world now blames all our tribulations and which earns us unparalleled
global disapproval.

But we know that they disapproved of us lots earlier. We disturbed
their peace already in the dawn of antiquity and our impertinence
persisted through crusades, inquisitions, countless exiles,
expulsions, executions (in the Savior's name or in affirmation of
Allah's glory), nationalistic uprisings (like Chmielnitski's Cossacks)
and all the way to the inevitable culmination in the systematic
Holocaust, which the world did nothing to prevent or later to
mitigate.

Throughout World War II we irritated the Americans, Brits, Russians
and French. We positively infuriated the indignant Ukrainians, Poles,
Latvians, Lithuanians, Slovaks, Croats, Hungarians, Romanians and
other enlightened humanitarians. We of course drove the Germans,
Austrians and their collaborators out of their minds, or they'd have
never sunk so low. Among Nazism's most avid collaborators were the
perpetually aggrieved Arabs, who blueprinted their own gas chambers
near Nablus.

Already preceding the "final solution," having had enough, we decided
to gather in our ancestral homeland - our resurrected old/new
sanctuary. But things there didn't go smoothly. Perfidious Albion
prevented our refugees from reaching safe haven, and Arabs instigated
bloodbaths way before that unspeakable "occupation" of 1967. It's
uncool to recall the massacres of 1920, 1921, 1929, 1936-39 and all
the incidental carnage in between.

We were ultimate underdogs, yet the world's sympathy wasn't showered
upon us. Our War of Independence was ignited by the Arab spurning of
the UN's 1947 Partition Resolution, but did the world care? Well, in a
way. It imposed an arms embargo on frail newborn Israel while its
attackers invaded, screaming "Itbah el-Yahud [slaughter the Jews]."
Immediately post-Holocaust the world still managed to discern
underlying justification for blood-curdling exhortations for our
obliteration.

NOWADAYS IT'S unperturbed by identical exhortations from the
Nasrallah/Ahmadinejad/Assad Axis.

We won't be safe until we realize that rendering ourselves more
vulnerable won't endear us to those whose outrage is remarkably
selective - to those who incredibly remained indifferent prior to,
during and after the Holocaust - those who'll never fail to detect
something distasteful about us, those put off by the fact that Jews
are always associated with "unpleasant episodes," like pogroms.

Before 1967 the collective Jewish misfortune was repressed only by a
minority of Israelis - mostly assorted communists and/or detached
eggheads. Thereafter, their psychosis became the vogue. We hankered
after normalcy. We aspired to live the good life. We yearned to be a
nation among nations. We craved the warmth of acceptance. We strove to
win this acceptance even at the expense our common sense and security.
We espoused what looked like European liberality and post-modernism.

Misguided liberal and post-modernist extremes could well be the
undoing of European civilization, but the Europeanization of Israel is
a far more urgent, clear and present danger.