Bill Mehlman*

by Victor Sharpe, 2006, 174 pp.

Nothing is more reflective of the myths which have attached themselves like barnacles to the 60 year-old Arab-Israel conflict than the notion that it surpasses the understanding of all but the most prolix “experts.”

In fact, nothing could be further from the truth, as Victor Sharpe, a featured contributor to the Israel Hasbara Committee’s widely read “Israpundit” blog makes clear in Politicide, a compelling  174-page disassemblage and dissection of the conflict in all its component parts.  The “pattern,” as Sharpe terms it, has been evident since Israel’s reestablishment in 1948:

Arabs start a war to kill Jews, Arabs lose the war and then claim

Victimhood.  The duped world then rushes in with aid and

sympathy for the Arab aggressor.  The Arabs then start yet

another war.

As long as repeated aggression bears no penalty and the repeated aggressor is repeatedly rewarded for trying to “utterly destroy its neighbor,” why should anybody be surprised at the Arab-Israel conflict’s defiance of all attempts at resolution. Israel’s obliteration is the  only resolution acceptable to its foes and given enough opportunities, they’ve no doubt of  eventual success.  Those who still failed to discern the “pattern” in the summer of 2006 as Politicide was going to press and 4,000  Hezbollah rockets were falling on Haifa and the Galilee, will get another chance in a post-Annapolis milieu featuring a post-Zionist Israel stripped to its undergarments suing for peace from its politicidal neighbors and support from an “international community” that wouldn’t waste a tear at its disappearance.

Bullet Train

In its apotheotic pursuit of a “peace” its enemies do not and never have had in stock, an Israel led by the most corrupt and inept government in its history has jumped aboard a bullet train to “politicide,” that stiletto word the late Abba Eban coined  to define  the act of murdering a sovereign state.  Can the train still be stopped? Highly unlikely  by a political echelon committed to the creation a sovereign terrorist entity between itself and the Jordan River, the handover of half its capital to the gunmen of Fatah, Tanzim and the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades and the restoration of the Syrian Army to the Golan Heights.  However, assuming the people of Israel recover enough of their benumbed senses, to replace Olmert & Co. with a government driven by a marginal sense of national self-preservation, they can yet look to a future for their land.  With the best airforce, pilot for pilot, in the world, a high-tech navy, an army that can still give a good account of itself if intelligently led and defensible borders  --  backed by the most robust economy in the Middle East – there is no combination of enemy forces, conventional or asymmetrical,  Israel could not defeat.

But another battlefield triumph would little enhance Israel’s long term prospects, the author avers, unless the Jewish state is prepared to invest a similar effort in winning the  more important battle of ideas, “the metaphysical war,” as he so aptly labels it. “It is not enough for Israel to win physical wars,” he warns. “It must win the hearts and minds of the people of the world.” To date, Sharpe  rates Israel’s performance on that stage  a “dismal failure.”   His advice to the Jewish state and its supporters is to stop trying to play catch-up with an Arab propaganda steamroller that deftly alters course every time one of its bogus charges against Israel is belatedly proven groundless.  It’s a loser’s game. “Go on the attack,” he declares, blast that infernal machine with  the cannon of simple, emotionally emotive  truths  about the Arabs’ continued rejection of peace, their shameless indoctrination of their children with  Jew-hatred, their unshakeable commitment to Israel’s destruction.  “It is the Arabs and their supporters,” the author asserts, “who must be maneuvered out onto the stony ground of having to defend themselves against powerful accusations made repeatedly and endlessly.”

Conjunction of Evils

Tragically, the battle for Israel’s survival is not confined to external enemies. Aligned with the forces of Islamic anti-Semitism, “Palestinization” and  its “useful idiots” on the left and the Jew-haters of the extreme right -- a “conjunction of evils [that] has conjoined to threaten anew the Jews at the dawn of the 21st Century” – is perhaps the most dangerous enemy of them all, “the enemy within.”  Sharpe portrays them as a “lunatic fringe” of Jews, Israeli and Diaspora, that “hates its Jewish roots and is more than happy to divest itself of Jewish history in the Land and willingly to give away even Jerusalem… so that they can continue to delude themselves into believing that ‘land for peace’ will satisfy the Arabs.”  Masquerading as university “professors,” these tenured agitpropists and their media acolytes have succeeded in rendering the better part of a generation of young Jews so confused and ambivalent about the justice of Israel’s cause they are unable or unwilling to defend it , and a  smaller but  growing part so turned off by  Zionism that they’ve come to equate it with apartheid oppression.

The sole long-term antidote to this poison, a meaningful Zionist-oriented Jewish educational system, might require decades to show results even given the unlikely abandonment by the liberal American Jewish establishment and its counterpart in  Israel of their fervent opposition to any such  development. Meanwhile, how does Israel cope with the more immediate problem of terrorism, which has plagued it for 60 years and can only accelerate with the inevitable post-Annapolis crash landing.  Politicide’s  proposed solution won’t find favor with the fanasists who invested so much of their capital in that Mad Hatter’s tea party, but it just might get the enemy’s attention. The answer to Arab aggression, the book avers is “to act in ways that make it so painful for the aggressors that they will realize that their violence has become horribly counter-productive.”  

Assuming that nothing could hold a candle to the pain felt by Israel’s enemies at the sight of  Jewish construction cranes rising  across the Green Line.  Sharpe’s “Zionistic” response  to terrorism would consist of  building, restoring and creating Jewish communities throughout Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan  Heights “whenever the Arabs…commit acts of aggression against the Jewish state and its long suffering people.  Such new and restored Jewish communities would remain as permanent facts on the ground… This should and must be official Israeli policy,” he adds. “Only then and with their own eyes will the Arabs see where their aggression is taking them.”.

Crocodiles

While Sharpe didn’t set out to compose an Israeli survival manual,  Politicide is that rare book that offers both a lucid exposition of the dangers confronting  the Jewish state and pragmatic, reality-based solutions. While they do not dovetail with the prevailing Israeli  paradigm of  peace through the surrender of vital territorial and historic assets and subservience to foreign masters, they’ve got it all over the appeasement Churchill memorably compared to “feeding the crocodile.”  He may eat you last, but he will certainly eat you.  For the crocodile named Hamas, the author recommends a diet of the heaviest artillery in Israel’s armory:

They will do all in their power to fulfill their religious

duty to destroy Israel – and no Western pleas will

stop them.  Only by unleashing massive and total war

upon them can there ever be a solution…

But even that, Sharpe cautions, will not avail the Jewish state if it continues to feed the most dangerous crocodile of them all – post-Zionist Israeli complacency. “The Jew learns not by way of reason but from catastrophe,” the author quotes the 19th Century Jewish philosopher Dr. Max Nordau remarking in an aside to national Zionism’s founding father, Vladimir Jabotinsky.  “He won’t buy an umbrella merely because he sees clouds in the sky. He waits until he is drenched and catches pneumonia.”

The clouds above Israel have gathered thick and black. Let us hope the umbrellas are at the ready.

*Bill Mehlman is the Israel representative of Americans For A Safe Israel and co-editor of the Jerusalem-based  ZionNet internet magazine www.zionnet.net.