The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

BY PROF. PAUL EIDELBERG

Part I. National Amnesia

We are very much our memories. Memory endows us with a sense of personal identity. A total amnesiac must recreate his or her identity—no easy task. Imagine how infinitely difficult it would be for a people to create a new identity if it were afflicted by national amnesia, i.e., had lost its historical memory!

National amnesia is on the agenda of the Left. This is what most distinguishes the Left from the Right in Israel. Enough to mention Shimon Peres, who mindlessly declared, “I have become totally tired of history, because I feel history is a long misunderstanding.”

In his marvelous novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera writes: “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” This encapsulates the struggle of the Right against the Left. In Israel the Left does not want to be reminded of the horrific consequences of the Oslo or Israel-PLO Agreement, for which the Left’s guru, Shimon Peres, is largely responsible.

It is now widely known that Oslo, as intended by the Left, entails the loss of Judea and Samaria including the Old City and the Temple Mount. What is not widely known is that Oslo was and remains nothing less than the Left’s attempt to destroy the historical memory of the Jewish people. So long as Jews retained Judea and Samaria, most Jews in Israel would remain bonded to the teachings of their prophets and sages, with whom Judea and Samaria are so intimately connected. This bond had to be severed: Judaism had to be eviscerated and the Jewish soul deconstructed. This was the Left’s hidden purpose at Oslo.

As Yoram Hazony points out: “In some crucial way, the Oslo agreement had signaled the end of the [anti-Zionist] mission, a turn of events that the celebrated author David Grossman described—mimicking the language of the accords, which called for an Israel military redeployment—as a ‘redeployment from entire regions of our soul.’”

Consistent therewith, the Rabin-Peres government erased the words “Judaism,” Zionism,” and “Eretz Israel” from the Soldiers Code of Ethics, and all but eliminated the Jewish content from the public school curriculum. The Left’s goal was to transform the Jewish state into a “state of its citizens” (the only way the Left could retain power, given its dependency on the Arab vote). Thus, while Arafat’s Palestinian Authority proceeded to indoctrinate a generation of Arab children to destroy Jewish bodies, the Rabin-Peres government proceeded to destroy a generation of Jewish souls. Future generations of Jews would be afflicted by national amnesia.

The Left’s assault on memory is a basic but unknown reason for the Muslim hatred of the West. Under the date line January 9, 1930, the Cairo newspaper al-Fatah makes the following remark about European colonizers:

The real danger approaches us from the spiritual war that Europe is methodically conducting against the spirit of the Orientals in general and of Muslims in particular, with the aid of its philosophical books, novels, theaters and films, and its language. The aim of this concerted action is of a psychological nature—to cut off the Oriental peoples from their past.

As pointed out in my book, A Jewish Philosophy of History,

Without a past there is no history; without a history there is no cultural or national identity. The loss of cultural identity is precisely what Muslims so much fear and hate about the West. Notice, however, that what foreign colonialists had allegedly done in Egypt is exactly what ultra-secular Jews have in fact been doing to their own people in Israel: depriving them of cultural or national identity…. If these ultra-secularists were to succeed, so that Israel did indeed become a “state of its citizens,” then this irreligious state could become an even greater threat to Islamic civilization—reason for Muslims to strive for Israel’s destruction!

The Left’s assault on Jewish memory is actually an assault on civilized society, for what is a civilized society but one that preserves the accumulated wisdom of the past, and what is this but the stored memory of a people? This applies to the Jews above all other nations! For the Jews are the people of universal history. What is the Bible of Israel if not the first and most comprehensive philosophy of history—from the birth or big bang of the universe to the rebirth of Israel?

This is what the Left is trying to erase from the Jewish psyche—the Jew’s historical memory, on which the moral progress of mankind ultimately depends.

Part II. Democracy and Memory

The historical or collective memory of a people is obviously conveyed by the written and spoken word. To promote national amnesia, the Left must control the news media. Ever since the Six-Day War of June 1967, when Israel regained Judea and Samaria and the Old City of Jerusalem—fulfilling another biblical prophecy—the Left has joined the nations of the world to undo that miracle. Judea and Samaria had to be erased from the historical memory of the Jewish people.

To undo the miracle of the Six-Day War, the leftwing-controlled media transformed Judea and Samaria into the “West Bank.” So often have Judea and Samaria been called the “West Bank” that even the Right has succumbed to this semantic subversion. The first appearance of this misnomer in an international legal document will be found in the 1978 Camp David Accords signed by none other than Menachem Begin! Twenty-five years later, another prime minister, Ariel Sharon, referred to Judea and Samaria as “occupied territory.” Sharon thereby aided and abetted the war against the historical memory of the Jewish people.

The Left also dominates the academic media. To erase the historical memory of Jewish youth, their mentors must deemphasize or place in question the cherished beliefs and values of the Jewish people. This can be done in various ways which reinforce each other. One way is to offer courses in comparative religion, which places all religions on the same level and thereby strips Judaism of universal validity. A second way is to portray the Torah as a human product by means of “biblical criticism.” A third way is to foster the doctrine of historical or moral relativism, which denies the existence of trans-historical or absolute truths.

There is a fourth and more subtle way to erase the historical memory of the Jewish people, and that is by means of democracy, the religion of modernity. To begin with, democracy has emphatically replaced Zionism as the basis for Israel’s legitimacy. Indeed, democracy has become the supreme law of what is just and unjust, as well as the highest standard of what is goop and bad or worthy of praise. Israeli politicians, judges, intellectuals, and not a few rabbis derive their respectability by ever extolling Israel as a democracy (the “only democracy in the Middle East”). But this is not all. Consider the two cardinal principles of democracy, freedom and equality. Devoid of rational and ethical constraints, these two principles are distorting and destroying the historical memory of the Jewish people.

Before continuing, I should point out that both freedom and equality are basic principles of the Torah, for they are derived from the idea of man’s creation in the image of God. As a consequence, freedom and equality, in the context of the Torah, are graced and constrained by the rationality and ethics of the Ten Commandments. In contrast, nothing in the concept of democracy logically entails the existence of God and the Ten Commandments, as may be seen from recent judicial rulings in the United States.

Lacking rational and ethical constraints, contemporary democracy insists on unrestrained freedom of speech and press. This has opened the floodgates of pornography, a multibillion dollar industry in the West. Enter Israel’s Supreme Court president Aharon Barak, the high priest of the Left, who declared, “one man’s pornography is another man’s art.” The permissiveness of Barak’s vulgar relativism, apart from being a confession of intellectual and moral bankruptcy, undermines the family by undermining modesty, for to legalize pornography is to makes public that which ought to remain private. Note, too, that pornography fosters obscenity—a staple of the entertainment media. Obscenity degrades speech, the very faculty that distinguishes the human from the subhuman.

As for the democratic principle of equality, it leads from the equality of all individuals to the equality of all generations. Hence there is no essential reason why Jews today should revere let alone defer to the teachings of their prophets and sages. Democratic equality thus tends to dissolve a people’s historical memory, and no people have a longer and richer historical memory than the Jews.

Democratic equality also levels moral distinctions. All “life-styles,” homosexuality and gay marriages included, become equal. This is egalitarianism, is the ideology of democracy in process of decay. Understood as an ideology, egalitarianism subordinates all values to equality. No country is more steeped in egalitarianism than Israel. Jews here have subordinated even their survival to equality. Suffice to mention the egalitarian principle of “one adult/one vote.” Given the Arab birth rate versus that of Jews, one adult/one vote must sooner to later lead to the Arabization of the Jewish state. The historical consciousness of the Jews will evaporate.

To criticize egalitarianism is to attack the narrow mentality of the Left, rooted in the eighteenth- century “Enlightenment.” The philosophers of that century regarded the biblical tradition as their primary competitor for the minds of men. Armed with a narrow rationalism, they attacked “revelation,” the foundation of the biblical tradition. This could not but undermine the concept and historical significance of the Chosen People. The Left regards the concept of the Chosen People with fear-filled abhorrence. Leftists label any denial of complete equality among ethnic groups and nations as “racism.” As Alexis de Tocqueville discerned, the more equal people become the more intolerant they become of any vestige of inequality.

So indiscriminate is the egalitarianism of the Left that it insists on the equal right of Arabs to an independent and sovereign state in Judea and Samaria, even though an overwhelming majority of the Arabs in question applaud the use of children as human bombs and are dedicated to Israel’s destruction! Egalitarianism has thus eventuated in suicidal madness.

Such is the primacy of equality among the Left that it will subordinate even freedom to that totalitarian principle, especially the Right’s freedom of speech! This is precisely what leftists did in the aftermath of the Rabin assassination, the specter of which has been raised by Labor’s surrogate prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to intimidate rightwing opposition to his transfer plan—Rabin’s or Oslo’s legacy. This is nothing but an attempt to stifle the freedom of those who want to preserve the Jewish people’s historical memory, whose depth and breadth and sanctity depend on Jewish retention of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. At stake are Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, which Jews dare not forget.

Part III. Infantocracy or Gerontocracy?

To lose one’s memory and thus one’s past is to become a child or childlike adult. Having no past, a child has no conception of what is good and bad, right and wrong. Like an animal, a child is amoral, even shameless. Amoral and shameless, a childlike adult does not discriminate between good men and villains and may hobnob with one as well as with the other.

This describes Israeli politicians who have consorted with, and continue to consort with, Arab despots. I am of course alluding to politicians that “negotiate” or have “negotiated” with Yasser Arafat or other members of his Palestinian Authority—terrorists responsible for the murder of hundreds of Jewish men, women, and children. A mature person, a person who can be held legally responsible for his acts, must obviously be capable of distinguishing between good and evil. But we would expect such a person to be cognizant of the simple fact that how individuals have behaved in the past is indicative of how they will behave in the future. A mature person, therefore, will not provide terrorists with arms to prevent terrorism. He may be mature in other respects, for example, he may be skilled in campaigning for and obtaining public office. But a person who arms Arab terrorists should not be dismissed merely as a bloody fool; he should either be consigned to a madhouse or charged with complicity in murder should his folly result in the death of any Jew. Only one having a juvenile mentality would commit such idiocy, and only adolescent minds—they may well be journalists and even political scientists—would find reasons to justify such inanity. Common sense alone would prevent such childish but murderous absurdity.

It so happens, however, that Shimon Peres, an octogenarian, and Ariel Sharon, a septuagenarian, fall into the category of childlike adults who deem it wise to arm Arab Jew-killers. Both of these aged politicians range abroad with smiling faces, apparently insensitive to the bloodshed Jews have suffered as a result of their folly. Not that younger politicians are immune to criminal stupidity. Nevertheless, there is no fool like an old fool. Moreover, an old fool is likely to be more callous. It is worth noting that, Maimonides, in the Fourteenth Book of his Mishneh Torah, excludes aged men from membership in the Sanhedrin because compassion or sensitivity to suffering tends to diminish with advancing age. Who does not know, however, that moral insensitivity is characteristic of children? Indeed, the cruelty of children is quite remarkable (recall Graham Greene, Lord of the Flies); and of course their fantasies are notorious. Let us not mince words. To give Arab Jew-killers arms to protect Jews—as Peres prescribed in that fantasy called the Oslo Agreement—is infantile as well as criminal. The same may be said of Sharon. Even though Israel has been soaking in its own blood for ten years because of Peres’ puerility, Sharon is anxious to give arms to Arab terrorists to maintain law and order in Gaza! As the prophet Isaiah put it, “I shall make their knowledge foolish” (44:25).

Is this stupidity-cum-irresponsibility inevitable among adults devoid of memory? The memory of a human being is not the memory of a computer. To remember that Jewish men, women, and children have been murdered by Arab terrorists is to remember not merely numerical data but events charged with emotion and informed by moral judgment. Computers do not feel moral outrage or the desire for vengeance. Yet this emotional and moral void seems to describe Shimon Peres, the apologist of Yasser Arafat, and Ariel Sharon, who shuns thinking in terms of “black and white” and who has thereby allowed Arafat to slaughter an “expendable” number Jews. Jewish blood is the lubricant required for the realization of a Sharon’s fantasy of a Palestinian state abiding in peace with the Jewish state of Israel. The memory of these politicians seems to be devoid of that which distinguishes the human from the subhuman.

A nation led by such men may well be regarded as an infantocracy or, what is practically the equivalent, a gerontocracy. Which calls to mind the words of Isaiah: “And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them” (3:4).