The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

The day before Prime Minister Menachem Begin went to the Camp David Summit of September 1978, the present writer met and warned him that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was pursuing a phased strategy to destroy Israel. Sadat put it this way in an interview with al-Anwar on June 22, 1975: “The effort of our generation is to return to the 1967 borders. Afterward the next generation will carry the responsibility.”

The PLO, Egypt’s creation, has been pursuing this phased strategy. Israel’s government knows this. It knows that:

1. Yasser Arafat’s top deputy, Abu Iyad (assassinated in Tunis) declared: “Setting up a Palestinian state on a portion of the soil of Palestine is a phase towards the final objective—to establish a state in all of Palestine” (December 18, 1988, Al-Siyassa, Kuwait daily). (more…)

1. The Nazis came to power by a democratic election.

2. Hamas came to power by a democratic election.

3. Ariel Sharon came to power by a democratic election and adopted a policy rejected by an overwhelming majority of the public.

4. Sharon founded a party, Kadima, which gained control of the government without having competed in any democratic election. (more…)

When George Orwell coined the spine-chilling line, “A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses,” he was referring primarily to England’s intelligentsia—the deaf, blind, mutes who were incapable of recognizing the enormity of evil that had come to power in Hitler’s Germany (as well as in Stalinist Russia).

Orwell saw that moral relativism had stupefied the mentality of university professors, novelists, and of course journalists. This stupefaction, he saw, had influenced the foreign policy of Britain’s political elites vis-à-vis Nazi Germany. Instead of preventing German rearmament and thereby precluding evil’s ascendancy in that country, or by failing to nip German expansionism in the bud, Britain’s ruling elites obscured the looming danger and pursued the policy of appeasement that led to World War II.

The mentality of that unteachable generation is very much alive in Israel. (more…)

In The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (Transaction Publishers, 2006), Edward Alexander and Paul Bogdanor have assembled eighteen essays that strip away the prophetic robes of Israel’s Jewish detractors. Jews who hate Israel and compete with unabashed antisemites in the savagery and unscrupulousness of their attacks on the Jewish state are the “accusers” in the subtitle of this book; Israel’s “defenders” are its writers.

Before 1967, Israel had the overwhelming support of world opinion. So long as Israel’s existence was in harmony with politically correct assumptions, it was supported, or at least accepted, by the majority of “progressive” Jews, especially in the wake of the Holocaust. This is no longer the case. (more…)

We are approaching the end of an era. Politics and democracy have entered their terminal stage. Party government has become nothing more than a struggle for power, and parliaments are but arenas for self-aggrandizement. This was inevitable. It was inevitable because, in its modern conception, democracy separated politics from morality. As a consequence, individual egoism was bound to supplant family and communal values.

Democracy has fulfilled its historical function. Its two cardinal principles, freedom and equality, liberated the acquisitive instincts, facilitated the conquest of nature, alleviated widespread toil and poverty, and opened the door to talents. But while men and women in democratic countries enjoy unprecedented freedom and equality as well as material abundance, a frightful number find their lives lonely and meaningless. The reason is not far to seek: democracy is the dissolver of ideologies, of traditional beliefs and values which alone can endow people with a sense of solidarity and purpose. (more…)

Shades of Yitzhak Rabin! The campaign to sanctify Ariel Sharon has begun. While the media’s melodrama surrounding his stroke is vintage Hollywood, the fiction of his having charted a new course for Israel promising peace is theater of the absurd. I sincerely hope Mr. Sharon survives his illness. But please, let’s not bury the truth.

Pundits everywhere ignore the treachery of this prime minister, who implemented Labor’s policy of unilateral disengagement, a policy rejected by an overwhelming majority of the people in the 2003 election. Some 8,000 Jews were expelled from their homes in Gaza; their lives have been shattered; and Gaza has become the base of world terrorism. With weapons flooding into Gaza and entering Judea and Samaria, all of Israel is now threatened—thanks to Ariel Sharon. (more…)

A Jewish Philosophy of History by Paul Eidelberg
Reviewed by Dr. Eugene Narrett

This erudite and ambitious work examines the development of philosophy, ethics, science and theologies from ancient times to the present, tracing the impact throughout of Jewish understandings of God, man and nature. The result is remarkable in its scope, clarity, practical teachings and emotional impact. A Jewish Philosophy of History is in many ways a searching elaboration of good news—many people would say the best possible news,—the rational means and empirically demonstrable stages by which Israel can and will be redeemed. (more…)