Perfidy
Israel faces the prospect of being ruled by a government led by Ehud Olmert, chairman of Kadima, a party that renounces all ideologies, hence a party with no past, no moral values, hence no Jewish values—hence a party that has renounced Judaism. Such a party, by definition, can only consist of unmitigated Egotists. Such a party can only consist of traitors—traitors of the Jewish people and of the Jewish State of Israel.
Is it not remarkable that a prominent rabbi and a university president joined this mindless and soulless party? Is it any wonder, however, that Ehud Olmert has named Shimon Peres as one of his projected deputy prime ministers—Peres, celebrated for his mindless and arrogant statement, “I have become totally tired of history, because I feel history is a long misunderstanding.” Shimon Peres is indeed a fitting leader of Kadima, a party of fools and opportunists, but above all, of traitors to the heritage of the Jewish people.
Before an innocents vote for such a party, let me remind them of Ben Hecht’s Perfidy, one of the most powerful books of the 20th century.
Hecht’s book documents not only the deeds of Rudolf Kastner, who collaborated with Eichmann’s plan to exterminate 800,000 Hungarian Jews, but also the complicity of the most prominent founders of the State of Israel. I mention this lest we forget that Jewish politicians betrayed the Jewish people in the past, have done so only yesterday, and are primed to do so tomorrow. We dare not remain silent.
“In my own time,” writes Hecht, “governments have taken the place of people. They have also taken the place of G-d. Governments speak for people … and determine, absurdly, their lives and deaths.” This was not so of the Jewish people in days of old, when our Prophets admonished kings and kingdoms, or when our Sages taught us the laws of piety and of public morality. In those days, “in the soul of the Jews, in his tabernacle and kitchen, there was only one Kingdom—that of G-d.”
Hecht asks: “What happened to this fine heritage when Jews finally fashioned a government of their own in Israel; what happened to Jews when they became politicians, what happened to a piety, a sense of honor, and a brotherly love that 2,500 years of anti-Semitism were unable to disturb in the Jewish soul?”
What happened is that Egoism and impersonal authority arose and removed piety and honor and brotherly love from public life.
There is no devilish or disgraceful deed, writes Hecht, “that cannot be shined up into a patriotic necessity by the right propaganda [such as the propaganda about ‘peace’ or ‘disengagement. or a ‘two-state solution’ to the Israel-Arab conflict]. All that is needed is for people to believe in their duly elected leaders.”
Gentiles have also been guilty of perfidious deeds. But in view of the centuries of torture to which the Jews have been subjected by the gentile world, it is doubly disturbing when Jews betray their own people, or remain silent in the face of perfidy.
Again Hecht: “The Jews have of necessity been good traders and bright salesmen, although they never before sold what a government clique has been selling [yesterday] to the Germans [and today to Arab Nazis]—their loyalty to their dead, their moral judgment of their enemies.”
Thus it was when Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Yasser Arafat, despite his responsibility for the murders of Jews—nay, his genocidal intentions toward the Jewish state.
Hecht reminds us that “The ancient Greeks believed that unpunished crimes brought plagues to the people who harbored them. They sought out and punished the evil doers in order to purify human life.”
Today the government of Israel rewards the murderers of the Jewish people with land, as Benjamin Netanyahu did when he gave Arabs 80% of Hebron, and as Ariel Sharon did when he dispossessed and deported Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria and turned their land over to Arab terrorists.
This is the path of perfidy to which Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, is committed. Is it not obvious that Kadima, mindless of the past, can have no future? But therefore a vote for Kadima is a vote for nihilism or nothingness.
