The Real Conflict
At least three years before George W. Bush entered the White House in January 2001, Ariel Sharon said a Palestinian state is inevitable. Israel’s greatest warrior had succumbed to a self-fulfilling prophecy, to defeatism, in fact, to Arafat’s cunning campaign of psychological warfare.
Given Mr. Sharon’s reputation as a hawk, is it any wonder that Mr. Bush became the first American president to publicly advocate a Palestinian state?
Sharon’s self-fulfilling prophesy, repeated over and over again by the media, has demoralized the people of Israel.
That self-fulfilling prophesy has advanced the Arabs’ phased plan for the annihilation of the Jewish state.
That self-fulfilling prophecy reveals that Sharon was not only a defeatist, but also ignorant of some basic principles of military science.
Carl von Clausewitz, perhaps the greatest military scientist in the modern era, understood that to achieve excellence as a military scientist one must also possess the knowledge of a political scientist. One must understand not only the strengths and weakness of your own country and of its allies, but also the strengths and weakness of the enemy and of its allies. This is not merely a matter of taking a few courses in comparative government and international relations, because political science, properly understood, includes knowledge of the social sciences, especially psychology.
By propagating the self-fulfilling prophecy that a Palestinian state is inevitable, Sharon, the world-renowned warrior, must be held responsible—more than others—for the Palestinian Authority’s psychological, diplomatic, and political victory over this country. There is not a single nation in the world whose policy toward Israel is not warped by that prophecy. But this does not exhaust Sharon’s culpability.
Prime Minister Sharon was actually given the green light to destroy the entire leadership of the Palestinian Authority! In The High Cost of Peace (2002), Yossef Bodansky, then director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, writes: “In late June [2002], a very senior member of the Bush White House privately told a senior Israeli minister that the administration ‘would not shed a tear if you (Israel) get rid of Arafat.’ And on July 11 [2002], National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, told Israel’s Channel 2 TV News that the Bush administration resolved that the entire PA leadership should be replaced …”
More than 1,000 Jews were murdered by Arab terrorists during the premiership of Ariel Sharon—on that basis alone the worst prime minister in Israel’s history. And now Prime Minister Ehud Olmert boasts of being Sharon’s heir. He is certainly committed to Sharon’s brainless legacy.
The people of Israel must know and face the truth: They have been undermined by their democratically elected prime ministers at least since July 1992 when Yitzhak Rabin formed the government responsible for the disastrous Oslo or Israel-PLO Agreement.
Democracies do make mistakes. But one of the virtues of a genuine democracy is its inherent tendency to be a self-corrective system of government by virtue of freedom of speech and of the press—a freedom that facilitates criticism of government policies. But is Israel really a democracy?
I have exploded this myth in books and in countless articles. But if further proof is wanted, Israel’s gallant Nadia Matar is being tried for “insulting a public servant,” Yonaton Bassi, who was appointed by Prime Minister Sharon to head the Evacuation Administration, which supervised the expulsion of 10,000 Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria. Mrs. Matar sent Bassi a fax comparing his appointment with a letter that had been written by the Berlin Judenrat in 1942 to the Jewish community, with details and explanations of their approaching deportation.
The trial of Nadia Matar is not only indicative of the paltry despotism to which this country has fallen. No, her trial for insulting Sharon’s lackey is symptomatic of the on-going psychological victory of the Palestinian Authority over the militarily powerful but morally impotent and degraded State of Israel.
Far more than freedom of expression is involved in the trial of Nadia Matar. Israel’s raison d’etre as a Jewish state is on trial. The conflict is between what the heroic Nadia Matar stands for and what defeatists like Ariel Sharon or Ehud Olmert stand for. It is nothing less than a conflict between good and evil—indeed, between life and death.
