Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s willingness to surrender the strategically important Golan Heights to Syria is the most recent example of the Left’s contempt for Jewish public opinion. The present writer recalls various polls taken before the June 1992 election, when overwhelming public majorities of 80 to 90 percent opposed any withdrawal from the Golan Heights.
In that election, the Labor Party’s official platform proclaimed: “Israel sees in the Golan Heights an area of great importance for its security, its safety and the ensuring of its water resources, even in times of peace. Consequently, in every peace agreement with Syria and in the security arrangements, Israel’s settlements and military control will be maintained on the Heights—on which Israel’s jurisdiction, law and administration have been applied.”
Just hours before the election, Labor Party leader Yitzhak Rabin told a Golan audience: “As for the future, it is inconceivable that even in peacetime we should go down from the Golan. Whoever even thinks of leaving the Golan wantonly abandons the security of Israel.” [Emphasis added.]
Once ensconced in power, however, the Rabin government proceeded to ignore Jewish public opinion on this crucial issue.
Reneging on campaign pledges regarding taxes and health care is one thing; reneging on a campaign pledge involving the very borders of the state is quite another. The more so when one considers Israel’s legal and historical claim to the Golan Heights, which it regained in a war of self-defense.
● To withdraw from the Golan, a mere 45 kilometers from Damascus, is to abandon the one strategic asset that has deterred Syria from attacking Israel in 34 years.
● To withdraw from the Golan is make Syrian aggression pay.
● To withdraw from the Golan is to dignify a ruthless tyrant.
● To withdraw from the Golan is to perpetuate a barbaric regime as well as the misery of its 20 million inhabitants. This, Prime Minister Olmert would do or justify in the name of “peace,” a word that has become an obscenity to anyone with a stitch of moral or intellectual integrity.
To grasp the nature of Syrian barbarism, let me take you back to a ceremony which that regime celebrated on the tenth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. I watched that ceremony on Israel television, clips of which should now be shown throughout Israel.
In that ceremony—and now I turn to its description in the October 21, 1983 issue of the Jerusalem Post Magazine [International Jerusalem Post]—“Syrian militia trainees [male and female] put on a show for Syrian president Hafez Assad. Martial music reached a crescendo as Syrian teenage girls suddenly bit into live snakes [some four or five feet long], repeatedly tearing off flesh and spitting it out as blood ran down their chins. As Assad applauded, the girls then attached the snakes to sticks and grilled them over fire, eating them triumphantly. Others [militiamen] then proceeded to strangle puppies and drink their blood.”
The reader can judge for himself what the snakes, the puppies, and the blood represent. TV Clips of that ceremony should be sent to Nancy Pillosi (Dem.), majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Pastor John Hagee, Joel Bell (Director of World Evangelical Zionists), Fox News and other media.
Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post report of that ceremony should be translated into Hebrew and Russian and distributed throughout Israel.
Of course, the TV clips should be shown in the Knesset, and those opposed to Israel’s withdrawal from the Golan Heights should declare: “We shall bring this government down if it abandons our Jewish brothers and sisters on the Golan to the genocidal enemies of the Jewish people laughing at us in Damascus!”
