First published December 10, 1994.
A respected political scientist has said that a revolution would have erupted in any Third World country had its people suffered what the people of Israel have suffered under the Rabin regime: deceit, betrayal, bloodshed, humiliation.
Perhaps, but Israel is sui generis—unique. Indeed, as one who has studied the basic causes and various occasions which lead to revolution, I can say with confidence that such is Israel’s singular character that a violent revolution in this country is a virtual impossibility.
To begin with, the mentality of most Israelis, including opponents of the government, is thoroughly bourgeois and democratic. Because bourgeois democrats are primarily motivated by the desire for comfort and security, they are politically moderate on the one hand, and constitutionally opposed to the hazards of revolution on the other.
But since these bourgeois democrats are Jewish—and many are religious—they comprise the most anti-revolutionary species imaginable: Jewish humanists. Let me explain.
Jewish humanists are really Christians without the Christian G‑d. They practice with a vengeance what Christians preach: “love your enemies,” “turn the other cheek,” “do not resist evil.” One may even say that contemporary Israel is the only Christian nation on earth! When it comes to loving one’s enemies, turning the other cheek, and not resisting evil, present-day Israel has no equal in the annals of human history.
Can you imagine the leaders of any avowedly Christian country raising money for their people’s enemies, as Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres have done for Yasir Arafat and the PLO?
To be sure, this Judeo-Christian charity—the hyphen here is quite appropriate—is for the sake of “peace.” That this money will make it easier for the PLO-cum-Hamas to kill more Jews is simply the price Jews must pay for “peace.”
Meanwhile, most Jews in Israel look upon their government’s complicity in murder either with indifference or bewilderment. To expect revolution from such Jews is to expect lambs to metamorphose into lions.
Besides, the Rabin government controls all the levers of power: the military, the economy, the media, the educational and cultural institutions, the official rabbinate, the Supreme Court, etc. And don’t forget that Rabin’s suicidal “territory-for-peace” policy is demanded by, and has therefore won the accolades of, the entire Oslovian and Orwellian world!
When to all this you add the disarming myth that Rabin came to power by virtue of a democratic election—which gives his government the color of legitimacy—it’s clear that he and his cohorts are ruling a democratically brainwashed people. Hence, to talk of revolution occurring in Israel is pure nonsense.
Not that most Israelis support the Rabin regime. But every Tom, Dick, and Harry among them thinks he’s a qualified political scientist, that he knows what to do about the nightmare called the “peace process.”
Amateurs have squandered hundreds of thousands of (donated) dollars on demonstrations, full-page ads, newsletters, special newspapers, video cassettes, law suits, etc. Not that these airings of opposition to the Rabin government are of no value. But had part of this money been used to produce, on a commercial basis, a professional stage play, “The Trial of Yitzhak Rabin,” things might be very different in Israel today.
A fair trial, with expert witnesses for the defense and the prosecution, could and would have only one outcome. And if the government sought to ban this exercise of freedom of expression, so much the better: the resulting publicity would be worth a million bucks!
Such a stage play could have been performed not in Israel, but in New York, London, Paris, etc.
The educational value of a properly staged trial would have been unequaled, and its political reverberations would have been tremendous. The trial would not only show how Rabin deceived the people of Israel in the 1992 national election, collaborated with the PLO to win that election, and violated the laws of his country before and after he formed the present government. The trial would also reveal the strategic, political, religious, historical, and global dimensions of the Arab-Israel conflict.
Imagine the impact on international audiences witnessing, in addition to the documentation of PLO atrocities and Arafat’s perfidious character, TV clips of Hafez Assad’s celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, when Syrian militia girls killed four-foot snakes with their teeth, followed by militia men twisting the necks off puppies and drinking their blood! And such material … could have been included in a commercial VCR version of the play!
Of course, all this is now academic—or so it seems. A non-violent revolution was possible shortly after the Rabin-Arafat handshake. Today people will prefer to wait for the 1996 Knesset elections, by which time, however, other irreversible and calamitous decisions will have been made by the Rabin government.
Epilogue (August 27, 2007)
Yes, and now we are waiting for the November “peace conference” in Europe, which will utterly undo the miracle of the Six-Day War and sign Israel’s death warrant.
