The establishment of a Palestinian state is almost a fait accompli. Such a state dooms the Jewish State of Israel.
In January 1988, the month after the eruption of the first intifada, the present writer saw that the national unity government led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir (Likud) and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Labor) lacked the courage to quell the insurrection. On that issue alone, the government had forfeited its legitimacy, a precondition of which is the ability to protect the lives and liberty of its people.
The craven character of the government was symptomatic of a terminal disease: the government would emasculate the IDF, demoralize the people, until Israel utterly succumbed to her implacable enemies and the insidious designs of the Saudi-oriented American State Department or former American officials on the Saudi payroll.
I therefore urged the establishment of a “Government in Exile” whose initial purpose was to shock the people of Israel, that is, to awaken them to the fact that their government, by failing to protect them, had ceased to be legitimate. Of course, I was not taken seriously by the legions of scribblers who burden us with their superficialities about Israeli government.
Now it has become all-too-obvious that the Olmert government has surrendered to the enemy and to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. President Bush, defeated at home (and in Iraq), needs a victory abroad: Israel is slated to be his sacrificial lamb.
Last month I warned, as did others, that each day Ehud Olmert remains in office brings us closer to the abyss. I said there is no reason to expect the full final version of the Winograd Report to bring about his resignation or induce the Knesset to vote no confidence in his government. Ehud Barak and his Labor party will not resign from the government, and neither will Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Beiteinu party. The same holds for Shas.
I also warned that a Netanyahu government will not save Israel. The silver tongued orator has clay feet. So what is to be done?
I said we need to form an alternative government, which means I am calling for a unique revolution. I have repeatedly proposed the formation of a team say of seven prominent individuals representing diverse professions and sectors of Israeli society to seek out a person qualified to be prime minister and to form a party whose goal is to enlarge Israel! That’s right: to enlarge Israel, to completely reverse the backward direction of Kadima.
I suggested the name of former IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen, Moshe Ya’alon. Why? Not only because he has stated, more clearly than any other general officer—in and out of office—that abandonment of Jewish settlements would endanger Israel. More than this, and regardless of any failings you may attribute to him, the revolution I am calling for will require significant support from soldiers and officers, and no general will win their confidence more than Ya’alon.
Now, the above-mentioned team of professionals—persons qualified to be cabinet ministers—will present Ya’alon a program having two basic issues: one territorial, the other institutional. Since he repeatedly said the Arabs, in the foreseeable future, will not abandon their goal to destroy Israel, Ya’alon must be urged to publicly declare that he not only opposes a Palestinian state, but also that Israel’s survival requires the destruction of the entire Fatah-Hamas terrorist network in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza and the extension of Jewish sovereignty over this land.
Ya’alon must be given a plan to accomplish this objective, a plan cognizant of adverse international reactions. If he adopts this plan—and nothing less is required to save Israel—we will announce to the public the establishment not merely of another party, but of an alternative government with him as its president; so that in the next election, the people will at last have a choice: either Ehud Olmert and the old dysfunctional system of government, or Moshe Ya’alon and a new, streamlined system of government.
This alternative government will create a Party to Enlarge Israel—a party to be known, however, only as an instrument of this alternative government. This alternative government will issue a Declaratory Statement calling for the following:
- Immediate resignation of the Olmert government and the holding of new elections.
- Abrogation of Oslo, destruction of the entire terrorist network in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and extension of Jewish sovereignty over this land.
- Adoption of a Constitution that shifts power from parties to the people by democratizing the three branches of government as follows:
- The Legislature: Legislators will be individually elected by and accountable to the voters in constituency or regional elections.
- The Executive: A popularly elected President to replace the corrupt system of multi-party government.
- The Judiciary: A mode of appointing of Supreme Court judges that safeguards the abiding beliefs and values of the Jewish people.
Since 37% of Israel’s registered voters did not vote in the 2006 elections, and since many if not most of those who did vote did so out of desperation, there will probably be well over one million “floating” votes in the next election. I believe that the party formed by our alternative government can win enough seats to control the next government.
The public will be given to understand during the campaign that we stand for “regime change.” They will know, for the first time, who will actually be the ministers of the government. They will know that the ministers of this government, for the first time, are united not only by the same political principles, but also by a calendar of strategic objectives that will be implemented once the alternative government is in power.
At the same time, however, the public will know that this alternative government will be constrained by a system of institutional checks and balances which has never existed in Israel. Indeed, Israel, for the first time, will have a genuine democracy, one rooted in the ideas and values which even gentile philosophers and statesmen admit have made the Jewish people the educators of mankind.
We must act now.
