Judea and Samaria activist Yechiel Leiter, a possible candidate on the Likud Party list in the February elections, is promoting a plan that calls for immediate steps that will lead to the annexation of 50% of Judea and Samaria.
Since Leiter has served as an adviser to Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, it’s reasonable to assume that his proposed plan expresses Netanyahu’s position. If so, this plan corresponds to Netanyahu’s policy of “reciprocity” in dealing with the Palestinian Authority.
What is more significant, however, is that Leiter’s plan—he’s religious—may be a political consequence of Netanyahu’s secular mentality, manifested in a statement he made before a joint session of the United States Congress shortly after becoming Israel’s Prime Minister in May 1996. There he baldly denied any “clash of civilizations” between Israel and her Arab-Islamic neighbors.
This denial reflects a widespread inability in the secular democratic world to acknowledge the true nature of Islam. By the “true nature of Islam” I mean the demonstrable fact that Islam is, in the words of Bat Ye’or, a “culture of hate”—a culture that engenders intolerance, violence, contempt for human life. No wonder Syrian-born psychiatrist Dr. Wafa Sultan denies that Islam is even a civilization.
In any event, only an ignoramus or intellectual coward denies the civilizational clash between Islam and Judaism. This denial therefore disqualifies, in principle, any Israeli who aspires to serve in the Knesset or in the Government of Israel.
Returning to Leiter, what assumptions underlie his plan to annex 50% of Judea and Samaria? Are we to conclude that the Arabs would agree to this plan when all the world and even Israel’s Supreme Court have virtually declared that all of Judea and Samaria belongs to the Palestinians?
Does Mr. Leiter regard his proposal as a “peace plan” or the first stage of a peace plan? If so, I ask: What good is a peace plan when Israel is at war with an enemy that defines “peace” as the destruction of Israel?
What good is a peace plan when the maps of the Palestinian Authority omit Israel from the Middle East?
With all due respect to Mr. Leiter, who I know is an intelligent and honest man, I wonder if he fell and had a slight concussion before he concocted this plan. For idiots and scoundrels aside, only a person suffering from some mental disorder would believe that genuine peace is possible between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, whose leaders have educated generations of Arab children to hate Jews and emulate suicide bombers.
Mr. Leiter aside, for he may not be in his right mind—perhaps only serving as Netanyahu’s trial balloon—what Israel needs is not a peace plan but a war plan. But a war plan requires a general—and not any general, but a warrior general, a virtually extinct species in Israel.
Israeli generals have become humanists and play actors. They seem to be more concerned about impressing the media than about killing enemy soldiers. This is called non-heroic warfare. Israeli generals religiously adhere to the Jewish concept of pikuach nefesh, saving human life. But they seem to have enlarged the meaning of this concept.
In obedience to the political echelon, they have extended pikuach nefesh to Israel’s enemies by avoiding “collateral damage.” This is the pathological consequence of worshipping in Alice’s wonderland of “peace.”
The Prophet Jeremiah warned us of those who cry “Peace, peace, when there is no peace.” He did not call them “doves”; he called them “liars.”
