Righting the moral compass

Righting the moral compass

By Gil Troy
The Jerusalem Report
September 18, 2006

What's wrong with this picture? Hassan Nasrallah miscalculates. Israel smashes his military infrastructure, levels his suburban Beirut stronghold, kills hundreds of his fighters, and he now slinks around town fearing Israeli retaliation. Nevertheless, aping Gamel Abdul Nasser's 1967 Six Day War triumphalism, Nasrallah declares himself the winner, to Arab cheers. Meanwhile, Israelis left and right demand Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's resignation, claiming "total failure," despite his having weaned Israel and the West from the six-year delusion that Hizballah is a responsible party, interested in running Lebanon, not ruining Israel.

Yes, Israel failed to deliver the knockout blow that Olmert promised unrealistically. Yes, each Israeli death is devastating, even though more Israelis died liberating Jerusalem in 1967. And true, it was a U.N. cease fire not IDF heroics that stopped Hizballah's shelling. But these results hardly justify daily headlines proclaiming "An Unmitigated Disaster" and analyzing "How We Suffered a Knockout" or Israeli reporters' many misleading comparisons with the Yom Kippur War, when the Arabs initially forced Israeli retreats and killed 2,688 Israeli soldiers. Even some American supporters of Israel have mourned Israel's "defeat," claiming "Hizballah's victory will provide a boost to every terror organization in the world."

France's Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy made his play for the new century's Neville Chamberlain Award by calling Iran "a great country . which plays a stabilizing role in the region." In England, many Muslims and their politically correct fellow travelers rationalized the plot to blow up airplanes with volatile liquids - planned for months -- by blaming Prime Minister Tony Blair's support for what they caricatured as the Israeli-American war against Lebanon.

Western defeatism, Israel's political bloodletting and Nasrallah's imaginative posturing could become self-fulfilling prophecies, turning Israel's imperfect victory into a demoralizing defeat which emboldens Hizballah, other Jihadist terrorists, and their Syrian and Iranian masters. Already Hamas spokesmen claim "the war has taught us that resistance," meaning violence, "works." Ominously, Israel's divisive recrimination orgy risks one of the war's greatest achievements: Hamas and Hizballah actually managed to reconstitute the Israeli center, resurrecting Israel's founding Zionist narrative of building a democratic, Jewish national homeland for a despised people despite genocidal neighbors.

Hamas and Hizballah violence returned the Arab-Israeli conflict to "ein breira" - there is no choice - fundamentals, dispersing Yasir Arafat's forty-year long fog. Arafat cleverly confused the issue by exploiting the baby boomers' rejection of their parents' black and white moral clarity and Third-World dictators' repudiation of the U.N.'s liberal-democratic pacifism. Amid this moral obfuscation, Arafat transformed terrorists into freedom fighters. Building on the reverse racism of treating Muslims and Arabs as necessarily colonized and dominated by seemingly white Westernized countries, Arafat made the primal conflict over Israel's right to exist a question of conflicting rights and parallel wrongs.

Succumbing to Arafat's con, the world community lost its moral bearings. Beginning with his outrageous 1974 United Nations speech wearing a holster, two years after Palestinian terrorists murdered Israel's Munich Olympians, Arafat proved terrorism works. Following the 1993 Oslo Accords, he starred in a twisted update of the Emperor's New Clothes, with the arch-terrorist masquerading as peacemaker. Many leading Israelis swallowed his line, allowing sympathy for Palestinians' plight to override national instincts for self-preservation and democratic norms against the terrorism, sexism, homophobia and racism of Arafat's autocracy.

Two unilateral withdrawals, hundreds of terror attacks worldwide, and thousands of deaths helped many - not all - shake off the Arafatist hypnosis. The shift began after Arafat led Palestinians from Camp David negotiations back to terrorism in September 2000. Alas, only after September 11, 2001 did some world opinion leaders, led by the Americans, link Palestinian terrorism to global Jihadism. Gradually, suicide bomb by suicide bomb, even the most polite circles recognized Arafat as the terrorist he always was.

Hamas's ascendance after Israel left Gaza in 2005 highlights this conflict's existential nature. The Hamas charter focuses the fight on Israel's right to exist rather than the Jewish state's just boundaries. Hizballah's parallel exterminationism after Israel's May 2000 withdrawal from Lebanon, finally exposed the Arafatist charade.

As a result, while enduring an unprecedented missile barrage, burying more than 150 fellow citizens, Israelis responded magnificently to this war's challenges. A spirit of idealism and altruism enveloped the country, as Israelis beyond missile range welcomed their neighbors, donated time and money to alleviate the suffering, and fought valiantly when called. Skeptics, doubting democracies' tenacity or fearing that modern consumer-oriented Israelis had grown soft, should note Israel's volcano of voluntarism and epidemic of elan. Ironically, Hamas and Hizballah salved the wounds of last August's disengagement, and, by contrast, highlighted the Jewish state's moral power and enduring morale.

Now, Israel's politicians must prove themselves worthy of leading their noble constituents. Olmert and his cabinet need to convert the military's battlefield wins into lasting political triumphs. They also must build on Israel's renewed clarity and idealism, articulating a modern Zionist vision for a proud, Jewish state building a moral democratic society as zealously as it defends itself against immoral neighbors.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University, and the author of "Why I Am a Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today."

Comment on this article using the "Post Reply" button