The Truth about the ‘Apartheid Wall’ (FrontPageMagazine.com) by Steven Plaut 05/02/12)
Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/05/02/the-truth-about-the-apartheid-wall/
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I was recently challenged by a polite academic who claimed to be
dumbfounded by the fact that I rejected as absurd his use of the
term “Apartheid Wall” to refer to Israel’s security barrier fence.
He demanded to know why I objected to the term, and what I thought
was a more appropriate name for it.
I responded that the the more appropriate and correct name for
Israel’s security fence is the “Leftists are Idiots” fence. Indeed,
I would urge everyone to adopt that name for it and insist that no
other be used in polite company.
The security barrier should be dubbed the “Leftists are Idiots” fence
because the very need for its construction was as a countermeasure to
the countless acts of murder and other violence triggered by the
imposition upon Israel of the Left’s political agenda with regard to
making “peace” with the “Palestinians.” The building of
the “Leftists are Idiots” Fence became necessary because of
the “recognition” of the PLO by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and
all the fruits of that poisonous tree that followed. The
consequential series of agreements to allow the PLO to import its
army of assassins and terrorists into the West Bank and Gaza (never
mind that the Hamas later evicted the PLO from Gaza) produced so many
massacres of Israelis that the only way to reduce the level of
violence was with large fences and barriers that
prevented “Palestinians” from getting close enough to Jews to murder
them.
The “Leftists are Idiots” fence was only the latest bi-product of the
long-time theology of the Left concerning how to make peace with
Arabs. The Left believes that Israel can appease its way to peace by
making endless concessions to the Arabs. The fact that every single
round of appeasements and concessions to date has produced escalation
of terror never persuades the Left that something is flawed with its
approach to peace or in its political theology. The universal
explanation by the Left for the utter and complete failure of
its “ideas” has always been to insist in totalitarian unison that
they fail because Israel does not make ENOUGH appeasements and
concessions.
The Israeli Left has been wrong about absolutely everything for at
least 20 years, and it would be very difficult to uncover anything
about which it was not wrong going back even 60 years. The Israeli
Left of the 1950s believed in Soviet-style economic central
planning. Under David Ben Gurion, it built and then preserved a
command-and-control economic mechanism that resembled that of Soviet
regimes in many ways. It was designed to place near totalitarian
control of the economy in the hands of the MAPAI socialist party
(later renamed the Labor Party). Israel was essentially a one-party
state until 1978, and that single ruling party was MAPAI.
Thanks to that command-and-control structure, Israel remained an
impoverished, underdeveloped Third World country until well into the
1980s, complete with Third-World levels of corruption, primitive
technology, and tax rates sometimes exceeding 100% of earnings. By
the late 1980s, the command-and-control regime was largely although
not completely dismantled, this thanks to a complex set of causes,
and Israel quickly morphed into a developed wealthy first-world
country, to the chagrin of its socialists. The Far Left yearns to
restore the semi-bolshevik planning and control structure, and has
now managed to co-opt much of the “Social Justice” protests in Israel
and recruit those protesters behind this goal.
But in the long term, the more harmful segment of leftist ideology
was the belief that the bulk of Arabs are good and decent people who
truly want piece and co-existence. That belief happens to be false.
The vast majority of Arabs want a genocidal resolution to
the “problem” of the existence of Israel and its Jewish population.
But the Left is so passionately wedded to this part of its political
theology that it has dominated everything the Left has done or said
for decades. And since the Left has been in office in Israel more
often than it has not been (while the Likud has itself often behaved
in many ways like a party of the Israeli Left), most of the most
destructive decisions and errors Israel has made stem directly from
this theology.
The Israeli Left believes that most Arabs are peaceful people and
that they can best be won over by implementing a nice form of
socialism (one that unfortunately does not work anywhere and cannot
possibly “work”).
When Israel became independent in 1948-49, the new state under the
leadership of David Ben Gurion went to great efforts to PREVENT the
emigration of the Arab population of what became Israel. (Never mind
that the anti-Semites later invented a pseudo-history in which Israel
carried out “ethnic cleansing.” The entire War of Independence was
an attempt by the Arab world to conduct a genocidal ethnic cleansing
of Jews!) This is because the Israeli government believed that most
Arabs are peaceful people and that they can best be won over by
implementing a nice form of socialism.
The early Israeli governments of the 1950s and 1960s, all led by the
MAPAI party, allowed many tens of thousands of Arab “refugees”
quietly to return to the territory of Israel. This is because the
government believed that most Arabs are peaceful people and that they
can best be won over by implementing a nice form of socialism.
The Israeli government of 1967 went out of its way to PREVENT the
emigration of the Arab populations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip
during and after the Six Day War. This is because the government
believed that most Arabs are peaceful people and that they can best
be won over by implementing a nice form of socialism.
The Israeli government has NEVER responded to pogroms and mob
violence by Israeli Arabs or West Bank and Gaza Arabs with serious
retribution. This is because the government believes that most
Arabs are peaceful people and that they can best be won over by
implementing a nice form of socialism.
The Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin, again a Labor Party
government, signed the Oslo Accords. It converted Gaza and most of
the West Bank into large terrorist bases and launching pads for
mortars and rockets. It did so because the government believed that
most Arabs are peaceful people and that they can best be won over by
implementing a nice form of socialism.
When it became clear that the only reason “Palestinians” even
wanted “independence” from Israel was so they could launch terrorist
aggression, nothing changed. This is because the government believed
that most Arabs are peaceful people and that they can best be won
over by implementing a nice form of socialism.
Israel has been bludgeoned into agreeing to the creation of
a “Palestinian” state in the West Bank and Gaza. This would be the
23rd Arab state. The Arabs already have more states than any other
ethnic group on earth and control territory nearly twice that of the
United States (including Alaska). Those who imagine that such
a “Palestinian” state would pursue peace and stability are captives
of the political theology of the Left. They believe that
most “Palestinian” Arabs are peaceful people who can best be won over
by implementing a nice form of appeasement and socialism.
And over the past year the “social justice” protest movement in
Israel was largely co-opted by the Israeli communist party and other
groups within the radical Left, effectively making further
appeasements and concessions to the “Palestinians” the central plank
of their agenda of “social justice.” This is because they believe
that most Arabs are peaceful people and that they can best be won
over by implementing a nice form of socialism.
Now since every single round of concessions and appeasements by
Israel has produced escalated Arab violence, the security fence was
proposed, originally as an innovation conceived by and endorsed by
the Left. But the Left quickly recovered from its momentary
transient common sense, after realizing that the security fence was a
departure from its decades-old agenda of achieving peace via
appeasement. And within weeks of the commencement of the
construction, the Left was denouncing the fence as
Israel’s “Apartheid Wall.” It also denounces as “apartheid roads”
any parallel pairs of roads, one for “Palestinians” and the other for
Israelis, made necessary so that Palestinians would not get close
enough to Israelis to murder them.
The irony is that no other country on earth would have responded to
the atrocities and murders coming from a hostile population located
at the fringes of its cities by building such a wall or such parallel
pairs of roads. Every other country on earth would have bombed the
attackers into the Stone Age and then driven them out en masse.
Consider what happened to the ethnic German minorities of Eastern
Europe.
But sauce for the Euro-goose is never sauce for the Jewish gander.
So, instead, Israel retaliated against the genocidal mass murderers
of its civilians by constructing a fence that makes it more difficult
for them to carry out their atrocities.
And that is why the correct name for what the anti-Semites have been
calling Israel’s “Apartheid Fence” should in fact be the “Leftists
are Idiots.” (Copyright © 2012 FrontPageMagazine.com 05/02/12)
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