All people, Jews or gentiles, who dare not defend themselves when they know they are in the right, who submit to punishment not because of what they have done but because of who they are, are already dead by their own decision; and whether or not they survive physically depends on chance. If circumstances are not favorable, they end up in gas chambers.
Bruno Bettelheim, Freud’s Vienna and Other Essays
Bettelheim, like the Greek poet Homer, understands that the force that does not kill, that does not kill just yet, can turn a human being into stone, into a thing, even while it is still alive. Merely hanging ominously over the head of the vulnerable creature it can choose to kill at any moment, poised lasciviously to destroy breath in what it has somehow “graciously” allowed, if only for a few more moments, to breathe, this force indelicately mocks the fragile life it intends to consume.
As for the pitiable human being that stands helplessly before this force, he or she has effectively already become a corpse.
Israel’s leaders, pressured by an American president, have missed an overriding point: Both Hamas and Fatah, even as they intermittently fail to achieve any true reconciliation with each other, still remain fully committed to Israel’s annihilation.
Both Hamas and Fatah remain fully committed to Israel's annihilation.
Israel, in some respects this “pitiable human being” in macrocosm, is now at the threshold of becoming a thing. Still called upon by U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to negotiate “Palestine” with unrepentant terrorists, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed to accept certain forms of Palestinian statehood, at least in principle. Strongly hoping not to be identified as an “obstruction to peace,” however, Mr. Netanyahu has somehow managed to discover reassurance in his expectations for Palestinian “demilitarization.”
There is no chance, of course, that any Palestinian state would ever consent to its own demilitarization. Any such refusal to demilitarize would be entirely consistent with authoritative international law. This is the case even if the Palestinian negotiators, in their pre-independence form, had formally agreed to such a limiting condition.
Earlier, several years ago, in a burst of presumed strategic ingenuity, Israel had decided to arm Hamas against Fatah. Islamic fundamentalists, they reasoned in Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv must surely be “better” than Yasser Arafat and his likely successors. Now, in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Netanyahu operates on the very opposite understanding. In both cases, Israel’s leaders, pressured by an American president, have missed an overriding point: Both Hamas and Fatah, even as they intermittently fail to achieve any true reconciliation with each other, still remain fully committed to Israel’s annihilation.
Neither terror organization should ever be expected to serve Israel’s security interests.
Neither Hamas nor Fatah could ever become a willing subcontractor for Jewish national survival.
Oddly enough, until very recently, the United States, similarly confused, in a program begun under President George W. Bush, and continued under President Barack Obama, spent several hundred million dollars giving advanced military training under American General Keith Dayton to Fatah forces in Jordan.
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Now, Hamas terrorists in Gaza, aided by Iran, are able to fire substantially upgraded military-issue rockets into southern Israel. When Israel retaliates, as it must, not only Hamas, but also Fatah, cheerfully and systematically exploit the indispensable reprisal for specifically propagandistic benefit. Ironically, the more Arabs that die as a consequence of the Israeli counter-terrorism operation, the (presumed) better for both Hamas, and for Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah/Palestinian Authority. This is because PA President Abbas fully intends to use the contrived “evidence” of Israel’s “disproportionality” to further his own statehood aims this month at the United Nations. After all, he will argue poignantly, if only there were a Palestinian state, Israel could be prevented, in the future, from inflicting such further harms upon entirely innocent Gaza populations.
From the standpoint of international law, the Abbas plan is a textbook case of “perfidy.” The Arab side is committing multiple violations of the law of war, or the law of armed conflict, for the express purpose of eliciting intentional harms to its own civilians. Moreover, in addition to deliberately placing Gaza civilians in harm’s way, Hamas steadfastly refuses to acknowledge that the obligatory IDF self-defense actions are always scrupulously discriminate, conforming not only to the law of war, but also to its own even-stricter national code concerning the “Purity of Arms” (Tohar HaNeshek).
However unintentionally, Israel has more-or-less come to accept a deformed image of itself, an image spawned not in Jerusalem or Hebron, but in Washington, Ramallah and Gaza.
Arguably, the Arab world ought to be grateful to Netanyahu for neglecting to emphasize the core contrast between its own purposefully provocative criminal excursions into terror, and Israel’s reciprocal, and carefully-measured efforts, at counter-terror. Similarly, both Hamas and Fatah should be very pleased that Mr. Netanyahu has not flatly ruled out a Palestinian state under all circumstances. Significantly, such a broad-based exclusion could be altogether correct, morally and jurisprudentially. It would also certainly be in Israel’s overall survival interests.
International law is not a suicide pact. Nonetheless, the Arab world does not willingly play the gentleman. In this respect, at least, it is an honest world.
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Even today, even while Netanyahu still agrees to follow the “Road Map,” the Palestinian Authority map of “Palestine” remains undisguised. On this unhidden bit of cartography, Palestine still includes all of Israel. There are no two-states on the maps of “moderate” leader Mahmoud Abbas, the ungrateful beneficiary of huge amounts of money “donated” by unsuspecting American taxpayers. There is only one.
Where is the still-vaunted “two state solution?” One might expect that Israel, after all the terror it has suffered, and for all the terror it must still await, would betray itself no longer. When Priam enters the tent of Achilles, stops, clasps Achilles’ knees, and kisses his hands, he has already reduced himself to a hapless and unworthy victim, one to be disposed of without ceremony, and in short order. Realizing this, a gracious Achilles takes the old man’s arm, pushing him away. As long as he is clasping Achilles’ knees, Priam is an inert object. Only by lifting him up, off his knees, can Achilles restore him to a position of self-respect and to a living manhood.
Here Israel and Priam part company. Israel’s frenzied foes, twisted by Jihad, and sustained by yet another incapable American president and secretary of state (Bush and Rice were no better), will never act in the considerate manner of Achilles. Their aim is not the high-minded revitalization of a respected enemy, but the literal “liquidation” of a thing.
On one day this year in mid-August, “Palestinian” terrorists attacked Israeli civilians in the South with gunfire, mortars, anti-tank missiles and two suicide-bombings. Eight civilians, including two kindergarten teachers and their husbands, were among those murdered. Also assaulted were a four-year old Israeli child, and another seven-year old child.
A few days later, over 70 rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza into the South. Here, again, there were several Israeli dead, and many “merely” wounded.
Naturally, the IDF had launched measured and necessary reprisals at terrorists and terrorist facilities in Gaza, correctly blaming the so-called Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) for the criminal attacks. There was also concern expressed that the Arab gunmen had been able to unleash their mayhem because post-Mubarak Egypt has been losing all control in the Sinai border areas.
What happened next? Israel and Hamas “agreed to a ceasefire.” But Hamas is a terrorist organization under international law, not a legal personality with which a sovereign state may enter into proper war-limiting agreements. By periodically entering into such asymmetrical and damaging “truce” agreements, Prime Minister Netanyahu continues to enhance the legitimacy and operational effectiveness of Israel’s criminal adversaries. It goes without saying that such enhancements are both impermissible and incrementally self-defeating, ultimately undermining Israel’s claim that its counter-terror policies are directed on behalf of the entire “international community.”
However unintentionally, Israel has more-or-less come to accept a deformed image of itself, an image spawned not in Jerusalem or Hebron, but in Washington, Ramallah and Gaza. Degraded and debased, this is the view not of a strong and righteous people, determined to stand upright in its own land, forever, but of an already-deceased victim, resigned a conspicuously-lacquered corpse-in-waiting.
To be sure, large majorities of Israelis have always fought courageously against precisely such an intolerable view, against the endlessly hapless visions of “disengagements,” and “realignments,” and “peace processes.” Still, this demeaning image remains very much “alive.” In certain quarters in Israel, it is plainly fashionable; in these twisted circles, it is even de rigeur.
Let us not mince words. The moral confusion of so many Jewish “intellectuals” emboldens Israel’s enemies. Writing several years ago about Israel’s Oslo Agreements, precursor of the Road Map, Israeli novelist Aharon Megged had observed: “We have witnessed a phenomenon which probably has no parallel in history; an emotional and moral identification by the majority of Israel’s intelligentsia with people openly committed to our annihilation.” Bewilderingly, this unique identification has taken poisonous root in a succession of Israeli governments, and still shows no real signs of abating.
For nation-states, as for individual human beings, there can be no hope for survival in the absence of true and unapologetic conviction to live.
Bruno Bettelheim would have understood.
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