Although we gave the world monotheism, we are a nation obsessively searching for idols. We sculpt some, raise them on pedestals, confer sanctity upon them and declare their worship mandatory. In other idols we seek imperfections, poke at them, dig at the surface and deepen the blemishes so we may be justified in smiting the ghastliness.
We make our obsessions personal, even long after the idols’ mortal models are deceased, long after they are really relevant.
Even Bar Kochba isn’t invulnerable, presumably because his fight for liberty and rebellion against ancient Rome was revered by Zionism’s founding fathers. That renders him permissible prey for zealous post-Zionists.
Hence posthumously Bar Kochba – another era’s son – is recurrently judged with arrogant hindsight according to postmodern precepts.
Moshe Dayan is hardly as antiquated, but he too is zealously seized upon by ardent left-wingers, who project the conclusions they purport to draw from his 1973 tactical bungles onto the country’s current predicaments.
Thrashing Dayan presumably buys aspiring scribblers the approval of leftist media and academia overlords. The annual Yom Kippur rite was exacerbated this year with the release of 37-year-old protocols, which contain little previously unknown. Yet the passion of the well-orchestrated “beat Dayan” fest would surely lead a just-landed Martian to assume that said Dayan is still a forceful mover and shaker.
As assiduously as we smite some idols, so we aggrandize others. To underpin compulsory veneration, our thought police scrutinizes calendars to apprehend the firm, publication or school, which – heaven help them – omitted highlighting Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination anniversary as a national day of mourning. Each year the personality cult is revived via public ceremonies, politicized vigils and manipulative melodramatic mantras. We’re all a captive audience of kitschy commissars.
LIKE IT or not, each year, we kick Dayan and pay obligatory homage to Rabin. Both rituals are grotesque, absurd and unwarranted.
When they lived, the two protagonists weren’t all that different, except that Dayan was more original whereas Rabin somehow always stumbled on opportunities or into pitfalls. The Left, far from jubilant about the 1967 victory, abhorred Dayan who, justly or not, embodied the triumph.
It tendentiously overlooked his truly appalling errors, like opening our labor market to Judea, Samaria and Gaza Arabs (not yet called Palestinians), owing to Dayan’s misguided assumption that they’d learn to love us. He turned the Temple Mount over to the Muslim clergy owing to his misguided assumption that a grateful Islam would appreciate Jewish magnanimity. Much of what we suffer nowadays can be traced to Dayan’s original blunders. Dayan was this country’s foremost liberal, but the Left refused to acknowledge that truth, nor the atrocious results of his misplaced liberality.
Dayan’s gravest Yom Kippur War-eve miscalculation was his refusal to mobilize the reserves and launch a preemptive attack. The Left disingenuously ascribes this to hubris and right-wing cockiness (though neither Dayan nor prime minister Golda Meir was remotely rightist).
The Left gloats at the “conception’s collapse,” implying that today’s Israel is still ensnared by identical right-wing swagger, just as likely to blow up in our faces.
This has become our conventional wisdom. Yet were Dayan and Co. smugly overconfident, they’d have rushed to deliver the first blow to show who’s boss. But rather than exude confidence, Dayan and Golda lacked confidence in the extreme. Their primary fear was of international censure and White House umbrage. They were meek and fretful rather than boastful and brash.
Their trepidation of “what the world would say” convinced them to avoid striking the first blow.
If there’s one overriding lesson from this initial pre-Yom Kippur War fiasco, it’s that never again should concern for world opinion overshadow vital self-preservation interests.
These interests dictate that we must stay strong and self-reliant at all times and that we never forfeit the option of ensuring our survival by whichever means we deem fit, regardless of what grimaces any given White House resident might make or what EU officials may bemoan in Brussels and Strasbourg.
Israel’s failure to preempt the attack upon it in 1973 didn’t win it good press. Quite the contrary. It has been directly and consistently downhill ever since. The world will not look out for us. As the wise old Hillel put it: “If I am not for myself, who will be?”
THE SECOND lesson is that if the Yom Kippur War showed us anything, it’s that we mustn’t cede a single additional inch of territory. Again this is contrary to the leftist claim that had Golda only been more pliable, and divested the country of strategic assets, war would have been averted. The question we need ask is what would have happened if the same armored Egyptian battalions had not crossed into the buffer that was Sinai but directly into the Negev, a hop and a skip in military terms from Tel Aviv.
The mind boggles at the horror. What would have happened if the Syrians hadn’t confronted the IDF atop the Golan Heights but had pounced on the Galilee? This should send shivers down Israeli spines, as should a scenario of Arab armies storming in from Judea and Samaria in the event we facilitate the establishment of a Palestinian state adjoining our Dan and Sharon regions. The disadvantageous start of 1973’s war wouldn’t have been so sensationally reversible were it not for the territorial shock absorbers.
In Rabin’s case too, the Left spins sham narratives.
Undoubtedly Rabin’s most grievous fault was to monstrously magnify the above dangers via his Oslo shambles – in many ways incomparably worse than the Yom Kippur War because Oslo evolved into a still-ongoing debacle.
Nonetheless, Rabin was hardly the dove leftist historiographers posthumously portray for propaganda purposes.
When Ehud Barak proposed to split Jerusalem in 2000, the late Leah Rabin, who best knew her husband’s mind, protested vigorously and asserted that “Yitzhak would have never allowed this.”
Now Rabin’s daughter Dalia continues in the same vein. Interviewed by Yediot Aharonot earlier this month, she offered the following insight: “On the eve of the murder my father considered stopping the Oslo process because terror ran rampant in the streets, while [Yasser] Arafat didn’t deliver the goods. Dad wasn’t blind nor running thoughtlessly headlong. I don’t rule out the possibility that he considered doing an about-face on Oslo.
After all, for him Israel’s security was sacrosanct… Historical processes develop, change and flow. It’s impossible to judge a person murdered in ’95 according to what happened in 2000.”
Very true, Dalia. Barak’s subsequent failings cannot be retroactively pinned on Rabin. The irony of ironies is that, for all we know, rather than snuff Oslo out, the Rabin assassination perpetuated it.
But the post-Zionists who determine our agenda don’t want Dalia’s nonconformist words resonated, lest they undermine the indoctrination. Hence her quasi-subversive remarks were hardly the talk of the town. Much more iconoclastic mischief was to be achieved by Dayan bashing.
Bucking the Trend ... 
Petty and ruinous vision of “peace for land”
Extremely short and petty moral, political, social, and global vision — this the factor which is really endangering Israel’s future, and for that matter, in a most effective, dramatic and destructive way. Not a few dozen eventual non-Jews demanding their citizenship without being as loyal to the Jewishness of the state as Avigdor Lieberman wants them to be. And who might qualify? There is no doubt that Lieberman doesn’t trust in this important matter even his labor and kadima colleagues …
Sure, it is easy to see the problem looking from the outside. Living and working at the moment in France, I am astonished to see the obsession of the majority of French people with a pure ideological arrangement sold to them many years ago by the French leftist parties, that the “social progress” means working less and less: not six days a week but five and eventually four, not 48 hours a week but 40 and then 35, not until the age of 62 or 65 or more, but 60, etc., etc. With the society not being able anymore to sustain the growing costs of such early retreats, the left still claims that it is their right government’s fault, not the mandatory exposure of able working people to an excessive leisure time. Notwithstanding the well-documented statistical evidence that the earlier people retire, the sooner they die …
Turning now my attention to the Israeli reality, I see the terrible autodistructive trend of Israeli politics, started with, as you correctly pin it on, Dayan who in my opinion was so liberal with the future Palestinians because he regarded them as a forever unmanned horde.
Then came Sadat-Begin’s magniloquent “peace process”, which sacrifices the good of Israel and of Israeli citizen to the petty ideological and leftist Carter’s vision of “peace for land” — which, as the history has proved, means “no peace and no land”. I speak about the same Carter — what a principle man ! — who embraces today Hamas and would not extend his hand toward Israel.
As a matter of fact, in 1982, when Begin gave up Sinai and Sharon invaded Lebanon, Israel’s security was at it its highest ever historical level. With Lebanon being the most friendly neighbor of Israel: tired of Arafat’s bands, having a difficulty to absorb Palestinian families, and admiring Israel’s success as an example of a small nation which not only has the ability to survive, but to be extremely lucky and happy at it. With the Palestinians, both of Gaza and of the West Bank slowly appreciating the peace, with a measure of dignity and prosperity they have never seen being citizens of Jordan. They, too, were impressed by Israeli example of democracy and prosperity, having some good jobs with the Israeli booming construction market, and certainly didn’t want to be reunited with Jordan.
All this has been destroyed in 1982. Ever since, Israel was not able to guarantee her citizens their physical security: without speaking of isolated kamikaze acts of terrorism, Israelis became victims of the systematic rocket shelling from Gaza and, during the war with Lebanon, from Lebanon.
And every time, when in this steadily worsening security climate the pressure “peace for land” mounted, Israel had no sense of decency, or humor ? without speaking about courage, to tell to her American “benefactors”: enough is enough. Instead, Israel has evacuated in panic the border with Lebanon, betraying the Christian Lebanese army created and sustained to protect her border at hte North. Then came the turn of the settlers from Gaza, with the Jewish families and lives destroyed even without anybody’s signature, just because of an expectation that this “sacrifice” would appease somebody — but it didn’t.
Today’s shameful leftist American Clinton-Obama play, according to the same “peace for land = no peace and no land” scenario, should be stopped. Israel should cherish in the first place her heroic pioneers, and not just her commercial and industrial successes which could be easily transferred to California or France (where 9% of all millionaires of the world live … with the present author not being one of them). Israel should cherish her Sefarad and Russian Jews who have no place to go if the Israel’s dream fails.
And Israel should take another, more reasonable and compassionate look at peaceful Palestinians, left out in the cold by both these “peace processes” and the Palestinian extremists, the pebbles in the great Arab design of an eventual Israel’s destruction.
Israel has no friends in the Arab and Muslim camp, just rabid enemies, like Syria, or patiently waiting predators, like Saudi Arabia, or amorphously hateful “companions of route”, like Egypt and Jordan, or smart but ultimately antipathetic Turkey and Malaysia.
Look: in spite all this self-defeating rightist propaganda of “the world hating us”, Israel still has many, many friends in Europe, Canada, and the USA. They will help us — on the double condition: that we will not destroy ourselves before the help comes and that they will continue to understand whom they need to help.
Dayan was a rightist like I am a leftist,but no matter, the left believes their own delusions-reality be damned.
Dayan, in his leftist delusions gave the Wafq more than a sandle hold into our holiest site.Dayan, in his leftist hubris, refused to mobilize our reserves, nearly costing us our homeland.Dayan was a holier than thou leftist, convinced that his recipe for peace was through the benevolence of Jewish ‘gifts’.
Rabin-mania is the left’s last gasp towards relevancy, their proof positive that peace is on the horizon, regardless of how many Jewish lives are sacrificed on their altar of appeasement.
One dares not imagine what will mania will prevail when Peres retires to the beyond….Shudder.
The obsession to villify this majestic term, as if it does not indicate anything of great significance and only land robbery and disdained brutality, says much about Christianity and Islam. The term Zionism was used because of its connection to Zion, which is mount Sinai. The greatest event in the universe occured here, not to mention all of humanity’s greatest laws.
No such thing as dumb Christians and Muslims who are unaware what Zionist means, and their attitudes expose them.
‘They were meek and fretful rather than boastful and brash’
The godless State is extremely adept at raising up one generation of fretful Jew after another.
Nothing changes in Israel only fearful and fretful small men and women rise to rule in Israel.
The left and right appeaser Jews are motivated by faithless,evil hearts.
A weak people who ignore their God and serve idols are always fretful.
Their many tarnished idols are the only thing they proudly worship.
Those who know their God like the young Melek David are brash because they boast in Him alone.
He defeated all of Israel’s enemies,never ran to another nation for help and silenced the giant whom everyone else in Israel was afraid of instead of appeaseing and hiding in fear from him.
May the fretful and meek Jew fade away forever and be replaced by those who know their God.
“I don’t rule out the possibility that he [Rabin] considered doing an about-face on Oslo.”
As Mandy Rice-Davies so aptly put it, “Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she”…
Look, this is Revisionist claptrap, of a piece with the meme put about later by one or two members of the Kennedy administration that if JFK hadn’t been assasinated he would have reversed himself after the 1964 election and taken the U.S. out of Vietnam. Of course, Kennedy was the very one who put us there — nearly 20,000 troops at the time of his death…
If Rabin couldn’t foresee the consequences just five years out from a radical policy shift critical to his nation’s security, he shouldn’t have signed off on it. C’mon, OF COURSE you can pin subsequent events on his incompetance…