This article examines certain pathologies of reasoning that are making Jewish self-defense difficult-to-impossible. Unless these pathologies are corrected quickly, the Jewish people will once again cooperate in their own destruction. This will be a tragedy -- yet another -- for Judaism, of course, but also for the rest of the world, which will be infinitely worse off without the Jewish people.
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Short Preface

The focus event is this: on Feb 25, 2005, there was another suicide bombing in Israel. It broke a cease-fire.

For the reaction of the so-called Israeli ‘left’ to this event, we can take a look at what Joel Schalit, managing editor for the Israeli ‘left-wing’ magazine Tikkun, wrote in an article that was sent out immediately:

“At 11:15 PM Israel time, a suicide bomber blew themselves up [sic] at Tel Aviv’s Stage Club. As of this letter’s writing, four persons are dead and thirty are wounded. According to news sources at Ha’aretz and the BBC, Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad has taken responsibility for the attack, while Agence France Press reports that the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade has also claimed responsibility.

(...)

While we here at Tikkun cannot emphasize strongly enough our solidarity with the victims of today’s terror attack, we similarly cannot emphasize enough the restraint we believe the Israeli government will have to show in responding to this event.”[1]

Remember: Tikkun is an Israeli Jewish ‘left-wing’ magazine. So the question is: Why doesn't this Israeli Jewish magazine even wait for an investigation to establish a minimum of facts about this attack before rendering an opinion on the proper response? Why is the lightning-quick response of this Israeli Jewish ‘left-wing’ magazine to advocate “restraint” by the Israeli government towards the extreme right-wing antisemitic terrorists who murdered innocent Israeli Jews in cold blood?

These questions must be answered because this sort of thing tends not to happen in other countries when its innocent citizens are attacked by terrorists. This article will attempt to answer these questions. But before we can return to the frankly curious position that Tikkun defends, and which holds the key to the question of why the Israeli Jews do not defend themselves, we must first identify who exactly is ultimately responsible for these murders, something that Tikkun neglects entirely to do.

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Who is ultimately responsible for these murders?
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Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade have mounted joint operations before, so it is not too surprising if they both take credit for the February 25 attack.[2] And they did do it. As reported in Xinhua, “The Israeli army…identified the Tel Aviv suicide bomber as a young Palestinian university student…[by name] Abdullah Badran, 21… a member of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.”[3]

The fact that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Islamic Jihad got together for this one may owe something to the fact that, as the same Xinhua wire explains, “the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade [is] an armed wing of the Palestinian mainstream Fatah Movement.” This is well known.[4] Though less well known, Islamic Jihad, too, is a component of Fatah.[5]

In other words, about this attack, either Fatah did it, or else Fatah did it. Take your pick.

The most important point is what the Fatah authorship of this attack means. And it is this: Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas, who has stepped in as Yasser Arafat’s successor, has no desire for peace with the Israelis and cannot be negotiated with. Why? Because if Fatah carried out the attack, this can only be because Mahmoud Abbas ordered it.

If this is not immediately obvious, the reason is probably that you have been conditioned to think that it makes sense to say that Fatah terrorists kill Jews against the orders of the Fatah chief. If so, then you will need the stepwise demonstration that here follows.

The demonstration
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First, I’ll take you back a little bit.

“On Dec. 15, [1989], Yasir Arafat, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, renounces terrorism. Within hours, the United States announces it is ready to talk with the P.L.O.”[6]

This lightning-quick reaction of the US government, notice, was to Arafat’s announcement of a supposed intention, not to the actual behavior of the PLO. This would establish a pattern.

As you may now hazily remember, there was of course an incongruity to be explained when the PLO began talking about participating in a ‘peace’ process with Israel. This incongruity remained even after the ‘peace’ process was jump-started: the terrorists of Fatah (the controlling force in the PLO), though they had supposedly "renounce[d] terrorism," simply would not stop killing innocent Israeli civilians. What happened to peace?

The PLO leaders smoothed this out by explaining that, well, they were very sorry about all the Jewish men, women, and children who kept getting blown up on their way to work or eating a pizza, wrecking the lives of their families, but they just couldn’t control the extremists. If only Israel would make a few more concessions, then perhaps they would have the political leverage to rein the bad boys in. PLO leaders really wanted peace.

And so it went, one murdered innocent Jew after another.

At first there was at least some weak skeptical resistance -- both in the media, and officially -- to the PLO’s hypocrisy,[8] but soon enough the Western media began claiming with a straight face, and in passing, what US -- and then Israeli -- officials were also saying: that Yasser Arafat’s interpretation of the conflict was the correct one: that he should not be blamed for Fatah violence because he could not control his own terrorists, and he could not control his own terrorists because the Israelis did not give him enough power.[10]

Leaving the absurdity of this aside for a moment, what would follow logically from accepting it? In other words, what is the logical consequence of accepting that Fatah kills innocent Jews against the wishes of Fatah leaders? Obviously, that no real peace negotiations can be conducted with such leaders, for they are incapable of delivering peace. To give Fatah leaders more power, each round, because this will supposedly allow them to rein the terrorists in, is not to ‘negotiate’ anything but to become a willing victim of extortion. It was imperative, therefore, to abort the so-called ‘peace’ process. But who reached this conclusion? Actually, there was a time, before we were all taught not to reason on this question, when the obvious could be found in print, in the Western media. Here is an example, from the New York Times (1989):

“Mr. Arafat sometimes took ‘credit’ and sometimes blamed P.L.O. groups he said he could not control. Assuming for the moment he really cannot control all the P.L.O. terrorists, why on earth should the Israeli Government recognize Mr. Arafat and his uncontrollable P.L.O. as its negotiating partners?”[11]

Yes, precisely. And the question remains: Why on earth did the Israeli Government recognize Mr. Arafat and his supposedly uncontrollable PLO as its negotiating partners? A better question is this: Why on earth did the Israeli citizenry allow this farcical plunge into eager suicide?

The most obvious answer to the second question is painfully simple: those who accept an absurd premise have no trouble moving to an absurd conclusion, and so the same people who alleged that Arafat could not control his own thugs presented this as the ‘evidence’ that at least Arafat meant well, and therefore that Fatah terrorist violence should not be blamed on the Fatah leader. The absurd corollary to this double absurdity became that this antisemitic terrorist organization, dressed up as ‘the PLO,’ should be allowed to negotiate for its own state -- smack against the Jewish state -- not on the basis of Fatah's actual performance, but on the basis of how strongly Western officials and the media vouched for the supposed intentions of Fatah leaders!

This was defended explicitly by Aaron David Miller,[11a] one of the chief US architects of the Oslo process, early on, in 1996:

“Miller told the National Association of Arab Americans, in referring to recent terrorist bombings in Israel, [that,] ‘...we do have a right and an expectation that 100 percent effort, if not 100 percent success, be exerted to deal with this problem.’ Mr. Arafat, and the PA and now the (Palestinian) Council, I think understands this...”[11b]

Yasser Arafat would be rewarded for (supposed) “effort” -- not “success.” The killings of innocent Jews could continue.

What makes such illogic possible? Antisemitism.

Antisemitism is a way of looking at the world, a perspective, and it impairs reasoning by insisting on the following sequence: first, suspend in the air the anti-Jewish conclusion; then build in a helter skelter rush to the ground a scaffolding of 'premises'; finally, never heed how ridiculous the crookedly resulting, upside-down staircase becomes. This perspective afflicts, unfortunately, all those Jews (not a few) who've accepted the nonsense I just laid bare. And this same perspective -- most unfortunately -- can be found in the arguments used by the Israeli prime minister to justify the Gaza disengagement.[9]

And yet...

And yet I have steered clear, so far, from the biggest absurdity: Yasser Arafat was always, and consistently, represented as the worst authoritarian.

Consider this revealing report in the Irish Times, from 1993 (i.e. immediately before the start of the Oslo so-called ‘peace’ process):

“Asked if the PLO chairman, Mr Yasser Arafat, and his tight circle, would continue the authoritarian style of rule which has led to demands for democratization of the leadership, Dr [Rashid] Khalidi said he ‘thought the PLO would rule as it always has, by [m]aking secret decisions and implementing them...’”[12]

As the same article informs me, it turns out that Rashid Khalidi negotiated for the PLO at the Madrid talks, which became the platform for the Oslo ‘peace’ process. So Khalidi knew what he was talking about, and he was speaking as someone with a pro-PLO bias. What he said was that no, Oslo would change nothing, and yes, Arafat would remain an authoritarian, “[m]aking secret decisions and implementing them.” Indeed, by all accounts this is what Arafat remained, for upon his death one would read that “Arafat never groomed a successor during his decades of authoritarian rule [my emphasis] of the Palestinian Authority, the PLO and Fatah, the PLO’s dominant faction.”[13]

Now, the two meanings of ‘authoritarian,’ according to Merriam Webster Online, are the following: 1) “of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority,” and 2) “of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people.” But we were told that Arafat’s terrorist thugs just wouldn’t obey him. If we accept this, then we cannot say that Arafat was an authoritarian leader, because authoritarian leaders are not disobeyed. So we have a contradiction.

Whenever we find a contradiction, so long as we are still capable of reason, we know that at least some part of what we hear is false. In this case, we may resolve the contradiction by deciding that Arafat was not really authoritarian, but lax and easygoing, making it sensible that he could not control his own terrorists. Or we may resolve the contradiction by deciding that Arafat really was authoritarian, in which case -- contrary to the common representation -- he had a tight grip over his armed thugs. What gives? Obviously, the truth is that Arafat was an authoritarian -- and even a totalitarian -- with a very tight grip over his armed thugs. Those who disagreed with Arafat would be instantly killed, which is why Arafat had several different security forces, all answering directly to him. If members of one of these security forces did not follow orders to the letter, he could get members of a different security force to kill them.

He broached no opposition, which explains why Arafat spent so much time killing Arabs. Consider a comment made about the Fatah Hawks in 1992: “the Fatah Hawks [are] young desperadoes who have killed many more real or imagined Palestinian collaborators than they have Israelis…”[14] And the Fatah Hawks were not the only predators in Arafat’s zoo: also in 1992, it was reported that “the body of a 30-year-old [Arab] mother of seven was dumped outside her home in Rafah refugee camp [in Gaza]. She gave birth to twins two months ago. PLO ‘Black Panthers’ claimed responsibility.”[14a] This is the kind of thing that, by the year 2004, had earned Arafat’s security forces the nickname “death squad” from the Gaza Arabs whom Arafat supposedly represented.[15] You just didn’t mess with someone like Arafat.[15a]

Thus, whenever Fatah carried out a killing, this killing had been ordered by the Fatah chief. If the Fatah chief did not order a killing, then Fatah didn't kill.

In conclusion, unless we say that Mahmoud Abbas, the new Fatah chief, is utterly different from Arafat, then, given that two separate Fatah groups claimed joint responsibility for the attack dated February 25 that broke the Sharm el Sheik cease-fire, what we have is that Mahmoud Abbas, the Fatah chief, broke the cease-fire by personally ordering the murder of innocent Israeli civilians.

Or can one argue that Mahmoud Abbas is different from Arafat? No, one cannot. The entire strategy of talking ‘peace’ while killling more innocent Israelis was in fact invented by Mahmoud Abbas, who was always more powerful than he seemed (the Oslo agreement was Abbas's brainchild, and it is his signature on the agreement, not Arafat's).[16] This explains why the same Fatah terrorists who, after Arafat’s death, publicly chanted that they wanted to go on killing Israeli civilians, also enthusiastically supported Mahmoud Abbas. An Associated Press wire dated 27 November 2004 reports that:

“…in the Balata refugee camp near the West Bank city of Nablus, about 1,000 Palestinians -- including scores of armed, masked militants affiliated with Fatah -- demonstrated for the continuation of the uprising.

The demonstrators also declared their support for Mahmoud Abbas [Abu Mazen], the new head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Fatah’s candidate in Jan. 9 presidential elections.”[17]

And the author of the February 25 attack, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade branch of Fatah -- which happens to be “the deadliest Palestinian militia,” according to Newsday[7] -- was especially passionate about Abbas, taking his side vociferously when it seemed like Marwan Barghouti, another Fatah leader, might seek the post:

“Zakaria Zubeidi, the 29-year-old West Bank leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a violent group linked to Fatah, said he would back Abbas. ‘Barghouti ... should resign from Fatah,’ he told The Associated Press.”[18]

So no: Mahmoud Abbas is in no way different from Yasser Arafat. The February 25 attack that shattered the Sharm el-Sheik ceasefire was on his orders. QED.

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Why isn’t this obvious to everybody?
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Westerners and many Israeli Jews miss this because they are conditioned to process information in absurd ways. I remind you that in the Tikkun piece dealing with the February 25 bombing, and mentioned at the top of this article, managing editor Schalit writes:

“While we here at Tikkun cannot emphasize strongly enough our solidarity with the victims of today’s terror attack, we similarly cannot emphasize enough the restraint we believe the Israeli government will have to show in responding to this event.”

Newspeak. Tikkun pretends that it can be, simultaneously, maximally solidary with the victims of the attack while making an appeal for maximum restraint against their murderers. Do not laugh. Tikkun is read, and the people who read it nod their heads. This is dangerous stuff.

But readers of Tikkun must have a reason for accepting such nonsense, and they do. The underlying argument is that Mahmoud Abbas tells the truth, and therefore when he says that he will cease attacks against Israeli civilians, he means it. Because, why would a career antisemitic terrorist whose doctoral thesis famously denied the Holocaust tell a lie to the Jews?[19] And therefore any violence that takes place cannot be blamed on the saintly Mahmoud Abbas. Consequently, to react with reprisals against the latest violence, goes the argument, will weaken Abbas in his supposedly sincere efforts to work for peace. We should let innocent Jews die.

Evidence that Westerners, and Israelis, have been conditioned in advance to accept such self-evident nonsense is not hard to find. This is NPR’s Linda Gradstein (National Public Radio), shortly after the supposed cease-fire was announced:

“A poll published this past weekend in the [Israeli] Maariv newspaper found the [Israeli] public equally divided over whether the Palestinian leadership will honor the commitments it announced at the Sharm el-Sheikh summit, including an end to attacks on Israelis. The poll also found that 57 percent of Israelis want their government to exercise restraint, even in the event of a new terrorist attack. Thirty-four percent would favor an immediate military response.

Many Israelis say they’ve been down this road before and it has ended in violence, and yet they still hope that maybe this time will be different. Linda Gradstein, NPR News, Jerusalem.”[20]

As an anthropologist, I am mouth-agape. Where else can we find a population that behaves like this? A majority of Israelis advocate restraint if there is renewed terror against them! So what the Israelis have done is this: they have given their terrorist enemies permission to attack. Kill us, they say in unison, we will not hit back. If this were the behavior of an individual, we most certainly would call this individual suicidal.

And what does it take to produce this behavior? Not much: the argument that Mahmoud Abbas is not the one killing them. Israelis believe it, and that is enough: if Abbas is not the one killing us, they reason, then there should be no retaliation. But this is astounding, because even if you accept the nonsense that Abbas supposedly cannot control the killers, then, as demonstrated earlier, there is no point in negotiating anyway, and the Israeli army should return to occupying the territories and making Israelis safe. And yet, no. Instead of abolishing the 'peace' process, what the Israelis have said is that, if they are killed, they will not retaliate! This looks like a carefully premeditated suicide.

The appearance is deceiving. This is mostly hope -- the hope of a profoundly ethical culture: "Many Israelis say they’ve been down this road before and it has ended in violence, and yet they still hope...," says NPR. They hope. They hope that, if only they try hard enough, they can find the sacrifice necessary to make their enemies see that they wish to live in peace, that they mean no harm. So this is also the hope of a profoundly innocent culture, made up of people who learn from an early age to be kind, and who therefore find it impossibly difficult to fathom -- in fact, they refuse to fathom, no matter what the evidence -- that there can be forces so evil as to wish to kill Jews simply because they are Jews (never mind that this has happened many times -- even recently). Anne Frank, who knew the Nazis were looking for her to kill her, a child, for no bigger crime than being a Jew, nevertheless famously wrote in her diary, before she was found and killed, that "Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart." So the antisemitism of Jews against themselves, which generates unreasonable self-blame, is not their only vulnerability; they are also vulnerable because they passionately want to be good, and to believe in the good of others.

Reading Tikkun without the proper suspicion, then, Israeli Jews fail to notice the antisemitic absurdities.

“Palestinian intelligence officials contend that there is strong evidence linking Lebanese Shi’ite organization Hezbollah to today’s [February 25] attack.”

Why is this absurd?

Because the highfalutin descriptor “Palestinian intelligence officials” refers to officials in Fatah, the leader of which is Mahmoud Abbas, who also runs the PLO (and the ‘Palestinian Authority’). It is Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of authoritarian Fatah, who gives orders to Fatah components Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to conduct terrorist attacks and then take credit for them. So if Fatah intelligence operatives are telling the Western press that Hezbollah is behind the February 25 attack -- even as Hezbollah denies responsibility for the attack that Fatah’s own gangsters publicly claim as their own[21] -- the only proper reaction is contempt. And the only proper conclusion is that the new cease-fire is a sham.

Therefore, Israel should stop cooperating with the phony ‘cease-fire.’
 

Tikkun’s advice to the Israelis is different
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Tikkun takes a different view, as we've seen. Their recommendation is "restraint" against the murderers. Tikkun managing editor Joel Schalit explains the reasoning behind that:

“…there is no way this suicide bombing can be rationalized, except to argue that it was meant to destroy the current ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians.”

This is a remarkable statement. If a suicide bomber detonates himself in the middle of innocent civilians, killing four and wounding thirty, the cease-fire is finished, because the definition of “cease-fire” is that neither side fires. And yet Tikkun writes that this attack was “meant to destroy the current ceasefire,” as if the cease-fire could survive the murder of innocent Israeli civilians! The only way Tikkun can do this is if it pretends that Mahmoud Abbas, the one negotiating with Israel, is not responsible. But Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah has immediately claimed responsibility.

So Tikkun is advocating that Israel respect the ceasefire even while its enemy does not. This Israeli Jewish magazine, whose poster-boy is the famous Rabbi Michael Lerner, is telling Israelis that the suicidal strategy is right for them.

But Tikkun is not quite done. It says, further, that

“…this attack will only serve the interests of Israeli and Palestinian hard-liners who oppose a resumption of the peace process”

Tikkun, notice, goes out of its way to say that the murder of innocent Israelis benefits “Israeli hardliners,” whom Tikkun considers so bad that it includes them in a category with the “Palestinian hard-liners,” also known as the Palestinian terrorists. It is a miracle that Tikkun does not hold these supposed “Israeli hardliners” directly responsible for the suicide bombing. But I point out that this is a reference to Israelis who think that Jews should not simply wait for the next antisemitic terrorist to kill more innocent Jews: that’s what an “Israeli hardliner” is. And the “resumption of the peace process” would be the resumption of the process of violent extortion where the PLO leadership gets more and more power for the promise, never kept, to rein in its own terrorists thugs.

With élan, Tikkun continues,

“. . .[this attack] will steel the resolve of Israeli settlers eager to show that the forthcoming July withdrawal from Gaza and the northern West Bank will do nothing to curb Palestinian violence.”

Not only does this attack benefit the “Israeli hardliners,” says Tikkun, but it is also good for those darn Jewish settlers (Tikkun cannot find enough Jews to blame for the murder of innocent Israelis by Arab terrorists). And why, according to Tikkun, do the settlers supposedly rejoice when innocent Israelis are murdered? Because it strengthens the settler’s argument that giving territory to the terrorists “will do nothing to curb Palestinian violence.”

But the settlers hardly needed the latest attack as ammunition for their argument given that Arab leaders in the West Bank and Gaza are going on the radio to agree with the settlers in public! For example, in a recent interview on National Public Radio, the Hamas spokesman explained his position to Robert Siegel.

[NPR interview excerpt begins here]

ROBERT SIEGEL: ... Bloodied and exhausted by fighting, with thousands of its members in prison, many of its leaders killed by Israel, Hamas has a stake in a cease-fire. But Hamas spokesman Samy Hamdan Abu Zouri told us in Gaza that [the] armed intifada that seems to have ended achieved important things.

Mr. SAMY HAMDAN ABU ZOURI (Hamas Spokesman): (Through Translator) For sure, the main achievement over the Israelis, the enemy - they decide to withdraw from Gaza.

SIEGEL: How confident are you that the Israelis will withdraw from Gaza?

Mr. ZOURI: (Through Translator) The most important ...(unintelligible) talk about the necessarity [sic] of withdrawing from Gaza. I’m sure and completely convinced that they are going to leave. Maybe it will take time, but they are going to leave.[22]

[NPR interview excerpt ends here]

According to the Hamas spokesman, the fact that Israel is planning to hand over Gaza this summer is an achievement of the violence of the Second Intifada. Therefore, according to the Arab terrorists, killing Israeli civilians is a good way to get territory. If we assume that Hamas wants territory, we may ask: What should someone do to get more territory, by this logic? Answer: kill more Israeli civilians.

So, after assuming that Hamas wants territory, we conclude that “the forthcoming July withdrawal from Gaza and the northern West Bank will do nothing to curb Palestinian violence,” which is precisely what, according to Tikkun, the settlers argue.

But perhaps Hamas does not want territory. Perhaps it merely wants to kill Jews (quite plausible). Well in this case the conclusion must be that “the forthcoming July withdrawal from Gaza and the northern West Bank will do nothing to curb Palestinian violence.”

And I point out that this is all entirely consistent with the Hamas stance above. The Hamas spokesman considers the withdrawal from Gaza “the main achievement over the Israelis, the enemy.” Over the Israelis. Get it? The Israelis -- “the enemy” -- are running scared. They will not be getting anything for their withdrawal.

To leave no doubt of the justice of my analysis, take a look at what the Hamas spokesman clarifies next.

[back to NPR interview]

SIEGEL: What is Hamas’ position on the state of Israel? Does it have a right to exist?

Mr. ZOURI: (Through Translator) Well, the Israeli-Arab conflict is very complicated and very long conflict and cannot be solved soon. So Hamas would accept permanent solutions to go on in life, but in the meantime we cannot accept the legitimacy of the existence of Israel in the land of the historical Palestine.

SIEGEL: So, so far for now, you don’t concede any legitimate right of Israel?

Mr. ZOURI: (Through Translator) For sure.

[NPR interview excerpt ends here]

Consider the phrase: “The Israeli-Arab conflict is very complicated. . . and cannot be solved soon.” What does it mean?

If Hamas recognizes the right of Israel to exist, a negotiated peace is possible, in which case the phrase above means that such a negotiated peace cannot be immediately achieved.

If Hamas does not recognize the right of Israel to exist, then so long as Israel exists, Hamas is at war with Israel. In this case, the solution to the conflict, from the Hamas point of view, is synonymous with the destruction of Israel, which is to say the extermination of the Israeli Jews. Under this assumption, the phrase “the Israeli-Arab conflict is very complicated. . .and cannot be solved soon” means that Hamas cannot immediately exterminate all the Israeli Jews.

Well, Hamas has just explained above that it does not recognize the right of Israel to exist; ergo, Hamas means to exterminate the Israeli Jews, as in fact the Hamas Charter makes clear.[23]

The PLO, created by a leader of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution, and whose founding charter also calls for the extermination of the Jewish people, has just broken the cease-fire.[24]

But most Israelis, as we've seen above, favor no retaliation to terrorist violence against them, and the Gaza withdrawal is still scheduled.

Can Israel survive if it does not defend itself?

No. Israel will not survive so long as the absurdities in Tikkun have a constituency. Minds need to be liberated, and fast.

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Footnotes and Further Reading
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