WarSclerotic

Telling the truth in the hall of lies, Israel Hayom, Dror Eydar, October 2, 2014

1. It was not unnecessary. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address at the United Nations General Assembly was only unnecessary in the eyes of the usual suspects. And in the eyes of Netanyahu’s enemies. But the speech was broadcast to millions of American viewers from coast to coast. This refutes the leftist commentators’ claim that the speech was directed only at an Israeli audience.

Israelis know the things he said in his speech, but we need a messenger to relay our truth to the world. It is important that once every year, the head of the Jewish state comes to New York to tell the truth at the United Nations hall of lies. It is among the duties of any statesman worthy of his title.

The leftist commentators also claimed that in his genocide speech, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas served the Israeli Right. Wrong. He doesn’t work for us. He revealed his true self, and that is a truth that the Left rejects.

2. Channel 2 commentator Amnon Abramovich slammed Netanyahu’s speech for lacking a solid peace plan. Labor and Meretz chairs Isaac Herzog and Zehava Gal-On echoed the assertion. And what about them? Do they have a plan? This is not the 1980s; we’ve already tried the Left’s snake oil solutions. Never mind the Israeli radicals and the Arab Knesset factions — they’d rather see us all go to hell and Israel cease to exist in its current form, or at all — but what does the rational, reasonable Left have to offer on the topic? What do they mean when they call for a “diplomatic solution” to the conflict?

Here is the Left’s ingenious plan, in a nutshell: A withdrawal to 1967 borders (with land swaps for settlement blocs), including a withdrawal from the Jordan Valley and the division of Jerusalem (including the Old City!) and an agreement resolving the refugee problem. The Left is divided on the question of how many refugees should be allowed to “return” to Israeli soil. This plan includes the evacuation/expulsion of (approximately) 100,000 Jews. They will be given the option of remaining where they are, under Palestinian sovereignty. Yeah, right.

The Palestinians have already twice rejected reckless deals involving this plan (offered by former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert). But let’s say that they were open to it: Excuse me, have we lost our minds? We withdrew from Lebanon — we got Hezbollah. We withdrew from Gaza — we got Hamas. The Israeli Left claims they won’t allow Hamas to take control over the Palestinian Authority — what are they planning to do, then? Dictate to our neighbors who they elect to power? And then, when the Arab winter begins to encroach on the Samarian hills, will they continue to conceal the truth behind catchphrases like “peace agreement” and “diplomatic horizon”?

3. I heard a radio program on which Israeli poet Nathan Zach complained about the establishment of Jewish towns and communities so close to the Gaza border. Why so close to Gaza? Is there not enough room throughout the Negev? With this complaint, Zach was trying to justify the fact that Hamas fires rockets at us. We pushed them, and they reacted… poor Hamas. The heroes living in the kibbutzim and communities along the Gaza border have now become illegitimate in the eyes of the crazy Left. They are now in the same category as the settlers.

4. The man who embodies the idea of a double standard, Israeli Arab MK Ahmad Tibi, concluded recently that saying that the IDF is the most moral army in the world is actually an oxymoron because occupation contradicts morality. He was being gentle. Last year, Tibi called the IDF an army of murderers. But we are not occupiers, Mr. Tibi. Most of the Palestinian population is currently under self rule, in the Palestinian Authority, which functions as a state. As for the rest of Judea and Samaria — it is the land of our forefathers. In any case, we never conquered land belonging to a Palestinian entity (which never existed), so at worst the land is disputed, not occupied.

As far as we’re concerned, the Arabs are the ones who invaded our land in the seventh century. Ever since the 1880s, the Zionist waves of immigration (aliyah) brought with them hundreds of thousands of people from Arab states. They came here looking for work, while the Jews were coming back to their homeland – the only place for them on earth. That is why the IDF is not an army of occupation but rather a force tasked with protecting Jews from what the Arabs of the region planned to do to us in 1948 and failed. They call their failure to kill us “Nakba” – a catastrophe.

Toward the end of his remarks, Tibi mentioned that he didn’t like the photo that Netanyahu showed at the U.N. (of rocket launchers next to children in Gaza), but that this does not justify the murder of hundreds of children. This begs the question: Putting all other rocket launch squads aside, should the particular launcher in the photo have been bombed, according to Tibi? If not, should we have waited for the rockets to explode on our children?

5. At the Channel 2 News studio, Opposition Leader Isaac Herzog was joined by three journalists who share his views. Tibi was also made to feel at home there. How is it that the only representative of the Israeli majority on the Channel 2 program, Communications Minister Gilad Erdan, was not joined by a single journalist who thinks differently than his or her colleagues?