Paul Eidelberg -- Realism

REALISM

By Professor Paul Eidelberg

April 12, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s candor in his “maiden speech” was indeed refreshing. He said inter alia that the Palestinian Authority must fulfill all the requirements of the “Road Map” to a Palestinian state—which means there will be no Palestinian state. This is “realism.” It means no end to the conflict—not if one takes Islam or Arab-Islamic culture seriously.

It’s plain that the Obama administration and the European Union do not take Islam seriously, which is why they are demanding a Palestinian state NOW. Unconditional acceptance of a Palestinian state was the objective of the Annapolis Conference, which Mr. Lieberman rejected in his maiden speech. In other words, he rejected unconditional surrender to Israel’s enemy, the Fatah-Hamas Palestinian Authority. Turn, however, to Obama’s visit to Saudi Arabia.

That the President of the United States should genuflect from the waist down to Saudi King Faud signifies the (ignominious) unconditional surrender of the United States to Islam.

Mr. Obama’s father was a Muslim (which makes him a Muslim). His mother a secular Christian. Obama’s bowing to King Faud signifies an alliance of Islam and the secularized Christian West against Judaism and the Jewish State of Israel.

This alliance may be said to have begun in 1975 when the United Nations declared Zionism a form of racism and subsequently endowed the Arafat-led PLO with “observer status.” Thereafter, both the US and the EU rolled out the red carpet to Arafat. In violation of its agreement with Israel concerning the PLO, President Carter Jimmy allowed the PLO to establish an office in Washington, DC. PLO offices were also established in various European capitals. The two offspring of Judaism again bit the breasts that had suckled them.

All this is beyond the “realism” of Foreign Minister Lieberman. His realism merely elaborates Benjamin’s Netanyahu oft-repeated slogan of “reciprocity” (a term foreign to the Islamic mind). What Lieberman and Netanyahu fail to see is that their affirmation of a Palestinian state makes their realism impossible.

This affirmation has pernicious consequences. First, to say “Yes” to an Arab-Islamic state in Judea and Samaria cannot but shrink and stultify the national identity of the Jewish people’s as well as their confidence in the justice and nobility of Israel’s cause. Acknowledging an Arab-Islamic state in Judea and Samaria—the heartland of the Jewish people—constitutes a PUBLIC TEACHING to Jews and Gentiles alike, that the Land of Israel does not belong exclusively to the Jewish people. This makes a mockery of the Torah and the teachings of the Prophets and Sages of Israel.

This teaching cannot but erode the historical memory of the Jewish people, since the teachings of their Prophets and Sages are intimately bound up with Judea and Samaria.
Second, nothing encourages the Arabs to persist in their genocidal objectives so much than the Jewish people’s renunciation of their God-given and exclusive right to the Land of Israel. Affirming a Palestinian state not only arms Israel’s Islamic enemies, it also undermines American and European support of Israel vis-à-vis the demands of those enemies. It is a confession of weakness. This weakness leads to almost irreversible errors.

For example, at the Likud central committee meeting that elected him as the party’s chairman a few months before the June 1992 election, Mr. Netanyahu rejected a resolution to the effect that a Likud government would not be bound by any agreement that compromised Israel’s security. He rejected this resolution on the fallacious grounds that a democracy must abide by its agreements. This is precisely the position of the present government coalition agreement.

What irony! For Great Britain violated the San Remo International Agreement which incorporated the Balfour Declaration and which affirmed exclusive Jewish sovereignty over what is now called the “West Ban”!

Quite apart from attorney Howard Grief’s scholarly argument that the Oslo or Israel-PLO Agreement of 1993 is itself a violation of international law (as well as of Israeli law), common sense tells us that no nation can be bound to an agreement which subsequently proves dangerous to its existence.

It is not international law—nor is it simply economic interests—that prompts democratic America and democratic Europe to unite with Islamic despots against the Jewish State of Israel. More significant is the age-old hatred of Judaism, the greatest enemy of paganism, which still animates the nations of mankind.

Here, political science or the reform of Israel’s flawed system of multiparty cabinet government is of limited value. Israel’s needs a rebirth of freedom—the freedom Abraham initiated when he turned away from paganism and became a servant of God. This is the freedom Jews exalt on Passover.

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At this crucial moment of history, in which the West is capitulating to Islam, I can only pray that God will endow Israel’s new government with the wisdom and courage to hold the fort against the barbarians and their timid allies in the democratic world.

Prayer by the Jewish people and by their political leaders may well be the only “realism.”

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Internationally known political scientist, author and lecturer, Eidelberg is the founder and president of The Foundation for Constitutional Democracy with offices in Jerusalem.

Prof. Eidelberg served in the United States Air Force where he held the rank of first lieutenant. He received his doctoral degree at the University of Chicago. He designed the electronic equipment for the first brain scanner at the Argonne Cancer Research Hospital.

Before immigrating to Israel in 1976, Prof. Eidelberg wrote a trilogy on America’s founding fathers: The Philosophy of the American Constitution, On the Silence of the Declaration of Independence, and a Discourse on Statesmanship.

In 1976 he joined the faculty of Bar-Ilan University in Israel. He has written several books on the Arab-Israel conflict and on Judaism. Demophrenia: Israel and the Malaise of Democracy analyses the mentality of Israel’s ruling elites. Jewish Statesmanship: Lest Israel Fall, which has been translated into Hebrew and Russian, reveals the flaws inherent in Israel’s system of governance and how they may be remedied. A Jewish Philosophy of History investigates the world-historical events leading to the rebirth of Israel in 1948.

His latest publication, The Myth of Israeli Democracy, provides an abbreviated version of a Constitution which shows how to make Israel a genuine democracy based on a Jewish conception of freedom and equality.

Eidelberg is on the Advisory Council of the Ariel Center for Policy Research, which has published many of his policy papers. In addition to writing more than 1,000 articles for newspapers and scholarly journals in the U.S. and Israel, he has a weekly program on Israel National Radio.

Prof. Eidelberg has been lecturing throughout Israel and the United States. He conducts seminars on constitutions, diverse parliamentary electoral systems, Jewish law, and related topics at the Jerusalem center of the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy.

Web site: Foundation for Constitutional Democracy

E-Mail: eidelberg@foundation1.org

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