IS THIS A SLEDGEHAMMER I SEE BEFORE ME? (Via Ransom Danegeld)

Enter the neo-Canaanites (Bret Stephens, Jurusalem Post, 8/21/03)

A . . . recent [Haaretz] profile (August 8) is of Meron Benvenisti and Haim Hanegbi. Benvenisti was once an old-style Labor Zionist who served in the 1960s as Teddy Kollek's deputy and in the 1980s became a muse of sorts for the New York Times's Tom Friedman. Hanegbi, a much less accomplished figure, was with Uri Avnery a leader in the ultra-Left Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) until he found the group too moderate for his views.

What unites Benvenisti and Hanegbi is that they have separately concluded that the two-state solution can't work. Many other Israelis, disillusioned with Oslo, have also come to this view, but not quite in the same way. For Benvenisti and Hanegbi, it isn't a Palestinian state that's a problem. It's a Jewish one. 'Israel as a Jewish state can no longer exist here,' says Hanegbi. Says Benvenisti: 'This country will not tolerate a border in its midst.' . . .

Probably by chance, on the same day the Benvenisti-Hanegbi profile appeared, Haaretz carried a long feature by Daniel Gavron on the so-called Uganda scheme, which was debated at the sixth Zionist conference 100 years ago. Headlined 'Nowhere in Africa,' after the recent film about a German-Jewish family that escaped from the Nazis to Kenya, Gavron's article asks 'whether [the scheme's] rejection by the seventh congress was a fatal historical error."

The article is a mostly competent piece of journalism. It covers the historic ground well. It also leaves little doubt that a Jewish state had no chance of establishing itself, much less succeeding, on the Uasin Gishu plateau in East Africa - or anywhere else on the continent, for that matter. Nor is it likely that even a temporary African haven would have saved large numbers of Jews from the Holocaust. Few had the foresight to leave Germany and Eastern Europe while it was still possible to get out. A dusty outpost in Africa would hardly have been an enticing destination.

"Even the land of Israel and Jerusalem," Gavron writes, "were only just powerful enough magnets to attract a sufficient number of Jews to facilitate the establishment of a Jewish state." . . .

What's interesting, then, about the Uganda article isn't what it says but the fact that it was written at all. It suggests an incredible fragility of belief in the Zionist enterprise as it came to be - and a negative belief at that. Are we here because it is, in some meaningful sense, our home? Not at all. We're here because it was the only workable and least-bad solution to an urgent refugee problem. Nowadays, however, perhaps it's not the ideal solution.

Of course I may be extrapolating too much. And Gavron and Haaretz are hardly typically Israeli. But Benvenisti touches on something very deep when he says that Israel's conflict is not between two national movements but between "a society of immigrants and a society of natives." It suggests that Jews no more belong here than they would have in Uganda. It suggests that Jews remain, at best, refugees. It suggests the Zionist enterprise is colonialist. And it means that the Jewish state is as illegitimate as it is doomed.

"In the end," says Hanegbi, "the region will be stronger than Israel, in the end the indigenous people will be stronger than Israel." The only solution is to abandon the idea of a Jewish state - "the mad dream," he calls it - to mix with our Arab neighbors in mixed cities and mixed neighborhoods and mixed families, and to "take part in the democratization of the Middle East." Let's stop trying to be Jews, counsels Benvenisti, and let's stop trying to build a "Jewish state." We're "neo-Canaanites" now.

Victory is the only option (Caroline B. Glick, Jurusalem Post, 8/22/03)

The one move that the Abbas-Dahlan (Arafat) junta has made since ascending to international celebrity is the PA's sponsorship of the hudna [ceasefire]. Over the past two months, every time that they were asked about their moves to dismantle the Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah terror organizations, they pointed to the hudna and said that this was all that was necessary to bring peace. Initially, Israel decried the hudna as a farce. But once Hamas and its friends in Islamic Jihad and the PA announced its implementation six weeks ago, the government immediately began to play ball.

The media also got taken in by the hudna. The day after 20 Israeli children and their parents were disemboweled and scorched in Jerusalem, the question that dominated the papers was: Is the hudna over? Even after Hamas announced yesterday the hudna was off, Israeli commentators continued to ask whether Hamas was serious about "restarting" its terrorist slaughter. . . .

A decision to kill, deport, or arrest Arafat and try him for crimes against humanity in an Israeli court of law would be an immediate catalyst for a military operation that would in fact bring this country victory and the security that would ensue. Why is this? Because the only way to win a war is to identify who the enemy is. After 10 years of lying to ourselves, the blood on the streets of our capital city calls out the truth. Hamas and Islamic Jihad could never operate if it weren't for the PA and Arafat and his new straw men Abbas and Dahlan. The longer our leaders dither and deceive us, the longer our army officers will believe that their work is meaningless and the longer our lives will be at the mercy of our enemies.

Our future lies in the hands of our leaders. Victory is the only option. What will it take for them to find the will to lead us to it?

Those of us old enough to remember when Art Buchwald was funny -- or to remember him at all -- will remember a column he wrote towards the end of every year imagining the meetings in which the most disastrous decisions of the year had been made. In that spirit, let's imagine the meeting leading to Israel's establisment: "Hm, we have a population of wretched, oppressed Jews who have been locked up in Europe's ghettos and shtetls for the last 1500 years. What should we do with them." "Obviously, send them off to a desert in the midst of a sea of rabid antisemites." One senses that this looked generous only in comparison to the Holocaust.

Fifty years later, the Israelis find themselves, through a series of logical steps, in a position in which they have to be restrained in their response to babykilling. The United States would have decimated any enemy that had done a tenth as much. Now the Israelis should be deciding between two stark choices -- capitulation or all out war. Naturally, in the aftermath of the latest bombing, there are those who counsel capitulation and those demanding war, but I expect that the Israelis, prodded by Washington, will punt. They will try, once again, to reconcile the irreconcilable, reminding us that the Jews are truly crazy; doing the same thing again and again but expecting a different outcome each time.

For my part, I remain convinced that the true guarantor of the future of the Jewish people is the United States. We even have some open desert of our own that could use some flowering and I don't think the Jackalopes are antisemitic, even if they are rabid. But my heart agrees with Ms. Glick. Kill Arafat. Try him if you must, but kill him. Posted by David Cohen at August 27, 2003 10:59 PM