A New Zionist Ethic?

By Sha’i ben-Tekoa

On Monday, 16 March, Israel’s Minister of Defense Israel Katz, was reported to have spoken that day at a meeting in the Kirya, Israel’s “Pentagon,” attended by the IDF Deputy Chief of Staff Tamir Yadai and head of Military Intelligence Shlomi Binder, describing a policy that was “shocking” for its break with years of leftist thinking, i.e. thinking peace with the Arabs is a possible goal with the right peace plan, when a more rational approach is fighting for Jewish rights.

This classic Israeli mindset includes the belief that when Israel is nice to the putatively primeval “Palestinians,” peace will reign and Israel will no longer be the outcast of the nations. This was the spirit of the loathsome Oslo, alleged peace process.

What Minister Katz did implicitly was, in effect, smash the idol against conquering enemy territory and keeping it. He said the Christians in southern Lebanon south of the Litani River can remain in their homes and villages, but the goal is to physically prevent “Hezbollah’s ability to return to the contact line and threaten (Israel’s) northern communities. So long as complete security for Israel’s residents has not been achieved, hundreds of thousands of residents in southern Lebanon who evacuated will not return to their homes until the safety of the residents of (Israel’s) north is guaranteed. We promised security and that is exactly what will be done.”

In practice, this means Israel claiming sovereign rule south of the Litani and forbidding Shiites to live there. Ironically, before WWI, the socialist Zionists believed today’s southern Lebanon should belong to the Jews.

In any case, Israel should finally adopt the classical role of the victor in war who takes land away from the defeated and stops expecting the Muslims to make peace before Islam undergoes a doctrinal revolution as formidable as the Protestant Reformation or 1965’s Roman Catholic Papal Bull called Nostra Aetate that deleted the belief that all Jews for all time bear the guilt of killing Jesus.

Israel’s residual, leftist spirit today, inherited from the founders, of course recoils at the prospect of claiming Gaza and southern Lebanon for Israel because that would prompt world anti-Jewry to shriek, “Israel is expanding its empire! Those racist, fascist, colonial imperialist Zionist settlers haven’t stolen enough land?”

What Israel has to do is claim sovereign ownership of Gaza per the UN Charter that incorporated the League’s Palestine Mandate and no less the same for southern Lebanon south of the Litani as retribution for Lebanon’s role as a terrorist base over decades of hosting the PLO and Islamist cult gangs. After WWII, the Allies reduced Germany in size. awarding some 44,000 square miles to the neighboring peoples the Third Reich had invaded and victimized, and so should Israel’s enemies lose land.

Shimon Peres once said the purpose of Zionism was the normalization of the Jewish nation and nothing has been more normal in human history than wars after which “to the victors go the spoils.”

Consider American history. The treaty that ended the American Revolution had the British cede to the Americans all the land west of the Appalachian Mountain chain toward the Mississippi River which eventually evolved into the states of the American Midwest.

Between 1846 and 1848, the U.S, fought a war with Mexico, was victorious, and wound up with about a third of that country as it had been pre-war.

The U.S. in 1898 went to war with Spain and became sovereign over Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, establishing as well a protectorate over Cuba.

Yes, world anti-Jewry would howl at such a claim by Israel that southern Lebanon is rightfully Israeli land and call Israel a state of “Racist! Fascist! Imperialist! Settler colonists!”

But they do that anyway.

Official Israel has been enslaved to the dream of peace with the neighboring Muslims, ignorant of the contents of the Koran and the history of the Jewish people who for fourteen centuries lived under the Islamic, if not jackboot then sandal and slipper and were “oppressed and humiliated” as commanded in the Koran every day for fourteen centuries one way or another.

The architects of the Oslo abomination believed the “Palestinians” were just like them, the Zionists, pining for a state of their own, when that is a perversion of history. Whatever their propaganda says about demanding a “Palestinian” state, they never took concrete steps in that direction.

Versus Theodor Herzl who wrote two books on the future of “Der Judenstaat” (The State of Jews)” and “Old-New Land,” the first a kind of prospectus for a stock offering, the economic and political nuts and bolts of creating a state on land which at the moment was, as it had been under Muslim rule, a barren wasteland, what pilgrim American novelist Herman Melville called in 1857 a “caked… depopulated Hell.” Herzl’s “Judenstaat” was a down-to-earth plan for creating such a state, versus the Arabs who have never produced their vision of a future “Palestinian” state.

Herzl’s second book was a Jule-Verne-esque fantasy of time travel to the state of the Jews twenty years after its peaceful founding. For the “Visionary of the State,” as Herzl is known in Israel, no bloody war of independence was foreseen, let alone the years afterwards in which Arab terrorists every year have bled Jews in gruesome, atrocious, terrorist horrors.

Although the Israeli Left has long sneered at religious Zionists as “messianists,” no less were the Marxists Rabin and Peres who thought the road to peace meant handing over territory to the blood-thirsty ghouls of the PLO terror gangs. The late journalist Uri Dan z’’l reported during the height of the Oslo delirium in1993 that those two were told by the Mossad that Arafat in his political career had made some 200 agreements, commonly with fellow Arabs and Muslims, and broke every one of them, to which Rabin and Peres paid no attention. So desperate were they to make peace and enjoy the love of the gentiles, they believed that with Israel, Arafat would become a man of his word.

It is time for official Israel to outgrow the shallow and ignorant fantasy of its founders who knew so little of Islam and its pre-Islamic culture.

What is happening in Israel in the north is not the first time barbarians there have launched terror missiles, that is, not one of these projectiles targets an enemy’s military forces or munitions factories. Every drone and rocket fired out of Lebanon, and no less from Iran, is meant to terrify non-combatants, kill them randomly and as such every launch is a war crime. Indeed, the next day, Hezbollah murdered a couple, both 70 years old, in Ramat Gan using these indiscriminate terror rockets.

Not that the utterly corrupt and antisemitic UN or EU will take note because the victims are the eternally guilty Jews.

Interesting too in this moment of history is the silence of HRW Human Rights Watch, which began in 1978 as a worthy organization before its corruption in the hands of anti-Jews. NGO Monitor notes that Human Rights Watch has crusaded in the past against such bombs in the spirit of the horror of gas attacks in WWI that were banned. They are the ammunition of terrorists who do not target an enemy people’s soldiers. They are terrorists who want to spread terror, an emotion, a terrible fear among non-combatants, defenseless women, children, the aged, the infirm. I think Magen David Adom has the statistics on how many senior citizens during the Gaza Qassam rocket attacks and in the current war have hurried to a bomb shelter in an attack, stumbled, fell and hurt themselves.

In 1978, Human Rights Watch was co-founded by three crusaders for freedom of speech and conscience Robert L. Bernstein, Jeri Laber, and Aryeh Neier[ as a private American NGO, under the name Helsinki Watch, whose cause was Soviet dissidents. But after Asia Watch (1985), Africa Watch (1988), and Middle East Watch (1989) joined, they eventually took over and renamed it Human Rights Watch, and under the direction of a Jewish, no-friend-of-Israel Kenneth Roth, HRW joined the world-wide Jew-bashing Left in smearing Israel for victimizing the “Palestinians.” Helsinki Watch renamed itself HRW, and in in April 2021 released a report accusing Israel of apartheid and calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate “systematic discrimination” against Balestinians, becoming the first major international rights NGO to do this.

In a word, until the onset of the current war launched on February 28, HRW crusaded against the use of cluster terror bombs in the same spirit that called for the banning of mustard gas as a weapon of war, but since their use is against the Jews, HRW is silent.

One of the great secrets, one of the elephants in the global room that is never mentioned in the New York Times and its sister MSM media outlets, is that the endless war against Israel is just this generation’s way of exercising its timeless hatred of what the Jews stand for: the existence of a G-d Who watches you and gave you a conscience.

Hence, the anti-Jews who experience the American alliance with Israel as coercive, even oppressive. They want to hate Jews as Jews have been hated for thousands of years and they resist being told the culturally politically correct thing is to support Israel. A beauty queen from decaying California objects to being told it is wrong not to “worship” Israel, her word. Tucker Carlson as well objects to being told it is not wrong to hate the Jews. He reminded the millions who watched the first memorial gathering for Charlie Kirk that it was the Jews who did not like being criticized by Jesus so they said, “Let’s kill him.”

It is time for Israel to concede the failure of Zionism to end antisemitism and act accordingly. Stake its rightful claims to Gaza and southern Lebanon as the victim of aggression by an enemy there whose religion denies the right of Jews to live free in their ancient homeland.

PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle ebook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.