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Jewish World Review March 17, 2009 / 21 Adar 5769 Israel's balance of delusion By Caroline B. Glick
The Left's latest fantasy is its enthusiasm for a deal with Hamas that would
free Gilad Schalit. By tonight, Israelis should know whether or not
our outgoing leftist government will agree to release between 450 and 1,000
Palestinian terrorists - including mass murderers serving multiple life
sentences - in exchange for Schalit whom Hamas and it sister terror groups
have held hostage since June 2006.
Schalit's plight presents two stark choices. We can surrender to all of
Hamas's demands and reunite Schalit with his suffering family, or we can
keep a stiff upper lip, refuse to negotiate with terrorists and wait until
we receive actionable intelligence on his whereabouts and attempt to rescue
him. We know what will happen in both cases.
If we surrender to Hamas's demands, we will ensure more families will suffer
the same plight as Gilad Schalit's family. We know that this will happen
because we have been through this process repeatedly. Every single time we
have released terrorists for hostages, the result has been more murdered
Israelis and more hostages. As before, the only thing we still don't know is
the names of the next victims. They could be any of us. And so, in a very
real sense, they are all of us.
If on the other hand the outgoing government opted for the stiff upper lip
approach, we know that we would increase the chance that Schalit will be
murdered. Hamas can kill him at any time. And in the event that the IDF
stages a rescue raid, there is a good chance that both Schalit and his
rescuers will return to their families in wooden boxes. Then again, we also
know that by not negotiating with terrorists, and by keeping jailed
terrorists in prison, we stand a better chance of protecting the lives of
the rest of us.
Both choices, of course, are miserable ones. But they are the only choices.
We can surrender or we can fight. There is no third option.
In keeping though with the Left's penchant for dreaming up imaginary
choices, the Kadima-Labor government decided to negotiate Schalit's release
with Hamas, but to pretend that in doing so, it is doing something other
than surrendering. Rather than admit that by agreeing to release hundreds of
murderers from jail he is placing every single family in the country at
risk, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert describes his urgent pleadings to
Hamas as a noble gesture towards the Schalit family, a gesture which
supposedly gives expression to Judaism's commitment to Jewish captives. That
is, he has moved the discussion of the terrorist release from the realm of
reality to the realm of metaphysics.
Much to his discredit, Prime Minister-designate Binyamin Netanyahu has
refused to criticize the outgoing government's surrender to Hamas. There is
some justification for his silence. The media is so adamant about moving
forward with the release of mass murderers that were he to speak out, he
would set the media against him even before he is sworn in to office. But
then again, the overwhelmingly leftist media will treat Netanyahu with
hostility regardless of what he does. So it seems unreasonable that he has
maintained his silence on this issue.
THE ONE POLITICIAN who has been outspoken in opposing the mass release of
terrorists has been MK Ya'acov (Ketzeleh) Katz, the leader of the National
Union party. Together with the families of terror victims who oppose the
government's intention to release their relatives' murderers, Katz has been
the loudest voice in politics stridently opposing the deal. He has made
clear that it will endanger the country and guarantee the murder and
abduction of still more Israelis.
Katz and the National Union have it right on this issue. Indeed, they have
it right on just about every major strategic issue they have championed.
From their opposition to the failed Oslo process to their opposition to the
failed Camp David summit, from their opposition to the withdrawal from south
Lebanon and Gaza to their opposition to the failed road map peace process
and the failed Annapolis peace process, the National Union has been right
all along. It has always stayed true to its principles.
One might think that given the National Union's consistent track record that
it would be the largest party in the Knesset. Surely voters would reward it
for its wisdom. But one of course would be wrong.
The National Union received four seats in the Knesset. Its sister party,
Habayit Hayehudi won three mandates. The two parties ran separately despite
their ideological and cultural affinity because their members simply
couldn't get along. They couldn't compromise on who would appear where on
the party list.
And this is the beginning of the story.
FOR ALL of its strategic wisdom and clearheadedness, the National Union is a
political home for delusional politicians. In all of its various
incarnations - from Tehiya to Herut to Moledet to the National Union - the
party has never been able to understand what it means to govern. It has
never been able to recognize that politics is the art of compromise.
In 1992, angry that Likud under prime minister Yitzhak Shamir bowed to US
pressure and participated in the Madrid peace conference, Tehiya brought
down his government. In so doing, it brought in Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon
Peres and brought the country the Oslo process and Yasser Arafat in
Ramallah.
In 1999, angry at Netanyahu for bowing to US pressure and agreeing to the
Wye Plantation accords, the National Union brought down his government. In
so doing, it brought in Ehud Barak and Yossi Beilin, the withdrawal from
Lebanon and the Camp David summit.
In all, the total of Israelis who have been killed due to Oslo, the
withdrawal from Lebanon and the Palestinian terror war which followed Camp
David comes to around 2,000. The country's weakened position today in the US
and Europe as well as in the Arab world, would have been inconceivable in
1992.
In both 1992 and 1999, the National Union and its predecessors were faced
with two choices. They could remain ideologically pure by bringing down
their own government and so risk empowering the Left, or they could
recognize that governance is the art of compromise, keep a stiff upper lip
and work from within the government to mitigate the strategic damage that in
their view Shamir and Netanyahu caused by bowing to American pressure.
And in both cases, the National Union rejected its real choices in favor of
an imaginary one. Both in 1992 and 1999 it chose to leave the government
while pretending that there was no difference between Likud and Labor. By
choosing this route, it effectively committed itself to strategic as well as
political blindness since it was forced to claim - wrongly - that there was
no difference between Madrid and Oslo or between Wye Plantation and Camp
David.
Last Friday it was disclosed that on Wednesday afternoon, Netanyahu had
reopened coalition talks with Kadima leader Tzipi Livni. Those talks had
ended weeks ago after Livni demanded that Netanyahu agree to share the
premiership with her through a rotation agreement, give her full control
over strategy for dealing with the Palestinians and adopt the establishment
of a Palestinian state as the primary goal of his government. All of Livni's
demands were nonnegotiable and all of them, both separately and together,
were unacceptable for Netanyahu. And so, he rejected them and for the past
two and a half weeks has been concentrating his efforts on building a
governing coalition with the right wing and religious parties.
AVIGDOR LIEBERMAN's Israel Beiteinu with its 15 Knesset seats is set to be
Likud's main coalition partner. Lieberman has been the most outspoken
champion of a Likud-Kadima-Israel Beiteinu coalition. This makes sense from
his perspective. Lieberman is viewed both by the West and by much of the
country's leftist elite as a racist. Due both to his legal worries and to
the fact that his actual policy preferences of surrendering the Galilee and
the Negev to the Arabs are far left of center, Lieberman cares deeply about
what the Left thinks of him. In his view, the only way to be accepted as
legitimate in leftist circles is to compel Likud to move to the left by
bringing Kadima into the government.
In part to satisfy Lieberman - without whom he cannot form a government -
and in part because he remembers that it was the National Union which
brought down his government 10 years ago, Netanyahu began his coalition
building talks with Kadima. They collapsed only because Livni made demands
that he could not meet.
In the current round of talks, Livni has reportedly maintained her demands,
but now Netanyahu is reportedly accepting them - at least partially. The
question that needs to be asked is what has changed in three weeks? Why has
Netanyahu decided that Livni's previously unacceptable demands are now
acceptable? The only reasonable answer is the National Union. Last week Katz
scuttled negotiations with Likud because it refused his demand for the
Construction and Housing Ministry. On Thursday, he joined hands with Habayit
Hayehudi chairman MK Daniel Herschkowitz and announced that neither of the
two parties would join Netanyahu's government if he doesn't meet all of
their demands, including the Ministry of Education for Herschkowitz. Without
the two parties, Netanyahu lacks a parliamentary majority.
It is possible that Katz and Herschkowitz are bluffing. In fact, it is
likely that they are. But what their behavior shows clearly is that
Netanyahu is correct when he says that a coalition that relies on them is
inherently unstable. And so, he has moved back into Kadima's orbit.
If the Olmert-Livni-Barak government goes ahead with its plans to spring
hundreds of mass murderers from prison in its last days in office, the
threat they will unleash will just be added to the long list of serious
threats that our strategically delusional leftist government has created and
expanded during its tenure in office. It would be the height of irony - and
tragedy - if due to the Right's proven political incompetence, the same
political Left remains in power as the main partners in the Netanyahu
government and so is given yet another opportunity to ruin the country.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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