“Stand for Israel, Stand for Reason”

The attack against Israel by the Jcall document is inspired by a short-sighted view of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In fact, the signatories of this appeal do not have the clear perception of the global physical and moral threat to which Israel is currently exposed. It is indeed incredible that intelligent and cultivated people like Alain Finkelkraut and Bernard-Henri Levy – instead of dealing with Iran that will soon keep the whole world under the threat of the range of its atomic bomb – play with the idea that Benjamin Netanyahu is the true hindrance to peace, that the essential obstacle to a resolution of the conflict is a reproachable attitude of Israel. The intellectuals who have signed the French manifesto ignore history and don’t care about the help that it will give and is already giving to the unprecedented delegitimization threatening the life of Israel.

Pushing Israel to concessions without rewards, simply means to surrender the enemy without any guarantee: the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza has produced disastrous consequences, the land Gush Katif inhabitants has been kicked out from, is since then a launching pad for missiles and terrorists; Ehud Barak’s concessions in Camp David, designed to give Arafat practically everything he was asking for, led to the horror of the second Intifada, with its two-thousand people killed by suicide terrorists, shootings and rocket attacks; the evacuation of Southern Lebanon in 2000 strengthened the Hezbollah, supplied them with more than 40,000 missiles and led to the 2006 war.

Finkelkraut, Henri Levy and their fellow signatories claim that they are concerned about the future and the security of Israel. But they actually ignore the basic element that has prevented success of any peace process, namely the Arab and Palestinian refusal to recognize the very existence of the State of Israel as a permanent nation-state in the Middle East. This all-encompassing rejection of Israel’s right to exist is reflected day by day in the Palestinian and pan-Arab media.

The attack against Netanyahu aims at breaking up his right wing coalition. But it actually never mattered whether an Israeli government was right or left wing: anyhow the Palestinians refused any proposal of peace.

Israeli land concessions like the ones the French intellectuals advocate, will never bring peace. Only a cultural revolution in the Arab world can achieve it, but nobody asks for that, not even Obama, who devotes US great strength to pressure only Israel. This is the current fashion.

Peace will not come because Israel becomes smaller. What will bring us closer to peace is if Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas stops naming public squares after mass-murderers like Hamas bombmaker Yehiya Ayash; if the Palestinians stop passing out candies when Jewish families are murdered by suicide bombers in restaurants; and when the Arab world accepts Netanyahu’s modest request to recognize the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish people.

This reality is ignored as well by the Israeli intellectuals who have signed a document attacking the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who wrote a very noble letter to support Jerusalem as the spiritual core and historical homeland of the Jewish people.

This sadly politically correct epidemic is probably designed to give some oxygen to the defeated pacifist movement that is actually able only to crash against the rock of the Islamist hatred culture and to defame Israel. But in this approach there is no contribution to any better future for the Middle East: the world must find the courage to face the new Islamist frenzy that springs from Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas and points to the destruction of Israel. Iran and its allies are of course arming themselves with lethal weapons, not with vain words, like those who signed “The Call for Reason”. But even words can kill and destroy.

The signatories of the J-Call manifesto show a blatant ignorance of the extended hand policy adopted by Netanyahu since his Bar Ilan speech in June 2009, the ten-months settlements freeze, the lifting of many check points and the adoption of important measures to ease the Palestinian economy. And you can clearly see that the “Finkelkraut document” has an Obama flavour, a prissy and respectable trendy attitude intellectuals are often unable to say no. This makes possible nowadays to the increasing number of Israel’s enemies to delegitimize the Jewish State by claiming that “even the Jews are with us”. If this was the signatories’s goal, they have indeed achieved it.