By Reuven Koret
June 3, 2005
At last week's AIPAC conference, for the first time in memory, the Israeli national anthem Hatikva ("The Hope") was not played after the American one. Each speaker at the conference endorsed the U.S. backed Roadmap and the Sharon Disengagement Plan. On the speaker's podium, there was no dissent.
Even Natan Sharansky, once the darling of the White House and a member of Sharon's government, was not invited after he resigned from the Cabinet because of his opposition to the Plan.
Poor AIPAC. They have been scared witless by the FBI sting operation to entrap their leaders. Now the lobby's leadership is desperate to ingratiate itself with the masters in Washington. Fully half of the Hill turned out for their gala.
Turns out it won't help them. The forced resignations of their executives won't suffice. The FBI is going after indictments, aiming for espionage charges.
For those who can't put two and two together, the Bush Administration is giving a lesson for American Jews they will never forget. The lesson goes something like this:
"Deviate from our line, our roadmap, criticize our Mideast policy and we will bring you down! No, better-- we won't need to bring you down because you will toe our line, follow our map, adopt our policy as your own. You Jews will heel, lie down and roll over when we so instruct. Or we will send you back to obedience school."
The dog-and-pony show continued later in the week when Mahmoud Abbas rode into town in his shiny new suit. President Bush not only put his money on this trick pony (to the tune of a $50 million first installment). He said that Abbas and the Palestinian will have veto power over Israel's final borders-- this in seeming contradiction to the belief, promoted by the Sharon government, that the United States endorses Israel retention of its major population centers and settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria -- the "West Bank."
Of course, that is not what the Bush Administration has said--only that these centers were facts to be "taken into account" during the final status talks. Sharon, foolishly, has based his entire disengagement plan on the assumption that the Americans would go easy on Israel, once we get out of Gaza. Sharon's lieutenant and attorney Dov Weissglas, boasted that the move would freeze the west in "formaldehyde" for many years to come.
The Israeli officials heard when they wanted to hear, believed what they wished to believe. When Condi nodded her head, an Administration official said, it just meant that she was listening, not that she agreed. But the Bush officials were leading them along all the way, using Sharon's political weight to try and bring the opposition to heel.
Further evidence in the collapse of "Israel's best friend" is the willingness of American officials to accept Islamic terrorist as new recruits in the Palestinian security forces.
And there is evidence that the Americans are willing to believe that Hamas participation in PA elections is a sign that they have become democrats, rather than exploiting quasi-democratic processes to achieve power for the Islamic exterminationist cause.
Bush was inclined to believe that Palestinian mothers don't want to raise their children to lives of violence, ignoring the hero-cult around which that culture celebrates murderous martyrs. They love to die killing Jews and the mommas and the papas often join in the jubilation when their sons and daughters succeed in killing and maiming Jews.
The latest news is that, following instructions from his American master, dear Dov Weissglas has announced that after the expulsions and retreats from Gaza and Samaria, the government of Israel will -- really, this time, they promise -- remove unauthorized outposts from elsewhere in the Judean and Samarian highlands.
The big snag in the plans is that the opposition to the disengagement is far greater than the Americans expected, and more than Sharon -- who should have known better -- evidently anticipated.
This opposition is motivated not just by the ideology of the pragmatic Zionism of which Sharon was once a staunch adherent, not by the Jewish imperatives that forbid expulsion of the living and unearthing of the dead, but also by the secular common-sense perspective that Israel is likely to gain absolutely no benefit -- not from the Arabs, nor the Europeans, nor the Americans -- for their painful sacrifices. On the contrary, Israel's flight from terror will be perceived as a glorious victory by the terrorists and an incentive by the Western powers to push for additional concessions, all the way back to the 1949 Armistice Lines and beyond.
All of this is so crystal clear to anyone with eyes to see that it may at times be incomprehensible how Israeli leaders could go along with a plan which is so transparently design to force the Jewish State back to indefensible "Auschwitz borders" in the words of the dovish Abba Eban.
Sharon is known for his saying that "the dogs bark and the caravan moves on." He is known as the bulldozer. While once he bulldozed to create facts for the Jewish return to their homeland, today he bulldozes under contract for those who would uproot, expel and endanger the very existence of Israel.
As incongruous as the imagery may be, Sharon and his pack of pusillanimous politicos have been leashed and trained and constrained by an American leash. Perhaps weakening in his mental faculties, he is now being led by foreign masters, who thus seek to bring the rest of the nation with him.
Before Passover, the gifted Dan Meth created a delightful animation which retells the story of the Hebrews' liberation from Egypt by reference to a disco tune that was wildly popular a few years back: "Who let the dogs out?" Here a councilor to Pharaoh inquires about the sudden departure of the Jewish servants and slaves.
"Who let the Jews out???!!" The call is repeated throughout the echelons of Egypt's corridors of power until we see the people of Israel marching enroute to the Promised Land.
Thus it is today. The real dogs are chained to the leashes of foreign masters while the free men and women are those that are marching and demonstrating and crying out for deliverance from the wicked edict of those who would expel thousands of families from their homes.
The true leaders of Israel today are those who are now attending Disobedience School, learning and training, struggling and straining, how to block and stop the Caravan that aims to lead their nation to ruin.
"Who let the Jews out?" the Americans and Europeans will demand furiously of Sharon. And we, unleashed, unashamed to sing "Hatikva" or abandon hope of being a free people in our own Land, will proudly and defiantly answer, standing before the mired chariots of State, and preventing their forwarding plunge to destruction:
"Woof! Woof! Woof! Woof!"
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