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David Horovitz: A Vacuum in the Center

In times of crisis such as these, Israelis, Diaspora Jews and other supporters worldwide desperately want to rally behind the government in Jerusalem, as it strives to find the policies to minimize the loss of life, revive the prospects for a normalized future, and ensure the survival of a Jewish state we can be proud to live in, visit and identify with.

Unfortunately, all too often, what many of us see is a collection of unrealistic or self-interested politicians -- very few of whom are providing firm and moral leadership, some of whom are even providing the opposite.

Neither I, nor I suspect the Israeli and pro-Israel mainstream, wish to be represented by a minister (Effi Eitam) who recommends the summary execution of captured Palestinians, however grave their alleged crimes.

Extraordinarily, few of those at the cabinet table both recognize the failures of the Oslo process and our existential need, nevertheless, to find a viable accommodation with the Palestinians. Instead, we have a foreign minister, Shimon Peres, still clinging pitifully to the former, and a prime minister, Ariel Sharon, unwilling or unable to contemplate the latter. Between Peres�s continuing masochistic embrace of Arafat, and Sharon�s public insistence on maintaining all settlements and silencing such faint voices of rela-tive moderation as Sari Nusseibeh�s, the pragmatic political middle ground is, appallingly, a no man�s land.

Neither can the mainstream have confidence in a cabinet leadership that is unable to distinguish between laws that legitimately designate our country as the homeland of the Jewish people, and proposed legislation that would deny its citizens equal rights. The overwhelming majority of ministers were unable to draw that distinction when approving, in early July, a bill that would effectively have rendered parts of Israel as Jews-only districts. Meir Sheetrit, the minister of justice, ignominiously abstained. For months, the Palestinians have falsely accused Israel of practicing apartheid against them; this ill-conceived legislation, shelved, hopefully to be buried, amid domestic and international uproar a few days later, would genuinely have constituted the most offensive discrimination.

The overwhelming majority of us recoil at the emasculation of our legal system inherent in the appeal by the leaders of Shas (with five ministers at the cabinet table) to Aryeh Deri to return to politics -- in explicit defiance of the stipulations of the parole board that released him early from jail in mid-July. Convicted of fraud, bribe-taking and breach of trust, utterly unrepentant -- with his wife blasphemously asserting that Israel�s ills are divine retribution for its mistreatment of him -- Deri has not yet completed his punishment. The parole board made clear that his freedom is conditional on his observance of its restrictions on his activities. Yet the deputy prime minister of Israel, no less, Eli Yishai, casually urges him to ignore them.

We wince and worry as an authoritative West Bank rabbi writes and distributes a scholarly assessment of why soldiers who refuse to serve in the territories might be liable to execution by their commander under halakhah, yet the silence from the cabinet table is deafening. In the months before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, rabbis were engaged in similar halakhic debate as to whether the prime minister merited the death penalty for relinquishing divinely promised land to the Palestinian Authority. When an Orthodox Jew gunned Rabin down, the standard response was that the murder could not be linked to their discussion, which was "purely theoretical." Rabbi Shlomo Aviner says much the same of his musings today -- that only the chief of staff might be authorized to carry out the death penalty against "refusenik" soldiers, that he knows the chief of staff has no intention of doing so, that there is no likelihood of a misguided extremist misinterpreting his learned deliberations as a call for action, and thus that we have "nothing to worry about." And nobody at the cabinet table stands up to denounce his folly.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has admirably preserved a national consensus in his dealings with the Palestinians. The alacrity with which reservists respond to call-up orders underlines the widespread acceptance of Sharon�s view that their deployment, however embittering to ordinary Palestinians, is sadly essential to our self-defense -- even if, as we know all too well, no full guarantee of our safety -- and that diplomacy cannot be conducted with a Palestinian leadership that is sponsoring terrorism. (One hopes, incidentally, that the new chief of staff, Moshe Ya�alon, will show a greater readiness than did his predecessor to properly investigate cases of accidental and unlawful killings of Palestinians.) Indeed, Sharon�s painstaking accumulation of definitive evidence against Yasser Arafat has brought the Bush administration shoulder-to-shoulder with his own.

But where is the energetic moral leadership his nation and its supporters cry out for? No distancing from Effi Eitam. No condemnation of Shlomo Aviner. Precious little incentive for Palestinian moderation. Support for the aborted "Jews only" bill. A congratulatory phone call to Aryeh Deri.

Arafat will not defeat Israel militarily. He will prevail, though, if, as it defends itself against him, Israel strays from pragmatism and democracy, and if it loses track of the moral values embedded in the Jewish faith, the source of our survival. We look to our leadership to speak out and act on the basis of a moral and responsible assessment of the common good. And, too often these days, we look in vain.