Blue & White Fantasy

By all the brouhaha that’s blown up over the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, you’d have thought Bibi had invited them to join the Likud. AIPAC’s condemnation came as no surprise as they need to appeal to a broad American Jewish audience many of whom are Leftists whose faith-du-jour is political correctness and whose self-esteem is measured in likes and followers on social media. Thus anyone remotely connected with Meir Kahane is as toxic as ISIS.

But even as this issue erupted, Leftists were willing to give a pass to ISIS and allow their brides and expat fighters to return to America and Britain because they deserved a chance at rehabilitation. But for followers of Kahane it seems there is zero tolerance.

No, Bibi did not invite Otzma to join the Likud. He simply brokered a deal to allow Otzma votes to actually mean something in this election, rather than fall into the dustbin by failing to reach the qualifying threshold. The message is: if the Left can have a Hanin Zoabi, the Right is entitled to have the people of Otzma.

The difference between Left and Right is often associated with politics. But its pathology is much more fundamental. Leftists like to see the world as a cuddly fluffy place where everyone should be given the chance to get along. They have no concept of pure evil and will almost always seek root causes to explain evil acts rather than accept them as evil on face value. People on the Right accept that evil acts are committed or incited by evil people and if we haven’t already eliminated them, they can never be trusted anywhere near the things we hold dear.

Put simply, the fundamental difference between Left and Right is between fantasists and realists.

Yuppies in the Tel Aviv bubble will likely vote for Gantz and Lapid simply because they’re the ‘new thing’ and it’s cool to get aboard. That’s the zeitgeist that got geniuses like Trudeau and Macron elected.

The older Haaretz-readers in the bubble mostly believe that if we give the Arabs their state they’ll leave us alone. If it has to include the settlements and most of Jerusalem, so be it. At least they won’t want Tel Aviv.

This is the same fantasy that holds that if you throw enough meat at an attacking lion it will turn into a vegetarian.

Which brings me back to Kahane.

Granted, I don’t condone everything he did or said in his lifetime. But the one thing you cannot deny is that he was a visionary. He never stopped warning that there would never be peace with the Arabs. In the 30 years since his murder by an Arab assassin, there have been more than a dozen peace plans bandied about. Grand ideas of land swaps, tunnels between Ramallah and Gaza and of course Oslo which repackaged the PLO as a more user-friendly “PA” led by people in suits. Those plans either failed or caused more bloodshed than before.

Kahane understood that this was never a territorial dispute. It was about our very existence as Jews … and within ANY borders.

The people who will be voting for Otzma Yehudit are not necessarily Jewish terrorists. Instead they are Jewish realists. And unlike members of AIPAC, they are not watching this scenario from their armchairs in Long Island. They are surrounded on three sides by the mortal enemies of Israel, armed by Oslo and empowered by Leftists who see poor Palestinians as underdogs under brutal occupation, rather than the pure evil that unrepentantly butchered poor Ori Ansbacher two weeks ago. The same evil that Kahane warned us about 30 years ago.

And to this resident evil, Lapid and Gantz want to give a state?

The only way of preventing this madness is by making as many right-wing votes count to preserve Eretz Yisrael as there will be left-wing ballots in favour of more peace experiments or, worse still, votes that allow the unified Arab parties to hold the balance of power over our territory.

I end with a commandment from this very day’s Torah reading: “Beware lest you forge a covenant with the inhabitants of the land to which you come, lest it become a pitfall for you”.