An Odd Couple: Israel’s Current Top Teachers
Bitterness, — that is the word of the day: bitterness; yet an opportunity is here if only Jews will listen, learn and act before it is too late.Â
Do we not know what it is when it is too late? We do not want to drink that cup again.Â
There is NO way that the Olmert - Peretz group will wage a genuine war against Israel’s primary enemies, Syria and Iran and their clients Hamas and Hezbollah -Lebanon. Lebanon is not sovereign however much Olmert may try to sustain that gone and buried fiction.
Similarly, he may issue statements that Israel is “at war” and will crush the enemy, but so long as he, his implausible party and Labor are in power there will be no declaration of war. Should there be massive escalation of hostilities against Israeli land and Jews, the Knesset might declare war but experience teaches that it will not fully waged: not even the 1967 war was fought all out, especially in Judea and Samaria…Â
Let us resist for now sketching plausible scenarios of tepid Israeli reactions to escalating Jihad and of the catastrophe that might be required for a significant Israeli military strike to ensue. Let us rather focus on the surprising tandem of truth tellers that emerged in the past twenty-four hours to reveal the particulars of the grave Israel’s anti-Jewish client regime in the Knesset and courts have dug for it.Â
Former Deputy Chief of Staff for Israeli Military Intelligence, Major-General Yaakov Amidror emphasized on Israel National Radio on July 12 that the Iranian-Syrian attack on northern Israel via their Hezbollah division was no surprise. Indeed it was no surprise to anyone that has followed events in Israel since former PM Ehud Barak began pushing for and eventually implemented the total withdrawal of the IDF from the buffer zone. Since May 2000 observers have watched and listened to the taunting and threats of Hezbollah and Iranian chieftains as Syria and Iran thickly garnished Israel’s northern border with missiles.Â
As General Amidror noted, “we were able to see, hear, and detect what Hezbollah was preparing but we could not take the initiative against them. Because of political arrangements with the international community it was decided to let them shoot first…â€?Â
Pause here and consider their implications of those sentences, a subject I have written and spoken about many times. “Because of political arrangements with the international community it was decided to let them shoot first…â€?Â
Who makes these arrangements? Israeli politicians and the politicized officer corps that goes along to get along; politicians who are the bought-and-owned clients of foreign regimes for whom Israel is a useful target and tester not only of counter-terror measures of various kinds but of how a population can be made used to living under assault while its leaders feed it “security” rhetoric.Â
The Jewish people, especially but not only in Israel have been sold out by their faithless, preening politicians and their appointees. And the foreign masters of these betrayers have decreed that Israel be shot first, that it bleed, that it become weakened, and ever more pliable as happened in 1973, the precoursor to the fatal Camp David agreements.Â
Clearly the upper echelons of the IDF, although they may read Sun Tzu do not take his strictures to heart, certainly not his warnings that civilian leaders not try to direct a war, not tell its generals how to fight the enemy. And, as Professor Eidelberg has explained, Sun Tzu instructs Generals to ignore politicians who hinder it from pursuing and repeatedly striking an enemy until its ability and desire to wage war is destroyed.Â
“Because of political arrangements with the international community it was decided to let them shoot first…â€? The discrediting of the entire political echelon and the need for regime change could not be more succinctly illustrated. Yet now that the enemy has been shooting first, the puppet politicians continue to restrict the IDF to carefully limited ‘surgical strikes’ rather than an hammer strike to bring victory against Syria and its Lebanese colony. And if this means preemption of Iran, that is gravely overdue and more dangerously belated every day.Â
Major-General Amidror did not explain what prevented his own views (probably shared by many officers) from prevailing and being made vigorously public for the six years that the Iranian-Syrian missile build-up continued. Perhaps it was more “political arrangements.â€? He did add, however, the basic truth that “if you don’t take the initiative, and you allow the enemy to shoot whenever and wherever he wants than even if he fails twenty times in the end he succeeds.â€?Â
“If you fail to take the initiative…â€? Our Rabbis often remind us of the Torah teaching that Israel is to be “a head and not a tail,â€? a teacher, a leader and initiator in all matters, war included. Ariel Sharon won his first term as PM by reiterating that he would “initiate, initiate, and again initiateâ€? against terror; that “we will not just react, we will win…â€? That’s the key, too bad that he didn’t mean it and didn’t do it. Instead he uprooted the Jews of Gush Katif and set the stage for the current crisis behind whose cloud victory waits…
No, Major-General Amidror, no more than C.O.S. Dan Halutz (who also journeyed to Washington to cement political arrangements) have bound themselves to the critical dicta of Sun Tzu regarding the duty of all soldiers, including top Generals to the nation rather than to the ruler of the day. As Amidror said, “the IDF is unable to fulfill its obligation to stop terrorism if it does not receive orders to do so, no matter what.â€?Â
Consider the implications of that “no matter what.� While his consensus platitude may suffice for a radio interview (and for a secure place in a power structure rapidly conducing to the destruction of Israel) it emphasizes that Israel’s survival depends on regime change. If this does not come from the IDF than from where? With power comes responsibility.
The man understands the military situation vividly: “if the [political] instructions are to ‘stop the terrorism but don’t hit Gaza streets,’ it can’t be done.â€? That’s right: the streets of Gaza must be hit hard, and the streets of Beirut, Damascus, Antioch, Hamath and Latakia. “The only way to stop terrorism is by going into the area and gaining control of the ground.â€?Â
Let us amend the General’s comments by insisting that this not be done by turning Israeli soldiers into cannon fodder to avoid harming enemy ‘civilians. Rather, the IAF should the leading edge of terror-suppression with a massive aerial assault, then occupation and then reclamation and re-settlement of the land by Jews. That’s what true peace-lovers want.Â
Here is the odd partner who on July 12 provided a complement to the good but incomplete assessment of General Amidror. We are referring to Abu Oudai, “rocket coordinatorâ€? for Abu Mazen’s Fatah and its self-styled “Al Aksa Brigades.â€?Â
Speaking with Aaron Klein of World Net Daily news service, Oudai emphasized that possession of Gaza had enabled Fatah groups to ship Kassams to Judea and Samaria where for upgrading and manufacture. He asserted repeatedly that all of central Israel, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and every Jewish area in Israel’s ‘waist’ would be targeted from “Palestinianâ€? cities like Tulkarm, Jenin and Kalkilye. “He hinted that Iran, Syria and the Lebanese Hezbollah would help in developing these rockets.â€?Â
Jenin is the main town in the northern Shomron that the “Disengagementâ€? of August 2005 turned into a virtual terror state cleansed of Jews. Jenin was where IDF soldiers were slaughtered in 2002 because the IAF was not allowed to strike with even a tiny fraction of its might. So now rockets will be shot from there and the other terror havens created by Oslo. Apocalypse and decision draw near.Â
“For if you do not drive them out, those who remain shall be pins in your eyes and thorns in your sides…â€? (Deuteronomy 32).Â
Klein asked Oudai about the threats of the Israeli government to take stern countermeasures alternating with their minimizing of the threat of Kassams, epitomized by Shimon Peres’s “kassams, shmassamsâ€? remark. “It is their own business that they deny and minimize,â€? he said astutely. “But in the coming days the proofs on the ground will be very clear to the average Israeli in the street.â€?Â
As I have often explained, and as is implied by Amidror’s comments above, Israel’s client politicians minimize these existential dangers because they are numbing their public to the fact of war that surrounds them. Even today, the “political arrangements they made with the international communityâ€? cause them to bind the IDF. After all, the Road Map must be saved. Hamas, Syria and Hezbollah must be taken down but only a little so as not to awaken the Israelis and thus endanger progress down the Road Map to Armageddon.Â
But perhaps Israel’s teacher Abu Oudai, if not General Amidror will wake up “the average Israeliâ€? before the iron gates are reached.Â
“The only unprecedented thingâ€? Oudai told Klein regarding the Israeli strikes against Hezbollah – Lebanon “is the frequency of the Israeli ‘empty threats.’ We are not afraid and we have nothing to fear.â€? Why should he and his cadres fear? As he notes, they have heard these empty threats thousands of times for fourteen years and still the Jews will not wage war. Moreover he knows what the grand game is and, as Arab mobs have been screaming since Britain made clear it would pervert the Mandate, that “the government is with us.â€?Â
Israel, you’ve been warned. “A time for war, — it’s not too late.â€?Â