The Justice-Security Connection

By Moshe Feiglin

The Herzliyah Conference has provided us with a glimpse of the rightist leaders' "alternatives" to the Ehud & Ehud government. If the ideas put forward at the Conference are any indication, both the classic Right and the religious Right are captive to the Oslo paradigm and the consciousness that produced it.

From Binyamin Netanyahu's speech, it seemed that he had memorized Shimon Peres' book, The New Middle East before ascending to the speaker's podium. The solution that the head of the Opposition proposed for the Gaza problem is "Economic Peace." Netanyahu spoke of joint industrial parks that will help the Gazans to become wealthy and extinguish their desire to fight. The catch is that this solution has already been tried. The abandoned industrial parks in Atarot and the Erez Crossing, both refurbished to fulfill Peres' dream, should be sufficient proof that joint economic ventures are not the solution.

Since Oslo's inception the Left has taunted the Right with the fact that it has no non-Oslo alternative. Foreign Minster Shimon Peres' pointed question to Opposition head Netanyahu during the Knesset Oslo debate "And what is your alternative?!" made it clear from the very start that the classic Right had no essential answer to Oslo. Bibi's speech at last week's Herzliyah Conference simply highlights that fact. Is it any wonder that when the Right rises to power in Israel it is still the Left that actually rules?

But why should we complain about Netanyahu? The religious Right is also captive to the Left's consciousness. "We must safeguard Nasrallah as the leader of the Hizbollah and not attempt to eliminate him," religious rightist General Yaakov Amidror said at the Herzliyah Conference. His remarks reminded me of the full page ad that a few friends and I had published in the Makor Rishon newspaper a number of years ago. The ad called for Israel's soldiers to eliminate Arafat. Israel's Attorney General investigated me because of that ad. He decided not to prosecute only so that the idea of eliminating Arafat would not get more media mileage. "That is exactly what Feiglin wants," the Attorney General said. In truth, he was right.

A short time later, when Arafat was on his deathbed, I published an article entitled, "Quick! Kill Him Before he Dies!" On the surface, the call to kill the admired arch terrorist when he was about to die anyway was patently illogical. Why should Israel set itself up for a violent Arab reaction when the contemptible scum was about to do the world a favor and make his exit on his own?

The answer is simple. There is an intrinsic bond between justice and security. True, a good army, modern weapons and sophisticated intelligence are all prerequisites for security. But nothing will help a country that is not armed with the ammunition of justice. When Israel signed the Oslo Accords, it signed away its most vital ammunition. Rabin's White House lawn handshake with the head of the Palestine (all of it) Liberation (from all the Jews) Organization was an Israeli announcement that it accepts the justice of the Arab claim on the entire Land of Israel. Oslo relegated Israel to the role of Jewish colonialists who wanted nothing more from the "native" Palestinians than to do a little business.

My call to eliminate Arafat did not stem from pragmatic considerations. It was a desperate attempt to restore Israel's sense of justice. I didn't think that we should kill him because it would effectively stop terror in the short term. I called to kill him because that was the just thing to do.

The Oslo pragmatism that surrenders the concept of justice from the outset has wreaked havoc on Israel's security. Today, it is in the worst state that it has been since the War of Independence. Israel's civilian population has become a legitimate target for daily shelling. Post-Oslo Israel has allowed the Arabs to arm themselves with tens of thousands of missiles, covering all of Israel with both a conventional and non-conventional ballistic threat. In just a short time, Iran will complete the development of the icing on the cake. But Oslo-consciousness Israel, disarmed of the faith in its own justice, is incapable of explaining to the parents of its soldiers why it must go to war to eliminate this existential threat. It will clearly not gain world support to attack Iran -- simply because Israel has already admitted that there is no real justification for its existence.

Maybe those Israeli leaders who are detached from their Jewish identity no longer view justice as an absolute value. Maybe they just view it as a primitive artifact of times past, irrelevant to the post-modern era. "We will give them honor and they will give us peace," Peres and his Oslo cohorts repeated time and again. Maybe we can expect no more of them. But when the religious Right repeats the Oslo mantras, all of our early-warning systems should be blinking. More than anything else, it points to the fact that Israel desperately needs authentic Jewish leadership that is confident in the justice of the Jewish Nation in the Land of Israel.