Right Left Confusion

Slowly but surely, the traditional stands of Israel's Right and Left seem to have interchanged. Leftist journalist Yaron London calls to turn Gaza into dust, while Manhigut Yehudit calls to encourage Arab emigration from Gaza by financial and organizational means. Manhigut Yehudit warns against a military incursion into Gaza, while more and more leftists call for a major military operation there. The Left insists that Sderot's children must stay in the missile-stricken city, while Manhigut calls for their immediate evacuation.

What is going on here? Has the Left become more patriotic than the Right? Not really. The difference between the Left and the Right is not in their respective desires for peace or in their humanism thresholds. The difference is at a completely different point: The point of Jewish identity. Transferring the Arabs out of Yesha as part of an orderly and humane plan to rehabilitate them in some other place on the globe would leave us alone with the Land of Israel. It would leave us with Shechem and Hebron, the Temple Mount and Rachel's Tomb. It would connect us to our irritating Jewish identity. And as the Left sees it, if we can't get rid of our Jewish identity by giving the land to the Arabs, then let's destroy some of them and force them to give us our hoped for normalcy. This is actually the concept that reigned in Israel from 1948 until 1973.

The Left has invented a new, cynical form of patriotism' at the expense of Sderot's children. Throughout modern history, children have been temporarily evacuated when their homes came under attack. But in Israel of 2008, that is unthinkable.

Why doesn't the Left want the children to be evacuated from Sderot? In the past, Israel would fight wars. When we fight a war, we can hope for victory and feel confident that the children will return. But the Left wants to erase our Jewish identity. To accomplish that, it invented the Oslo peace' process. The solution to the Kassam problem entails a complete turnabout from the Oslo concept. First, it means understanding that this is our land. Second, it means accepting that we are not in a peace process, but rather, in a war over our land. Third, it means that we must decide to destroy the enemy, to triumph in war, to conquer Gaza, annex it to Israel and settle the entire area with Jews. But this change means that we connect to our Jewish identity, and the Left does not want that to happen. So Israel will not really go to war and it will be sure not to really win.

If there is no real victory, the children of Sderot will not return home. In fact, their parents will join them and the rest of the dominos of the State of Israel will quickly collapse. So the children of Sderot are actually hostages of the Oslo concept. They are the cannon fodder on the altar of the Israeli dream of normalcy.

We must demand the evacuation of the entire non-combat population of Sderot. The State must find them a respectable solution in another place until it fulfills its most basic responsibility and restores peace and quiet to the area. The IDF is supposed to be the defensive shield of the State - not the children of Sderot.