Second of two parts
Re “He Thinks Israel Is Foolish to Fret Over Its Safety”
When I read Prof. Andrew Bacevich’s “Courting Israel” essay in the Sunday Los Angeles Titanic, an op-ed page screed against Israel for acting like fraidy cats just because they are surrounded by terrorists who hope to wipe them out, a frightening vision came to mind:
A burly giant of a man spanking a crying 4-year-old child with vigor.
We live in a respectable neighborhood, but my wife never walks alone after dark. Why tantalize trouble?
Israel is a country of 6-plus million, frightfully hated by most of the 100 million Arabs who ring the Jewish state. And Prof. Bacevich wonders why, with all the money and equipment the U.S. has shipped to Israel over the years, those insecure Jews still worry about being wiped out? He must have used a vacuum cleaner on his mind.
Let him stroll through Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem or in any other Israeli setting. If he returns intact, label him lucky.
Let him don a yarmulke and try to enter one of the 21 neighboring Arab lands.
He Knows the History of War
As a career military man — even though these days, at 63 years old, he professes to hate war — surely he has not forgotten that it is as permanent of a presence as oxygen. Especially in the Middle East.
We left off yesterday after Prof. Bacevich said Washington historically has had two objectives in acting as “peace-creating” Big Brother to Israel and the Arabs:
• “To cajole Arabs into accepting Israel’s existence.”
• “To allay Israel’s security concerns.”
He flirts with being dead wrong in claiming that “incomplete” “progress” has been made toward the first goal. I could invite every Middle Eastern Arab who accepts Israel’s legitimacy into our modest-sized dining room for dinner tonight. We would still have enough space to accommodate three herds of elephants.
The professor, like most leftists, lives in political Disneyland. He envisions life as he wishes it were. His cynically aggravating observation that “peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan have barely dented Israeli apprehensions that destruction lies just around the corner” suggests a puerile perspective of daily life in Israel.
“Among a people for whom Auschwitz …seems a looming prospect,” he writes mockingly, it is “beside the point” “whether such anxieties reflect collective paranoia or a sober persistence of anti-Semitism is beside the point.”
You Try Going There
No it isn’t, pal. It is the point. How dare you.
Hop on your bike, professor. Wheel over the border into Amman sporting your newest yarmulke, and then tell me what chickens those cowardly Jews are.
He is galled that President Obama offered 20 aircraft to Israel to convince the Jewish state to stop building apartments and other homes in the Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem for 90 days so that the Palestinian representative (!) will return to the peace talks table.
Haven’t we given enough already? Prof. Bacevich asks, a skepticism that can be debated. But only because he is a leftist who believes that the single reason the Palestinians don’t have a “state” is because of Jewish stinginess in refusing to turn over their homeland to their enemies who snipe — bullets — at the daily. If the professor is bean-counting, Jews have given the terrorists practically everything except their heart valves.
He changes up cadences and focal points throughout his essay but consistently makes a U-turn back to his main thrust: What are those silly Jews afraid of? We have given them all the protection they ever will need.
Sixty-five years after 6 Million Jews were destroyed in the Holocaust, many of us believe that a large-scale tragedy can be repeated.
Comfortable in his northeastern digs where racial/cultural prejudice still shines more often than the sun, the Boston University professor reaches a conclusion we Jews realized at the dawn of statehood in May 1948:
“Nothing that the United States can do will put Israeli fears to rest (about their security). Indeed, by offering ever more weapons and by conferring ever more privileges, Washington ends up validating those fears.”
Buried, but not deeply, below that wordy barrage is the haughty professor making fun of Jews, again, for fearing that one of those Allah-loving Arab lands will rain bullets on wide swaths of the precious population.
Sixty-two years of intermittent wars — all but one started by Arab terrorists — have failed to persuade the professor that Israel is more vulnerable than any sovereign society on the planet. (The only conflict Israel ignited was the Six-Day War on June 1, 1967, when several Arab armies were massed on the Israel border.)
What’s to worry, Charlie Brown Bacevich?
Because Israel, with assistance from Washington, possesses a muscular but hardly failproof arsenal, Prof. Bacevich feels safe in rebuking the bully-boy, fraidy-cat Jews.
“One consequence,” he says of Israel’s renowned arsenal, is “an inclination to strike first and ask questions later.”
Wouldn’t you, under the circumstances?
Even though the Arabs launched every war except ’67’s, Prof. Bacevich says that Israel should wait until it is struck before shooting — a recipe for vanquishing the Jewish state, which seems to be what he wants.
