Civilians Killed By Hezbollah Rocket Attacks on Northern Israel Map
July - August 2006

The Time Is Now. Israel And The West On The Brink

The Time Is Now. Israel And The West On The Brink
Filed under: Front Page
by Phyllis Chesler,PhD The Jewish Press,

Our beloved Israel is engaged in an existential fight for survival.
From the moment of its birth in 1948, Israel has been under constant
siege. This latest war, however, feels different. It comes upon
Israel after decades of non-stop terrorist attacks, large-scale
military battles, and endless international boycotts and condemnation.

Israel has been relentlessly demonized and successfully isolated by
lethal propaganda. World-class illiterates and leading academics have
loudly agreed that Israel is a "Nazi, apartheid" state that deserves
disdain and death or have shamefully looked the other way as Jewish
blood flowed and the noose tightened, perhaps secretly hoping that a
second Holocaust – this one for the Jews of Israel – might somehow
spare the West from experiencing its own much larger Holocaust at
Islamist hands.

I first wrote in these pages in 2004 and again in 2006 that the
beginnings of a second Holocaust were already discernable. A handful
of others also envisioned this. Only recently have some Jewish-
American leaders begun to entertain this idea and to repeat our lines
but without acknowledging their source. Until now I was mocked as
a "Jewish Cassandra" by certain Jewish leaders and slandered,
banished, or simply ignored by the mainstream (liberal, left, and
feminist) media.

Tragically, many of our leading Jewish intellectuals and our mainly
liberal Jewish masses shared the view that whatever was happening was
not really happening – and if it was, that Israel either had only
itself to blame or actually had the power to reverse the course of
events. Even today, many Israeli leftists and feminists actually
believe that Israel can find peace by negotiating with Hamas and
Hizbullah. They send me their ideas. They boggle the mind.

Over the years, Israelis have learned to live large and tough and
sweet despite the unending attacks against them. Now, for the first
time, Israelis, Jews, and their many supporters are beginning to
contemplate the unbearable – namely, that the siege against Israel
might never end, that our Islamist enemies (and their supporters in
the Western media and academy) will never stop until they wear us
down completely, drive us into the sea, or annihilate us with nuclear
weaponry.

Of course, Israelis are not leaving (though many of Israel's
wealthiest and most well connected citizens have second and third
homes on other continents and work and travel outside of Israel a
great deal). True, thousands of Jews have made aliyah in the past few
years, despite the ongoing violence, and world Jewry, our Christian
Zionist supporters, and the American government have continued to
visit, fund, and arm Israel.

Still, there is a somber and infinitely sad quality to the
conversations I've had with many Israelis. Those who have lived long
enough are exhausted and afraid. The never-ending battle for the land
is consuming their young. They and their children after them have all
fought and been wounded in Israel's unending wars; now they are
sending their grandchildren to the front. Worse: the entire country
has become the front.

In the space of five weeks, trees that took one hundred years to grow
were burned to the ground by Hizbullah rockets. The Israeli north
became one vast ghost town, Kiryat Shmonah was devastated, more than
a million Israeli refugees were forced to flee – though they have
been welcomed by other Israelis who live in temporarily safer,
southern communities. (May this hospitality begin to unite our
people.) But little of this has been shown by the world media, which
has focused obsessively on the Lebanese civilian dead.

How ironic. Israeli civilians are essentially soldiers while Iranian
terrorist army members who dress in street clothes are counted by the
media as "civilian" dead. Despite being stopped in some instances by
vigilant bloggers, the world media continue to run Hizbullah's
doctored footage and craftily arranged photo opportunities.

Israelis are asking some hard but necessary questions. A Haifa
resident admitted that "finally, for the first time in 40 years," she
is "depressed" and wondering "whether Israel has a future." Israel's
enemies, she said, "live only to fight, kill, and die. They `win' if
they can reduce our way of life to one of brute existence."

A resident of Jerusalem tells me "the loss is great, the fear is
deep, confidence is low, support for the soldiers is high, but we
feel isolated and misrepresented, misunderstood. Where will this end?"

Another Jerusalem resident says, "The war in the field is barely
connected to the war being constructed by the media who mold the
broadcasts to fit their ideologies. The ironies are too much to bear."

A refugee from Nahariya: "The Israeli government is not showing us
the pictures of the northern towns. But are they getting out to the
world? Do you see the Israeli wounded, are you getting the picture of
what it's like to live in a bomb shelter actually or in your head for
five or six weeks? How long are we supposed to do this?"

The director of a northern kibbutz for handicapped and special-needs
children writes that his vulnerable charges are "terrified by all the
rocket-dodging" and by life in "small, crowded, underground spaces."

Even some proverbially nonchalant Tel Avivians have confirmed that
they have been staying home "every single night" to be close to their
young children and aging parents "in case they are bombed."

Today, for the first time, Israelis and Jews are beginning to think
the unthinkable. How long must Israel continue to do the heavy
lifting in America's civilizational war against Iran and Syria and
indeed against Islamist jihad? At what point will Israel need to
consider exercising its nuclear option against Iran?

Can Israel, or Israel and America, succeed militarily? Even if they
can, will the fallout for Israel be greater politically – or
radioactively? Must the Jews once again enact another Masada-like
scenario? Or is Israel, unrestrained, still capable of an Entebbe-
like commando action that will stop Ahmadinejad/Armageddon?

Conversely, will the Jews have to consider leaving Israel again, at
least temporarily? If they do, where will they go? To the moon? Under
the sea? Perchance to Arizona or New Mexico for a century until
things quiet down in the Middle East? But will Jews ever be safe in a
Jew-hating world without a strong Israel?

Just this month a London hairdresser refused to cut "the hair of a
Jew" (a woman who had frequented the salon for a decade) and 20
Jewish shops were vandalized in Rome. Anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, and
anti-American marches (not to mention terrorist attacks against
trains and buses and plots against airlines) continue unabated in
every major European capital. Placards read: "Europe is the Cancer.
Islam is the Answer"; "Europe You Will Pay, Your 9/11 Is on Its Way";
and "Be Prepared for the Real Holocaust."

And it's not just Europe: Dislike, if not open hatred, for Israel,
coupled with the belief in an evil Zionist lobby, is rampant on
American campuses, within certain quarters of the American State
Department, and among the progressive and mainstream media. This
month in Washington, D.C., ten-year-old Arab-American girls chanted
pro-Hizbullah slogans.

Religious Zionists will never give up on Israel; I doubt secular
Israelis will either. I certainly won't. And Israeli soldiers are
absolutely willing and able to fight. But the exhaustion and the
danger are real and must be factored in. We must weigh every option,
make all kinds of contingency plans, be prepared to act on all
fronts – simultaneously, if need be.

There are at least a million totalitarian Islamists willing to die in
order to kill Jews and other infidels; more than a billion of their
fellow Muslims have, thus far, refused to challenge and subdue them.
These civilian-terrorists, who hide in rat-holes and caves, rooming
houses and dormitories, are adept at using our technology and our
legal system against us. Israel was in the forefront of fighting
Arafat's kind of terrorism but we are now in the al Qaeda/Hizbullah
era. New military, undercover, and propaganda strategies must be
adopted.

Many people, including some Jews, accuse Jews of elevating our
suffering above that of other groups. They see this as selfish, even
racist. In my view, what happens to Israel is a prophecy and a
warning to the world about what will happen to all humanity. Perhaps
this is one way the Jews are special or "chosen." We constitute God's
holy classroom.

If the world does not stop the jihadists in Israel, if it chooses to
sacrifice the Jews once again, it will, soon enough, find itself
bombed back to the seventh century and living under Islamic religious
law. Several Iranian dissident friends have begged me to explain to
them why America has not already stopped Iran. As one distraught
dissident put it, the mullahs have already murdered vast numbers of
their own countrymen and will stop at nothing to return to a
Caliphate. "And the Jews?" he asks. "How can they, of all people,
hesitate?"

If not now, when? If not us, who? The time is now.

Christian Zionists, Hezbollah, Israel, Jihad, Lebanon, Opinion, war