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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Extremism in the defence of liberty

Ariel Sharon may be his own worst enemy, says Paul Gottfried, but the man has chutzpah - and he is in the right

Nowhere does Sharon bring up the question of whether Palestinians were expelled or not - something that has driven Israel's American friends into frenzied defences of what the Israeli army did or did not do in 1947 and 1948. But even assuming that Israeli soldiers caused Palestinians (whether or not it was the as many as 750,000 refugees that is often alleged) to abandon their homes and property, much has changed since 1948. At least an equal number of Arab Jews were subsequently driven out of Arab countries and relocated in Israel; meanwhile, many of the Palestinians who fled have been successfully integrated (as I discovered on a trip to the Middle East last summer) into Jordanian society. Moreover, two generations of Israelis, who were born and grew up in Israel, feel themselves fully entitled to stay there. Whatever the historic rights and wrongs committed by both sides, those who are now the dominant group in Israel are not morally obligated to give up their sovereignty, at the likely price of losing their property, political rights and possibly lives.

Although the present Israeli premier gave this interview almost 20 years ago, he is describing the Hobbesian state of nature into which Israelis have continued to be thrust. Those who come to kill them are not pursuing diplomacy by other means. The quaint definition of civilised warfare that Karl von Clausewitz furnished in the early 19th century does not apply to the escalating Palestinian-Israeli conflict. One side appears to have no peace position short of physically eliminating the other side; while the side being targeted by terrorists has no practical alternative but to engage in retaliation. The struggle is not between democratic and anti-democratic ideologues, or between those who represent whatever democratic models American journalists are currently embracing and those who do not. The war in the Middle East reveals what seems to me to be an absolute enemy, and a leader who resists that enemy with all of his resources and who shouts back at his critics: 'Better a live Judaeo-Nazi than a dead saint.'

Having spent the last 12 years among German Anabaptists, who run the college where I teach and who are my neighbours in the central Pennsylvania town where I live, I have grown allergic to the morbid personalities associated with peace churches. The sanctimonious, brainless attempts at 'outreach' I have witnessed among these Anabaptist pacifists, who seek to indulge their would-be killers (and who are now anxious about having offended Muslims), may explain my less than critical reaction to Sharon's blustery style. Given what passes for moral sentiments in my part of the woods, I can only marvel at his politically incorrect chutzpah.

More articles from: Paul Gottfried | this section

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