Steven Den Beste discovers a well-written talk/essay (I will link to the original if it turns up) purportedly given by professor Haim Harari to an advisory board of a “large multi-national corporation” in April, 2004. Steven did some research on Google to trying to verify the claim, but came up empty-handed, so I decided to try the Hebrew Google, on the assumption that this avenue was unavailable to him.
I came up with even less information than he did – Israeli academic writing is mostly in English. But I did find this, from a summary of a seminar given by Haim Harari:
המחקר עקב אחר רפורמת "מדע לכל" בישראל מתוך 'עין הסערה' מרגע הולדתה ועד היום.
The research following after the “Science for All” reform in Israel from out of ‘Eye of the Storm’ from the moment of its birth until today.
Of course this may be spurious, but people do tend to favor certain phrases in their speech. From its context in the seminar description, what he means by “Eye of the Storm” is not what you would expect from reading the essay Steven found – that Israel is in the eye of the storm engulfing the Middle East – he means that Israel has had to deal with its “normal” problems, e.g. education, while simultaneously fighting for its survival. The implication being that these problems have never gotten the attention that they would otherwise deserve – which is very true.
As a fellow inhabitant of the storm’s eye, my reaction is: “Of course.” Even Israeli leftists wouldn’t dispute much of this – though their ideas are almost indistinguishable from the European and American left. They simply choose not to see a relationship between the facts presented in the essay and the Israel’s “sins”.
The ideological background of both Israeli Left and Right is somewhat different from the US’s. The United States has the capability to solve its problems with Middle East terror, hopefully by inducing the Middle East to reform itself, but as a last resort by waging war against it – and winning. Israel doesn’t have either of these options. It is a very stark reality, human nature rebels against the idea that we are powerless to solve our problems, that the best we can do is find a way to live with them – or hope that someone else (the US) will solve them for us. The continued strength of the Israeli Left springs from this source, though it has been significantly diminished by Arafat’s rejection of the Clinton peace plan, which Barak accepted. (I am continually amazed and appalled that this episode has been forgotten and ignored by the media, since it is clear proof of Arafat’s unwillingness to make peace on any terms other than Israel’s destruction.) The Left claims that Israel is responsible for its problems, a very comforting thought since it implies that it can therefore solve them. In contrast, the Right offers only the possibility of perpetual war – a future too depressing for many Israelis to confront.
I’ve often heard the war on terrorism referred to as asymmetrical warfare. I get the impression that what is meant by this is that the “strong” governments are fighting against a “weak” foe, who uses the only means available – terrorism. But the author of “Eye in of the Storm” points out the real asymmetry, morals:
Do you raid a mosque, which serves as a terrorist ammunition storage? Do you return fire, if you are attacked from a hospital? Do you storm a church taken over by terrorists who took the priests hostages? Do you search every ambulance after a few suicide murderers use ambulances to reach their targets? Do you strip every woman because one pretended to be pregnant and carried a suicide bomb on her belly? Do you shoot back at someone trying to kill you, standing deliberately behind a group of children? Do you raid terrorist headquarters, hidden in a mental hospital? Do you shoot an arch-murderer who deliberately moves from one location to another, always surrounded by children? All of these happen daily in Iraq and in the Palestinian areas. What do you do? Well, you do not want to face the dilemma. But it cannot be avoided.Suppose, for the sake of discussion, that someone would openly stay in a well-known address in Teheran, hosted by the Iranian Government and financed by it, executing one atrocity after another in Spain or in France, killing hundreds of innocent people, accepting responsibility for the crimes, promising in public TV interviews to do more of the same, while the Government of Iran issues public condemnations of his acts but continues to host him, invite him to official functions and treat him as a great dignitary. I leave it to you as homework to figure out what Spain or France would have done, in such a situation.
The immorality of the terrorists is appalling. But personally, I am far more appalled by supposedly moral people who aid and abet them by condemning Israel – for going to extreme lengths to maintain its moral standards, while defending itself against an immoral foe.
Posted by David Boxenhorn at June 20, 2004 02:03 PM