By Any Means Necessary

(This blog will be updated roughly once a month. Please remember to return in four weeks' time.)

I didn't write last month. What should I write that I haven't already written? Israel is heading towards disaster. The writing on the wall is so painfully clear to anyone willing to see.

Why don't Israelis take their future into their own hands? Why don't they rise up and overthrow their leaders?

I feel like repeating what the great Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky said at a public rally in Warsaw in 1939: "I state with shame that the people behave now as if they were already doomed. I have not found anything like it, neither in history nor in novels. Never did I read of such acquiescence with fate.

"It is as if twelve million educated people were put in a carriage and the carriage was being pushed towards an abyss. How do such people behave? One is crying, one is smoking a cigarette, some are reading newspapers, someone is singing – but in vain will you look for one who will stand up, take the reins into his hands and move the carriage somewhere else. This is the mood. [Mah la'asot?] As if some big enemy came and chloroformed their minds."

How true. How tragic.

This settlement freeze is another step toward the abyss. And no one does anything. Sure they protest. But peaceful protests won't accomplish anything. Israel is not America. You can hold a million rallies in Israel, each one attended by a million people, and nothing will change. Netanyahu and every other prime minister does what he wants, when he wants, regardless of what the public desires.

Our "right-wing" prime minister now wants to negotiate with Syria on top of everything else. Great, he's graduated. Last time he was prime minister he held secret negotiations with Syria, news of which only emerged several months after he left office. Now, he is holding public negotiations. Why should he hide? There's no reason for him to. Nobody will stop him.

Israel has become a tyranny. And tyranny only understands one language: force. Democracy and "playing nice" is all well and good in normal times and when dealing with a fair system. Israel, however, is corrupt and dictatorial. In normal times and in a normal system, violence against a government is a sin. In normal times and in a normal system, protests and lobbying is how the citizenry affects policy. However, these are not normal times and Israel's political system is not normal. In such times and when dealing with such a system, violence is in order.

Mentioning "violence" sends tremors down people's backs and anyone who uses this word is considered an extremist. However, no less a respected personage than Thomas Jefferson thought people not only have a "right to revolt" but a "duty to revolt" in certain circumstances. If one opens his Bible, one will discover that our ancestors were not at all hesitant to use violence against their own brothers when necessary. I challenge anyone who has actually learned Tanach to prove me wrong. (Need I also remind readers of the Chanukah story?)

If this suicidal "peace" process is not stopped by force, a very real possibility exists that the miracle state founded in 1948 may not be around in 50 years. When will Israelis and Jews around the world realize that Israel's destruction is truly possible if the country continues along its present course?

Far left-wing Jews wouldn't much care if Israel disappeared. They think it an immoral state, a vestige of evil 19th-century imperialism. Haredim also wouldn't much care. They never wanted a state and would be satisfied if Arabs controlled historic Eretz Yisrael as long as their yeshivas remained intact.

But where are the "right-wingers"? Where are the religious Zionists? Where are the settlers? Don't they realize what's at stake here? Why won't they do anything? Why are they crying, smoking, singing, and reading newspapers as "the matzav" gets worse and worse?

Unless they fight, using absolutely any means necessary -- whether these means are "nice" or ugly, peaceful or bloody -- the third commonwealth will fall. It pains me to write those words, but it will fall if Israelis don't act.