Many of this blog’s readership are duly familiar with Professor Paul Eidelberg and the close association herein. Nonetheless, it bears repeating, for not unlike with Dr. Martin Sherman, as well as with Professor Louis Rene Beres, his assessments often serve as a self mirror, at the same time that further insights are often gleaned.
I assist several Zionist academics with their efforts, chiefly through their policy centers. I am particularly in sync with the policy prescriptions elucidated by Dr. Martin Sherman (his latest tv interview at i.24tv on the “peace process”) andProfessor Paul Eidelberg (his latest interview at Inquisitr, ‘Organized Treachery vs. Organized Hypocrisy‘). Therefore, I lend them my insights.
My “go to” expert on all matters pertaining to international law, and a country’s right to anticipatory self defense – via preemptive strikes – is none other thanProfessor Louis Rene Beres of ‘Project Daniel.’ The working group’s original policy paper is found herein. He was Chair of the above strategic nuclear policy paper given to PM Ariel Sharon in 2003 – and subsequently briefed the report to President George W. Bush and to current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – in relation to Israel’s nuclear strategy in the face of Iran’s pursuit of WMD’s. He is a man of great integrity and humility.
Lou, a heartfelt thank you for being my mentor.
But before we get to the main event, please understand that the ways in which Israel’s top leadership reacts to serial terror is more than indicative of their state of mind.
The Palestinian sniper who Tuesday, Dec. 24, shot dead an Israeli civilian employed by the IDF to repair the damaged Gazan border fence, sent Israeli government and military chiefs into an agony of indecision over how to fight back against surging Palestinian terrorism attacks without derailing ongoing US-sponsored Middle East peace talks. Tuesday afternoon, Israeli warplanes struck a Hamas base in Gaza. This was no more than a relatively mild response. However, Hamas is evacuating its bases in case of further strikes.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had hoped that by refraining from punishing the Palestinian attacks – spreading out from Gaza, across the West Bank, in Jerusalem and inside Israel – he could bring the talks to a successful conclusion. But he was wrong. Like his predecessors, he faild to meet the challenge which defeated them too: How to talk peace with the Palestinians under terrorist aggression.
Netanyahu however finds himself in worse straits due his secretiveness on the extensive concessions he has offered the Palestinians in such sensitive areas as the Jordan Valley as well as the West Bank, under US Secretary of State John Kerry’s bulldozing tactics.
He almost gave the game away by a secret meeting he held with the dovish ultra-religious Torah Judaism (Aguda) Party leaders, suggesting he was planning a government reshuffle to drop pro-settlement factions from his government in favor of a lineup more amenable to concessions.
With the above firmly in mind, presenting,
Serial Mendacity: The Road to a Mental Disorder
Prof. Paul Eidelberg
Introduction
Much of the historical data in this article is drawn from scattered reports of the Independent Media Review and Analysis (IMRA) and other sources. It was necessary to lightly edit this assorted material to make it more coherent and historically more familiar to diverse readers.
My paramount objective is to provide prima facie evidence that Israel is a self-entrapped state; that its decision makers are ensnared in escapism or in denial of reality. I dare say that these decision makers are suffering from a mental disorder comparable to schizophrenia. This disorder is obscured by the co-presence of normal behavior, but which normal behavior does not preclude irrational responses to the hostile attitude and behavior of Israel’s most proximate antagonists, the Jew-hating Palestinians.
With Israel, we are dealing with Jewish politicians confronted by existential threats as well as by Arab-Islamic enemies whose traits of character cannot be readily understood and realistically addressed by people whose formal education and moral values and whose habits of life are maladapted to the language and behavior of Muslims and Arabs. This means that the Jewish state of Israel does not fit very well in the Islamic sea of the Middle East, where even Arabs and Muslims are each at their own throats. But this means that Western political analysts, including highly educated students of Islam may lead us astray as we try to understand the conflicts raging in the Middle East, especially the conflict between Israel and that nebulous entity called the “Palestinians,” an almost random conglomeration of people lacking clear-cut historical and territorial definition, as well as clearly defined ethnic and religious characteristics. As for Israel, it seems to be limping along from crisis to crisis without any clear sense of national purpose beyond the mundane but not very inspiring value of security.
Part I. Analysis of a Syndrome: Hung by Their Own Petard
Israel is trapped in a syndrome I call “serial mendacity.” Not that mendacity is a national trait of Israelis. Rather, it’s a reaction to the mendacity which diverse scholars say is deeply engrained in Arab-Islamic culture. Even Sonia Hamady, a liberated Arab sociologist, admits that “Lying is a widespread habit among the Arabs, and they have a low idea of truth.”
Hence it’s ironic that mendacity became the modus operandi of Israel’s government when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his Foreign Minister Shimon Peres consummated the fraudulent Oslo or Israel-PLO Agreement of September 1993. This nefarious agreement obscures the most pertinent truths about Israel’s enemy, Islam.
First of all, Islamic supremacism makes it impossible for Muslims and Jews to coexist in genuine and abiding peace. Second, how can Muslims engage in honest negotiations with infidels, when their holiest book, the Quran, describes infidels as apes and dogs? Third, the Muslim doctrine of taqiyya makes a virtue deception and dissembling even with regard to fellow-Muslims. Successful taqiyya is a mark of individual and social superiority, which harmonizes with the theological supremacy that animates Islam and its wars against unbelievers. These characteristics of Islam undermine the primacy of reason as opposed to the primacy of force in resolving disputes with adversaries. As a consequence, it is futile and self-defeating to deal with Muslims on the basis of ‘reciprocity” or compromise, concepts foreign to Arab-Islamic culture.
As conceived by Muslim statesmen, the Oslo Agreement was nothing more than a diplomatic tactic designed to obtain territory from peace-intoxicated Jews and thus facilitate the annihilation of Israel. The demise of the Jewish state is of course sanctified by Islamic scriptures.
It follows that Israeli decision makers did not take these scriptures or Islam seriously. They disregarded Islam’s 1,400-year tradition of genocide, its denial of the nation-state system on the one hand, and its global ambitions on the other. In contrast, Israel’s democratic politicians have been conditioned by the Western concept of pluralism and adulation of parliamentarianism whereby diverse parties resolve their differences by means of mutual concessions or compromise.
Probing more deeply, the fact that Israeli politicians, unlike their Muslim counterparts, prefer to resolve differences via the primacy of reason as opposed to the primacy of force or intimidation clashes with a basic principle of Islamic theology. We need to bear in mind that Islam’s Deity represents absolute Will unbound by Reason, hence unbound by law or justice. This theology stands in striking contrary to Judaism—as illustrated by Abraham’s questioning the justice of God’s projected destruction of Sodom and Gomorra. Can anyone imagine Muhammad or Saladin or Ahmadinejad interposing between Allah and the genocides committed in his name by Muslims?
Given the overweening arrogance of Muslims underlying their murderous hatred of Infidels and supplemented by their art of deception called taqiyya, Muslim diplomats and despots have made fools of western statesmen. Prevarication is congenital in Islam, but what Western decision makers and opinion makers dare expose this seemingly “racist” portrayal of Islam? It needs to be born in mind, however, that that the untruthfulness intrinsic to taqiyya harmonizes with Islam’s theological rejection of the primacy of reason which, in the West, is the faculty for communicating truth.
Both Israeli and American leaders have ignored Islam’s addiction to taqiyya. By so doing they have endowed Islamic mendacity with a religious veneer and have thereby conditioned Israelis and Americans to remain silent about the Oslo charade. This silence has effectively deprived American and Israeli statesmen of free will—ironically, the human faculty denied by Islamic theology! We may therefore say that the Oslo charade has made Western liberals and atheists the victims of a theology which not only rejects free will, the very quality that distinguishes the human from the subhuman, but which thereby warrants Islam’s denigration of infidels as apes and dogs!
Part II. The Unfolding of a Monumental Dilemma
Now, these ironic conclusions aside, one thing must be kept uppermost in mind: Oslo obscured the fact that the PLO is dedicated to Israel’s destruction. This truth was known to every Israeli Prime Minister, beginning with Yitzhak Rabin. It was concealed by all of his successors: Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, and Ariel Sharon. All were ensnared in falsehood.
None of these prime ministers possessed the wit and the guts to expose the mendacious and vicious nature of the PLO—something I had personally and naively recommended to Peres in a September 1976 meeting with him arranged by former Israel Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Haim Laskov. If Prime Minister Netanyahu revealed the truth about Oslo, he would be incriminating all of his predecessors, as well as himself! Such an exposé would collapse the State of Israel, for it would then be known to the people of this country that their prime ministers were guilty of at least criminal negligence, hence that they were responsible for the thousands of Jewish casualties resulting from the Oslo Agreement. No future prime minister of Israel can avoid this dilemma!
Let us therefore review some of the evidence accumulated by IMRA which exposes the fraud perpetrated by the Government of Israel. We begin with a letter to Yitzhak Rabin from PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat dated September 9, 1993 and published by Ha’aretz Magazine:
Mr. Prime Minister,
The signing of the [Israel-PLO] Declaration of Principles marks a new era in the history of the Middle East. In firm conviction thereof, I would like to confirm the following Palestine Liberation Organization commitments: The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security. The PLO accepts United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. The PLO commits itself to the Middle East peace process, and to a peaceful resolution of the conflict between the two sides and declares that all outstanding issues relating to permanent status will be resolved through negotiations … The PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence and will assume responsibility over all PLO elements and personnel in order to assure their compliance, prevent violations and discipline violators….
The PLO affirms that those articles [of the PLO Covenant] which deny Israel’s right to exist, and the provisions of the Covenant which are inconsistent with the commitments of this letter, are now inoperative and no longer valid….
Sincerely,
Yasser Arafat
Chairman, the Palestine Liberation Organization
September 9, 1993
Prime Minister Rabin responded on the same day: “… The Government of Israel has decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and to commence negotiations with the PLO within the Middle East peace process.”
Four days later [on September 13, 1993], the Declaration of Principles was signed in Washington. A month later, the Israeli government committed itself to the PLO by encouraging the activity of the Palestinian institutions of East Jerusalem. In April, an economic agreement with the PLO was signed in Paris. In May, the first PLO officials arrived in Gaza and Jericho, and two months later Yasser Arafat arrived in Gaza. In August of 1994, the protocols transferring authority to the PLO were signed at the Erez checkpoint and Cairo, and in November, donor countries decided on generous grants to the PLO. In December 1994, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the head of the PLO, the Prime Minister Yitzhak of Israel and Foreign Minister Peres.
In September 1995, Oslo II, also known as the Taba Agreement, called for Israeli withdrawals from various areas of the “West Bank.” In November and December of 1995, the PLO assumed control over six cities in Judea and Samaria. In January 1996, 812 terrorists were released from Israeli prisons and 10 days later, elections were held for the Palestinian Authority Council and its president. The reconciliation process reached its climax in April 1996, when Prime Minister Shimon Peres announced that the Palestinian Covenant was annulled.
However, in 2002, nine years after the 1993 exchange of mutual recognition by Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, the Government of Israel (with the participation of the Labor Party) accepted the assessment by the Israel Defense Forces General Staff and the Shin Bet security service that the continued presence of IDF forces in Judea and Samaria is a necessary—though not always sufficient —condition for preventing terror activity. In the opinion of many of these officials, Oslo had fostered a dangerous distortion of the message of peace vis-à-vis the PLO, indeed, that the political method of resolving disputes between of the Arab residents of Samaria, Judea, and Gaza on the one hand, and Israel on the other was “blocked” or no longer tenable.
The perception of the Oslo Agreement as a means leading to peace was based on three assumptions. The first assumption was that the PLO had given up its traditional goal of eliminating the State of Israel. The second and related assumption was that the PLO had really given up violence as an instrument to achieve that traditional goal. The third assumption was that the PLO had renounced its claim of the right of return of the 1948 Arab refugees to their homes. Therefore, the logical conclusion was that a genuine and abiding peace agreement with the PLO was within reach, since the main obstacles were removed from the path to peace, while the remaining disputes, which were detailed in the Declaration of Principles, would be settled around the negotiating table.
That hope was not realized, despite the early, formative period of the Oslo Agreement in the years 1993-1996, when a “dovish” government headed by the Labor Party, with the participation of the left-wing Meretz party, was in power. The PLO terror war continued despite Oslo, and it proceeded along two axes.
The PLO’s Strategy and Tactics
The PLO’s goal was embedded in two plans, strategic and tactical. The strategic plan was included in the Palestinian Covenant, which was approved by the Palestinian National Council (PNC) in Jerusalem, in 1964. The plan is based on the negation of Jewish nationhood. The Jews have no right to statehood in Palestine since they “only belong to a religion.” But since such a state was established on Palestinian land, it must be removed through “armed struggle.”
The PNC approved of this plan in 1974. The plan was known as the “stages plan” for the liberation of Palestine. The PNC decided to achieve control over all of Palestine gradually by negotiations punctuated by “armed struggle.” The PNC had thus decided on a “peace-and-terror” strategy, a strategy of stages by which to truncate and eventually eliminate the Jewish state.
About a year before the 1993 signing of the Oslo accords, the late Faisal Husseini discussed the distinction between strategy and tactics in a speech to an Arab youth organization in Amman (Al-Ra’y, Jordan, November 12, 1992). “In the life of all nations there are two political strategies: the overall strategy and the current political strategy. We have to know that the slogan for the current stage is not ‘from the sea to the river’ … we have not conceded and will not surrender any of the existing commitments that have existed for more than 70 years … We have within our Palestinian and united Arab society the ability to deal with divided Israeli society … We must force Israeli society to cooperate … with our Arab society, and eventually to gradually dissolve the ‘Zionist entity,’”
Two years after the signing of the Oslo Agreement, Husseini repeated this cunning Palestinian stratagem on July 22, 1995, at the University of Jordan. “The political solution we are now proposing is within the context of our political strategy and not our overall strategy. Our policy with regard to the second strategy is known. If you ask any Palestinian, he will tell you that the boundaries of Palestine go from the river to the sea. There are no arguments over that. We might be mistaken about our political strategy, but we are never wrong about our permanent overall strategy.” Husseini proved that this is indeed his permanent view when he reiterated the distinction six years later. He told the Cairo Al-Arabi on June 24, 2001: “We distinguish the strategic, long-term goals from the political phased goals, which we are compelled to temporarily accept due to international pressure … The Palestinian borders according to the higher strategy [are] ‘from the river to the sea.’ Palestine in its entirety is an Arab land, the land of the Arab nation, a land no one can sell or buy, and it is impossible to remain silent while someone is robbing it, even if this requires time and even [if it means paying] a high price.”
In that interview, Husseini revealed the PLO’s strategy with regard to the Oslo Agreement. “The people of Troy … cheered and celebrated thinking that the Greek troops were routed, and while retreating, they left a harmless wooden horse as spoils of war. So they opened the gates of the city and brought in the wooden horse. We all know what happened next.”
Arafat described the tactic in a speech at a Johannesburg mosque, in May 1994 in which he compared the Oslo Agreement to the peace agreement signed between Mohammed and the Koraish tribe, at the Hudeibah springs. Mohammed signed the agreement in a moment of weakness, all the while intending to violate it and eliminate the Koraish, after he gained strength —which is what he did. “This [Oslo] agreement,” said Arafat in Johannesburg, “I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our prophet Mohammed and Koraish, and you remember the Caliph Omar refused this agreement and [considered] it a despicable truce.”
Barely an hour before the signing of the Declaration of Principles at the White House on September 13, 1993, Jordanian television broadcast a brief speech by Arafat in Arabic, which he had taped in Washington a few hours earlier. With caution that was appropriate to the timing, he mentioned the foundations of the PLO’s traditional struggle: liberating Palestine and turning it into an Arab land, the right of return of the Palestinian Diaspora to their homes, the “stages plan” of 1974 for gradual fulfillment of that right, and jihad as the means of fulfilling the plan.
There was no contradiction between what the PLO’s leaders were saying publicly in Arabic, and what was being said to Israeli representatives in closed-door discussions, and there was no concession on the right of return of the refugees to their actual homes. Deputy Defense Minister Mordechai Gur, who conducted talks with the PLO’s representatives during 1994, said (Ha’aretz, January 30, 1995), “It’s not very pleasant to hear what I hear from the Palestinians. They aren’t talking about the house in Hebron … They are talking about the university hill in Tel Aviv … Once, during one of the sessions, I called aside the head of their delegation and told him that if I were to record the discussions and play them back to the members of my party, not the opposition, 90 percent of them would say ‘stop the talks immediately.’”In early 1995, the Palestinian Information Ministry issued Booklet No. 5 in which the State of Israel is defined as “land occupied in 1948.”
Middle East Media Research Institute Booklet No. 6 declared: “Palestinian refugees and the right of return,” published in English 28 years after the 1967 war, refers to “more than four decades of occupation.” It says “the 1947 resolution guarantees the right of return of all those Palestinians who want to return home and live in peace with their neighbors.” Other sections of the booklet mirror the Palestinian covenant. “The Palestinian people didn’t accept the Balfour Declaration at anytime … The 1947 resolution on the partition of Palestine came only to complement the unjust laws and military orders enacted by the British Mandate government – the partition of Palestine was baseless and illegal … The purpose of the Zionist movement was the establishment of a state of their own at the expense of the original inhabitants of Palestine … Arab and international attempts that sought to convince the Jews to accept self-autonomy rule in Palestine, were doomed to failure …”Arafat himself declared on the Voice of Palestine, November 11, 1995, that the handover of responsibility for cities in the “West Bank” to the PLO will not end “until all of Palestine is liberated.” A clear definition of “all of Palestine” was heard from one of the “moderates” in the PLO leadership, Ahmed Qureia (Abu Ala) who declared on December 23, 1995 at the Deheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem, “Inshallah, the return [of all the Arab refugees] is coming soon.”For Israel, the test of real change in PLO goals would be the implementation of Arafat’s letter of September 9, 1993 renouncing terrorism. When Prime Minister Peres announced on April 24, 1996 that the Palestine National Council had that day annulled what amounted to the genocidal provisions of the PLO covenant, he described this as “the most important ideological event of the past 100 years in the Middle East”; but this he said without realizing that Arafat had deceived him. The circumstances and details of the deception were only to become known two years later, in an article by the legal advisor to the Foreign Ministry in the years 1993-1996, Joel Singer (“The truth about the covenant,” Ma’ariv, June 19, 1998).When the government realized it had been deceived, it demanded a “clarification” from Arafat. It received, in English, a false version of the PNC decision which was nonetheless approved by Israel’s Government presumably because it surfaced only a few weeks before Israel’s May 1996 elections. Singer said in his article that “this was blatantly a political decision.” Elsewhere the article quotes Arafat, “I never gave an opinion to the Israeli government saying that the amendment to the Palestinian Covenant, as adopted by the PNC, met the Palestinian commitments.”The PLO’s fraud was exposed by the chairman of the PNC, Salim Za’anun ten days after the PNC met. He told Al-Nahar on May 5, 1996, that “the PNC accepted a ‘third formulation,’ different from what Israel demanded.”
Five years later, he revealed the entire truth in a manifesto issued in Cairo on February 2, 2001: “The PLO Covenant continues to exist, because the PNC was never convened to ratify the changes that were proposed in the past, particularly because no legal committee was appointed to draft the necessary change.”All of this makes clear that even in the “years of hope,” the PLO did not give up realization of all its rights, as expressed in this order: first, the right of return of the refugees to their homes; second, the right of self-determination after the return of the refugees; and third, the right to establish a state with Jerusalem as its capital on the basis of the fulfillment of the first two rights. The gap between these three conditions and the existence of the State of Israel is unbridgeable….Nissim Zvilli, a member of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee stated in Ha’aretz, July 27, 2002: “I remember myself lecturing in Paris and saying that Arafat’s double-talk had to be understood. That was our thesis, proved [later] as nonsense. Arafat meant every word, and we were naive, thinking that he is doing it to overcome the resistance to the agreement among his public.”
As far as the PLO is concerned, the Oslo agreement was not derailed and the violence involved in its implementation was dictated from the moment it was signed. Things could not be any different—and therefore they were not.People like MK Nissim Zvilli learned from the bitter Oslo years that Israel cannot reach peace by giving up homeland. The “alchemists,” who failed to bring peace-by-giving-up-land with an agreement, now promise us serenity while abandoning the land without an agreement. [This was exemplified in August 2006 in Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.] Israel’s desperate politicians assume that what does not happen with retreat will happen with escape.Escapism is not only a recipe for continuing war. [Escapism is a mental disorder. In fact, it is one of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, which also includes delusions, apathy, depersonalization, stereotypic behaviors, flattened emotional reactions (to tragedies), impairment of volition, and lack of self-esteem (vis-à-vis others).]
Conclusion
To conclude, let us step back to gain some historical perspective. In 1993, Israel’s Labor Government, seemingly oblivious of the 1,400-year Arab addiction to violence, hoped that the Oslo Agreement would result in the annulment of the PLO’s genocidal Covenant, and that it would put an end to terror and lead to peace.
The Knesset ratified the Agreement 61 to 50.In 1998, the Likud Government knew that the PLO’s genocidal Covenant remained in force. The Government knew that the operational agreement between the PLO and Hamas about the division of labor with regard to the use of terrorism and negotiations remained in place. In fact, the Government’s own sources were explicitly warned that the PLO intended to violate the Oslo Accords as well as the Wye River Memorandum, the agreement Netanyahu and the Palestinian Authority signed on October 23, 1998. The Knesset nonetheless approved the Wye agreement 75 to 19. (None of the extensive security provisions embodied in that agreement have been observed by the PA or enforced by the Netanyahu Government.)Israel’s Government is not only inept; it suffers from a profound intellectual and moral sickness quite rampant in Western Civilization, which lost its moral compass when it abandoned its roots in the Old Testament. Mere criticism alone will get us nowhere. To go on and on subjecting the territorial policies of Israel’s Government to rational and empirically-based analysis—which Oslo critics have been doing for more than 20 years—is no more effective than trying to talk sense to a catatonic schizophrenic.◙
To wrap things up, when asked by Prof Eidelberg to critique the above analysis, this blogger offered the following and it speaks for itself:
Firstly, you are laying out a prima facie case how Israel’s leaders have adopted serious maledictions from their enemies, as they stumble from one crisis to another, and then pass off their behavior (having become serial liars themselves) as “strategies” which must be implemented, either for “peace” or for security, or a combination thereof.
Now, it is one thing to lie to ones enemies to “get the job done” ala psy ops etc, but it is another order of magnitude to do so to ones own citizens, particularly in relation to life and death matters. Not only that, but they have adopted their own lies as truths. They are literally trapped in their own (mental and mendacious) vortex.
You have demonstrated that DIAMETRICALLY opposed value systems make it impossible to bridge the divide between Israel (the west) and the Arab/Muslim world, thus abrogating any agreements signed etc. Pretending what is isn’t has become Israel’s/west’s modus operandi. Que credo absurdum.Most tellingly, despite ALL the Arab leadership’s admissions to Arab audiences – revealing what their strategies and tactics are – none of this gives Israel’s leaders pause, even with the evidence of Arab duplicity before them. As such, they are entrapped by their serial mendacity, loathe to EXPOSE the full extent of Arab leadership’s treachery – and through their own words no less!
In effect, if they so desired, Israel’s leaders could hold both domestic and foreign press conferences, proving, once and for all, through Arab statements, precisely why Oslo must be vitiated. Alas, such (long overdue) statesmanship would indict the entire Israeli leadership and this they will NEVER tolerate. Hence, they would rather continue along the nation’s dismemberment.
NOT only that, but Israel’s leaders played a DIRECT part in all of Oslo’s national destruction, in so far as the leadership understood precisely what the PA junta was up to. In other words, there is NO longer any plausible deniability. Sach ha’kol, they are accomplices to the PA/PLO/Fatah’s crimes!
You clearly delineated that to continue their serial mendacity they had to pretend that “this and that” didn’t exist, so that they could be free to sign “this and that”. In other words, style over substance, but in matters of grave national import, possibly existential in nature. What kind of leaders behave/operate this way? Serially mendacious…who also happen to be mentally ill/besieged.
Indeed, a mirror image.
Adina Kutnicki 