Comments of the President

By Robert J. Loewenberg

A Guide to Our Programs: Part II

Basing Peace or a Robust Strategy on Deceit About a “Booming Capitalist Economy”

OK for Pols, Not Policy Analysts

The framers of Oslo stressed a deceit: Israel has a Booming Capitalist Economy. Why? To convince people “We're making peace from strength?” Obviously. But there was another reason. For example, take the religious Zionists. Was it the main thing to convince them?

The framers seemed to go out of their way to attack religion. This is how the peace process became an anti—religious crusade. The Ultra—Orthodox (or anti–Zionist) religious population now against the process could have been kept out of the entire question.

But if they had been neutralized, revisions to Israel's Basic Law doctrine wouldn't be on the table today. Rabin made much of how Oslo must unseat the “status quo” of accommodation between religious and secular. His attorney general pursued this. A man who resembled Hannah Arendt's “modern party revolutionary,...[he dissolved] every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose.” The result is the status quo has been replaced by Israel's new agenda: Torah law v.Democracy law. Democracy's champion is the chief justice.

Laws, Not Men

The radical or Marxist basic law idea in Israel frankly contradicts the Western separation of basic law from politicians according to which states are ruled by “laws, not men.” Israeli legislators make the basic law and then administer it, except when the court, actually the chief justice, assumes the power of chief legislator.

An amendment to the Basic Law can be enacted by Knesset members sitting as the committee of the whole. At this moment there is a proposal for the Knesset to fund religion defined as anyone's religious “need.” Americans are being ask to support it as Israel's separation of State and religion. But this amendment will convey absolute power to the State in the Marxist mode. Instead of separating religion from the State, the amendment destroys religion and undermines its role in limiting state power as in free nations.

Using Deceit

So the deceit about the economy was not to convince the religious. Instead the peace process played a role in advancing the revolutionary aim of eliminating the opiate of the people.

What about convincing the world's press and the State Department? The Jewish organizations? And there's a tiny band of Jewish opponents of the process in distant American outposts. Was the deceit for convincing them?

Then how about the Likud party? In the first place Likud is “Labor lite.” In the second place it took Likud only five months to notice that supporting the peace process had an economic dimension. No one, and Likud wouldn't be the first, ever troubled about the contradiction of Israel's booming capitalist economy and its appetite for $8—10 billion in free money to pay down the huge annual difference between imports and exports (to which Israel's hyped hi—tech contributes $6 billion). Likud picked up the booming economy theme as fast as it dropped its 32 year old identification with The Settlers —in five months.

So who are the framers and the latecomers trying to convince with a transparent deceit about a booming capitalist economy? What is it for?

Consider that little band I mentioned. On the advice of a policy expert from Washington, it's calling on Israel to adopt a robust strategy in place of the peace process. Actually, the strategy is from an Institute publication of 1996 called “Clean Break” — with one difference. IASPS said no strategy until you stop free money and fix the economy. The expert said build a robust strategy on the booming economy! In other words, use the deceit about the economy devised for the peace process for a policy opposed to it! What's this little band want with the deceit?

Some years back my old friend David Wurmser, notwithstanding his present research in political safety, pointed me to an Arab writer he thought explained Israel's deceit.

“Israel,” wrote Rami Khouri, “has made an economic/ ppolitical retreat from eastern Palestine: it camouflages this retreat in the vocabulary of `security,' for it cannot speak the words of the truth of its failure.”

He means the truth is Israel's economic/political failure to hold the land. This is what ordinary people deduce from Israel's policy. The people who made the peace process and the deceit about the economy were revolutionaries. Camouflaging the truth about “retreat from eastern Palestine” means hiding its success. What success?

That the retreat is “the greatest event in Jewish history for the last 4000 years” (Mr. Peres).

The truth unspoken hides in a dialectical fiction about capitalism that brings revolution — the last sturdy rope for the Jewish Jew to hang his pearl of wisdom about strategy. It's nationalism in one country — the “National Liberation Movement of the Jews” means freed Jews liberate nations.

It took Jews in outposts. They prefer deceit to truth that can be spoken. If their “capitalism” kills religion and nationalism which are the twin evils of Marx's Jewish `god' capitalism, the dialectic is resolved. It takes a robust strategy.