There is a specter haunting Israel and its American Jewish supporters. It is called guilt. Guilt over the “repression of Palestinian human rights.” Guilt over the refusal to remove “the main obstacle to peace in the Middle East, the “occupation of Arab land seized in 1967.” Guilt over the unwillingness to give the “Palestinians” their own state in the “occupied lands.” And now, guilt over the killing of “Palestinians” and “innocent civilians in Lebanon.”
It is a powerful weapon, this guilt; Jews have a difficult time coping with it. A people that has been the most debased of losers for 2,000 years finds it difficult to cope with victory. It finds it extraordinarily difficult to remain normal. It inherits insecurities, complexes, guilt. It begins to believe its enemies slander. It loses its self-respect and longs for the love of a hating world. It is important that those who have retained their self-esteem and some Jewish survival speak out against the disease of guilt and moral insecurity.
No guilt. Are the lands of 1967, “occupied” by the Jews, the main obstacle to peace? Is the year 1967 the origin of the conflict? How peaceful it must have been in 1966, when Sinai and Gaza were in Egyptian hands and the Golan was possessed by the Syrians to shell for 19 years the Jewish settlements below, and when Judea-Samaria (the “West Bank”) and East Jerusalem were in the hands of the “moderate” King Hussein. Why did they all go to war? What did they want then? When one has East Jerusalem and attacks Israel, can it be that he desires, West Jerusalem? And Tel Aviv?
And what did they wish in 1947 when they rejected the “Palestine” state offered them by the United Nations and went to war, killing fully 1 percent of the population? And what did they wish in the riots of 1936-38 when there was no country called Israel and they murdered more than 500 Jews? And in 1929 when no “Zionist occupation troops” were in Hebron, why did the “Palestinians” rise up to murder 67 Jews in one day? And why the pogroms in Jerusalem and Jaffa in 1920 and 1921?
What troubles the Arabs is the very presence of large numbers of Jews in the land, Israel of any size, Zionism. That is what troubles the Arabs. That is the obstacle to peace. Let us inscribe that on our hearts lest we open the doors to a repetition – on – a grand scale – of that which the Arabs have done to Jews since 1920. And the bearers of guilt would do just that.
No guilt. There is one sublime reason why we should not give up a centimeter of land: It belongs to us!
If we have no right to Judea-Samaria, then we indeed have no right to Tel Aviv. Abraham did not walk on Dizengoff Street, nor did our ancestors live in the Israeli cities that were built in the 20th century. But Abraham, who lived in Hebron, and Jacob in Shechem, now Nablus, and David in Bethlehem are the ‘sole legitimate reasons that Jews can lay claim to a Tel Aviv and the kibbutzim of the guilt-ridden left. The land belongs to us because the G-d of Israel, Creator and Titleholder of all lands, gave it to us.
No guilt. There is no such thing as a “Palestinian people.” They are Arabs, part of the Arab nation, possessors of 21 lands. Let them live in peace in any or all of them. but, there are no “Palestinians.”
It was the Roman emperor Hadrian who, after the Jewish revolt against the Romans, angrily erased the name of the state, Judea, and invented the name “Palestine,” after the Philistines. In every normal case, an existing people gives its name to a land. The Franks named it France and the Angles, England, and the Germanics, Germany. Only in this ludicrous case does a Roman invent a name, give it to a land, and the arriving Arab trespassers become “Palestinians.” One presumes that had Hadrian not changed the name, Israel would today be fighting Yasir Arafat and the Judean terrorists.
No guilt. The “Palestinians” civilians in Lebanon cheered and supported every Palestine Liberation Organization murder and shelling of Jewish towns. They are united in hatred of Israel. It would be nice if they were not mingled with the P.L.O., but they are. And if the only way to destroy the terrorists is by shellings and bombings that take the lives of people who cheer our death, we have no choice. I wonder how many mourned and protested the killing of German civilians during World War II bombings of Berlin, Hamburg and Dresden? And Gen. Yekutiel Adam was gunned down and murdered by a 14-year-old “innocent Palestinian child.”
No guilt. There is nothing ethical about dying or anything moral about another Holocaust. There is nothing immoral about winning and nothing necessarily noble in a loser. Let us cast off the chains of guilt and reject the accusations of its bearers. The greatness of Judaism is its spirit, but no spirit can survive without a living body.
No guilt. Rather faith, pride, strength and the love of Jews rather than the enemy who would destroy them. That is sanity, that is Judaism.
Rabbi Meir Kahane
“K A H A N E”
The magazine of the authentic Jewish Idea
Nissan -5737 April-1977
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