The Israel-hating governments of the West have had their way. The past three years of jabbing at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a leader whose only objective is the defense of the country, has come to fruition: He lost the election to Labor Party Leader Ehud Barak. The West’s disdain for the Jewish state, however, is certainly not limited to the past three years.The problem is that the Arab world hates the West but they still depend on the West for oil sales. Likewise, the West is horribly dependent on the Arab world – a collection of dictatorships – for the oil to run their economies.Although Israel is a Mideastern country with a Mideastern culture, the Arab world falsely believes it to exist because of Western support. Although many Western countries have supported a minimal Jewish state in words, their deeds have shown quite the opposite. In fact, when five invading Arab armies tried to annihilate the Jewish state at its inception, the United States enforced an arms embargo on the entire region, knowing that the Arab armies could purchase weapons from its communist allies and that the Jewish state had almost no other alternatives.As a result, the West has constantly tried to appease the Arab world by pressuring Israel into making its borders indefensible and arming its sworn enemies. Appeasement, by definition, does not work. The most famous example is the attempt to appease Hitler in Munich. Once granted the Sudetenland, he immediately demanded more.The same process is already taking place in the Middle East. Israel relented to international pressures in 1993 by signing the Oslo Accords. Israel agreed to give away land it rightfully owned in exchange for promises of peace from the Palestine Liberation Organization.Israel has since given away a sizable chunk of land and the Yasser Arafat-led PLO continues to campaign for violence and the destruction of Israel. Arafat has recently demanded even more land than was agreed to be up for negotiation. Official Palestinian Authority (the new dictatorial government created by the Oslo Accords) television programs teach small children that it is glorious to blow one’s self up in the streets of Jerusalem for the sake of killing Jews.Despite all these blatant desires for bloodshed, the West, led by the United States, has continued to blame Israel for the lack of peace. Because Israel possesses no absolute necessity of our economy, it is being forced to help create a new, belligerent country. Now, the West has forced into office a pawn – Ehud Barak – that will gladly carry out its policies of giving without receiving.Barak’s Labor Party believes that Arafat and his cronies want peace, a belief that is contrary to both the words and deeds of Arafat, the PLO and the Arab population at large (Up to 40 percent of Arabs in Judea, Samra and Gaza – the territories Israel won in the defensive war of 1967 – support violence and terrorism). You see, Israel has now been involved in five full wars for its survival, as well as a constant threat of terrorism. They are tired of fighting, and the United States has led the successful campaign to exploit this feeling and elect Barak.The outcome of this mess is astounding. Assuming Barak’s government does not fall early and fills out his full four year term, a new country will be created. This country will be comprised of a random group of Arabs who do not constitute a single nation. Most of them arrived in the area in the early to mid 20th century, after the arrival of the British and Jews (the latter of which were joining Jews that had kept a presence in the land for 3,000 years) brought a standard of living unheard of in the Middle East.This new country will not be a democracy. In its current limited sovereignty, it has established itself as a dictatorship that helps kill opposition. It has already allied itself with Iraq; it burns American flags routinely. It is not and will not be only an enemy of Israel, but an enemy of democracy, the United States and ironically, the Western world that is forcing its creation.It is not too late to make a difference though. It is past time that we all call or write our congressman and other representatives to firmly inform them: as Americans, we support peace, we support democracy, and we therefore support the state of Israel. So let Israel do what’s best for itself – stop pushing your own detrimental agenda!
Benjamin Rapp is an undecided sophomore from Cincinnati and is vice president of the Ohio State chapter of the Tagar Zionist Student Activist Movement.