Self-haters and census takers
By Ron Dermer

(January 10) The seizure of the munitions ship Karine A was 
a feather in the cap of the Israeli Defense Forces. Operation 
Noah's Ark, which sent Israel's elite naval unit hundreds of 
kilometers from its borders to commandeer a boat on the high 
seas, was by all accounts a spectacular success - not a shot 
fired, not a man down. There was even talk of the mission 
taking its place alongside the raid on Entebbe and the 
bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor in the pantheon of Israeli 
daring. 

For a military whose reputation over the past decade has sunk 
along with the nation's deterrent posture, the mission's 
importance went far beyond keeping a deadly arsenal out of 
the hands of terrorists bent on our destruction. Unfortunately 
for Israel, few people outside the country were paying 
attention. 

Ironically, the "success" of the mission helps explain why it 
went largely unnoticed. 

Notwithstanding the mutual recriminations between the military 
and Foreign Ministry over who was responsible for the public 
relation's fiasco, the bloodless takeover of an arms ship 
is not a riveting story. After all, action novels with 
smokeless guns and live bodies don't exactly fly off the 
shelves. To be sure, if the government had used the capture 
of a ship with 50 tons of lethal cargo as a casus belli 
against the Palestinian Authority, the world would have surely 
taken notice. 

But predictably, that did not happen. Instead, with a familiar 
dissonance, the government declared that the operation revealed 
Arafat's true intentions and then did nothing about it. While 
many Israelis were no doubt thinking to themselves that where 
there is a Karine A there is surely a Karine B, the government 
acted like a vassal state waiting for a foreign power to give 
it permission to defend its own citizens. 

But the seizure of a munitions ship bound for Palestinian 
Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's terrorist kingdom was 
far less revealing about the by-now-clear intentions of 
both the Palestinian Authority and our government than it 
was about the mindset of the debilitated Israeli peace camp. 
Indeed, it seems that nothing will convince these 
irrepressible doves to rethink their flawed assumptions 
about peace with Arafat. 

Though Oslo's doves came in may shades of white, what remains 
of the once-strong Oslo peace camp are basically two groups: 
the self-haters and the census takers. 

The self-haters: The Zionist self-haters are different than 
the anti-Zionists in that the former are as firm in their 
commitment to a Jewish State as they are to an Arab one. 
Since they have deluded themselves into believing that the 
Arab world has accommodated itself to the existence of Israel, 
to them the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has 
already been resolved. What is necessary to end the current 
violence is only to expunge the Israeli sin of "occupation," 
a sin that has badly stained their blanched humanitarian 
consciences. Indeed, they see resistance to the "occupation" 
as legitimate and believe that returning to the pre-1967 
lines will end the conflict and secure Israel's future. 

A recent article by David Grossman, a renowned Israeli author, 
placed him squarely with the self-haters. He railed against 
Israeli "self-righteousness" and saw in the seizure of the 
arms destined for Arafat as proof "that if you oppress a 
people for 35 years, humiliate its leaders, harass its 
population, and do not give them a glimmer of hope, the 
members of this people will try to assert themselves in any 
way possible." 

Preposterously suggesting that we behaved no differently 
when "we were under occupation and tyranny" and making 
specious analogies with Jewish resistance to Mandatory rule, 
Grossman displayed a level of historical ignorance not 
uncommon among Israel's literary elite. 

The census takers: The census takers are different than the 
self-haters in that they realize that the Arab-Israeli 
conflict has not been resolved. Correctly seeing the roots 
of the conflict in the refusal of the Arab world to accept 
the legitimacy of a Jewish State, they nevertheless see 
two states for two peoples as the only solution that will 
secure Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. What drives 
them is not guilt over the so-called occupation, but a 
Palestinian demographic time bomb. 

However, what keeps them within Oslo's dwindling camp is an 
additional proposition. They believe that Arafat is the only 
man with whom an agreement can be reached in the foreseeable 
future. Having poured their considerable energies and staked 
their shrinking reputations on Oslo and Arafat, they refuse 
to consider any other possible solution to what is a genuine 
problem. 

Put simply, they see three million Palestinians and they can 
only say Oslo. 

Both these groups were unmoved by the seizure of the ship 
last week. For the self-haters, the arms only reveal the 
fighting spirit of our enemy - a spirit no different than 
our own. For them, the only strategic conclusion to be drawn 
is to leave the "territories" as quickly as possible. 
For the census takers, this week's inertia is the product 
of a wrongheaded belief that a strategic decision to oust 
Arafat and the PA will not help resolve the problem of three 
million Palestinians on our doorstep. Unfortunately, their 
love affair with Oslo still blinds them to recognizing that 
dismantling the PA is a necessary first step toward addressing 
the problem they hope to solve.