Blows to Israel Must Never Go Unanswered By Martin Peretz

latimes ^ | September 5, 2003 | Martin Peretz

[dennisw]

By Martin Peretz (Martin Peretz is editor in chief of the New Republic)

September 5, 2003

The nation's security depends upon exacting a tremendous price against those who attack it

Jewish history had prepared neither Gentile nor Jew for the cosmic achievements the Zionist enterprise would make in the process of reconstituting a nation. These achievements are easily summarized: the ingathering of a millennially dispersed and diverse people; the regeneration of its ancient and near-moribund language; the fashioning of a lively and democratic polity and press; a genuinely independent judiciary; the mobilization of one of the two or three most proficient and scrupulous militaries in the world; the crafting of a commonwealth curious, open, tolerant — a nation-state not unlike the United States.

At the end of a century of unthinkably cruel and ultimately empty revolutions — Nazism, communism — Israel stands virtually alone in the right to assert that, after the crackup of empires and rage for popular sovereignties, it is a success, and a decent one at that.

Now envision Israel in its actual neighborhood — the tyrannical societies of the Middle East made even more twisted by corrupting and unproductive oil wealth — and you have a standing reproach to the Arab hubris that lies to itself.

(excerpt)

[dennisw]

more----->

From the western Sahara to the deserts abutting the Persian Gulf, not a single regime beyond Israel has so much as even embarked, or allowed its entrepreneurs to embark, on the exacting beginnings of industrial advance. This wide swath of terrain on which a quarter of a billion people live produces with all its hands and brains just about what little Finland or Spain does. Remind yourself also that not one ruler across the region governs by consent of the ruled. Evoke the phantoms of lost grandeur put in the heads of miserable boys and girls by dogma and dogmatics.

[goldstategop]

Israel MUST defend itself with all the means at her disposal. There is no "road map" to proceed with. The Palestinians want Israel to disappear. Every one but our State Department appears to grasp the truth.

[dennisw]

My Dad is a Democrat and will never change. Even he liked the way the IDF brought the Nablus apartment house down on the terrorists today

[Starrgaizr]

Should the Arab world harness the power of increased economic freedom while clinging to totalitarian ways as long as possible in the Chinese style, then their danger will grow.

[cincysux]

That was pretty cool, I sure hope more than one evil-doer was killed.

[Arkady]

"First they came for the Jews..."(and the liberal media still has their head in the sand.)
The neo-nazis even had the gall to criticize the fly-over of Holocaust-survivors of Auschwitz the other day...the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Israel is and always will be our first line of defense against those who want to return to the Dark-Ages.

[Bedford Forrest]

There is no "road map" to proceed with.

Does anyone know for a fact the name of the pinhead who coined this nonsensical phrase?

[SevenDaysInMay]

Moham's islam teaches that his lemmings must kill infedels, not just have Israel disappear.

I got sick of hearing about Israel when Jews were being killed during the "Peace Process"es, especially Oslo and Clinton's ego Nobel pitch.

Israel must destroy those who attack Israelis and those who harbor them.