No Holds Barred: A Frank Conversation With Steven Plaut

Erudite and outspoken, Steven Plaut is a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press whose essays, many of which have appeared in this front-page space, always generate enthusiastic reader feedback.

A professor at the Graduate School of Business of Haifa University, Plaut brings a sharply analytical mind to any subject about which he writes, and one thing he doesn`t believe in is pulling his punches. He was as combative as we expected him to be during our recent interview.

In addition to The Jewish Press, Plaut`s articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsday, Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, Maariv, Fortune, Middle East Quarterly, National Review and Commentary, among others.

JEWISH PRESS: You seem to have emerged in the past few years as one of the most prolific writers around on Jewish subjects.

Plaut: Until Oslo, I kept a fairly low profile in the Israeli media, took no public stands on Right vs Left in Israel, and restricted myself to publishing articles about economic policy in Israel and abroad.

Oslo broke the camel`s back. From that moment on, I have devoted myself to doing everything in my power -- mainly through Op-Ed writing and Internet agitating -- to help stop Oslo and rescue Israel from the mega-stupidity of its own leaders. I have also long been trying to protest and analyze Jewish self-obliteration through assimilationism in America. I regard Jewish political liberalism as the main avenue of Jewish assimilation in America.

They say that a people deserves the leaders it gets, but in the case of Israel such an assertion would border on being an anti-Semitic libel. Israel has produced a long stream of incompetent demagogues and cowardly lemming-like leaders, divorced from reality and pursuing national self-obliteration.

Sharon is marginally better than Netanyahu, Barak, Peres, and Rabin. But this is not the Sharon of 1973 or 1982. It is a tired, timid, and exhausted Sharon, unwilling to take the heat for pursuing a serious Israeli defense. Like his predecessors, he seems to think that Palestinian terrorism must be allowed to continue until the Palestinians feel they have reached catharsis and just get tired of murdering Jews.

It is true that Sharon has launched numerous half-hearted reprisal campaigns against the Palestinian savages, unlike the four prime ministers who immediately preceded him. But those reprisals consist of the Arik Sharon Hokey-Pokey: "You put your ground troops in, you take your ground troops out, and you move `em all about." Then you pull them out again until the next atrocity.

By trying to be Shimon Peres II. Netanyahu was elected in 1996 for the sole purpose of ending Oslo. Upon his election, however, he turned about 180 degrees and pursued Oslo with all the same delusional vigor as Peres and Rabin before him. True, he scowled when hobnobbing with Arafat, in contrast to Peres`s idiotic grins, but in fact he was simply pursuing Oslo -- albeit Oslo Lite. He abandoned Hebron to the terrorists. He responded to Arafat`s launching of the Tunnel Pogroms by turning the other cheek. He continued the face-to-face meetings with Arafat even as Arafat was mass murdering Jews. He signed the Wye appeasements, making him the Wye`s Man of Chelm.

Netanyahu lost to Barak in 1999 for the same reason that New Coke failed -- why have a pale imitation of an Oslo appeaser when you can elect the real thing?

Netanyahu tried to make a comeback and challenge Sharon this fall in the Likud primaries by posturing to the right of Sharon. But his wager that Israeli voters had forgotten his track record from 1996-99 proved incorrect.

I believe they should be indicted and prosecuted for a thousand counts of second-degree murder. Depraved indifference to human life and reckless endangerment are bases for charges of second-degree murder. First-degree murder -- the actual pulling of triggers or detonating of bombs -- is of course a worse crime, but second-degree murder is still murder.

It has become difficult to speak with any objectivity about Rabin because of the tragic ending of his life. But in reality, Rabin was a total disaster as prime minister and bears a lot of the blame for turning Israel into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. His policies were foolish and deadly. I like to think that had Rabin lived, he soon would have realized the foolishness of Oslo, reversed it, and tossed Peres and Beilin into a dungeon. But of course we will never know what he would have done.

How does one even try to explain the Oslo Debacle inflicted on Israel by its own leaders?

A facetious answer would be that Rabin and Peres had an ingenious master plan. You see, they figured out that much of anti-Semitism is based on the common stereotype of Jews being smarter than other people, and they figured that they could end anti-Semitism once and for all by proving how false this stereotype is.

And how do you explain the fact that the PLO and Syria did not take Israel up on its offers of complete capitulation under Ehud Barak?

There are two explanations: a religious-mystical explanation and a rational-scientific explanation. The religious-mystical explanation holds that Arafat and the senior Assad were simply stupid and so believed that by holding out for ever greater Israeli concessions, American pressure would deliver an unlimited and open-ended set of Israeli surrenders. The rational-scientific explanation is that the Almighty hardened their hearts, much like He did with Pharaoh, and He did so in His infinite mercy in order to save Israel from the stupidity of its own leaders.

Of the current party leaders in Israel, I do not see many with any vision of how to rescue the country nor any sense of what needs to be done to end the war.

The Labor and Meretz parties are composed entirely of Oslo leftists, who differ only slightly from the anti-Zionist communist party. Amram Mitzna is not only preaching a policy of unilateral self-dismemberment, but is also one of the biggest liars Israeli politics has ever produced. Ideologically he is qualified to be mayor of Jenin, and his record as mayor of Haifa would be enough to certify him to be the prime minister of Zimbabwe.

The Shinui party is not interested in anything besides bashing the Orthodox and exhibiting contempt toward Judaism. The religious parties are far more interested in getting their shares of the budgetary fiscal pork than they are in rescuing Israel from the Oslo debacle. I like Efi Eitam, the new head of the National Religious Party, but most of the rest of his party slate consists of ``centrists`` who have not made up their minds yet whether appeasing the Palestinian terrorists or fighting them is the answer.

The only concern of the other religious parties regarding the danger that Mitzna will order a unilateral capitulation to the Arabs is that the eviction of the Yesha settlers not take place, G-d forbid, on Shabbat.

There are some small parties to the right of the Likud with better positions regarding Oslo, but they are divided and too small to have much impact. And even they do not speak in unambiguous terms about what really needs to be done.

Finally, there are the Arab nationalist Stalinist and fascist parties, which would like nothing better than seeing the Jews of Israel herded into concentration camps. There are almost no Jews who vote for the communists other than some of my colleagues on the faculties of the universities. All of the Arab student organizations on campus are associated with these parties.

Given your political views, you must be feel like a real outsider at Haifa university.

Haifa University is one of the two worst bastions in Israel for leftist academic extremism, the other being Ben-Gurion University. The other universities are only slightly less awful in terms of the prevalence of leftist radicalism and anti-Zionism among the faculty members. Haifa University hosts some of the worst tenured traitors in Israel, people who devote every waking moment to promoting anti-Israel embargoes by anti-Semites overseas, to spreading anti-Israel lies and propaganda, to rationalizing Palestinian atrocities. A few even write for Islamist fundamentalist and neo-Nazi websites and journals. Of course, not all faculty members are extremists or even leftists, but there is a strong leftist domination.

Israeli universities have all adopted pro-Arab preferences and quotas in admissions in the name of ``affirmative action,`` and for all intents and purposes Arab students (and sometimes faculty) are admitted with almost no standards at all. Haifa University has the country`s largest Arab student body, and the Arab students have been radicalized by Oslo.They prance about campus with T-shirts and posters with portraits of Nasser and Che Guevera. There are frequent rallies of Arab students and Jewish faculty leftists waving PLO flags and screaming anti-Israel and anti-Jewish slogans, including slogans supporting violence.

I was born in Philadelphia in 1951. My dad was a refugee from Germany who arrived in New York in 1938 with some change in his pocket. He served in the U.S. army under Patton and was in the same unit with Henry Kissinger. He met my mom when he went to donate blood in 1948 to Magen David Adom and she worked there as a volunteer. Dad had been in hachshara (chalutz training) camp in Europe to go to Palestine in the 1930`s, but the British White Paper kept him out.

I grew up in a (religiously) Conservative home. It was also a Zionist home, and I was a member of Habonim, which was then beginning to morph into a far-left group (at which point I quit). Bill Cosby`s mom was my babysitter as a youth, was at my bar mitzvah, and my dad sold Bill his first suit of clothes. Really.

While at first fairly secular after moving to Israel, I have in recent life become considerably more observant -- I am shomer Shabbat and shomer kashrut -- and am attempting to fill in the gaping holes in my Jewish education.

I received my undergraduate degree from Temple University in Philadelphia. I did my MA at Hebrew University and then returned to the U.S. and did my Ph.D at Princeton in economics. I specialized in international and urban economics and later developed a specialty in finance. After that, I taught for a couple of years at Oberlin College while also working at the Federal Reserve Bank.

Here in Israel I taught first at the Technion and then moved to the University of Haifa. I`ve also taught at Berkeley, at UCI, at Central European University, Tel Aviv University, University of Nantes, and Athens Laboratory for Business Administration.

I made aliya in 1981. My parents made aliya shortly after me. My dad had come full circle from his hachshara days. He passed away in 1991. My mom lives in Netanya.

I`m married to Dr. Pnina Ohana Plaut, granddaughter of Rabbi Nissim Ohana (chief rabbi of Egypt and later of Haifa), zt`l. She is a transportation engineer and city planner at the

Two-and-a-half years ago I had kidney cancer. I made it a topic in my book The Scout, which is set against the background of an intensive care ward, and some of the religious ponderings in the book are related to the near-death situation at the time. Now, thank G-d, I am recovered and fit as a fiddle, or as near abouts as you can be at age 51.

I wake up each morning and force myself to read Ha`aretz, the Israeli far left newspaper. Then I face a choice. I can either walk around all day enraged and curse people and scream at my kids and provoke my wife, or I can release it all in an Op-Ed piece or commentary and then smile at the world and pet the cat and sniff the flowers. In other words, it is psychotherapy for me and keeps me out of a straightjacket.

There`s an old Israeli joke: The pessimist says things are awful, while the optimist says things could not possibly get worse.

If Amram Mitzna is elected, I have my doubts as to whether Israel will survive. If he loses, we buy time. Israel needs to follow the first rule of medicine: you cannot always cure problems, but your first moral obligation is never to make them worse. For the past decade, Israel`s governments have been ceaselessly making things worse.

It is conceivable that there will develop a counter-reaction to the Oslo era. Just like Oslo was a byproduct of Israel self-doubt, self-denial and self-hatred, so it is possible that the rebound-reaction will be a reassertion of Jewish pride, a return to Jewish roots, a return to Judaism by those segments of society that sought liberation through deJudaization.

But let us be clear. Jewish tradition teaches us that we cannot just sit back and count on miracles as an automatic entitlement, nor take their occurrence for granted. We cannot count on Divine intervention always to rescue the Jews from the folly of their leaders. Israel`s survival is in danger thanks to the mega-stupidity of its political elite and its chattering classes. The fact that these people are still out inventing new formulas to make Oslo ``work,`` rather than demanding immediate Reoccupation and DeNazification, shows how uncertain are the prospects for Israeli survival.

How do you view the state of Jewry at the end of the secular calendar year 2002?

In a recent essay in Commentary, David Gelernter wrote, ``Most American Jews, I would bet, know more about Christianity than about Judaism.`` He then added that they do not know much about Christianity either. I would say the situation is even worse in Israel. And in Israel the ignorance threatens to produce not only assimilation, but the destruction of the country with all that this implies.

Ain´t Democracy a Wonderful Thing?
Steven Plaut
31 December 2002

It is one tiny step back from the brink of demise for Israeli democracy. Israel´s election board gave a loud hard slap to the mug of the anti-democratic Supreme Court Justice Mishael Cheshin that could be heard round the country.

In the past few weeks, Israel´s McCarthyist Left has been attempting to prevent assorted non-leftists from running in the coming elections, while defending to the death the rights of Israel´s Arab fascist parties, openly identifying with the enemy in time of war, to run in the elections. First, Moshe Feiglin was banned from running on the Likud slate. Why? Because five years ago he was convicted of blocking traffic at an intersection in an anti-Oslo protest. For that intersection blocking he was indicted for "sedition", although the "sedition" was clearly in the fact that Feiglin was anti-Oslo in his political opinions, not in the fact that he was blocking some cars from moving ahead freely. You see, Amir Peretz, the head of the Histadrut ‘crime family’, has also sent out his trade union hooligans countless times to block intersections, while trying to extort assorted concessions and gifts from the government. He is also running for the Knesset on his own slate, yet he has not been banned from anything. Nor have leaders in the student unions, who blocked traffic intersections to demand free tuition and are now running as members of various party lists.

Then Comrade Cheshin, one of the advocates of judicial activism (meaning judicial dictatorship) in the Supreme Court, decided to attempt to block the JDL-Kach´s Baruch Marzel from running as part of the Herut party slate of Knesset member Michael Kleiner. I thought that Kleiner was foolish for recruiting Marzel for his slate, but whether or not I am correct and whether or not Kleiner´s party should sit in the Knesset is a matter for the Israeli voter to determine. It is not for some politically-correct anti-democratic non-elected Supreme Court Justice to dictate.

Cheshin filed his recommendation to ban Marzel from running and threatened to try to ban the entire Herut party. At first, the Election Board was inclined to go along, but then - in a surprise move - it reversed itself and declared that Marzel is free to run. Cheshin was outraged. "I have investigated and discovered that Marzel is still a leader of the Kach movement," said Cheshin.Well, I have also investigated, and I have discovered that Amram Mitzna is still a leader of the Israeli Labor Party, which is responsible for the deaths of nearly 1200 Israelis since signing the Oslo Accords. How come he has not been banned? How come the great defender of democracy, Justice Cheshin, has not had a single word to say about the arbitrary anti-democratic banning of the JDL-Kahanist movements in Israel on the grounds of their having unpopular political opinions? After all, the Kach groups have never killed anyone, unlike the policies of the Israeli Labor Party and unlike the Arab terrorists celebrated by Tibi and Bashara. But Comrade Cheshin is sticking to his guns. In Haaretz, on December 30, 2002, he insists that it is entirely justified that non-elected Israeli judges decide which candidates voters may vote for in elections.

Meanwhile, before anyone gets all hot and bothered and suggests I am being inconsistent when I suggest that the fascist Arab lists of Azmi Bashara and Ahmed Tibi be banned, let me remind you what happened in the cradles of democracy: in Churchill´s Britain in World War II no parties openly identifying with Hitler were allowed to run for parliament or operate at all. In the United States, no parties openly identifying with Germany and Japan were allowed to run for elections during World War II. Instead, Japanese-American civilians were sent en masse to internment camps, for far less provocation than that coming from Israel´s Arabs, who never have been interned anywhere, nor penalized at all for the sedition proudly proclaimed by many of them. The ‘Caring Left’ is sighing that if the Arab fascist parties are banned, for example under Israel´s anti-terrorism laws (Israel´s intelligence services have reported that people in Bashara´s party are involved in terrorism), or under Israel´s anti-racism law (the same one used to ban the Kach groups), then Israel´s Arab voters will be left “without an adequate way to express themselves.”

Tch, tch, tch. What a shame.

Yes, they would be. You see, Israel´s ‘Caring Left’ would like a situation in which the national dialogue within Israel taking place between Jews and Arabs would be over the logistics of how the Jews should be expelled from their homes and transported into concentration camps by the Arabs and their Jewish leftist-extremist collaborators. That is precisely the agenda of the Israeli Arab Stalinist and fascist parties, and of certain Jewish leftist extremists. Yes, by banning them, Israel would be placing certain limits on "free speech" - in ways similar to Churchill´s Britain. After all, Oswald Mosley spent the war in irons, so why is Uri Avnery running around free?

No one should be stopping the Israeli Arabs from setting up their own parties, as long as those parties renounce violence and sedition, as long as they accept as a given Israel´s existence with its Jewish majority, as long as they distance themselves from Palestinian terrorism, al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein. Then, they can advocate whatever they please. But banning the Arab fascist-Stalinist parties would also be making an important moral and political point. Arabs who seek any sort of dialogue and legitimacy and representation in Israel must do so on the basis of the acceptance of the rights of Jews to life, liberty, and happiness, on the basis of renunciation of genocide and violence; thus, not on the basis of debates over the logistics of the annihilation of Jews. If no Arabs are willing to seek office on the basis of those values, then so be it. They can just sit by the sidelines with no representation in the parliament, no claims on budgets, no logrolling, no pork barrels.

Bashara and Tibi are denouncing those moving to ban them and their paries as "racists" - this coming from the very same people who celebrate the blowing up of buses and cafes full of Jewish children, who openly pimp for the PLO and Hizbollah, who openly support Israel´s enemies in time of war. If Oslo has left Israeli Jews with even a smidgen of national pride, then they should refuse to countenance any political debate or "dialogue" with any Israeli Arabs on the issue of how to achieve Israel´s own extermination and the Jews´ annihilation.

Those seeking the annihilation of Jews should be "debated", to borrow a bon mot from that old Woody Allen movie, with a baseball bat. That sound anti-democratic to you? Tough.

--------------------------------------------------------
Steven Plaut teaches at the University of Haifa and is author of The Scout

Budda-Bing!!!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.