2008 Woodie Awards
There is a War Going On!
Shimshon Ayzenberg
Issue date: 3/29/05 Section: Opinion
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There is a war going on and Israel is disengaging from this war by giving the Gaza Strip back. But will that really end it? The Gaza Strip is only a small chunk that the Palestinian Arab terrorists want. They will not be satisfactorily appeased. The war will go on and the best thing that Israel can do now is fight it head on.
At the start of the Arab Revolt, in 1936, Moshe Segal suggested to his partner that they should change their course of action from havlaga (Hebrew for "self-defense") to hagava ("strategic action" against the enemy). Moshe Segal and his partner were top members of Irgun Zvei Le'umi, a special network of security services that defended scattered Jewish communities in the British Mandate from regular Arab attack.
Segal's idea was not carried out right away. Zeev Jabotinsky was by that time a forcibly exiled patriarch and sole commander of the first Jewish legion since the days of Simon Bar Kockba, which Segal called the "Irgun Zvei Le'umi", "The National Military Organization." Jabotinsky did not approve of this kind of concerted fighting from the Irgun even when the Jews were under attack.
The very first time the Jews seriously went after the Arabs was in 1940, the same year Jabotinsky died. By that time the circumstances for world Jewry were unbearably bleak: the Holocaust in Europe had already devoured scores of thousands of Jews, scores of thousands more were stuck between international boundaries without refuge as no country wanted to admit them, and the Arab Revolt eventually made the British promulgate the White Paper which choked Jewish immigration to Palestine to a mere trickle. A controversial splinter group of the Irgun called Lehi orchestrated reprisal attacks on the Arabs that had allied with Nazi Germany.
That "history repeats itself" is a clichéd phrase, but, alas, it has poignant resonance for Israel today as the country is about to embark on a historic phase with the disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Once again the Jews are confronted by an unmistakable Arab enemy that is cooking up the same old Nazi fascism and inculcating its numerous youth to be hate-filled and treacherous toward the Jews as if the past fifty years elapsed without trace; once again we are back to Palestine at the time of the Arab Revolt and the outbreak of World War II.
At the start of the Arab Revolt, in 1936, Moshe Segal suggested to his partner that they should change their course of action from havlaga (Hebrew for "self-defense") to hagava ("strategic action" against the enemy). Moshe Segal and his partner were top members of Irgun Zvei Le'umi, a special network of security services that defended scattered Jewish communities in the British Mandate from regular Arab attack.
Segal's idea was not carried out right away. Zeev Jabotinsky was by that time a forcibly exiled patriarch and sole commander of the first Jewish legion since the days of Simon Bar Kockba, which Segal called the "Irgun Zvei Le'umi", "The National Military Organization." Jabotinsky did not approve of this kind of concerted fighting from the Irgun even when the Jews were under attack.
The very first time the Jews seriously went after the Arabs was in 1940, the same year Jabotinsky died. By that time the circumstances for world Jewry were unbearably bleak: the Holocaust in Europe had already devoured scores of thousands of Jews, scores of thousands more were stuck between international boundaries without refuge as no country wanted to admit them, and the Arab Revolt eventually made the British promulgate the White Paper which choked Jewish immigration to Palestine to a mere trickle. A controversial splinter group of the Irgun called Lehi orchestrated reprisal attacks on the Arabs that had allied with Nazi Germany.
That "history repeats itself" is a clichéd phrase, but, alas, it has poignant resonance for Israel today as the country is about to embark on a historic phase with the disengagement from the Gaza Strip. Once again the Jews are confronted by an unmistakable Arab enemy that is cooking up the same old Nazi fascism and inculcating its numerous youth to be hate-filled and treacherous toward the Jews as if the past fifty years elapsed without trace; once again we are back to Palestine at the time of the Arab Revolt and the outbreak of World War II.