Illustration by Ryan Wallace

Stop by enough Middle East "peace" rallies these days and you'll feel like Churchill in the late 1930s, who wondered how much longer his countrymen would be swept up in pathetic attempts to rationalize Hitler's behavior. I go to these things compulsively, wondering how much further into the absurd these delusional people will go. These gatherings, populated with anti-Western, anti-globalization, anti-capitalist zealots, quickly move from espousing annoyingly earnest rhetoric of the "give peace a chance" sort to damning Israel as the sole villain in the Middle East. It's bad enough that rally-goers unthinkingly equate Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat, a dictator, with Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, a democratically elected leader. Even worse, with increasing enthusiasm they liken Sharon to Hitler.

At least here in the United States this inane thinking is expressed with words. In Europe, the rhetoric has devolved into vile acts. There, proponents of "peace," aided by unruly mobs of Arab thugs, proclaim their peaceful urges in fine Orwellian style by burning synagogues, beating up Jewish kids playing soccer, and harassing old folks ambling along the streets. Meanwhile, pampered aristos casually malign Israel in the course of conversation: just this past December, at a fancy dinner party hosted by Daily Telegraph owner Lord Black, the French ambassador to the Court of Saint James's described Israel as "that shitty little country."

Practitioners of anti-Semitism have recourse to all the antique rationales:

the Jews killed Christ; the Jews are clannish; the Jews control the fill-in-the-blanks (media? banks? transportation system? universities?). Over the last century, though, many anti-Semites have devised a fanciful, self-serving escape clause: they are not anti-Jewish, they tell themselves and the world, just anti-Israel. These last are oblivious to Martin Luther King Jr.'s acute, unapologetic observation that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.

For their part, Arabs, less sophisticated in the nuances of anti-Semitism, simply call for the murder of Jews, including ultra-Orthodox residents of parts of Jerusalem -- Jews who don't even recognize the existence of Israel. Such murder is advocated in the tightly censored press of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Meanwhile, in the last 19 months, Arabs have launched 60 suicide bombings in Israel. Iraq gives $25,000 to the families of each of these mass murderers. Iran was recently caught shipping 50 tons of high-tech weaponry to the Arafat war machine. (It was intercepted in the Red Sea by Israeli naval commandos.) And who knows how much silent money has been funneled in that direction from the Saudi royals. The ruse of mere political opposition, which sustained some Westerners' delusion that the Arabs simply (simply!) wanted to undermine Israel, has been abandoned. It is now full steam ahead: "Death to the Jews" has joined "All Palestine for the Palestinians alone" in the rhetorical arsenal. And by Palestine, they mean Israel as well as the territories.

I WORK AT NIGHT as a radio talk-show host. Lately, my callers and I have been engaged in two main topics: the collapse of Cardinal Law's "moral" authority owing to his failure to deal with priests who molest kids, and the war between Israel and the Palestinians. What I hear about the Middle East is a drumbeat of ignorance masquerading as historical fact, coupled with unashamed calls for, as one man put it a few weeks back, "completing the job Hitler began." This man moved gingerly from demanding first that Israel remove its troops immediately from "Palestinian territory" -- there is, of course, no such thing -- to dissolving the whole country and sending its Jewish inhabitants packing "back" to Europe, to finally advocating, with amazing sang-froid, the total annihilation of the Jewish people.

Of course, this one call isn't representative of what most Americans are thinking. But I do receive a disproportionate number of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish calls to those who take the other side. What this suggests to me, after 26 years in the business, is that Jews and pro-Semitic gentiles simply don't care to be heard publicly. Perhaps they are too placid (or maybe too stupid) to recognize that while few listeners ever call, lots of people pay attention to those who do, and the average listener absorbs what seemingly informed callers have to say.

One thing has become clear to me as I have listened to the balance of my show's callers weigh in against Israel. It is that our government's mixed-signal preachments on terrorism and the Israeli-Palestinian horror have contributed to European disdain for Israel, Arab determination to annihilate Jews, the United Nations' clear tilt against Israel (most recently by calling for an investigation into what happened at the Jenin refugee camp while doing nothing in response to the lethal string of suicide bombings against Israel), and the American "peace' movement's insistence that Israel is the sole offender in this war.

It's understandable, though hardly commendable, that because Europe has thus far been spared the jolting horror experienced in this country on September 11, 2001, Europeans just don't "get" the nexus between the US war against terrorism and the Israeli version of the same. But then how could they get it when President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell don't know how to express it?

After all, Bush and Powell have tangled themselves up in conceptual and strategic knots. In 1991, Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, convinced the first president Bush not to pursue the Gulf War to its logical conclusion: the destruction of Saddam Hussein and his terror regime. Now Powell and others have convinced the second president Bush that the only way to prosecute the war on terrorism is to re-establish a "coalition" with "partners" among Arab dictatorships who would rather live in a world in which Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction than see any Arab regime come under attack by infidels. So what we get from alternate sides of the presidential mouth is "You are either with us or against us" and "We will pursue terrorism wherever it is found," along with "I say it again: Israel must withdraw without delay from Palestinian areas." Translated from Bushonics, that means: the United States will go full-tilt against forces that proclaim their intent to destroy America, but Israel mustn't do the same against forces that proclaim their intent to destroy Israel.

Foolish consistency may well be the hobgoblin of little minds, but rational consistency is essential to policymaking. The administration's statements may possibly be intended as a "fool you" gambit to make the Arab extremists believe that Washington regards Israel's attempt to root out terrorism as illegitimate. But if so, it's a "fool us" gambit in that Arab dictators and their howling mobs have taken such statements seriously and stepped up their murderous assaults. In Clintonian terms, Bush has empowered the Arab killers and continues to enable them by causing them to think that they are free to share their murderous rage with the world. What most Americans don't understand, and what my angriest callers don't "get," is that allowing Israel to be ravaged will inspire similar tactics against us.

Former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently estimated that the percentage of the Israeli population killed by suicide bombers -- nearly 500 deaths -- translates proportionally in American terms into many tens of thousands of people. No thinking person could say with any seriousness that if we suffered such atrocities in our malls, restaurants, buses, and other public places, we would do anything less than what Israel is doing: exact a horrendous price from the perpetrators.

YOU WANT TO SPEND the rest of your life in a futile debate? Get into a discussion of how the Middle East got to this point, beginning with the ancient Jewish kingdoms, through the Roman occupation, to the centuries during which resident Jews had no real authority in the Holy Land. Move on to the era when Muslim caliphs controlled the region through the dominion of the Ottoman Empire and then to the period of post-World War I British control, following the defeat of the Ottomans. From there go to the United Nations-proposed two-state solution in the mid 1940s through the 1948 war following Israel's establishment of independence, when the Arabs were bent on pushing the Jews from their new state into the sea. Talk about Jordan's control of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) from 1948 to 1967 and Egyptian control of Gaza during the same period. If you haven't yet come to blows, go over the Six Day War launched by the Arabs against Israel in 1967, which resulted in Israeli occupation of Judea and Samaria, and then try to talk about our own time, when mass murderers routinely ply their trade to a chorus of praise by Arafat, the Jordanian queen, and the kept intellectuals and sycophants of the Arab world.

The Allied occupation of Germany and Japan was a legitimate action intended to pacify hostile populations and expunge murderous regimes. Also legitimate was the decision not to end occupation until those former enemies had proven they had abandoned their wretched policies of the 1930s and '40s and erected democratic structures in their place. Today, the Israeli occupation of Judea and Samaria is also fully justified; it is the outcome of a war prosecuted against Israel. The Israelis must and will remain there until its Arab residents agree to abandon their commitment to destroy Israel. Of course, there's no indication that the Palestinian Authority dictatorship under Arafat has any such intention. On the contrary, its statements in Arabic (visit www.memri.org for the English translation) reiterate the belief that the whole of what was once the mandate of Palestine, including all of pre-Six Day War Israel, must be a Palestinian-Arab state.

The simple principle that the victor in a war brought on by an attack against it has the full right and a moral obligation to pacify the enemy, including occupying territory from which the aggression was launched (and continues to be launched), makes scarcely a dent in the minds of folks who call talk shows, mine among them, or who trudge off to "peace" rallies. Nor does it influence those who take their cues from the manifestly anti-Israel news reporting on National Public Radio or the opinion pieces in many liberal newspapers and magazines -- all of which view Israeli and Palestinian actions in terms of moral equivalence. With press coverage like this, it's not surprising that Palestinian sympathizers see the Israeli presence in the territories as "occupation" in the most illegitimate sense of the term.

Nor is it surprising that they believe the entirety of the so-called West Bank -- which is simply the area controlled by Arabs after the ceasefire of 1948 -- is Palestinian territory. How quickly they forgot (or perhaps never knew) that the occupants of this land, formerly governed by the Jordanians, were never given the same rights accorded Jordanians and didn't start referring to themselves as Palestinians until the mid 1960s. To describe this land as "Palestinian territory" betrays an ignorance of history (if knowledge of events occurring in just the last half-century can rightly be called "history"). This land is nobody's territory, though it is held by Israel for good reason. Its final status and borders were to be determined by negotiation -- as recognized by international agreement and reiterated in the Oslo accords. It has become popular over the past year to forget that fact.

But at this point, negotiation to determine the borders of a state run by Palestinians -- before they abandon their irredentist fantasies, before they pledge full acceptance of Israel's legitimacy, before they abjure violence and commit to living in harmony with Israel -- would be absurd. The United States would never have left Japan and Germany had there been hordes of Japanese militarist kamikazes and Nazi "suicide bombers" tossing themselves into American military camps, apartment buildings housing servicemen's families, and restaurants and shops patronized by Americans. The "occupation" of Judea and Samaria must continue until their residents begin to act like civilized adults instead of rabid juvenile delinquents routinely employed in the slaughter of innocents. Indeed, this occupation must continue until Palestinians stop teaching their children how to turn themselves into projectile human explosives.

People unfamiliar with, say, the redrawing of the European map from the late 19th century to the present (owing to population shifts and war) believe with a passion usually reserved for revealed religion that the 1948 ceasefire line is the result of a settled agreement. They think that "pre-1967 Israel" may try to remain a Jewish state, if those pesky Jews really insist, but the part previously occupied by Egypt and Jordan absolutely must be -- and in their minds already is -- the State of Palestine.

The predominant goal of the Arab dictatorships -- and the only one safely expressed -- is the total elimination of Israel. The European attitude is one of hostility to Israel and renewed hatred of the Jews. You don't need a Mensa-level IQ to get these points clear in your mind. But they elude our "intellectuals" and "peace"-mongers. And, as always, such facts don't register with those bottom-feeding anti-Semites who need little rationale to scrawl swastika graffiti or leaflet Jewish neighborhoods with pamphlets that propound hatred and hint at oncoming violence.

In spite of these realities, Israel rightly intends to root out the masterminds of terror, to remove Arafat from his rancid "leadership" of the Palestinians, and to return, if need be -- possibly repeatedly -- to areas where Arabs live in Judea and Samaria until the violence ceases.

I BEGAN with Churchill, who nearly alone in late '30s Britain, warned of what lay ahead. We have no Churchill today, but thanks to the Internet and other means of mass communication, we already know what's coming: a combined Arab, European, and United Nations drive to delegitimize Israel and submit Jews to a 21st-century Final Solution. If you think I'm exaggerating the threat, listen to the talk-show callers and read the letters to the editor in mainstream newspapers and the essays published by "intellectuals" who embrace the theory of moral equivalence. They have one thing in common: they issue perfunctory statements of "concern" about poor Jews dying as a result of "wicked" Israeli policy, while crying gushers of tears over the sad fate of the Palestinians -- who are never viewed as victims of Arab leaders' half-century of miscalculation and perfidy.

To change course -- to mount a Churchillian reversal before it's too late -- would require concentrating on facts, sifting through anti-Semitic propaganda, and insisting on consistency in American policy. But that's exactly what we're not seeing from our opinion-makers, such as James Carroll, who recently wrote that Israeli settlements have created "radical insecurity no matter what Palestinians do"; our religious leaders, such as the three Episcopal bishops who several months ago picketed the Israeli consulate in Boston to protest Israeli military action in the West Bank; or our scholars, such as the 80 MIT and Harvard professors who recently signed a petition calling for their schools' divestment from companies doing business in Israel.

If Americans truly believe the West has a right to survive and that expunging Arab-Islamic-fascist international terrorism is justified, then surely Israel has the same right. And if they don't, we don't. And that leaves us -- where?

David Brudnoy teaches in the College of Communication at Boston University and is a WBZ Radio talk-program host and film critic for the Community Newspaper Company.

Issue Date: May 17 - 23, 2002