What about Greater Palestine?
By Berel Wein

(November 9) There is an anecdote told about Chaim Weizmann, 
Israel's first president. It is probably apocryphal, but it 
has merit nonetheless. 

Weizmann had returned to London from an intensive visit to 
the Holy Land, where he had inspected Zionist pioneering 
efforts. He was asked by his colleagues in the Zionist 
movement of the Diaspora to assess the Zionist achievement. 
Weizmann responded "All of the lies that I have told over 
the years have turned out to be statements of truth." 

Well, we live in a generation where all of Weizmann's truths 
are being portrayed as lies. In a bitter article that passes 
for a book review, one of the champion breast-beaters of 
Israeli journalism writes: "We who were born afterward [after 
the War of independence], weren't told the whole truth; they 
only taught us the good parts, of which there were many. 

"But, after all, there were also dark chapters which we heard 
nothing about. Instead we were fed lies - there's no other 
word for it... They lied when they told us that all the 
'infiltrators' were bloodthirsty terrorists, that all the 
Arab states wanted to destroy us and that we were the only 
ones who simply wanted peace all the time. They lied; oh, 
how they lied." 

Well, he is right that they lied to us. They told us that the 
Bible, which is our only basis and claim to any centimeter of 
this land, was written by a committee and really has no 
authority. It is nice literature and it was after all written 
in Hebrew so it has value but not validity. 

They lied to us when they denigrated everything that the Jewish 
people have accomplished in the Exile; when they ridiculed the 
"galut" Jew. 

They lied to us when they told us that Socialism and Communism 
were the wave of the future, that Stalin was the great 
"progressive father" of mankind, and that May Day was more 
important than Shavuot. 

They lied when they assured us that the State would solve the 
problem of antisemitism, that once we were "normal," secular 
and physically strong we would be accepted and secure. 

They lied; oh, how they lied! 

So the Lord, who always rewards humans measure for measure, 
has now brought the matter full circle. The children and heirs 
of the original founders have now done to them what they in 
their time did to their fathers: they have called them liars. 
So Israel is the cruel bully that the media and the Arab 
propagandists have always made us out to be. The invasion of 
Israel by the seven Arab armies in the War of Independence was 
justified. 

THE SIX DAY War was unnecessary. Yasser Arafat, the killer of 
the children of Ma'alot, is morally correct in allowing us to 
be shot at, stoned and blown up. For after all, we were not 
perfect! And if we were not perfect, then in the cockeyed logic 
of the self-haters, we should roll over and play dead. 

Why? Because we are not morally perfect in the eyes of those 
who so self-righteously proclaim that they never tell lies. 

The question that disturbs me is whether or not we are being 
lied to again. Is Arafat our partner for peace or for anything 
else? Do the Arabs, who never lie, really intend for us to take 
a million strangers into our country? Do they really see a 
Palestinian state that stretches from the Jordan to the 
Mediterranean? If Greater Israel is dead, what about Greater 
Palestine? 

To continue to foster false hopes and illusions about peace and 
a Middle East rose garden, illusions that have been disproven 
by the facts on the ground - is that not pernicious lying? 

And the worst fate of a liar is that he convinces himself of 
the truth of his lies. Thus, we have bent over backwards 
"understanding" the difficulties of Mr. Arafat and appreciating 
the "justified" rage of the teenage truants on the Arab street. 
We are believing their lies. Worse still, we are adopting their 
lies as our truths. 

And oh, how our enemies lie and lie and lie! 

Well, my friends, we should brace ourselves for a hard dose of 
truth. It no longer matters what happened in the Israeli wars 
of the past. It matters greatly what is happening in our current 
war. The hard truth is that wars are won by high morale and 
steadfastness, belief and vision. The further hard truth is 
that these commodities are currently in short supply amongst us. 
We have accepted so many lies over the past century of 
secularism and modernism that we cannot any longer assimilate 
the truths of Jewish history within ourselves. We are bereft of 
our greatest weapon and asset - our belief in our cause and our 
survival. Facing this hard truth may soon allow us to strengthen 
ourselves in time and win this war as we were able to do in the 
past. 

I certainly hope so.