In the previous article we saw how the Western media -- with faked photographs and who knows what else -- goes out of its way to attack the Israelis and apologize for her terrorist enemies. Amazingly, much of the Israeli media also attacks Israel with lies, printing articles that the Arab media can exceed only cosmetically, with volume and tone.

To convince you of this, I will make an extreme claim, and then I will proceed to defend it, with evidence. My claim is that Gideon Levy’s article, published in the middle of the war against Hezbollah (8 August 2006) in the important Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz with the title “The Real Estate War,” and containing Gideon Levy’s analysis of the war in Lebanon among related topics, does not contain one true claim, and moreover that every single one of its many errors is designed to attack the Israeli Jews.

Below I will examine Gideon Levy’s article in full, omitting nothing. It has to be seen to be believed. My demonstration of Gideon Levy’s outright lies and fabrications will raise the question: Why was anything like this published in a major Israeli newspaper? The next piece will attempt to answer this question.

Gideon Levy’s first sentence
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Gideon Levy’s “The Real Estate War” opens with the following sentence:

“This miserable war in Lebanon, which is just getting more and more complicated for no reason at all, was born in Israel’s greed for land.”[1]

We have here two contradictory claims, so let us focus on each in turn.

First, is it true that the war in Lebanon was getting “more and more complicated for no reason at all”? Not according to the Lebanese journalist Michael Béhé, who, writing from Beirut, explains that the Hezbollification of Lebanon has proceeded to a nightmarish degree, and that Hezbollah has been armed to the teeth by the Syrians and the Iranians with the sole purpose of destroying Israel. He states:

“Before the Israeli attack, Lebanon no longer existed, it was no more than a hologram. At Beirut innocent citizens like myself were forbidden access to certain areas of their own capital. But our police, our army and our judges were also excluded. That was the case, for example, of Hezbollah’s and the Syrians’ command zone in the Haret Hreik quarter... A square measuring a kilometer wide, a capital within the capital, permanently guarded by a Horla army,[2] possessing its own institutions, its schools, its crèches, its tribunals, its radio, its television and, above all… its government. A ‘government’ that, alone decided, in the place of the figureheads of the Lebanese government -- in which Hezbollah also had its ministers! -- to attack a neighboring state, with which we had no substantial or grounded quarrel, and to plunge us into a bloody conflict. And if attacking a sovereign nation on its territory, assassinating eight of its soldiers, kidnapping two others and, simultaneously, launching missiles on nine of its towns does not constitute a casus belli [i.e. a just cause for war, in this case for Israel to retaliate against Lebanon], the latter juridical principle will seriously need revising.”[3] (my emphasis)

According to Lebanese journalist Michael Béhé, then, the war in Lebanon was getting more and more complicated for extremely good reasons.

Here again is Gideon Levy’s first sentence:

“This miserable war in Lebanon, which is just getting more and more complicated for no reason at all, was born in Israel’s greed for land.”

Immediately after stating that the war in Lebanon is supposedly getting more complicated “for no reason at all,” Levy contradicts himself -- still in the first sentence -- and supplies a reason: “Israel’s greed for land.” Let’s ignore the contradiction and ask simply: Is there any substance to the accusation that Israel has shown any “greed for land”?

In the first half of the 20th century, in the context of widespread persecutions and mass murder of Jews (‘pogroms’[4]) that had been taking place all over what is now Eastern Europe, the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, voted in favor of creating a Jewish homeland in British Mandate ‘Palestine’ so the Jews might live in safety. The Jews had a right to immigrate and settle in the territory so defined, which initially included all of present-day Israel, plus what is now the Kingdom of Jordan. However, most in the British ruling elite did not want to fulfill their treaty obligations to the Jews, and so they allied with the most racist of the local Arab leaders, and collaborated with them in the production of massive anti-Jewish terrorist riots, there to provide themselves with an argument that, due to Arab opposition, creating the Jewish homeland was just too difficult, so the project should be abandoned.

The British did not succeed in aborting the project entirely, but they did use the anti-Jewish Arab violence which they themselves instigated as the excuse to reduce severely the territory in which Jews could settle. First, by changing the definition of ‘Palestine’ when they lopped off ‘Transjordan,’ which later became the Kingdom of Jordan, putting off limits to the Jews a full 75% of the territory originally designated by the League of Nations. The British later reduced the area open to the Jews to just 4% of the original Mandate territory. This was the mid-1930s, when Nazi persecution was reaching a high pitch. Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion accepted this outcome. All of this is documented in the following HIR piece:

So, was the Zionist acceptance of a severe reduction of the Jewish homeland what Gideon Levy means by “Israel’s greed for land”? No, probably not.

After World War II, in which the European Jewish population was exterminated by the German Nazis and their numerous allies, the United Nations voted in 1947 to partition what remained of the territory where Jews could settle into two states, one Jewish, one Arab. This proposed Jewish state was absurdly small, and moreover divided into three, non-contiguous pieces.[5] The Arabs refused, explaining that, rather than an Arab state in what had been British Mandate ‘Palestine,’ they much preferred to exterminate the Jews and finish what the German Nazis had not, launching a combined Arab war meant to secure this result. Azzam Pasha, Secretary General of the Arab League, announced: “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades.”[6] The Jews by contrast accepted the absurdly small Jewish state that the UN had condescended to allot them, and fought for it with their lives.

Could this further Zionist acquiescence in yet another reduction of the Jewish homeland be what Gideon Levy means by “Israel’s greed for land”? Can’t be.

Defending themselves successfully against the combined Arab genocidal attack of 1947-48, the Israelis miraculously won and even made some modest territorial gains. But this was not “greed for land.” The Israelis had fought for their sheer survival, and the new land was needed as a buffer against the next genocidal attack, which the Arabs were promising would come, as indeed it did come, several times. “In the period 1949-53 Arab attacks killed hundreds of Israelis, four-fifths of whom were civilians.”[7] In October 1955, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser beefed up his military considerably with help from the Soviet Union, and then announced a blockade of the Strait of Tiran, Israel’s only port south of Elat. Given Egypt’s genocidal intentions, amply demonstrated by the constant barrage of terrorist attacks launched by Egypt from the Gaza Strip,[7a] and given that the Soviet Union’s arming of Egypt would soon erase Israel’s military edge, Israel seized the Sinai peninsula as a buffer against Egypt. An infuriated US president Dwight D. Eisenhower forced the Israelis to withdraw.[8]

Could this withdrawal from Egypt be what Gideon Levy had in mind? Is this “Israel’s greed for land”? That is absurd: a withdrawal shows the opposite of “greed for land.”

For years prior to the 1967 war, there were terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians from the Jordanian and Syrian borders, while Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser continued to promise an impending Arab genocide of the Jews.[9] Then, in 1967 there was a general Arab mobilization on all of Israel’s borders. When Israel’s emergency diplomacy obtained nothing, the Israelis attacked in order to prevent the impending destruction of the country. Israel won and acquired some territory, notably the Golan Heights from Syria; the Gaza Strip from its illegal occupier, Egypt; the Sinai, also from Egypt; and the West Bank from its illegal occupier, Jordan.

Amazingly, immediately after this,

“[Israeli prime minister Levi] Eshkol [made a] secret offer to trade much of the newly won territory for peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, and Syria [but] was rejected by Nasser, who, supported by an emergency resupply of Soviet arms, led the Arabs at the Khartoum Arab Summit in The Sudan in August 1967 in a refusal to negotiate directly with Israel.”[10]

But this -- Israel’s immediate offer to return the conquered territories to her genocidal enemies (in exchange, mind you, for nothing more than a promise of peace) -- simply cannot be what Gideon Levy means by “Israel’s greed for land.”

In 1969 Egypt launched the War of Attrition against Israel, and in 1973 Egypt and Syria attacked again in what became the Yom Kippur War. And yet despite all this, under pressure from the United States, Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt.[11] “Israel’s greed for land”? Well no.

“To date, approximately 93 percent of the territories won in the defensive war have been given by Israel to its Arab neighbors as a result of negotiations.”[12]

Since 1994, Israel has been participating in the so-called Oslo ‘peace’ process, the purpose of which has been to give the PLO more and more power in the West Bank and Gaza, in the direction of eventually giving this land away for a PLO state. In exchange for what? For peace, supposedly, but the PLO has not even tried to produce such peace. The government of Israel has been so hell-bent in giving away this land for nothing at all that in fact it cleansed the Jews who lived in Gaza and simply turned it over to the PLO/Hamas: the so-called Unilateral Disengagement.

And in the year 2000 Israel unilaterally withdrew from Lebanon, completely, asking in return simply that there be no more terrorism against Israeli civilians (something Israel didn’t get).

Israel is the only country in history to return territory willingly to enemies who lost it after launching a war of aggression, and it has done this several times, despite the fact that its enemies are genocidal. If there is a country in the world that has demonstrated -- beyond all reasonable doubt -- that it has no greed for land, it is Israel. But since Israel has no greed for land, it follows that “Israel’s greed for land” cannot be the cause of anything, and therefore it cannot be the cause of the war in Lebanon.

What Gideon Levy has written for opening sentence is a contradiction, yes. But if one ignores the contradiction what survives is a colossal absurdity.

Onward with the analysis, up to and including Gideon Levy’s fifth paragraph
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I now quote the rest of Gideon Levy’s first paragraph:

“Not that Israel is fighting this time to conquer more land, not at all, but ending the occupation could have prevented this unnecessary war. If Israel had returned the Golan Heights and signed a peace treaty with Syria in a timely fashion, presumably this war would not have broken out.”

After telling us that the reason for the war in Lebanon is “Israel’s greed for land,” Levy states in the second sentence that the war in Lebanon, after all, has nothing to do with “Israel’s greed for land.” Amazing. But notice: “Not that Israel is fighting this time [my emphasis] to conquer more land...” In other words, in previous wars, according to Levy, Israel has fought to conquer more land. As I have just reviewed, however, every single one of Israel’s wars has been a defensive war fought against enemies who were trying to exterminate the Israeli Jews.

Levy’s second paragraph likewise has nothing to do with documented history:

“Peace with Syria would have guaranteed peace with Lebanon and peace with both would have prevented Hezbollah from fortifying on Israel’s northern border. Peace with Syria would have also isolated Iran, Israel’s true, dangerous enemy, and cut off Hezbollah from one of the two sources of its weapons and funding. It’s so simple, and so removed from conventional Israeli thinking, which is subject to brainwashing.”

Levy claims that if Israel had returned the Golan Heights to Syria peace would have followed. But Hezbollah was created by Syria and Iran in order to exterminate the Israeli Jews.[13] Since Hezbollah has been attacking Israel for years, and since it recently escalated these attacks, this war, too, is a defensive war fought against a genocidal enemy: Syria (and Iran). In such circumstances, does it make sense to expect that returning the Golan Heights to Syria will bring peace? What planet is Levy from? The Golan Heights cannot be returned unless Israel wishes to commit suicide, and this is not my opinion but that of a Pentagon study done after the Six Day War (in which Syria lost the Golan Heights to Israel).[14] Levy considers his intellectual opponents to be “brainwashed,” so this must be a synonym for the study of history.

Next Levy writes:

“For years, Israel has waged war against the Palestinians with the main motive of insistence on keeping the occupied territories. If not for the settlement enterprise, Israel would have long since retreated from the occupied territories and the struggle’s engine would have been significant[ly] neutralized. Not that a non-occupying Israel would have turned into the darling of the Arab world, but the destructive fire aimed at Israel would have significantly lessened, and those who continued to fight Israel would have found themselves isolated.”

But the historical facts are as follows.

Before the PLO was brought into the Jewish state Israel was not “waging war against the Palestinians.” On the contrary, these were the best of times for the so-called ‘Palestinians,’ who prospered as they never had before under the benign Israeli administration (skeptics should consult the footnote).[15] What Gideon Levy characterizes as a “war” has in fact been a process of continuous capitulation to PLO terrorism, with veritable hordes of antisemitic terrorists released from Israeli jails (other criminals do not enjoy such Oslo largesse -- in the Jewish state, you have to be a non-Jewish murderer of Jews in order to get a free pass out of jail). In addition, the Israeli government brought the PLO into the Jewish state in order to advance the Oslo ‘peace’ process that would gradually relinquish the West Bank and Gaza in exchange -- supposedly -- for no more terrorism. But Levy claims to see an Israeli “insistence on keeping the occupied territories.”

And notice that Levy is writing shortly after Israel handed Gaza to the terrorists unilaterally, which is to say in exchange for...nothing. Or else, Israel handed Gaza in exchange for more terrorism, because that is precisely what it got.

In yet another contradiction, Levy admits above that turning over these territories will not, in fact, buy Arab goodwill. And yet he claims that evacuating these territories “would have significantly lessened” the attacks on Israel. How does that follow? And even if it did follow, what would have to be the underlying principle in Levy’s moral reasoning? Applied to the personal level, it would mean that Levy would give the keys to his home to a criminal who had publicly promised to murder Levy's entire family, on the theory that by capitulating to the criminal this latter would spare Levy's children, though he would still kill Levy’s wife. Levy cannot be sure of this outcome, but he thinks the risk is worth taking (and the wife expendable, in any case).

Another problem is that Levy writes in the conditional: “[if we had produced a] non-occupying Israel...the destructive fire aimed at Israel would have significantly lessened.” This is like watching a parent wonder what kind of adolescents his already thirty-something children will make. We have hard historical data, already, on what a “non-occupying Israel” produces: the terrorism from Gaza increased after the so-called Disengagement, and this terrorism in fact helped produce the current war in Lebanon.[16]

Levy continues:

“The war against the Palestinians is therefore unequivocally a territorial war, a war for the settlements. In other words, in the West Bank and Gaza, people were killed and are getting killed because of our greed for land. From Golda Meir to Ehud Olmert, the lie has held that the war with the Palestinians is an existential one for survival imposed on Israel when it is actually a war for real estate, one dunam after another, that does not belong to us.”

‘We are guilty,’ says Levy, pounding his chest so hard that one wonders he doesn’t make an exit wound through his back. But Levy has given us nothing to support his allegation that “the war against the Palestinians” -- which is not a war against the ‘Palestinians’ -- is “a war for the settlements,” so Levy’s use of the word ‘therefore’ breaks the rules of logic. Because the rules of logic require that one precede the term ‘therefore’ with premises that actually support one’s conclusion.

Let me now provide some examples in the proper use of ‘therefore.’

Both the PLO and Hamas are organizations with ties to the German Nazis. Hamas was created by the Muslim Brotherhood, which allied enthusiastically with the Nazis during WWII.[17] And the controlling core of the PLO, Al Fatah, was created by Hajj Amin al Husseini, who first gained notoriety as the chief organizer of massive anti-Jewish terrorist riots in British Mandate ‘Palestine,’ and then went on to become co-architect, with Adolf Eichmann, of the German Nazi extermination of the European Jews.[18] It is no surprise, therefore, that both the PLO and Hamas should explain with great clarity in their constitutions that their goal is the extermination of the Israeli Jews.[19] It follows, therefore, that neither the PLO nor Hamas cares one little bit about land: their goal is killing Jews. It is hardly a lie, therefore, that the Israelis are fighting for their survival. To give the terrorists land, therefore, is to improve their strategic position with regard to their genocidal goal. The settler movement that Gideon Levy scorns is, therefore, defending Gideon Levy from extermination.

What is most amazing in the above is that Levy should characterize Ehud Olmert -- who was rushing to abandon the West Bank to the terrorists before Hezbollah forced him to retaliate lest he face a revolt in the Israeli officer class -- as somehow obsessed with real estate for Israel. Consider that, in the middle of the missile exchanges, Ehud Olmert committed what was reported as a 'gaffe' when he “suggested to an interviewer that the war in Lebanon could provide an impetus for his planned withdrawals from the West Bank.”[20] In other words, Ehud Olmert was undeterred by Hezbollah’s dramatic exposure of Israel’s vulnerability, and he was still hoping that he could get away with the cleasing of the West Bank Jews. The terrorist enemies of Israel were delighted to hear this, and in their view the significance of Olmert’s statement was that “[We are in] the beginning of a new era in the region [that] will break the psychological wall in the idea that Israel is invincible.” The statement is attributed to “Abu Maamun, a senior leader in Jenin of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorist group... the declared ‘military wing’ of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party.”[21] Since Ehud Olmert, under terrorist attack, endorsed the policies preferred by Israel’s terrorist enemies, the ruling elite controlling the Jewish state may be described as allied with Israel’s terrorist enemies even when politically impractical. It follows, therefore, that the Israeli ruling elite is not waging a “war for the settlements” but against them. Anybody accusing the Israeli government of waging a “war for the settlements” must be, therefore, either an imbecile or a liar.

And I should point out that Levy’s chest-pounding nostra culpa that the land “does not belong to us” is again historically incorrect. The West Bank and Gaza were going to be part of the Arab state that the United Nations voted to create alongside a Jewish state in 1947. The Arabs refused this state, preferring to exterminate the Israeli Jews instead.[22] The genocidal attempt failed but Jordan managed to establish itself as an illegal occupier of the West Bank, and Egypt as an illegal occupier of the Gaza Strip. Egypt and Jordan then lost these territories after they used them as launching pads for yet another genocidal attempt on the Israeli Jews in the Six Day War of 1967.

Given,

1) that the Arabs (including, importantly, the so-called ‘Palestinian’ Arabs) first refused a state in these territories, preferring to murder Jews;

2) that neither Jordan nor Egypt were the least bit concerned about creating a ‘Palestinian’ state when they controlled these territories; and

3) that Israel gained these illegally occupied territories defending herself from a genocidal attack launched from them,

we may state, therefore, that if anybody has a right to this land, it is Israel.

If Gideon Levy has trouble with this argument we can ask him to imagine a personal version of it. He could imagine, for example, that he was accosted in the street by a man with a knife, intending to slit his throat, but Levy managed to grasp at the man’s wrist and, after a struggle, to wrest it from him, gaining the upper hand. Imagine further that Levy does not make an attempt to injure the man, who, from a distance, barks at Levy, “Okay, now give me my knife back.” Does this man have a right to get his weapon back? Certainly not. And Levy would be a suicidal imbecile to return it. In parallel fashion, when a piece of land is the platform to launch a genocidal attack, that piece of land is a weapon, just like the knife, and if the genocidal attacker loses it trying to exterminate your people, then he has no right to get it back. Period.

(This is all without mentioning that, as HIR has shown, the supposed 'Palestinians' -- the one's who supposedly rightfully own the West Bank and Gaza, according to Levy -- do not even exist: almost all of the people designated by this term immigrated to the area after the Zionist Jews came to British Mandate 'Palestine' and created an economic boom there.[22a])

What about the Golan Heights? In the next paragraph, Gideon Levy writes:

“The situation is different with Syria. For 33 years, the Syrians gave up the military effort to reinstate their occupied lands. Israel can pass a dozen Golan Heights laws to annex it, but occupied territory remains occupied territory. During those three decades, the prevailing view in Israel was that there was no need for peace with Syria: The Syrians sat quietly anyway, so why give them back the Golan?”

The above is false. Hezbollah has been attacking Israel with such regularity that providing here a full list since 2000, when Israel completely evacuated Lebanon (depriving Hezbollah of its previous excuse to attack innocent Jews), would take up too much space, so I have documented in the footnote a list of Hezbollah attacks against Israel just for the year 2005 (probably incomplete).[23] Given that HIR has already shown that Hezbollah belongs to Syria (and Iran), it follows that Syria has been attacking Israel.[24]

And why has Syria been attacking Israel?

Israel evacuated Lebanon in 2000; since then, Hezbollah has been claiming to attack Israel because it wants a minuscule territory called Shebaa Farms ‘returned’ to Lebanon. But didn’t Israel evacuate Lebanon in 2000? Yes. It turns out that Shebaa Farms was never part of Lebanon -- it was part of Syria, in the Golan Heights, and Syria lost it with the rest of the Golan in the Six Day War of 1967.[25] The Pentagon, by the way, also considers the Golan indispensable to the survival of Israel.[26] What all this means is that the Lebanese Hezbollah, Syria’s proxy, has been advancing a phony Lebanese claim to Shebaa Farms in order to help Syria regain a foothold in the Golan through Lebanon, which Syria controls. It is false, therefore, that, “for 33 years, the Syrians gave up the military effort to reinstate their occupied lands,” or that “the Syrians sat quietly away.” And since Syria lost the Golan after using the Golan to launch an attempted extermination of the Israeli Jews, the Golan no longer belongs to Syria, and, therefore, is not “occupied territory.”

I hope the proper use of ‘therefore’ is now clear.

The rest of Gideon Levy’s article
________________________________

Next Levy writes:

“This is the same dangerously foolish thinking that characterized the first 20 years of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinians sat quietly, surrendered under the Israeli occupation boot, and it did not occur to anyone to return their territory. Instead, Israel established the settlements. Only when the Palestinians woke up and realized they were going to lose their lands forever did they begin a violent campaign; and only after blood was spilled, did Israel wake up from its dreams and realize that it could not hold onto all of the territories forever. Thus, with regrettable delay and years of bloodshed, the recognition of the PLO, the Oslo accords, the disengagement and the convergence were born -- all partial and fake solutions meant to postpone the end of the occupation.”

Contrary to what Levy writes, the first 20 years of Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza were the best of times for the Arabs who lived there, as pointed out above.[15] Ever since the PLO was invited in, things have been so bad for the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza that they’ve taken to nicknaming the PLO ‘police’ the “death squad,”[27] not coincidentally because it goes around robbing, extorting, and murdering Arab civilians (often in close coordination with Hamas).[28]

The Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza did not “begin a violent campaign” because “they were going to lose their lands forever.” As HIR has shown, the First Intifada was a terrorist war -- masquerading as supposed non-violence! -- launched by the PLO so that the media and the United States government could lead the world in representing the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza as victims, and thus impose on the Israelis -- with US threats -- the diplomatic circus known as the Oslo ‘peace’ process, the purpose of which was to bring the PLO into the Jewish state so that it could prepare the Arab population for genocide.[29] But this is not advancing fast enough for Levy, who labels the “disengagement” (the cleansing of the Gaza Jews so that PLO/Hamas can have total control over Gaza), and the “convergence” (which proposes to do the same thing to the West Bank), “partial...solutions meant to postpone the end of the occupation”!

(War is peace, freedom is slavery, and total, unilateral withdrawals are ways of “postpon[ing]...the end of the occupation.” George Orwell was not kidding around: a controlled media will speak like this, because the whole
point is to make political reasoning impossible.)

What follows from what Gideon Levy writes is that he feels no compassion for the Arabs whom the gangsters of PLO/Hamas daily oppress with absurdly brutal violence, mauling them also with a horrific ideology. As with non-Jewish antisemites, including especially the Arab ruling elite, it would appear that Levy is quite happy to sacrifice innocent Arab life if it can be used to attack the Jews.

Levy continues:

“We did not need all of that with the Syrians -- after all, they sat quietly all of these years. Now comes the war in Lebanon and proves that this was a mistake. Although the Syrians sat on the sidelines, the danger from that direction was not removed and the delusion that the Golan would forever remain in Israeli hands, without our being asked to pay for its occupation, is now slapping us in the face.

But the current war could yet turn out to be only an appetizer for the coming wars, which will be far more dangerous. The saying that time is on our side is another delusion. The Arab and Muslim world has armed, in all of this time, and the danger of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles is already hovering over our heads. The only response to that is maximum neutralization of the flashpoints, before the bomb arrives. But Israel has chosen to close its eyes and build its future on a horrifyingly temporary quiet, or on more and more war operations.”

Again the false claim that the Syrians “sat quietly all of these years.”

Now, suppose that Gideon Levy believes that, when the nearby Muslims get their nuclear bombs, they will keep them in their missile silos as a deterrent. In this case he would not write that “The Arab and Muslim world has armed…and the danger of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles is already hovering over our heads.”  So Gideon Levy thinks that the Muslims want nuclear bombs in order to drop them on Israel, and therefore that they mean to exterminate the Israeli Jews -- because a nuclear attack on tiny Israel could not have a different purpose. “The only response to this danger,” Levy argues, “is maximum neutralization of the flashpoints, before the bomb arrives.” In the context of Levy’s other arguments, this means that the Israelis must give away all the strategic land from which genocidal attacks have been launched in the past, and as fast as possible, so that it is all ready by the time the Muslims acquire nuclear capability. No comment.

Levy continues:

“Just when territory is losing its military importance because of the development of new fighting technology, Israel is using security excuses to stay in the territories. Former-prime minister Ehud Barak criminally missed the opportunity to sign a peace treaty with Syria after he got ‘cold feet,’ as witnesses said, and retreated at the last minute. That’s how it works with us. When the other side is quiet, why return territories? And when they do go to war, ‘there’s nobody to talk to,’ and certainly not while we are ‘under fire.’

While we are ready to jump on any war bandwagon, as in this time, we endlessly procrastinate when it comes to peace negotiations. Now, too, when Syria, pushed around by the U.S., desperately wants to return to the ‘family of nations,’ is an excellent time to try to make peace with it -- but there are those who say now is not the time. What will the Americans say? They, after all, are against any deals with Bashar Assad of ‘the axis of evil.’”

It is false that Ehud Barak got “cold feet.” What is true is that Barak offered to give the Syrians everything they wanted, even though they were demanding not just the Golan, but also some important chunks of territory in the Galilee that had always been Israeli. And yet despite all this it was Syria’s Bashar Assad who refused Barak, because it is easier to stay in power in Syria if you are breathing fire against the Israelis: “Assad indicated that he was unprepared for a full peace with Israel no matter how forthcoming Barak was on ceding territory.”[30]

One could be forgiven for guessing that Gideon Levy is really a Syrian. He defends all sorts of radical falsehoods in the service of defending the view that now is an excellent time to make ‘peace’ with Syria -- even as Syria rains Hezbollah rockets on Israeli civilians. He also fumes that “Syria...[is] pushed around by the U.S,” a complaint that would make more sense coming from a Syrian than an Israeli. But whoever Gideon Levy really is, what he says is a falsehood: the US does not push the Syrians around. As the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin explained,

“...successive American administrations have been reluctant to openly push for an end to Syrian protection of Hezbollah. In fact, the United States has been unwilling even to publicly request that the Syrians end this protection. ...[there is a] long-standing American policy of avoiding public statements which mention or suggest that Syria controls Lebanese policy decisions.”[31]

And the Washington Post explained the US’s initial reaction to Israel’s act of self-defense as follows:

“President Bush and his top diplomats scrambled Thursday night to quell spiraling violence in the Middle East and protect the new democratic government in Lebanon as Israeli forces escalated their strikes.

Bush initially told reporters that ‘Israel has a right to defend herself,’ qualifying the statement only with a call to avoid toppling the Lebanese government, which he deems a model for the region.”[32]

In other words, the Lebanese state that the US government rushed to protect (and has now protected with its ‘cease-fire’), this ‘state’ which Lebanese journalist Michael Béhé explains is no longer a state at all, but merely a platform for Syria and Iran’s effort to exterminate the Israeli Jews, is precisely the kind of government that the US would like to see replicated all over the region (this is consistent with the entire history of US foreign policy towards Israel).[33]

War is peace, freedom is slavery, the enemy is your ally.

Finally, Gideon Levy ‘concludes’:

“So, there it is, another excuse to miss a golden opportunity, another mendacious excuse. As in the case of the peace with Egypt, the move that has guaranteed Israel’s security for years far more than any war, and which was put together behind the America’s back [sic], America would not be able to oppose a peace agreement with Syria. Now, after we’ve hit Hezbollah and ruined Lebanon, the prime minister of Israel should declare: the Golan for peace. That could contribute a lot more to our security than a thousand useless daring operations in Baalbek, but it would take a lot more courage than going off to fight another unnecessary and useless war.”

As if to confirm your suspicions that Gideon Levy is really the pen name of a Lebanese Shiite Islamist in the pay of the Syrian government, he comes out and he says it: “The Golan for peace.”

But, anyway, was the ‘peace’ agreement with Egypt “put together behind America’s back,” as Levy claims? For a different view, I shall quote the Encyclopedia Britannica, which cannot be accused of being outside the mainstream. Britannica says that after Egypt’s defeat in the Yom Kippur war of 1973,

“Egypt’s Sadat persuaded U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger [to]... pressure Israel to end the war short of a complete Egyptian military defeat and then, through intensive travel between the various capitals -- what soon was being called shuttle diplomacy -- achieved disengagement agreements on both the Egyptian and Syrian fronts during 1974.”

Later,

“The faltering Egyptian-Israeli negotiations were finally rescued when Carter convened a summit at the presidential retreat of Camp David, Maryland, in September 1978. In this secluded site -- an “elegant jail,” Begin called it -- Carter shuttled between the two leaders over a 12-day period, and out of these negotiations emerged the Camp David Accords. …The Camp David Accords earned Sadat and Begin each a share of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Peace, but the subsequent peace process proved far more difficult than the parties expected. It took seven more months for Egypt and Israel to reach a final agreement, which was signed on March 26, 1979, and called for a three-year phased Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai...”[34]

In addition to the strong pressure applied by the US, and its micro-managing of the whole process, the US became a major arms supplier to Egypt in order to buy its cooperation with US wishes. But Gideon Levy would have you believe that the Egyptian-Israeli peace agreement was put together “behind America’s back”!

War is peace, freedom is slavery, the enemy is your ally, and the fastidious executive producer was entirely uninvolved with the production.

Gideon Levy accuses that his opponents are “mendacious.” For those not fluent in English, here is Merriam Webster Online’s definition of that word: “given to or characterized by deception or falsehood.” Isn’t Levy’s accusation a bit cheeky? After all, his own article is a series of direct contradictions to standard, mainstream, documented history. And I point out that every single historical, logical, and moral error in Levy’s piece goes in the same direction: it defends the terrorist enemies of the Jewish people. Levy’s article reads, quite frankly, as if it had been written in Syria by the Hezbollah propaganda office. And perhaps it was.

One question that comes to mind, of course, is:

Who is this Gideon Levy?
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In October 2000, the Independent wrote the following:

“Palestinian antagonism is such that when two uniformed Israeli reservists stray into Ramallah -- not two undercover commandos, as the Palestinian media claims -- they get torn limb from limb...”[35]

It is a good idea to pause until this has been properly digested. What does it mean that two Israelis were “torn limb from limb” by a ‘Palestinian’ mob? It means this: their arms and their legs were literally ripped from their bodies by lunatics who thirst to bathe themselves in Jewish blood.

It is hard to decide what is more amazing, whether the deranged savagery of the PLO-indoctrinated Arabs in the West Bank, or the fact that the ‘authorities’ in the West Bank themselves handed these two Israelis to the mob for lynching.

“[The two reservists] were arrested by Palestinian police, and then were handed over to a mob that slaughtered and mutilated them.”[36]

Kenneth Levin writes in The Oslo Syndrome that, following this incident, Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea applied to fellow Israeli journalists what he called the “lynch test.”

“Barnea cited as failing the ‘lynch test’ those Israeli journalists who, even in the face of this savage episode, remained uncritical, knee-jerk apologists for the Palestinians and indicters of Israel.

Barnea noted in particular Haaretz writers Gideon Levy, Amira Haas, and Akiva Eldar... Levy, a few days before the lynchings, insisted that the Palestinians were right to resort to violence because only in the face of violence had Israel ever made concessions to the Arabs... Three days after the lynchings, Levy was writing in the same vein. The real obstacle to peace, he declared, was that Israel was not a peace partner. He mentioned the lynchings only to dismiss them as paling in significance beside the difficulties of the Palestinians.”[37]

So this is Gideon Levy: a man who finds it impossible to condemn -- and even applauds -- the crazy Arab terrorists even as they tear the arms and legs of two innocent Jews right out of their sockets.

Another important fact about Gideon Levy is the following:

“Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist for Ha'aretz and former spokesman for Shimon Peres.”[38]

Gideon Levy is a former spokesman for the powerful Israeli politician who told the Israelis that the Fatah/PLO would bring peace to Israel if only it was allowed into the Jewish state. Shimon Peres neglected to inform the Israelis that Fatah/PLO was created by an architect of the German Nazi Final Solution, or to remind them that Fatah/PLO calls for the extermination of the Israeli Jews in its constitution. Naturally, someone as dishonest as Shimon Peres, and as hell bent on destroying the Jewish state, will want someone like Gideon Levy for spokesman.

Obvious questions that remain are the following: Why is someone like Gideon Levy getting published in a major Israeli newspaper?; Why is somone like Shimon Peres able to become prime minister of the Jewish state?; and, Are these people idiots or traitors?

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Footnotes and Further Reading
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