That Earlier, Long-Lost Israel

It was a different age. It was a different Israel. It was a different Israeli Labor party and a different Israeli Left.

May 5 was the 28th anniversary of the Maalot Massacre in northern Israel. The massacre followed only shortly after the Israeli Labor Party produced the debacle of the early stages of the Yom Kippur War, where Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan chose to ignore all warnings that the Arabs were about to attack and refused to mobilize the reserves.

But it was still a different Israel Labor Party from that of Ehud Barak and Shimon Peres. It was a Labor party dedicated to building settlements all over the "occupied territories" to prevent any talk of Palestinian statehood. It was a Labor party that was, at most, willing to consider a compromise deal with Jordan for the West Bank within the framework of the "Allon Plan." It was a Labor party that refused to recognize the Palestinians as a "people" and which criminalized even holding a chat with Arafat and the PLO.

It was also a different Israeli Left. In the entire country there were only a handful of "army service resisters," and they were members of the Maoist extremist group Matzpen. A group of Matzpen members were later arrested for espionage for Syria. The only politician speaking about anti-Zionism was Uri Avnery, and he got elected to the parliament as a kind of national spoof — on the basis of his semi-pornographic Olam Hazeh magazine — a sort of Israeli Larry Flynt.

Even the Israeli campus Left refused to have anything to do with the PLO or Fatah. True, the week before the massacre, Hebrew University's leftist newspaper was calling for conducting talks with the Marxist Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PDFLP. But even this student Left knew nothing could be expected from the Islamist fascists of the PLO, insisting that, as good Marxists, we could all collaborate with Palestinian Marxists like Naif Hawatme of the PDFLP for some joint class struggle.

In 1974, more Israeli Arabs voted for the "Zionist" political parties than for the Stalinist Fascist party, then named RAKACH and today known as HADASH. And even the RAKACH vote was little more than symbolic protest — not open identification with PLO terrorism.

On May 5, 1974, terrorists from the PDFLP, the very group the campus Left had been promoting, infiltrated Galilee from their bases in Lebanon and took over a school in Maalot where students on an annual trip were staying. They held the students and some teachers hostage, and demanded that Israeli release three Palestinian terrorists in exchange for the complete release of all hostages.

It was a different country. Golda Meir ruled out any negotiations with terrorists — knowing the risks, but also knowing that any capitulation to the terrorists would mean an endless string of future atrocities. Though the country was still in trauma from the October War, she ordered the army to retake the school. Twenty-three children and five adults were massacred by the terrorists. Of these, some were in fact killed by Israeli bullets in the firefight. But no one — not even the Left — placed the blame for these deaths on any doorstep but that of the terrorists.

But, years later, the same Israeli Labor party was to decide that the only way to deal with terror is to reward it, to capitulate to it, and to put thousands of terrorists on the street and arm them with Israeli weapons — to pursue self-debasement and auto-annihilation. Labor leaders even invited several of the leaders of the PDFLP, the organization that massacred the Maalot children, to move to the West Bank and participate in "peace" negotiations with Israel. The country that had been created in the name of "Never Again" was now rewarding Palestinian Nazis.

And today, in 2002, the most "hawkish" prime minister in Israeli history — head of the Likud — sets Arafat free to show the world that Israel is afraid to to fight terrorism, because in their case it might upset Bush's plans. President Bush wants a docile Israel, one that won't interfere with his attempt to create a façade of Arab endorsement for his plans to attack Iraq. Quite a different age.