Diplomacy's Unfaithful Dance

The battles are winding down, many have died and as the smoke begins to clear our leaders emerge triumphantly and victoriously waving a piece of paper. Another piece of paper. For this paper hundreds died, thousands wounded and billions were spent and lost.

What is this paper? It's yet another agreement. As if Israel were the weaker party, we celebrate simply managing to get the enemy to sign another agreement. What is that agreement worth? As much as the other agreements were. As much as any agreement reached through external pressure with a third party which believes it won the war and has a sworn religious obligation to exterminate us from the face of the earth can be worth. Nothing.

Once upon a time Israel's leaders handed us victories. Today they hand us pieces of paper like men trying to dodge their creditors by writing out IOU's. This particular IOU reads, "To the Nation of Israel and the Free People of the World. Owed one victory over Islamic Terrorism. To perhaps be delivered by a UN multinational force. Or not. Someday."

We have been literally papered over with agreements these last few decades. We signed one with Egypt after its leaders decided they had no hope of defeating us on the battlefield and our spirits rose. Still we held off for a few years before going off on a paper signing spree. We signed many papers with the Palestinian terrorists we turned over major portions of our country to. Of course the terrorists didn't keep their end of the bargain, but then our leaders were too busy basking in the glow of their foreign admirers praising them for just signing the paper.

Perhaps even along with the paper those admirers might even throw in a Nobel Prize or two, a trinket to flatter and amuse our leaders, ever contemptuous of their own citizens and their ears ever cocked for an accented word of foreign praise. But a Nobel Prize isn't given for just signing papers, major sacrifices are required, major betrayals. Sweden is the altar where the priests of Baal no longer sacrifice cows and pigs but profer human sacrifices. Thousands of murdered men, women and children; the blood of the citizens of Israel poured on the altar of diplomacy and international recognition in exchange for a trophy for their politicians.

We've signed papers before with Hezbollah. We did it in 1996. The papers didn't prove to be worth very much. Since then our strategy has been to get other parties to co-sign the papers for the terrorists. We tried to get America and the UN to do it but both of these worthy parties had the unfortunate tendency of only noticing defaults by our side, never by the side of the terrorists. But then the terrorists are themselves co-signed with the vast wealthy parties of Riyadh, Tehran and Islamabad and everyone knows that banks are all too willing to forgive defaults by such moneyed interests. We by contrast have only the pennies we scraped together, not given to us in black gushings from the ground but earned in bitter toil while all around us men with blades between their teeth crept towards us through the silent night.

Every now and then we look out into the darkness and think we see something but quickly we look away again. It is better not to look too long into the faces of our enemies for that in time brings on despair. We have seen them too long and done nothing and the time may be approaching when there is nothing at all that can be done and no more notes to be signed except the one turning over our country to the enemy, perhaps by way of a third party. That final disengagement not just from the 1967 territories but the 1948 ones as well. The ultimate disengagement already being trumpeted in columns in the Western press calling the existence of Israel a mistake. And what does one do with mistakes? One remedies them.

For near two thousand years the bulk of the Western world insisted that the existence of the Jews was a mistake and they did their best to remedy that with fire and sword, with axe and spear, with trenches dug in Polish earth and gas chambers and lime kilns. Today the intellectual elites continue to insist Israel is a mistake and though the good citizens of Europe no longer take sword in hand and march with torches to burn Jews in synagogues, they have discovered noble savages willing to do the work for them. Or at least they become noble savages when viewed through a distant enough lens.

True they seem less noble when they are burning cars in Paris, raping women in Oslo and plotting to bomb airplanes in Hamburg and London; but this the Europeans quickly forgive. After all such entertainments bring a little excitement into the staid bag of socialist nations ruled by memo from the environs of Brussels. And they are certain that as soon as Israel lies placidly on its deathbed with its throat cut, these noble savages will quickly abandon all their grievances and cast off their burkas and fez's to instantly become proper Europeans. In a pig's eye, as their Imams would say.

And where is Israel in all this? Is it with King David striding home swinging a giant's head under one arm and a slingshot of Uzis in the other. Hardly. we have a new king now. Meet King Ahab. Henpecked by his foreign wife Jezebel he sits fretfully by the window while the priests of Baal rampage across Judah. He has taken the wife of the enemy to his bosom and he knows something is wrong but his mind is too little to know what. He chases away the prophets who would tell him and busies himself pettily coveting the vineyards of his neighbors, accumulating power and wealth, while his own Lady Macbeth stains her hands gathering his trophies in. And if the vineyards are in Gaza and the Shomron. If she keeps the vineyards rather than passing them over to him, he is still certain he will receive his share of their wine to drink and become intoxicated and forget that of a once mighty and noble power, what remains are the idle and corrupt rich and a common people waiting for the next blow to fall.

The King suspects his wife is unfaithful to him. He has caught her at it numerous times. But each time he is assured that it will never happen again. It is his fault she is unfaithful, the servants of the foreign kings he has allowed to rule in his stead tell him. The multitude of her unfaithfulness only proves all the more how wicked he is to her. He does not quite understand this formula but slowly, grudgingly he accepts it. Each time he sighs and signs new agreements with her, giving her yet more and more of the best of his land in exchange for the same promises from her. He would escape this sham of a marriage but his own weakness entraps him. He does not dare defy the rule of the foreign kings whose aid he invited because of his weakness and whose counsel he must now keep. They now rule in Judah, not him.

Thus the king and a nation dance diplomacy's unfaithful dance, sacrificing all for pieces of paper that are violated on the very day they are signed and still the king pretends he sees nothing for his dignity is at stake and if he must be betrayed and his nation along with him, then he would rather be betrayed then be thought a fool. In for a penny, in for a pound. He signs more papers and more as if the papers were victories rather than mimeographed defeats. With each surrender his face takes on a determined look, driven to go on with the charade. Hand me more paper, he cries, I'll sign over the West Bank, the Golan Heights, Jerusalem.

In the night the enemies creeping with knives in their teeth laugh as the king clasping his invisible partner dances on.