A Petition against the Vichyite Petition handed to the Euro Parliament

Professor Shmuel Trigano has asked people to sign the petition below which was drawn up to counter the Vichyite petition submitted to the European Parliament at Strasbourg by a group of foolish, supposedly peace-loving intellectuals, much like those intellectuals in France and Britain before World War 2 who wanted to make peace with Hitler and thought that giving him various territories that he was demanding could lead him to make peace. This madness supported the disastrous Munich Pact of 1938 and culminated in the beginning of the Second World War. In other words, the peacemongers helped bring the world to war. The peace process of the 1930s, called "appeasement" at that time, led to war.

The first link is to the Vichyite, peacemonger petition. The link towards the bottom is to the petition supported by Shmuel Trigano, Professor Richard Landes, Professor Pierre-Andre Taguieff, Professor Raphael Drai, Dr Judith Gachnochi, Dr Georges Gachnochi and by several other professors and intellectuals, as well as by me, Eliyahu m'Tsiyon. The message from Shmuel Trigano and others is below the broken line

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
BE REASONABLE !

A group of intellectuals and personalities, ostentatiously claiming their Jewishness as a pledge of objectivity, has taken the initiative to publish an “Appeal to Reason” (http://www.jcall.eu/); an appeal they intend to circulate as widely as possible. Unfortunately this appeal goes against it’s own stated aims: democracy, morality, solidarity within the Diaspora, and the commitment to Israel’s fate. It is clear that this offensive has a self-serving agenda and doesn’t truly stand for the best interests of the Israeli people.

We took into our hands to organise a petition under the name of: “Be Reasonable”.

1) The idea of an imposed peace with Israel under pressure, even with the intervention of the superpowers, is a denial of both the democratic process and the international law, with hints of neo-colonialism. It violates the freedom of choice of the citizens of the Israeli democracy and sets a dangerous precedent for all other democracies.

2) It relies on the cooperation of a U.S. president who fails to face the deadly challenge of Iran, and of the European Union, which has generally identified itself with the Palestinian cause. Israel is under threat of extermination, a threat expressed by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its satellites surrounding Israel from the north (Hezbollah) and to the south (Gaza, i.e. Hamas).

3) While these petitioners put the blame and responsibility of political deadlocks on Israel alone, every objective investigation tends to prove that neither the Palestinian Authorities nor the Palestinian society are genuinely interested in a fair peace: according to a poll by the Al-Najah University in Nablus, 66.7% reject the creation of a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders, 77.4% reject the idea of Jerusalem as the capital of both states (April 2010). Creating a Palestinian state without the assurance that there is a real desire for peace within the Palestinian population as well as in the entire Arab world would expose the small territory of Israel to a fatal strategic weakness.

4) The “Appeal to Reason” is suffering from amnesia. The Oslo Accords led to an unprecedented wave of terrorism. The withdrawal from Lebanon was followed by the establishment of Hezbollah. The withdrawal from Gaza helped legitimise Hamas. Furthermore, the guarantees of the UN Security Council are not worth the paper they are printed on: the disengagement from Gaza led to the election of Hamas and the subsequent daily shower of rockets and missiles. Wouldn’t an independent Palestinian state with “East Jerusalem” as a capital be the hub of even more intensified terrorist activity? By then, expression of regrets by our Reasonable Petitioners would be worthless.

5) The sense of morality, of honour and the commitment to peace are not the monopoly of just one side. They are a permanent challenge. This ill-advised petition could bring serious harm and injury to the citizens of Israel. Indeed, such a position has been used to justify calls for boycott against the State of Israel, its products and its citizens as well as questioning the legitimacy of Israel’s existence.

Confronted with the real threats to its security, which compromise any possibility of lasting peace in the Middle East, we intend to establish and promote a public mediation forum within the European Union. This forum will defend and publicise the legitimacy of the State of Israel within the framework of a true and sustainable peace, and continue the fight against anti-Semitism that has been dangerously
resurfacing in Europe.

Please endorse this declaration and show your support for the State of Israel.

Please sign and forward “Be reasonable!”

To sign click the following link: http://www.dialexis.org

First French signers:
Jean-Pierre Bensimon, professor of social science, Raphael Draï, professor of political science and law, Judith Gachnochi, psychologist, Georges Gachnochi, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Nicolas Nahum, architect, Georges Elia Sarfati, university professor, linguist and philosopher, Perrine Nahum Simon, CNRS researcher, historian, Pierre-André Taguieff, research director at CNRS, philosopher, political scientist and historian of ideas, Michèle Tribalat, demographer, Shmuel Trigano, professor of political sociology, editor of revue “Controverses”.
[Note: not all of these signatories are Jews]
- - - - - - - - -
Commentary on the Vichyite JCall petition: Luc Rosenzweig [ici en francais]
Summary of an article on the Peace Process of the 1930s that prepared the road to war [here]
The full article summarized on the previous line is [here]
- - - - - - - - -

Fiamma Nirenstein sent the following critique of the same Vichyite petition sponsored, by the way, by an outfit called JCall, an affiliate of the American JStreet astroturf gang financed by billionaire George Soros, various Arab and Iranian interests, and others. JStreet was set up to help Obama promote an anti-Israel policy in the United States, supposedly with Jewish support. Fiamma Nirenstein is a journalist and member of the Italian parliament, where she is deputy chairperson of the Committee on Foreign Affairs.
- - - - - - - - -

"STAND FOR ISRAEL, STAND FOR REASON"

The attack against Israel by the Jcall document is inspired by a short-sighted view of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In fact, the signatories of this appeal do not have the clear perception of the global physical and moral threat to which Israel is currently exposed. It is indeed incredible that intelligent and cultivated people like Alain Finkelkraut and Bernard-Henri Levy - instead of dealing with Iran that will soon keep the whole world under the threat of the range of its atomic bomb - play with the idea that Benjamin Netanyahu is the true hindrance to peace, that the essential obstacle to a resolution of the conflict is a reproachable attitude of Israel. The intellectuals who have signed the French document ignore history and don’t care about the help that it will give and is already giving to the unprecedented delegitimization threatening the life of Israel.

Pushing Israel to concessions without rewards, simply means to surrender the enemy without any guarantee: the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza has produced disastrous consequences, the land Gush Katif inhabitants has been kicked out from is since then a launching pad for missiles and terrorists; Ehud Barak’s concessions in Camp David, designed to give Arafat practically everything he was asking for, led to the horror of the second Intifada, with its two-thousand people killed by suicide attacks; the evacuation of Southern Lebanon in 2000 strengthened the Hezbollah, supplied them with 40,000 missiles and led to the 2006 war.

Finkelkraut, Henri Levy and their fellow signatories claim that they are concerned about the future and the security of Israel. But they actually ignore the basic element that has prevented success of any peace process, namely the Arab and Palestinian refusal to recognize the very existence of the State of Israel as a permanent nation-state in the Middle East. This all-encompassing rejection of Israel’s right to exist is reflected day by day in the Palestinian and pan-Arab media.

The attack against Netanyahu aims at breaking up his right wing coalition. But it actually never mattered whether an Israeli government was right or left: anyhow the Palestinians refused any proposal of peace.

Israeli land concessions like the ones the French intellectuals advocate will never bring peace. Only a cultural revolution in the Arab world can achieve it, but nobody asks for that, not even Obama, who devotes US great strength to pressure only Israel. This is the current fashion.

Peace will not come because Israel becomes smaller. What will bring us closer to peace is if Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas stops naming public squares after mass-murderers like Hamas bombmaker Yehiya Ayash; if the Palestinians stop passing out candies when Jewish families are murdered by suicide bombers in restaurants; and when the Arab world accepts Netanyahu’s modest request to recognize the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish people.

This reality is ignored as well by the Israeli intellectuals who have signed a document against the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, who wrote a very noble letter to support Jerusalem spiritual core and historical homeland of the Jewish people.

This sadly politically correct epidemic is probably designed to give some oxygen to the defeated pacifist movements that is actually able only to crash against the rock of the Islamist hatred culture and to defame Israel. But in this approach there is no contribution to any better future for the Middle East: the world must find the courage to face the new Islamist frenzy that springs from Iran, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas and points to the destruction of Israel. Iran and its allies are of course arming themselves with lethal weapons, not with vain words, like those who signed “The Call for Reason”. But even words can kill and destroy.

The signatories of the J-Call manifesto show a blatant ignorance of the extended hand policy adopted by Netanyahu since his Bar Ilan speech in June 2009, the ten-months settlements freeze, the lifting of many check points and the adoption of important measures to ease the Palestinian economy. And you can clearly see that the “Finkelkraut document” has an Obama flavour, a prissy and respectable trendy attitude intellectuals are often unable to say no. This makes possible nowadays to the increasing number of Israel’s enemies to delegitimize the Jewish State rejoicing “even the Jews are with us”. If this was the signatories aim, they have indeed achieved it.

SIGN THE PETITION "STAND FOR ISRAEL, STAND FOR REASON"


A large number of distinguished Italian intellectuals and others have signed the statement sent by Fiamma Nirenstein. The Italian original is here.