CLEAN OUT THE STABLES AND PREPARE FOR WAR
Prof. Moshe Sharon

The Lebanon War (the “Three Weeks of Mourning” war) of the summer of 2006 has not yet come to an end. It is only an introduction to the prologue. Today it is clear to everyone who is prepared to confront unadorned reality, and they are the majority of people in Israeli society with the wish to live, that we have to take advantage of the short period of time left to us to prepare the army for the inevitable next war.

Hezbollah is the immediate enemy. No one will disarm it because it has no intention of disarming and there is no one to coerce it to do so. The UN is collaborating with Hezbollah and none of its member nations has any interest in dealing with it.

After many years, during which the Shiites were the most backward segment of Lebanon’s population, they have now become the masters. They are supported by two countries that arm them to the teeth, provide them with massive economic support, and enable them to emerge as the spearhead in Islam’s war against Israel.
Let’s say it clearly: Nothing was achieved in this war except for a ridiculous UN document and an interlude during which the enemy will have the opportunity to better entrench itself 700 or 70 meters from the border, in and under villages that were virtually undamaged. The homes of fellow Lebanese are its shelters and their babies are its human shields, and it has learned that it is dealing with Israelis for whom the lives of their enemies very often take precedence over the lives of their soldiers and civilians.

Jews can live under Muslim rule, subservient to this law, but woe unto them if they try to emerge from the status of dhimmi, which the Islamic law destined for them. Therefore, the establishment of the State of Israel, in which the Jews not only are not under Muslim patronage but even rule over Muslims, has created a situation which is in contravention of the laws of nature. The establishment of a Jewish state on Islamic land is an open rebellion against Islamic law, an insolence toward its prophet and impudence towards Allah.
However, in order to realize that the entire world will be ruled by the Islamic legal system according to which one Muslim government will be established with the Commander of the Faithful at its head, every Muslim is called upon to sacrifice, and first and foremost to want to sacrifice his life for the sake of this holy objective.
Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad recently gave a speech before a group of Iranian scholars on the subject of Islamic art. He declared that true art is martyrdom. The death of the martyr, he said, is the most sublime expression of true art, and added in his flowery language, which sounds so good in Persian, that with the help of Allah, Islam will soon be raised to the highest peaks from which it will rule the entire world. Inshallah. (May it be the will of Allah).
In the last generation, this zealous and combative Islam, which directly influences the lives and the thoughts of many millions of people, has discovered the way to fight the enemies of Islam around the world. It discovered that through the combination of education to hatred, zealotry and martyrdom, with cheap, unsophisticated weapons and a few kilograms of explosives, it was possible to undermine the security of western societies, to damage the framework of their lives and to expose the helplessness of the large empires. We call acts of horror that indiscriminately strike at innocent people, terrorism. However the Muslims, who engage in those acts, call them jihad, holy war.

Today, the world is filled with Muslim assassins, who undergo a long process of
indoctrination and are happy to be martyrs and to reach the next world quickly. During the Middle Ages only the suicide martyrs themselves were indoctrinated; in the modern Islamic world, an entire public is being indoctrinated. This indoctrination is carried out in every possible manner: by preachers in mosques and in religious study groups; in the electronic and print media; by Muslim intellectual elites – writers and artists, filmmakers and playwrights, actors and singers; in schoolbooks, in schools, in and out of class.
The thrust of Muslim propaganda is directed against the Jews. From European anti-Semitic sources the Muslim authors collect everything that describes the Jews as the filth of humanity fit only for destruction.
The blood libel is also alive and well in the world of Islam. Thus, for example, in a film which has been shown on the Hezbollah TV station al-Manár on a regular basis, a group of Jews is seen slaughtering a Muslim child and using his blood to prepare unleavened bread. In Syria, Mustafa Tlas, who was the minister of war, wrote his doctorate on the Jewish use of blood for ritual purposes and called it The Matzah of Zion.
When a Muslim, unceasingly exposed to this volume of hatred, looks at the map of the Middle East and sees a tiny patch stuck in the heart of the Arab-Islamic world like a dagger, and he knows that the patch is controlled by Jews, in refutation of the entire Muslim doctrine, he inevitably sees it as a shocking violation of all he believes in. With his independent existence and all the trappings of sovereignty, the Jew is challenging the truth of Islam; this cannot be permitted!
Thus, the time has come for the Jews in that little patch, who live in the bubble that they have created for themselves and inside of which they play peace games, to internalize the simple, clearly manifest truth: there is no peace nor will there be peace in the Middle East as long as an independent Jewish state exists in which Jews and Muslims enjoy equal rights. There is not and there will not be peace in the Middle East unless it is in accordance with Islam: the total destruction of the Jewish state, the destruction of most of its Jewish residents and the transformation of Palestine into an integral part of the Muslim world. If after the destruction, the expulsion and the mass slaughter some Jews remain in Palestine, they might be allowed to receive second-class citizen status, living in the shadow of Islam and according to its laws. That is the only Islamic plan! It is not a secret plan. It is publicized, advertised, preached, taught but on the whole, unfortunately ignored, minimized, and in many western circles “explained,” tolerated and even excused.

The Muslims consider the State of Israel nothing less than a sacred Islamic endowment, a Muslim waqf, that was expropriated from Muslim hands in a momentary tragedy and therefore must be returned to Islamic hands. Sometimes various sophisticated political tools have to be employed. It is possible and permissible, according to Islamic law, to reach a cessation of combat, a temporary postponement of the jihad, as Mohammed did with his enemies. (Recently Hamas, following Muhammad’s precedent, suggested 10 years armistice – hudnah – with Israel). Cessation of combat can even have the characteristics of a “peace agreement” as then the enemy is willing to sacrifice vital interests and expose itself to the eventual Muslim attack.

Holy War is the strategy and therefore the agreements (“peace”) with Egypt and Jordan are a sort of interlude. They are agreements between governments, in which the Arab side fulfills only a bare minimum of its clauses. Egypt, which committed itself to stopping the atrocious propaganda against Israel and to normalizing relations, is the leader of anti-Semitic activity in the Arab world. Egypt acts enthusiastically against Israel in international bodies. Along with the blatant education of the masses to hatred of the Jews in every mass media outlet, Egypt has been preparing an enormous military infrastructure for years, with the assistance of the United States and the European countries. Is it necessary to ask, to fight against whom did Egypt create an army of close to a million soldiers?

Up to this point we have addressed Islam in general; however it is necessary to pay special attention to Shiite Islam against which the State of Israel just fought and will have to fight under more difficult conditions in the future. Shiite Islam is the more messianic branch of Islam. It has built itself up as a religio-political body, concentrating its hopes, beliefs and aspirations around the image of the “hidden imám,” the Mahdi whose imminent appearance from his hiding place is anticipated at any moment. The Shiite messianic concept is unlike the Sunni and Jewish ones. In contrast to these, according to which the identity of the Messiah is not precisely determined, the Mahdi of the Shiah is a living Messiah. He is a direct descendent of Muhammad; he has a name (also Muhammad), his father and his ancestors are known; he is alive and well in his hiding place in this world and awaiting the opportunity to appear. It will be an impressive appearance with a drawn sword and blood and fire. The Mahdi will go to war against the whole world (including Sunni Islam). He will win; and finally, a descendant of the Prophet will rule over Islam in its entirety – the one, true Amir al-Mu`minin – Commander of the Faithful.

The Shiites have always been and remain a minority within Islam. Throughout their history they bear on their foreheads the mark of Cain for the murder (in 680) of the third imam, Imam Hussein. True, they did not murder him; it was the representatives of the Sunni government who did it; however they feel that they were accomplices to the crime, and that, in their eyes, was a terrible sin against God. The sin of standing idly by when Hussein was murdered rests on every Shiite wherever he may be and cannot be expiated. All the Shiites can do is to remember the murder every moment of their lives and attempt to feel some of the pain that Hussein felt on the day he died. Therefore, the Shiites perform their Ashurá ceremonies (called ta‘ziyah) in public. They cut themselves with knives, daggers and swords, spill each other’s blood and even spill the blood of babies in their cradles in an outburst of mass ecstasy, and they aspire to die at that moment as an act of identification with the death of the Prophet’s grandson. This one day, the 10th of Muharram, the first month of the Islamic year, expresses, perhaps more than anything else, the death wish, the desire for martyrdom and the thirst for suffering, pain and blood.
Throughout their history, the Shiites have sought to achieve some sort of legitimacy for themselves in the Sunni world, in whose eyes they are considered “dissenters.” Now they believe that they have found the way to accomplish that. Over the course of more than 50 years, the Islamic Sunni world – headed by the huge Arab world, surrounding Israel like a ring – has been unsuccessful in getting rid of the Jewish state. Now Iran, the only Shiite country in the world, is sure that it can do it. Under its leadership the Shiites will assume leadership of the jihad against the entire world and they will start it from Israel. The aspiration to acquire nuclear weapons is part of the plan. Iran plans to use them and if in the process millions of Muslims die, all the better – paradise has room for all the martyrs. Perhaps that is what the Mahdi is waiting for, that the entire world be drawn into a colossal Armageddon. He will certainly choose to appear surfing on waves of blood, blazing fire, and the billows of smoke of a radioactive world, and bring an end to the humiliation of Islam by the infidels and salvation to the world – a Muslim world free of Jews ruled by the laws of the Mahdi. Ahmadinejad truly believes that he is destined to hasten his coming.

Hezbollah is a Shiite organization whose name means “Party of Allah.” This name incorporates a patently Islamic idea – Hezbollah is actually the entire Islamic world, as all Muslims are Allah’s party, all Muslims are his nation, all Muslims are his army. The Hezbollah of Lebanon is avant-garde, the front line camp of Allah’s army and as such it fulfills the role of fighting against the front line of the Satan – Israel. This explains the demonological imagery that we see and hear on a daily basis in the Arab media outlets: Israel is the devil’s son, the “little Satan”; America, England and the Western world in general are the great Satan: that is to say, the ultimate negative force confronting Allah and the entire Muslim nation. The great Satan confronts the Great Hezbollah – the Islamic nation in its entirety. The little Lebanese Hezbollah confronts the little Satan.

If war is the only existing alternative in this part of the world (“agreements” are also part of it), the public justifiably asks: How long? And the answer is: Until the Muslims lose all hope of liquidating us, and that means forever. The Arabs and Islam in general will never be able to come to terms with the reality expressed in the simple question posed on a daily basis by one or another Muslim leader: How is it possible that a billion and a half Muslims, who control massive resources, cannot wipe out (another) six million Jews ensnared in a fifty-kilometer-wide death trap.

Anyone unwilling to understand that this is the reality with which we must live, and anyone unwilling to deal with it, does not belong in the Middle East – the old, cruel Middle East.

We must, therefore, return to classical warfare. Not a “small, smart army,” like the one suggested by Ehud Barak, the Prime Minister who brought the Party of God down on our heads, but a large regular army, emergency warehouses filled to capacity and beyond, a reserve-force trained and skilled to the utmost capability. A fundamental change of values, a reordering of national priorities: Everything for an offensive force, not a defensive one; a well-trained military force standing ready to attack with maximum force.

It is not against Lebanon that we should have fought this last war, but rather against Syria, Hezbollah’s patron and the link connecting Iran and Hezbollah. The airports, the fuel storage facilities, the dams on the Euphrates, the army headquarters, the missile systems and the presidential palaces all should have become heaps of ruins and the Israeli army should have been on the outskirts of Damascus. That could have been accomplished if Israel had a bold leadership which understood that the state is in a battle for survival. Iran, too, would certainly have begun thinking differently.

And another classical concept of warfare – strategic depth. The Six Day War for the first time provided Israel with limited strategic depth, until Oslo, when Israeli leaders relinquished it to Arafat’s gangs, whose declared aim is the destruction of Israel. However, the army retains control of the “killing area” of the Jordan Valley, and backed by the Jewish settlements it can control the mountain region. The foolish “disengagement” relinquished territories of the highest strategic importance in Gaza and exposed the country to missile terrorism, and now fools seek to cede the last remaining strategic assets in Judea and Samaria. If that were to happen, Israel would become a narrow coastal country, like the post-1187 Crusader state. In the recent war, the residents of the north fled to the center of the country. Where will the residents of Tel Aviv flee when not Katyushas, but merely primitive Kassams and mortars are fired upon the city from Samaria? Into the sea to fulfill the Arabs’ great dream?

A substitute for the strategic depth that we lost in Lebanon has not and will not be found. When the IDF fled Lebanon in 2000, proponents of the flight said that there would be no more fatalities in Lebanon. The price of remaining, they said, was too steep: 25 dead per year. In the present war, we have paid exorbitant interest in dead, wounded, disabled, and destruction for each of those six years.

And regarding the Palestinians. Here we must decisively do away with the notion of the Palestinian state. Not because of a “messianic” vision, as the opponents of Jewish settlement in the ancient Jewish mountain home of Judea and Samaria say, but rather because a Palestinian state which will control the coastal plain from the mountains is a surefire recipe for destruction. Therefore in the framework of reordering national priorities, settlement in the mountains should be established as a fundamental component right after rehabilitation of the military force. This is an existential need, not ambition of occupation or colonization as Israel’s enemies call it. A nation cannot “occupy” its own country.

Therefore, the nonsense of building a “security fence” should be halted and the billions saved should be earmarked for the army and for investment in other vital needs. A fighting nation does not hide behind a bizarre joke of cement and barbed wire fences. Even the Great Wall of China did not halt invaders.

Is there leadership in the State of Israel capable of facing the truth without fear, a far-sighted leadership, leadership that will develop Israeli might to an extent that its enemies will be forced to postpone the jihad against it indefinitely?

Is there leadership that will begin to establish fundamental values that are based on truth and not on empty fantasies that have humiliated the state and placed its very existence in danger?

Perhaps such leadership can be found after the stables have been cleaned out.
(Moshe Sharon is Professor of Islamic History at the Hebrew University. This is excerpted from an article that appeared in the September 2006 Nativ)

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CLEAN OUT THE STABLES AND PREPARE FOR WAR Prof. Moshe Sharon

CLEAN OUT THE STABLES AND PREPARE FOR WAR
Prof. Moshe Sharon