Ben-Ami is not one of my usual targets of incitement. He has not made a political career out of nonsense and hypocrisy like Yossi Beilin and Yossi Sarid have. But whatever Beilin and Sarid are guilty of, Ben-Ami is decidedly the single worst minister in the current government from the point of view of Israeli survival.
In two separate media, on two separate occasions over the past few days, the man who holds the Foreign Affairs and Internal Security ministries - two of the most sensitive portfolios in the government - held forth on his idea of unity. To wit:
The Yediot Aharonot newspaper on Friday quoted Ben-Ami as saying: "As democrats, we understand that every agreement [with the Palestinians] involves a split in the nation. This is sad, but it is unavoidable. If we strive for a broad consensus from right to left, something that we all agree on, maybe we will live in peace amongst ourselves - but we will not have an agreement with the other side... We understand that in order to make this difficult breakthrough, there is no choice but to go with a divided people. Only war unites. Peace, sad to say, divides."
Arutz Sheva radio on Monday quoted him as follows: "We must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, even at the expense of tearing the nation apart and a split. Unity is a recipe for no decision."
It is one thing for a government minister of Israel to commit the heinous crime of treason in handing over Israel's heartland, or Judaism's holiest site, to murderers and terrorists who will kill more Jews in order to get more concessions. It is one thing for these ministers to negotiate with terrorists even as more Jewish blood is being spilled. These are crimes, even under Israeli law, and eventually the perpetrators will be judged - if not by a court of law then by history, as the traitors they are.
But the crimes of Ehud Barak, Yossi Beilin, Yossi Sarid, and even Binyamin Netanyahu, pale into insignificance next to the insanity that is being suggested by Shlomo Ben-Ami. Here we have the man responsible for Israel's internal security, for law enforcement, for the maintenance of order in Israel, openly suggesting that he prefers a divided nation, one in which serious political or social division could easily lead to civil war.
The utter brainlessness of Ben-Ami's now openly stated position leaves me speechless. There are simply no words to properly express the profound and total anger I feel toward this man. It takes a lot for someone to surpass the anti-Semitism and self-hate of a Shulamit Aloni or a Yossi Sarid or a Yossi Beilin in my books. And while Ben-Ami's statements are not on the surface anti-Semitic, I can now proclaim that he is the single most dangerous person for the future of this country.
Not only is Ben-Ami willing to cede the Jewish homeland to our enemies, not only is he prepared to allow hundreds of thousands of Arabs into Israel as full citizens, not only is he prepared to hand over the Temple Mount to people who are already destroying any evidence of Jewish history in the place, but he is now also demanding that the Jewish population of Israel be divided in order to further weaken what is left of the Jewish State once the Oslo surrender is completed.
Shlomo Ben-Ami is plainly a menace to Israeli society. How else can one explain the statements of a minister responsible for law and order in society, who says that law and order should be abandoned if that is what it takes to cede his nation's homeland to its enemies? Any government that has Shlomo Ben-Ami as a minister, or as a supporter, is now by definition not fit to govern. If Ehud Barak has any hope whatsoever of winning the elections in two weeks, that hope will come with the unceremonious firing of Ben-Ami from all positions and his ignominious ouster from the Knesset. Nothing less will be adequate for any leader with pretensions of power in this country.
There is one glimmer of hope in Ben-Ami's sorry performance this weekend. What Ben-Ami is busy negotiating at Taba with his terrorist friends is something he calls peace. But even Yitzchak Rabin was convinced after about a year of Oslo that peace would not be the result. It is becoming increasingly clear even to many on the left, that the end result of Oslo will be war. By the Grace of G-d, that war has not yet happened, and Israel's already divided nation has been given every chance to unite internally before that war is forced upon us.
The past four months of violence have served to unite many segments of the population in the belief that Israel is not about to welcome peace any time soon. But it is not yet enough. There is still plenty of divisiveness left in the Israeli populace, as the left wing's election campaign daily proves.
Shlomo Ben-Ami, as a leading government minister, has taken the divisiveness a step higher, proclaiming that such is actually government policy. But he also states that "only war unites."
It is therefore with great hopeful expectation that I look toward the coming war that Ben-Ami, Barak and the rest will bring upon us through their cowardice and through their Benedict Arnold negotiating tactics. For this war will unite us, and in so doing put an end not only to the policies being touted by Ben-Ami and his friends, but also to any dream of a political future for the bunch of them. And that would be a tremendous benefit to the entire State of Israel and the entire Jewish nation as a whole.
Copyright 2001. Yehuda Poch is a writer living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission only.
