from NY to Israel Sultan Reveals
The Stories Behind the News

Posted: 29 Dec 2009 08:02 PM PST

It is difficult to comprehend the extent to which the
left has inserted appeasement into the culture and the educational system
of the State of Israel. From the youngest ages children are taught to
pursue appeasement dressed up as peace, with the same enthusiasm and verve
that Palestinian Arab children are taught to pursue Jihad. The anniversary
of the assassination of leftist Prime Minister Rabin is treated as an
extended series of events that seems to stretch on forever, as leftist
politicians call for peace with Arab terrorists "at any cost" and denounce
the right for inciting the murder of Rabin by criticizing his creation of
a terrorist state within Israel's borders. Not the anniversary of Israel's
independence nor the commemoration of the Holocaust has the moral stature
anymore that Israel's left has invested into "Chag Rabin".

And the results of the left's propaganda campaign can be seen
in the falling recruitment numbers and the rise of draft dodging. As
much as a quarter of Israeli men now dodge the draft, and a far larger
number of women. This is all the more shocking in a country where a
generation ago draft dodgers were held in contempt and found leading a
normal civilian life nearly impossible. The credit for this transformation
belongs to the left, whose politicians had preached to a new generation
that the army was irrelevant, whose reporters smeared soldiers at every
turn, whose activists stood guard at checkpoints to prevent IDF soldiers
from doing their jobs, who treated draft dodgers as heroes for refusing to
serve in the "Occupation Army".

The sharp rise in draft dodging by
the sons and daughters of the left, from former Prime Minister Olmert's
own son down, has moved the burden of service over to the Religious
Zionist community, the patriotic sector of Israel that has not been
infected by the left's agenda. While the left complained that their sons
were forced to die for the settlements, the Settlers became the IDF,
fighting and dying for Ashkelon and Haifa. The heroes of the last Lebanon
war, such as Major Roi Klein, who threw himself on a grenade to protect

his men, and the casualties, increasingly came from the settlements.

While Olmert's sons were living abroad, it was the sons of the settlements,

from the families of men and women living on Israel's frontier with Islamic

terror, who went out and fought.

Unsurprisingly this also paralleled the left's war
against the Religious Zionist community, from the ethnic cleansing of the
Jewish communities of Gaza, to the criminalizing of political dissent for
children as young as 13 and a constant demonization campaign by the
domestic and international media. With the burden of military service
increasingly coming down on Religious Zionist soldiers, even as the left
was working feverishly to crush Religious Zionists for representing an
obstacle to their plans for Israel, the resulting paradox in which the
left needs Religious Zionist soldiers to crush Religious Zionist
communities has touched off a feverish debate within Israel.

The
debate over whether Religious Zionist soldiers should obey orders that run
contrary to their own moral values and the interests of the State of
Israel, centers on the balance between obedience to the state vs the duty
to the values for which one fights. Increasingly many new recruits are
stating that they will not obey any orders to ethnically cleanse Jewish
communities, which has brought out the usual manufactured outrage from the
media outlets of the left. The soldiers have been accused of undermining
democracy, which the Israeli left in its usual fashion interprets as being
synonymous with their own agenda, as when former Histadrut union thug and
current chairman of the Kadima Council, Haim Ramon, proclaimed in an open
forum, "If you do not obey the rules of our democracy we will crush you."

Many on the right however also believe that it is more important
to preserve the forms of the state, that it requires that soldiers follow
orders that they find immoral, orders that will ultimately lead to the
destruction of the body of the state. Isi Leibler recently expressed a
similar view, which while acknowledging the unpleasantness of the orders,
denounced Rabbi
Eliezer Melamed of the Har Bracha Yeshiva who had stated that soldiers
should not follow immoral orders to participate in the suppression and
ethnic cleansing of Jewish communities in order to appease Islamic
terrorism. The case of the refusniks from the Kfir Brigade, like the case
of Rabbi Melamed, has been phrased as one of conflicting obligations,
between the supposed democratic rule of law represented by the state, and
the private morality of individuals and factions that must subsume their
contradictory beliefs for the good of the state.

This model however is an inherently wrong one. The state cannot
function outside the values of its citizenry and its armed forces. The
army does not fight for the government of the state, it fights for the
enduring existence of the nation and for the people of that nation. It is
not merely a tool for executing government policy, but a shield and a
sword against the enemies of its people. Successive Israeli governments
have devalued the army and undermined its moral purpose by watering down
the IDF oath and the IDF code of ethics. Prime Minister Rabin took the
first step in this direction by recruiting Professor Asa Kasher, a radical
left wing activist and co-founder of Yesh Gvul, to remove Zionism and a
love of the land from the equation, leaving only obedience to elected
authority.

The problem is that Israeli elected officials have not
represented the values of its citizenry in quite a while. Whether Labor,
Likud or Kadima-- Israeli Prime Ministers have acted in response to
external pressure while selling out the will and values of the electorate.
Meanwhile the Knesset has degenerated into a pig trough by a squabbling
gallery of rogues who dive in and out of parties like Olympic swimmers,
who scrabble for bribes while announcing that whatever "street" they claim
to represent will not tolerate it if their wishes aren't met. It is not
only that they do not represent an ideal policy, they do not even
represent their own voters.

The Likud does not represent
conservative voters any more than Labor represents left leaning voters,
Shas does not represent Sefardim any more than Bayit Yehudi represent Dati
Leumi voters. Kadima does not even bother to pretend that they represent
anyone at all, except the Arab voters bribed to cast their ballot for
them. Aside from the government subsidies they distribute, they are
generally alien to the voters who elect them. With Prime Ministers who
spend most of their term in office struggling to stay one step ahead of
American and European pressure, and the Knesset-- and a Knesset whose
members struggle to grab as much as they can before they're indicted, by
an Attorney General who is likely to end up being indicted himself, if he
isn't bought off with a spot on the Supreme Court, Israeli democracy is
severely broken.

More to the point the Israeli political system not
only does not represent the wishes of Israeli voters, but it does not
represent the welfare of the nation itself. By repeatedly shrinking the
country's borders, opening checkpoints to terrorists, creating and
maintaining a terrorist state inside Israel, and ethnically cleansing
Jewish communities from inside Israel-- the political establishment has
demonstrated that it does not have the best interests of the country or
its people at heart. While IDF soldiers cannot set policy for the state,
nor can they be expected to undermine the country under orders from the
state. And that is exactly what orders aiding and abetting terrorism, or
orders in favor of ethnically cleansing Jews are. Therefore they have a
right to dissent from those orders in the name of values that are
generally held by Israelis and in the name of the preservation of the
nation. Even if it does not meet with the approval of the
state.

The difference between a tyranny and a free nation is simple
enough. In a tyranny the people are obedient to the state. In a free
nation the state is obedient to the people. In a tyranny the character of
the people reflects the character of the state. In a free nation the
character is determined by its citizens. The foremost value of Israel and
the IDF cannot be obedience to the state, for the state only exists in
order to maintain the nation and the people of Israel. If the state
becomes inimical to that purpose, it ceases to have any legal right to
rule. Similarly the government of every nation only derives its right to
rule based on its ability to serve the needs and wishes of the
people.

A state derives its political authority from the
electorate, its legal authority from the values of the people, and its
moral authority from sustaining their existence. Obedience to the state is
not itself a value, only a contingency by which the interests of the
people are met through mutual cooperation in service of one another.
Anything else is tyranny. Democracy is not in and of itself a value, it is
a mechanism through which the people enforce their will upon the state. If
the state maintains democratic elections, but its elected officials act
against the interests and contrary to the wishes of the people, then the
state has neither legal nor political authority over them except in the
guise of a tyranny. If the leaders of a state act contrary to the
interests of the people and their survival, they have no further moral
authority, as moral authority at the state level is vested above all else
in the survival of the people.

Rabbi Eliezer Melamad and the recruits are demonstrating their
loyalty to the underlying moral, political and religious framework of the
nation of Israel, by rejecting the dictates of a political system that is
destructive to the survival of that nation. As such theirs is the higher
loyalty. When state conflicts with nation, and the government conflicts
with the people-- the higher loyalty is to the people and the nation, not
the state. This same framework holds true in every country. It is the
underlying ethical basis for any state that governs a free people. To
place the government over the values of the people and the survival of the
nation, is to commit a horrifying act of treason that turns the state into
a tyrannical shell serving only its own interests. Not that of the nation
or the people.

Israel's leftist establishment has turned the
political system and the cultural sphere into a hollow shell by consuming
the land and the people, in the name of their ideology of appeasement and
naked greed. By aiding terrorists, they themselves have become the worst
threat to the survival of the State of Israel. And if the left wing and
their corrupt collaborators do not give up their death grip on power, the
Nation of Israel may have to replace the State of Israel in order to
survive.