Heart-Rending Complete Speech of Caroline Glick
Excerpts:
“One of the most fundamental lessons we learned growing up in our parents’ house was the difference between reality and fantasy.”
“As children, the distinction seemed obvious to us. But apparently, the difference between the two is a lot less easy to discern than it would seem.”
“This must be the case because the fact of the matter is that today, for the second time in 12 years, a government of Israel — being led by an elderly politician with a distant past as a war hero — is basing its policies on fantasy rather than reality.”
“On July 18, 1995 Ori Shachor and Ohad Bachrach – aged 18 and 19 were hiking in Wadi Kelt when they were murdered by Palestinian terrorists. They were each shot in the head and then, after they were dead, their throats were slit.”
“I remember their murders well. They were killed on a Friday morning. I was sitting at a hotel in Zikhron Yaacov with the heads of the Israeli and Palestinian negotiating teams as they laid out the schedule for the next week of talks when we got word of the killings. ”
“On Sunday morning while I was driving up the coastal highway to Zikhron Yaacov, opponents of the Oslo process staged a creative demonstration. A convoy of cars, buses and trucks drove up the highway at 20 miles an hour with signs reading, ‘Rabin, Peres, go slow.’”
“I was deeply moved by the demonstration. I cried the whole way to Zikhron. I was grateful to the protesters – who made me arrive an hour late at the talks. I was grateful to them for taking the time to show their loyalty to the memory of the young men – for maintaining the honor of our dead.”
“But when I got to the hotel, my tears were replaced by shock. here, the heads of our delegation were livid at what they considered the chutzpa of the demonstrators for making us start our negotiations late. Uri Savir, then director general of the Foreign Ministry and head of our delegation, like the politicized IDF generals, apologized to the Palestinians for the inconvenience caused them by the demonstrators.”
“They apologized even as the murderers of Shachor and Bachrach had in the space of 36 hours been arrested and released by the Palestinian security forces. And they apologized even as their Palestinian counterparts were the commanders of the security services that released the young men’s killers.”
“For these Israeli leaders, the fantasy of the peace process was impervious to the screams of our murdered youths. For these so-called peacemakers, their murder – at the hands of the so-called ‘enemies of peace’ – was a simple inconvenience. ”
“Yehudit Shachor, Ori’s mom told reporters a couple of years later that when she tried to talk to Shimon Peres about the fact that her son’s murderers were walking free, Peres told her that there was nothing that he could do about it because he was in the business of signing peace treaties.”
“All he could offer was the suggestion that Mrs. Shachor speak with Yassir Arafat.”
“The fantasy of Oslo was that the Arabs want peace with Israel. This fantasy was laid to rest five years ago when the Palestinians began their terror war against Israel in earnest — with the support of the entire Arab world and Iran.”
“Israelis lost their faith in the fantasy of peace as our people were incinerated at cafes, on buses, at bar mitzvah parties and at Passover Seders while in the background, from Cairo to Tehran to Beirut and Damascus to Amman, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were turned into TV mini-series and the infamous forgeries went into their thousandth printings throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds.”
“The odd and tragic thing is that just as the fantasy of Oslo was disintegrating against the overwhelming power of the reality of war, it was replaced not with a strategy for victory based on reality, but by a new strategy based on a new fantasy.”
“This new fantasy, propounded by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is the fantasy of disengagement.”
“In August of this year, at the command of Sharon and his yes-man Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, the Israel Defense Forces and the Israel Police deployed a force of 50,000 soldiers and policemen to forcibly expel all Jews from Gaza and northern Samaria. In so doing, Sharon and Mofaz made Israel the first country to ethnically cleanse land from Jews simply because they are Jews since the Holocaust.”
“The justice system in Israel was subverted to ensure the accomplishment of the goal of making Gaza and northern Samaria Judenrein. People were denied permits to protest. People’s freedom of movement was restricted as policemen intercepted buses transporting lawful protesters to legal demonstrations.”
“Thousands of people were arrested en masse and kept behind bars for weeks and months without trial or indictment for the “crime” of opposing their government’s policies. Among these Jewish political prisoners were hundreds of minor children. And when the Public Defender’s office put out a report explaining that laws were prejudicially enforced based on the suspects’ political views, Chief Public Defender Inbal Rubinstein was forced to apologize for the report under threat of firing from Justice Minister Tzipi Livni.”
“Today Sharon and his associates are planning to move immediately after the general elections to expel an additional fifty thousand Jews from their homes in Judea and Samaria. Indeed, the coming elections will answer one question and only one question:
Will Sharon continue the policy of ethnically cleansing the Land of Israel of Jews and transfer 95 percent of Judea and Samaria to our enemies – even before he begins negotiating Jerusalem, the immigration of foreign Arabs to the Land of Israel and Israel’s security arrangements with anyone?”
“That is, will Israel expand its vulnerability to national destruction at the hands of our enemies and continue to turn Jew against Jew in the hopes of inciting a civil war?”
“Will Israel, at the same time as the Iranians with the silent support of the Arab world call for the eradication of the Jewish state, continue to cling to the fantasy that we can live in our land and pretend that we are not part of our neighborhood?”