The decade of defeatism

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
31 December 09

Strictly in the Israeli context, the first decade of the 21st century deserves to be remembered as the decade of defeatism. The country ushered in the new millennium with an air of resignation. The no-can-do premise and loser mentality still persist, perniciously.

It's essentially a psychological state in which defeat is the foregone conclusion, anticipated as inevitable and accepted without significant resistance. Thus Kadima MK Nahman Shai pontificated in a radio interview that "Israel has no choice but to pay the price Hamas demanded for Gilad Schalit" and if more abductions are thereby engendered, "we'll have to pay then too. That is our lot."

To be sure, Israeli defeatists aren't all cut from the same cloth. Some, especially on the ideological Left's fringes, promote anything that weakens the state. Their espousal of capitulation to Hamas over Schalit's kidnapping wasn't inspired by concern for his welfare but by desire to further dent Israel's armor. Hence they portray settlements as, heaven forefend, compromising the country's Jewish majority. Yet they simultaneously clamor against new citizenship legislation geared to prevent the wholesale importation of hostile Arabs under the guise of family reunions, as occurred in Oslo's wake when some 150,000 Arabs were willy-nilly added to the population. That transpired without arousing any outcry from the Left, which, at opportune occasions, wrings its hands in despair over the purportedly perilous Jewish demographics.

Since the more hypocritical ideological defeatists hold inordinate sway in the media, they also perforce mold opinions, forge zeitgeist and orchestrate political crusades. They inspire widespread defeatism compounded by the citizenry's intellectual indolence. Their demoralizing spin is that there's no sense to struggle and sacrifice because the fight will anyhow be lost. The inescapable by-products are erosion of faith in the cause and the pervasive perception of all headliners as corrupt and unworthy. "They're all the same" is the oft-heard catchphrase.

IRONICALLY, THIS cynicism failed to foil the most cunning abuse against our most fundamental existential interests. The public let Ariel Sharon - striving to extricate himself from whopping legal entanglements - cheat his voters with an abrupt volte-face, renege on the referendum he initiated, crush his opponents with political steamrollers and propagate patently false prophesies about the bounties of disengagement.

The Ehud Olmert-Tzipi Livni duo had ample opportunity to change course but seemed fettered to the folly and indeed plotted more of the same.

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