Prefatory note: A version of this article was published 12 years ago on July 3, 2004, a year before the Government of PM Ariel Sharon expelled the thousands of Jews from Gaza. Since then, hundreds of Jews have been murdered by the Palestinian Authority, which has received yearly grants of hundreds of millions of dollars from the United States. These grants make the United States a greater patron of Islamic terrorism than Iran! That this egregious fact has not aroused any moral criticism on the part of American political scientists is rather easy to explain: moral indifferentism permeates the mentality of higher education in the democratic world, including Israel. In other words, democracy in Israel, as well as in America, has been afflicted by the disease of moral anesthesia.

Moral anesthesia in action: Oslo

Hardly any other concept more vividly describes the behavior of Israeli politicians toward the slaughter of hundreds of Jewish men women and children, and the wounding and traumatizing of thousands more that have resulted from the Oslo or Israel-PLO Agreement of 1993!

So deep and widespread is the moral anesthesia that afflicts Israel that, in January 2002, only ten members of the then Sharon-controlled Knesset had enough intellectual capacity and volition to vote YES on a resolution by former MK Michael Kleiner to abrogate Oslo!

The fact that more Jews had been murdered by Arab terrorists under Sharon’s reign than had occurred under all of his four predecessors had no decisive impact on the result of Kleiner’s resolution! Indeed, so deep and enduring is the dehumanizing influence of the “Oslovian pathology” that it persists to this day in the pathetic, paralytic character of the Netanyahu Government!

Oslo is not simply the failure of a policy. Oslo is a terminal disease! It manifests the moral anesthesia displayed in 1993 on the White House lawn, where Yitzhak Rabin shook the bloodstained hands of Yasser Arafat to the applause of three former Presidents of the United States!

If more evidence is wanted about moral anesthesia, let me remind readers that not even the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq could prompt PM Sharon to alter his policy of self-restraint against Arab suicide bombings and rocket attacks, a policy requiring, as one general put it, “educating the [Jewish] population to absorb blows” – one way of describing moral anesthesia. Let’s offer more evidence.

Gaza

Map of Gaza showing towns in Israel that have taken rocket fire from Gaza for thirteen years. Source: User Orlovic/Wikimedia Commons, released into public domain.

In April 2003, Prime Minister Sharon accepted a document concocted in secret and prepared in collusion with some of Israel’s worst enemies, a document called the “Road Map to a Palestinian State.”

The document was apparently inspired by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, but foisted on the uninformed people of Israel by a “Quartet” consisting of the U.S., the UN, the European Union, and Russia.

Without cabinet or Knesset discussion, Mr. Sharon accepted that document, even though it would retreat Israel back to its 1949 borders, what Abba Eban famously called Israel’s “Auschwitz” lines. This would be the inevitable consequence of establishing a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria.

Yes, but lo and behold, on June 14, 2009, PM Netanyahu endorsed the creation of that Palestinian state in the heartland of the Jewish people! This remains Netanyahu’s purpose to this day, any statements of his to the contrary notwithstanding.

For that Palestinian state, ladies and gentlemen, would represent the fulfillment of Netanyahu’s fondest ambition, to bring security to Israel – if only Abbas would recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people!!! This is why he has persisted during all these dreadful years worshiping at the shrine of Oslo, the holy place of moral anesthesia!◙