The current war in Lebanon will come to an end sooner or later. We, the Israelis, will survive, and then lick our wounds, recharge our diminishing energies and return with revitalized enthusiasm to the commercials, holidays, and tele-amusement shows.

The Hezbollah will probably suffer some damage and we might buy ourselves a temporary fake peace sponsored by some international scarecrow force in Bermuda shorts and opera glasses. We might also succeed in getting back our kidnapped soldiers through some sort of a cynical deal that will allow both sides to swallow the pill. Yet whatever the consequences of this endless confrontation we cannot win this Lebanese war that was imposed on us.

We will not win because we cannot uproot the Hezbollah from Lebanon, just as we cannot uproot Muslim fundamentalism from the Arab states.

We will not win because our enemy is an antidemocratic group (certainly not minor in the Muslim population) that had legitimized lies and forgery in its cultural tradition. It is a group that tends to build its life picture by wishful thinking and talk, and not by vigorous empirical methods and a sense of criticism and integrity. For even when Israeli tanks stand on the doorstep of Beirut, Hassan Nasraalah will portray himself and will be accepted by the Arab public as a new Salah al-Din. And even if the entire Hezbollah army falls in battle, their organization will proclaim a Zionist defeat.

But above all, we will not win because this war is only a single battle, just a "promo", to the real Great War, waiting in the wings: The Third World War -- the Islamic Jihad against the free world.

It is astonishing, even heartbreaking, to see how immense the similarity is between 1933 and 2006. In those days the western world witnessed some loony, who took over the German regime, a bizarre character, almost comic who developed a satanic ideology targeted at wiping the democratic cultures off our planet. By the same token, Ahmedinajab, the ruling president of Iran, is perceived by many in the western countries as no more than an aggressive bully who cannot control his mouth. However, Ahmedinajab, like Hitler, is neither marginal nor alone. Millions of fanatical Muslims march behind him, applauding his inciting speeches. They have replaced the outdated 'Zieg Heil' with the fashionable roar 'Allahu Akbar'.

The forgotten World War II arose out of a deep inferiority complex and sick chauvinism, and this impending war will emerge out of a deep inferiority complex as well as insane chauvinism (there is no society that tramples women and rejects feminism more than the fundamental Islamic society). These negative feelings and the culture of chauvinism conceived ruthless hostility and slander, which eventually fashioned well-oiled machinery of brainwashing, operating in private houses, mosques, institutions of education and the Arab media.

Nasrallah kidnapped our soldiers and bombed our cities in the name neither of Lebanese interests nor Palestinian rights, but in the name of an organized religious agenda, which is aimed at the destruction of Jews and the Jewish state.

And again, just as in the old horrifying days, the object of the collective hatred, the generator of the vicious ideology against the free world, is the Jewish stereotype.

In the old days it was the stereotype of the ugly and the deceiving merchant in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, who was presumed to plan to rule world economy, along with the stereotype of the Jewish Communists, who were presumed to be plotting to abolish the Aryan European race and culture.

Today it is the "Jewish settler" (in all Israeli territories, not just in the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem) who is tied to the American imperialist, the symbol and leader of the free world, in a joint scam to occupy Muslim lands, to desecrate Muslim holy places and to drink Palestinian children's' blood.

The rhetoric is very similar. Just listen to what they're saying now in Iran, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon or Gaza -- actually in the whole Muslim world. In one of his recent speeches the chairman of the Iranian Parliament described Hassan Nasrallah as a holy warrior with the late Khomeni's blood flowing in his veins. Truly, this blood is pulsing through the arteries of thousands of Muslim priests and preachers, hammering at the temples of millions of ecstatic shaheeds who are yearning to blow themselves up, taking as many Jews as possible with them just to fulfill the sacred commandment and to earn the glory of murdering the Jewish Satan.

And all those western politicians and opinion shapers (no wonder the Spanish prime minister reacted to the recent news from Lebanon by donning a kafiyyeh), particularly the European media, focus their eyes and their camera lenses on the destruction caused by our defensive guns and missiles (as if it was we who initiated this bloody conflict and are keen to kill innocent civilians just for the fun of it and to flaunt our prowess) accusing us - with double-standard morality - of carrying out disproportionate retaliation: these are the descendants of the Europeans who did nearly nothing to save us when the fires of the crematoria were blazing. They are helping - directly and indirectly - to fashion the old Jewish stereotype into the new one - the "New Jew", namely the Israeli. They are not rushing to stop the Iranians from building new military machinery that will burn six million New Jews in the nuclear furnace of the global era. And what are we, the Israeli Jews, doing to survive? Not much. Just like our grandfathers and grandmothers we deny the apocalyptic news, waiting for this racist hurricane to pass. Moreover, our democratic tolerance and Jewish masochism make us accept, often encourage, Israeli pseudo-intellectuals who blacken our image, condemning our acts of self-defense in their hypocritical articles and interviews in the local and foreign media. In the name of some "divine" moral standards they denounce and despise Israeli aggression and arrogance, helping the new Anti-Semites to demonize us.

Can we stop the ticking clock of Muslim anti-Semitism, which is targeting the Israeli state? Perhaps this latest war in Lebanon will shed more light on the genuine motives of the fundamentalist Muslims and will open some more eyes in the western world. I beg you: Do not make the same moral mistake you made during and before the Holocaust. If you do not wake up soon we will no longer be here to blame you.

 
Oz Almog is Professor at the University of Haifa, Israel. He is the author of The Sabra -- the Creation of the New Jew, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1997. E-mail: oalmog@univ.haifa.ac.il

This article was published in Hebrew: in Ynet
(http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3283312,00.html) July 30, 2006.

Thanks to David Nathan who sent this in and wrote "This is the most important overview i have ever read .... bar none."

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