THEY MUST GO
Written in 1980, published in 1981
RABBI MEIR KAHANE
Separation – Only Separation (excerpts)
The Six-Day war of 1967 - what a divine, golden opportunity! What a disastrous failure to seize it!
They poured across the ancient lands - theirs. The children of Israel. The soldiers, children of a generation that went to the gas chambers, a thing the Gentile had come to equate with the Jews. Now they burst across the ground from which, just days earlier, the Arabs had boasted of the coming slaughter. The trap, the iron noose, which the Arabs had built around the Jewish state in May 1967 was shattered. “The trap is broken, and we have escaped!” (Psalms 123).
Across the land – theirs – they poured. Judea, and its hills! Bethlehem, where David was born and where for two millennia Rachel stood weeping for the sons and daughters who now returned. Hebron, where the fathers and mothers of the nation lived and are buried. Samaria, with Shechem and Bet El and Shilo and Jericho and Gigal and the ten tribes and Elijah and Hosea and – history. Gaza, where Samson smashed the Philistines….And now, the children had returned, incredibly, swiftly, mightily, to free the land from the trespassers, to redeem the stolen homeland.
What an opportunity! The Messiah knocked and history smiled and they touched fingers with their ancestors. Now, now was the opportunity to rid the land of those who a bare forty-eight hours earlier had danced in an orgy of Jew hatred, vowing to do unto Jewish men what they had done – partly – in the decades past and to inflict on Jewish women the horrors of which they were so capable. Now, now as the moment whose time had come. Now.
How the Arabs expected to be slaughtered! How they knew what they would have done if the roles were reversed! In Hebron white flags flew from every window as the inhabitants shook in terror, remembering 1929. The sixty-seven murdered Jews rested heavily on their heads as they waited for Jewish vengeance….
No, the Israeli soldiers did not slaughter them – and how they expected it! And how they would have fallen and kissed the soldiers’ boots had they been told: “You know what you deserve. You know what you did and what we should do to you. You know what you would have done in our place. But we are not you: we are Jews, and we give you a chance to live. You have forty-eight hours to take all that you can and cross the Jordan. Out! They would have kissed Jewish feet and fled.
Israel would have been free of them, and the ugly world that just days earlier had waited in expectation and anticipation of Jewish tragedy would have remained silent, so thunderstruck was it at the miracle of the Six-Day War! And Israel would have been free of the cancer, the terrible specter of 800,000 more Jew haters. And Jews could have settled the length and breath of the land, and we could have brought the redemption that much closer….
But no, the gentilized and the Hellenists – whose terror of man is an article of faith replacing awe and faith in G-d – fled from greatness. It was the same fear of the world reaction that saw orders given not to shell the Old City lest Christian and Muslim holy places be damaged. Jewish soldiers had to pick their way through the narrow streets and alleyways. Dozens were killed by sniper fire – all needlessly, all murdered by Arab bullets and Jewish timidity.
The Arabs were neither killed nor driven from Hebron. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, one of the architects of the Jewish disaster, raced to the city to assure the Muslim Khadi (“priest”) that the cave of Machpela would remain in Muslim hands. The cave in which are buried Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah, and which had been barred for centuries to Jews, now would continue to be a Muslim site. Hebron would remain Arab, thanks to Dayan.
It was the policy of a man who opposed attacking the Golan Heights for fear that the Soviet allies of Syria would intervene. It was the fear of a man who not only refused to expel the Arabs, but forcibly returned those who had already fled! The Arab village of Kalkilya, which touches Kfar Saba, was for years one of the most vicious nests of terrorists. Regularly, the vipers would slither from Kalkilya to murder Jews. For years, Jews watched with gritted teeth and waited for the day…
In 1967 it came. The populace fled in panic. Thousands abandoned their village and swarmed eastward to the Jordan. Dayan ordered paratroopers to catch them and bring them back – lest the world think that Israel was preparing a new wave of refuges. Heaven forbid!
The miracle came and was rejected. The gold was turned by reverse alchemy into dross. Rather then being free of 800,000 enemies, the Jews allowed them to remain – them and their endless number of children. They drain us of our money, kill our children, and steal our land. In 1967 Muadi Abu-Minsha feared a slaughter. In 1975 he said: “Israel has no choice….I think the whole world recognizes the justice of the Palestinians… Arafat’s plan is a good one and I think Israel should adopt it.”
History will never forgive Israel its failure of nerve and fear of world opinion. The nation as a whole is already paying the price.
The question is not how can we remove the Arabs, but rather how can we not? To do nothing is the simplest and most simplistic policy. It will certainly spare this government, and perhaps the next both the agony of having to take the bold and excruciating step and the price of not taking it. The deluge, the flood will not come tomorrow. But come it certainly will, and sooner than we think. This generation already feels the first searing heat that will become the terrible flood of fire. No, the question is: How can we possibly sit and not rid ourselves of the Arabs who seek to destroy us from within? What inexplicable loss of national preservation, will, and sanity makes the Jews of Israel hesitate to save themselves?
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