Excerpts from a Speech by Frank J. Gaffney before the Women’s Pro-Israel Political Action Committee

U.S. Senate Caucus Room, 16 March 1994

"A CALL TO ARMS IN THE JEWS’ ‘IDEOLOGICAL WAR’"

[T]he Israeli leadership and many in the American Jewish community have unintentionally played into this latest bid to establish moral equivalence between the principally Jewish victims of the Holocaust and the so-called "victims of Zionist aggression."

I am mystified by the lengths Jews in Israel and elsewhere have gone — not just to denounce Goldstein’s criminal conduct — but to apologize for it. Such apologies unavoidably imply an association with — and responsibility for — the crime. [Worst of all,] the apologies for Baruch Goldstein are being tendered in the context of Israel’s titanic ideological struggle with its Arab foes….

It is crucial to remember that Israel is not at peace with the Arab world, notwithstanding its much ballyhooed September Declaration of Principles with the PLO and the public relations feeding frenzy that ensued. At best — thanks to Israel’s brilliant performance in various Arab wars of aggression — it has foreclosed, for the time being at least, the Arabs’ military option. As a result, Israel’s Arab enemies have been obliged to pursue their objective of the destruction of the Jewish State through other means. To a considerable extent, the vehicle of choice has been a relentless campaign of "ideological warfare" in which Israel and its people are systematically portrayed as the real enemies of peace.

Unfortunately, the aftermath of the Goldstein crime suggests that the Arabs are making great inroads in this campaign. Indeed, Israel’s enemies appear to be poised to secure through skillful use of moral equivalence and other techniques of ideological warfare what they could not do with tanks, missiles and warplanes. The Arabs’ goal remains the acquisition of territory vital to Israel’s security and, in the process, the delegitimation of the underpinnings of Zionism — that is, the ‘historical connection of the Jews to Palestine….’

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I believe that those Israelis and American Jews who now demand that these communities be abandoned to the Arabs in the interest of peace are not only putting at risk Israel’s right to occupy and control the high grounds and vital watersheds of Judea and Samaria. These territories constitute strategic depth vital to Israel’s security and offer secure sources of precious water — the resource upon which life literally depends in the arid Middle East.

What is worse still, is that these Jews in Israel and the United States are also undermining the Jewish peoples’ historic claim to the rest of their homeland in the Middle East.

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In short, Israel is facing what may be its most deadly crisis since 1948 — a crisis of confidence in the morality and legitimacy of Zionism….Put simply, Israel is the answer to the so-called "Jewish problem" — the problem of anti-semitism and Jewish statelessness and powerlessness. That answer is a Jewish state in the Jewish homeland — not only as a benefit to those who live there, but as an essential means of providing dignity and, if necessary, a refuge to those who do not.

…The Jews must not be party to the termination of their people’s historical connection to a homeland in Palestine. Should they do so, the stage could be set for future calamities that will make the aftermath of Baruch Goldstein’s atrocity pale by comparison and perhaps even come to rival the catastrophe of Hitler’s "Final Solution."