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PARTISAN REVIEW
apartment buildings and surrounded themselves with the civilian
population as hostages. We will be careful, but will not hold our fire,
because,
"If
Adolf Hitler himself hid in a building with twenty other
civilians innocent of any crime, wouldn't you blow it up?" Amos
Oz, writing in the popular
Yediot Ahronot
of June 21, responded in a
piece entitled, "Hitler's Dead, Mr. Prime Minister."
"Isser Harel and his men," Oz reminds Begin, "kidnapped
Adolf Eichmann without harming any member of his family [let
alone twenty innocent civilians]. Perhaps it would have been prefer–
able had you, the day after Ambassador Argov's shooting, consulted
with Harel on how they did it, rather than [listening to] General
Sharon and Chief of Staff Eitan .... [You are always resurrecting]
Hitler in order to kill him anew, every day again."
Now in case one might accuse Oz of forgetting that "even para–
noids have enemies," he goes on to say, "As to the P. L. 0.: I once
entertained hopes and illusions . I have liberated myself from them. I
am convinced that the P.L.O. is incapable of compromise with the
existence of Israel. ... But you did not lead us into a war whose
purpose was to finish off the P. L. O .... Your real goal was to crush
the Palestinians until they reach the level of indentured servants on
their knees within the Greater Israel of your visions." And not need–
ing to be reminded that, even with a moderate policy, Palestinian
and Arab extremism would be a hard nut to crack, Oz says, in the
New York Times Magazine,
that even if we have to wait for a genera–
tion for the Palestinians to respond to us, we must wait, that is, keep
open the option of West Bank compromise, in order to remain true
to ourselves.
Former head of Military Intelligence and one-time Begin
cabinet minister Meir Amit, in an interview in the
Jerusalem Post,
said roughly the same thing: In the absence of a moderate political
initiative on the West Bank, going into Beirut is unjustified.
"To seize the moment," Yirmiyahu Yovel wrote on June 28 on
the Op Ed page of the
Times
(a space considerably more hospitable
to Israeli doves than the Student Union in Yovel's Hebrew
University), "Israel must not only show the sword to the P.L.O. but
at the same time offer the olive branch to the Palestinian people,"
advice even Yovel is sure will fall on deaf ears in Menachem Begin's
Jerusalem.
Author Yizhar Smilansky noted in
Davar
on June 27 that "the
solution isn't in Beirut but in Schem," that is, Nablus, a leading
