All people, Jews or gentiles, who dare not defend themselves when they know they are in the right, who submit to punishment not because of what they have done but because of who they are, are already dead by their own decision; and whether or not they survive physically depends on chance. If circumstances are not favorable, they end up in gas chambers. Bruno Bettelheim, Freud's Vienna and Other Essays

Bettelheim, like the Greek poet Homer, understands that the force that does not kill — that does not kill just yet — can turn a human being into stone, into a thing, while it is still alive. Merely hanging ominously over the head of the vulnerable creature it can choose to kill at any moment, poised portentuously to destroy breath in what it has allowed, if only for a few more moments, to breathe, this force makes a mockery of the fragile life it intends to consume. The human being that stands helplessly before this force has effectively become a corpse before any lethal assault is even launched.

Israel, now divided and manipulated by a largely American-drawn "Road Map," is potentially this human being writ large. Called yet again by the United States and others to throw itself upon the tender mercies of sworn Arab-Islamic enemies, the Jewish State faces a very basic choice. It can accept an immutably-genocidal Palestinian state carved out of its own still-living national body, or it can correctly affirm its incontestable obligation to endure. Should the Sharon Government accept the current "Road Map" to a mythical two-state Solution, it would already lie diminished, waiting meekly for an easily imagined collective death without Jewish honor or dignified remorse. Almost alone among the nations, such a suppliant state would neither quiver nor tremble, despite its cartographically obvious march toward oblivion. Even today, even after Oslo, the official Palestinian Authority (PA) map of "Palestine" includes all of Israel. There are no two-states on the PA maps; only one. There is no plan for coexistence with Israel in PA doctrine; only continuation of a longstanding "phased plan" for "liberation."

One should expect, after Oslo, that Israel would betray itself no more. Under Israel's suicidal Oslo agreements with the Palestinian Authority, one should recall, successive Israeli governments received only bloody spasms of terror in exchange for substantial territorial surrenders. Under Oslo, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu and Barak deferred shamelessly and repeatedly to those murderous Palestinians who pledged openly to "Slaughter the Jews." Offering endless entreaties on their knees, Oslo-era Prime Ministers — most disgracefully, of course, Shimon Peres — argued arrogantly that Israel's codified capitulations would ultimately bring "peace." Instead, in an irony so monstrous that it is psychologically unbearable, Israel was preparing to become, by its own deformed hand, another Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

When Priam enters the tent of Achilles, stops, clasps Achilles' knees, and kisses his hands, he has already reduced himself to a hapless and unworthy victim, one to be disposed of without ceremony and in very short order. Realizing this, a gracious Achilles takes the old man's arm, pushing him away. As long as he was clasping Achilles' knees, Priam was an inert object. Only by lifting him up off his kness could Achilles restore him to a position of self-respect and to a living manhood.

Here Israel and Priam part company. Israel's many enemies, animated by Jihad, will not act in the honorable manner of Achilles. Their aim is not the gracious revitalization of a religiously despised adversary, but rather the "liquidation" (actual term used frequently in Arab publications and speeches) of that inert object by means of genocide and war. It follows that the Illiad offers certain important lessons for Jerusalem, but that these lessons must be based upon a fully candid appraisal of Israel's foes.

For whatever reasons, Israel — under Oslo — came to accept a craven view of itself that was spawned not in Jerusalem or Hebron, but in Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, Teheran, Jericho and Gaza. Degraded and debased, this was the view not of a strong and powerful Jewish people, determined to remain alive in its own land, but of a conspicuous corpse-in-waiting, ingathered from exile only to make its seemingly relentless disappearance easier to inflict. It goes without saying that large majorities of courageous Israelis had always fought bitterly against such an intolerable view — against the vision of Israel's inexcusably pathological "Peace Camp" — but it was usually the operative national image nonetheless. After Auschwitz, after Belsen, after Warsaw, after Lodz, could there have ever been any more hideous expression of Jewish self-loathing than the insistent official Israeli tolerance of Palestinian terror?

What had gone wrong? In one very insightful analysis, the answer lay in Israel's "psyche of the abused." Here, Dr. Kenneth Levin, a prominent psychiatrist, likened Israeli behavior to that of an abused child. Distorting its past to conform with enemy and "post-Zionist" views of Jewish original sin, much of Israel believed — especially in its persisting acceptance of Oslo — that it was responsible for Arab terrorism and Islamic holy war. Such belief, paralleling the beliefs of the abused child, would bring it to utopia. What was forgotten here is that utopia, as Thomas More instructed, means "nowhere."

Writing earlier about Israel under Oslo, the Israeli novelist Aharon Megged noted: "We have witnessed a phenomenon which probably has no parallel in history; an emotional and moral identification by the majority of Israel's intelligentsia with people openly committed to our annihilation." This identification had created a Jewish body politic that was disarming itself while it was arming its enemies, hastening the onset of existential harms even while it pursued other forms of military preparedness. There was a way out of this humiliating and fateful dilemma, but it would have had to go far beyond the standard suggestions of policy and leadership changes. It was a way that required, more than anything else, an upright posture for the nation, a posture that precludes clasping the enemy's knees and kissing his hands. It was a way of dignity, not of supplication. It was a way of staying alive, of avoiding not only death, but also the shameless death-in-life that could now cripple Israel even more completely as it wrestles strenuously with the latest "Road Map."