Israel’s Destruction Is Arabs’ Only Goal : The existence of a Jewish state, not the absence of a Palestinian one, is the issue. And it’s the West’s values that are at stake.

This past week thousands of Palestinian Arabs who fervently want Israel extinguished rained stones on Jews worshiping at the Western Wall. Israeli police responded with tear gas, with rubber bullets, and finally with live ammunition, and 19 Palestinians died.

Then the U.N. Security Council condemned Israel for the “excessive” response. The only effect on Israel will be to further embitter its peace movement, for the condemnation gives new meaning to the word hypocrisy.

In that council sit nations every one of which condemned Israel for destroying the Iraqi nuclear weapons plant in 1982. In that council sit, among others, the Chinese butchers of Tian An Men Square, the totalitarian state of Cuba, and the two greatest suppliers of weapons to Iraq--France and the Soviet Union. And the condemnation was led by an American Administration that killed 50 to 100 times more civilians solely in order to remove a leader in Panama whom we loathed--not in order to repel a mob of thousands stoning people at prayer.

But it is not these nations’ hypocrisy alone that is most dangerous; it is their lack of perspective.

Here is Israel, a state the size of New Jersey, surrounded by countries that are morally equivalent to Nazism and Stalinism. Here is a state that, a generation after the gas chambers, has to fit its children with gas masks because hundreds of millions of Arabs hate the Jewish state far more than they care for fellow Arabs. The torture chambers of Iraq and Kuwait, and the obliteration of an Arab country, mean nothing to Arabs; it is the existence of a tiny Jewish state in their midst that gives their lives and deaths meaning.

The Arab world, once a beacon of intellectual and religious thought, is today a caldron of hate and cruelty. It is the Jews’ miserable luck (as it was the miserable luck of Lebanese Christians who once led the only free Arab country) to be stranded in this moral desert.

If Israel were situated anywhere else, it would be seen for what it is: one of the world’s most humane and energetic democracies. With its kibbutzim-- the only non-coercive social, economic and sexual egalitarianism in the world--its hospitals and medical research, its desert irrigation and its cultural life, Israel would be regarded as the Prophets’ “light unto the nations.”

Instead it has had to fight, and fight, and fight again--not for land that it never sought, not in wars it never wanted. Just to live.

Having viewed the West Bank as a moral cancer in Israel’s midst, I am a Jew who since 1967 has wanted Israel to rid itself of this land for anything approaching real peace. But I have never deluded myself about the moral chasm that separates Israel from its Arab and Muslim enemies.

I have never deluded myself that Palestinian self-determination prevents Arab-Israeli peace, since one never saw a single Palestinian flag, never once heard about the existence of a Palestinian nation, when the entire West Bank was under Arab control before 1967.

And I have never forgotten the unique role that Israel plays in the world--albeit involuntarily and perhaps unwittingly. For 3,000 years, ever since bringing the Ten Commandments and the Prophetic message to humankind, the Jewish people have been the world’s miner’s canaries: When Jews are killed, non-Jews with good values discover that there are noxious moral fumes about that will soon kill them, too.

When there was a Hitler, the West ignored Nazism; his anti-Semitism was unfortunate for the Jews but irrelevant to non-Jews. Had the West understood that Jew-hatred is hatred of freedom, hatred of humanism, hatred of ethical monotheism, and had therefore confronted Hitler sooner, tens of millions of innocent non-Jews would have not have been slaughtered in World War II. So, too, had the West not dismissed Moammar Kadafi and Palestinian terrorism as “anti-Zionist” alone, and understood that “anti-Zionism” is simply the post-Holocaust expression of anti-Semitism, innumerable non-Jewish victims of Arab terrorism would have been spared. Indeed, Kuwait might now still be a living state.

It isn’t Yitzhak Shamir who causes the hatred. Israel-haters wanted Israel dead when it was governed by David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir. Nor is it the West Bank; Israel-haters wanted Israel dead when Israel had no West Bank. And it isn’t Israel’s reactions to the intifada; more Palestinians were killed by King Hussein in September, 1970, than by Israel in 42 years.

The cause of the hatred is the mere existence of the Jewish state, a state that embodies Western democratic and humanistic values in the midst of Arabs and Muslims who hate democracy and the West.

Those are the issues. The rest is commentary.

If the West learns this, and confronts the post-Communist threat to its highest values--that of the Arab world and Muslim fundamentalism--it will save itself great suffering later. If not, once again, Jewish children will be gassed, but they will not be the only ones.