Barak A Battered Wife? Hardly.

I read this article when it was published at the end of June, but didn't have a chance to blog on it until now. Yisrael Beiteinu Minister Uzi Landau stated that Defense Minister Ehud Barak suffers from "battered woman syndrome."

"Defense Minister Ehud Barak brought us the retreat from Lebanon, supported the Disengagement in Gaza and the failure of the Cast Lead operation that strengthened Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza,” Landau said, “and now he offers additional future retreats.” He was referring to Barak's statements that he was proud of the IDF's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 and that Israel would need to make additional unilateral withdrawals.

"This reminds me of a battered woman who, instead of confronting her batterer, asks herself again and again where else she needs to give in,” Landau said.

“It is unthinkable that every minister from the Labor party is conducting his own private policy,” Landau told reporters at the 14th Cleantech exhibition in Tel Aviv. “Maybe it is time to find out where the Palestinians need to give in on something, in order to bring about a diplomatic agreement.”

This is an apt description, but it is not entirely accurate. What Barak suffers from is in fact Stockholm Syndrome, as does most of the dwindling Israeli Left. Israel has been held hostage by the hostility and terror of the Falacstinians for so long that they have come to identify with their captors; sympathizing with their "cause," accepting their narrative lie that Judea and Samaria are Falacstinian when it is not, and that the Jews are occupiers when in fact it is the Arabs who are the occupiers.

They believe this so fully and so entirely that they are not only destroying Jewish homes and synagogues, condoning the police and Yassam's brutal use of violence against unarmed Jewish protestors, they leave their fellow Jews unprotected against their hostile Arab neighbors, who attempt to murder them at every available opportunity, which is becoming increasingly easy as Bibi and Barak remove Yesha security to make Obiedobey happy in the hopes that they can maintain their power over a country the White House resident wants destroyed.

Witness the violence wrought against Jews by Jews. In this, the 9 days leading to Tisha b'Av, marking the destruction of both of the Holy Temples in Jerusalem, we must ask ourselves, what hope and trust can we place in people like Barak who order this kind of brutality against his own people, keeping in mind he did so out of his desire to placate and please the "president" of the United States, and his hatred against those who love the G-d of Israel.

It is not out of bounds to suggest that beatings taken by Israeli soldiers in the flotilla raid are perhaps some spiritual recompense for what happened at Amona and elsewhere. It is against Torah for Jews to beat, trample, maim, and evict other Jews. There is a price to be paid for it. We gave up land in 2005 and got rockets. We signed the Oslo accords, gave up Jewish control of our lands and got more than 1500 dead Israelis. Barak withdrew from south Lebanon and rockets rained down on the Galil. No Jewish blood should be shed on account of peace gestures made to the murderers who want us all dead.

Barak is not the battered woman. He is in fact the batterer. The question is how long will the battered residents of Judea and Samaria take the abuse? When the Romans marched on Jerusalem, Jews were slaughtering each other in the streets rather than uniting against the common enemy. If Klal Yisrael does not stand up and end this how will we defend ourselves when the next worldwide war against us begins in earnest? HaKadosh Borachu blesses us with nissim when we merit them. When the government of the Jewish state attacks its own the only merit is our resistance, and our desire to not only stay on the land, but drive our enemies from it.

Perhaps the tide is turning.