The Moloch of Peace

"Human history has known many idols, in modern history their place has been taken by Isms, Communism, Socialism, Humanism; which have been increasingly abandoned by their apologists. The new modern idol is the idea of Peace. This perverse peace has become a bloodthirsty Moloch demanding constantly new human sacrifices.

The government of Israel which has refused to walk in the one true path, the path of the Creator, has become a criminal government. Olmert has not yet had enough human sacrifices brought on the altar of peace. Against everything he has gone to a meeting in Annapolis threatening to turn all of Israel into a sacrifice to the Moloch of peace."

Rabbi Dov Lior of Hevron

Nachman Zoldan, the father of Pre-Annapolis terror victim Ido Zoldan, completed his seven days of mourning by visiting Rabbi Ovadya Yosef to ask him to withdraw from the government. While thousands of people went to Homesh to commemorate his son at the ruins of a home built by Ido Zoldan, Nachman Zoldan went straight from sitting Shiva to try and persuade Rabbi Ovadya Yosef to withdraw from Olmert's coalition and preserve Yerushalayim and Israel.

Nachman Zoldan's meeting with Rabbi Ovadya Yosef was arranged by Rabbi Havlan of Shas' Council of Torah Sages who has been strongly pushing for Shas to leave the Olmert coalition. Will even that move Rabbi Ovadya Yosef's heart or will the clarion call of the shekels Shas is due to receive in the budget drown out a father's grief?

In the aftermath Rabbi Ovadya Yosef has responded to yet another delegation of Rabbis by promising to leave the coalition if a decision is made to split Yerushalayim. By which point of course it will be too late and Israel will have committed itself to an agreement that the US and Europe will do its best to hold us to. And when that comes, Shas will no doubt have another excuses.

When exactly would Shas quit? According to a source in Shas, the formulation looks something like this.

"True, Shas is a right-wing party," the source said, "and there's no question that our street doesn't like discussing Jerusalem, but to quit? Certainly not. Even if Olmert were to raise the topic of Jerusalem at the summit, Shas wouldn't resign from the coalition. We'd vote against it in the cabinet and the Knesset, but we'd stay, and I say that after many conversations I've had with Rabbi Ovadia (Yosef, the Shas movement's spiritual leader)," the source said.

"We would quit over substance, not declarations. Who can tell us when to resign? Lieberman? Who is he to determine things for us? We'd wait for the negotiations and if, toward their culmination, we see that Jerusalem is to be divided, then I assume we'd quit. But a paper read at a conference, when everybody knows it is unlikely to be carried out, is no reason to leave, and we have no intention of leaving," he said.

"The battle over allocations in the 2008 budget is no less important to us than the core issues," he says. "To this day, Shas has had no significant social victories. Labor can claim the minimum wage, the Pensioners Party has the old-age allowances, but what does Shas have to show to its supporters? We'll fix that in the next budget."

The burned out hulk of Yerushalayim apparently, on top of the hundreds murdered after Oslo. A monument of Shekels heaped to the sky on the graves of the crippled and the dead. Surely a victory for the voters of Shas.

To get a measure of the arrogance, there is the response of Shlomo Benziri.

"People come up to me and ask me what Shas is still doing in the coalition," said Benizri. "I manage to shut them up pretty quickly, though." Benizri explains to his retractors that Shas is led by Sephardi Jewry's eminent halachic authority, who has decided that, for the time being, there is no reason to leave the government."

But then it is a question of what one worships, God or the Moloch of Peace? In the name of the Moloch of Peace, the liberal and even conservative parties of Europe, America and Israel have shed their own nation's blood and seek to shed Israel's blood.

Some go to worship the Moloch of Peace in exchange for perceived profit, others because they have lost all faith in anything but surrender and bargaining at the table to cut off an arm instead of an arm and a leg.

The ceremonies of the Moloch of Peace are the conferences, the slit throat is the handshake but the blood that flows is no metaphor at all.