Paul Eidelberg, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, detects the ideas behind the Israeli unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. He writes:
It began when the leaders of Israel, superficially good men, began to consort with profoundly bad men. I am referring to Israeli prime ministers, the leaders of a reputed democracyâ??ostensibly a good regimeâ??began to negotiate publicly with Arab tyrants, i.e., the rulers of bad regimesâ??and did so in quest of â??peace.â?
By negotiating with bad men, Israeli prime ministers dignified them and thereby obscured the difference between just and unjust regimes. In other words, Israeli prime ministers initiated what is now called â??moral equivalence.â? By so doing, they morally disarmed their own people. They lowered their peopleâ??s moral standards as well as their peopleâ??s sense of honor.
In an op-ed at the onset of the withdrawal process two years ago, Robert Tracinski observed:
Justice demands that one judge rationally the character and conduct of those one deals with, rewarding the good and punishing the evil. To insist on diplomacy as an unqualified virtue–regardless of the nature and conduct of one’s foe–does not save lives or resolve conflicts; it merely rewards and emboldens the aggressors.
As Ayn Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged, “In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.”