| Israel warns the world......George Will - syndicated columnist -
News Chief website Sun 15th |
To understand the man who will make it, begin with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's belief that stopping Iran's nuclear weapons program is integral to stopping the worldwide campaign to reverse 1948. It is, he says, a campaign to "put the Jew back to the status of a being that couldn't defend himself - a perfect victim."
Today's Middle East, he says, reflects two developments. One is the rise of Iran and militant Islam since the 1979 revolution, which led to al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah. The other development is the multiplying threat of missile warfare.
Now Israel faces a third threat, the campaign to delegitimize it in order to extinguish its capacity for self-defense. After two uniquely perilous millennia for Jews, the creation of Israel meant, Netanyahu says, "the capacity for self-defense restored to the Jewish people." But note, he says, the reflexive worldwide chorus of condemnation when Israel responded with force to rocket barrages from Gaza and from southern Lebanon. There is, he believes, a crystallizing consensus that "Israel is not allowed to exercise self-defense."
From 1948 through 1973, he says, enemies tried to "eliminate Israel by conventional warfare." Having failed, they tried to demoralize and paralyze Israel with suicide bombers and other terrorism. "We put up a fence," Netanyahu says. "Now they have rockets that go over the fence." Israel's military, which has stressed offense as a solution to the nation's lack of strategic depth, now stresses missile defense.
That, however, cannot cope with Hamas' tens of thousands of rockets in Gaza and Hezbollah's 60,000 in southern Lebanon. There, U.N. Resolution 1701, promulgated after the 2006 war, has been predictably farcical. This was supposed to inhibit the arming of Hezbollah and prevent its operations south of the Litani River. Since 2006, Hezbollah's rocket arsenal has tripled and its operations mock Resolution 1701. Hezbollah, learning from Hamas, now places rockets near schools and hospitals, certain that Israel's next response to indiscriminate aggression will turn the world media into a force multiplier for the aggressors.
Any Israeli self-defense anywhere is automatically judged "disproportionate." Israel knows this as it watches Iran.
Last year was Barack Obama's wasted year of "engaging" Iran. This led to sanctions that are unlikely to ever become sufficiently potent. With Russia, China and Turkey being uncooperative, Iran is hardly "isolated." The Iranian democracy movement probably cannot quickly achieve regime change. It took Solidarity 10 years to do so against a Polish regime less brutally repressive than Iran's.
Hillary Clinton's words about extending a "defense umbrella over the region" imply, to Israelis, fatalism about a nuclear Iran. As for deterrence working against a nuclear-armed regime steeped in an ideology of martyrdom, remember: In 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini said:
"We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world."
You say, that was long ago? Israel says, this is now:
Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, says Israel is the "enemy of God." Tehran, proclaiming that the Holocaust never happened and vowing to complete it, sent an ambassador to Poland who in 2006 wanted to measure the ovens at Auschwitz to prove them inadequate for genocide. Iran's former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is considered a "moderate" by people for whom believing is seeing, calls Israel a "one-bomb country."
If Iran were to "wipe the Zionist entity off the map," as it vows to do, it would, Netanyahu believes, achieve a regional "dominance not seen since Alexander." Netanyahu does not say Israel will, if necessary, act alone to prevent this. Or does he?
He says CIA Director Leon Panetta is "about right" in saying Iran can be a nuclear power in two years. He says 1948 meant this: "For the first time in 2,000 years, a sovereign Jewish people could defend itself against attack." And he says: "The tragic history of the powerlessness of our people explains why the Jewish people need a sovereign power of self-defense." If Israel strikes Iran, the world will not be able to say it was not warned.
Syndicated columnist George Will can be reached by e-mail at georgewill@washpost.com.
JERUSALEM Two photographs adorn the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Together they illuminate a portentous fact: No two leaders of democracies are less alike -- in life experiences, temperaments and political philosophies -- than Mr. Netanyahu, the former commando and fierce nationalist, and Barack Obama, the former professor and post-nationalist. One photograph is of Theodor Herzl, born 150 years ago. Dismayed by the eruption of anti-Semitism in France during the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the 19th century, Herzl became Zionism's founding father. Long before the Holocaust, he concluded that Jews could find safety only in a national homeland. The other photograph is of Winston Churchill, who considered himself "one of the authors" of Britain's embrace of Zionism. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 stated: "His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." Beginning in 1923, Britain would govern Palestine under a League of Nations mandate. Mr. Netanyahu, his focus firmly on Iran, honors Churchill because he did not flinch from facts about gathering storms. Mr. Obama returned to the British Embassy in Washington the bust of Churchill that was in the Oval Office when he got there. Mr. Obama's 2009 speech in Cairo, courting the Arab world, may have had measurable benefits, although the metric proving this remains mysterious. The speech -- made during a trip when Mr. Obama visited Cairo and Riyadh but not here -- certainly subtracted from his standing in Israel. In it, he acknowledged Israel as, in part, a response to Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. Then, with what many Israelis considered a deeply offensive exercise of moral equivalence, he said: "On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people -- Muslims and Christians -- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland." On the other hand? "I," says Moshe Yaalon, "was shocked by the Cairo speech," which he thinks proved that "this White House is very different." Mr. Yaalon, former head of military intelligence and chief of the general staff, currently strategic affairs minister, tartly asks, "If Palestinians are victims, who are the victimizers?" The Cairo speech came 10 months after Mr. Obama's Berlin speech in which he declared himself a "citizen of the world." That was an oxymoronic boast, given that citizenship connotes allegiance to a particular polity, its laws and political processes. But the boast resonated in Europe. The European Union was born from the flight of Europe's elites from what terrifies them -- Europeans. The first Thirty Years' War ended in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia, which ratified the system of nation-states. The second Thirty Years' War, which ended in 1945, convinced European elites that the continent's nearly fatal disease was nationalism, the cure for which must be the steady attenuation of nationalities. Hence the high value placed on "pooling" sovereignty, never mind the cost in diminished self-government. Israel, with its deep sense of nationhood, is beyond unintelligible to such Europeans; it is a stench in their nostrils. Transnational progressivism is, as much as welfare state social democracy, an element of European politics that American progressives will emulate as much as American politics will permit. It is perverse that the European Union, a semi-fictional political entity, serves -- with the United States, the reliably anti-Israel U.N., and Russia -- as part of the "quartet" that supposedly will broker peace in our time between Israel and the Palestinians. Arguably the most left-wing administration in American history is trying to knead and soften the most right-wing coalition in Israel's history. The former shows no understanding of the latter, which thinks it understands the former all too well. The prime minister honors Churchill, who spoke of "the confirmed unteachability of mankind." Nevertheless, a display case in Mr. Netanyahu's office could teach the Obama administration something about this leader. It contains a small signet stone that was part of a ring found near the Western Wall. It is about 2,800 years old -- 200 years younger than Jerusalem's role as the Jewish people's capital. The ring was the seal of a Jewish official, whose name is inscribed on it: Netanyahu. No one is less a transnational progressive, less a post-nationalist, than Binyamin Netanyahu, whose first name is that of a son of Jacob, who lived perhaps 4,000 years ago. Mr. Netanyahu, who no one ever called cuddly, once said to a U.S. diplomat 10 words that should warn U.S. policy makers who hope to make him malleable: "You live in Chevy Chase. Don't play with our future."
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10224/1079388-109.stm#ixzz0wlRchjvb
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