Tag Archives: Egypt

Guide to the perplexed

Israel’s leaders are reportedly concerning themselves with one question today. Are there any circumstances in which US President Barack Obama will order the US military to strike Iran’s nuclear installations before Iran develops a nuclear arsenal? 
From Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu down the line, Israel’s leaders reportedly raise this question with just about everyone they come into contact with. If this is true, then the time has come to end our leaders’ suspense. 
The answer is no. 
To all intents and purposes, there are no circumstances in which Obama would order an attack on Iran’s nuclear installations to prevent Iran from developing and fielding nuclear weapons. Exceptions to this statement fall into two categories. Either they are so implausible that they are operationally irrelevant, or they are so contingent on other factors that they would doom any US attack to failure. 
Evidence for this conclusion is found in every aspect of Obama’s foreign policy. But to prove it, it is sufficient to point out point three aspects of his policies.
First of all, Obama’s refuses to recognize that an Iranian nuclear arsenal constitutes a clear and present danger to US national security. Obama’s discussions of the perils of a nuclear Iran are limited to his acknowledgement that such an arsenal will provoke a regional nuclear arms race. This is certainly true. But then that arms race has already begun. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, the UAE, and Kuwait have all announced their intentions to build nuclear reactors. In some cases they have signed deals with foreign countries to build such facilities.
And yet, while a nuclear arms race in the Middle East is bad, it is far from the worst aspect of Iran’s nuclear program for America. America has two paramount strategic interests in the Middle East. First, the US requires the smooth flow of inexpensive petroleum products from the Persian Gulf to global oil markets. Second, the US requires the capacity to project its force in the region to defend its own territory from global jihadists. 
Both of these interests are imperiled by the Iranian nuclear program. If the US is not willing to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it will lose all credibility as a strategic ally to the Sunni Arab states in the area. For instance, from a Saudi perspective, a US that is unwilling to prevent the ayatollahs from fielding nuclear weapons is of no more use to the kingdom than Britain or China or France. It is just another oil consuming country. The same goes for the rest of the states in the Gulf and in the region.
The Arab loss of faith in US security guarantees will cause them to deny basing rights to US forces in their territories. It will also likely lead them to bow to Iranian will on oil price setting through supply cutbacks. In light of this, the Iranian nuclear program constitutes the greatest threat ever to US superpower status in the region and to the wellbeing of the US economy. 
Then there is the direct threat that Iran’s nuclear program constitutes for US national security. This threat grows larger by the day as Iran’s web of strategic alliances in Latin America expands unchallenged by the US. Today Iran enjoys military alliances with Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Brazil and Bolivia. 
As former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton has argued, at least the Soviets were atheists. Atheists of course, are in no hurry to die, since death can bring no rewards in a world to come. Iran’s leaders are apocalyptic jihadists. Given Iran’s Latin American alliances and Iran’s own progress towards intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities, the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran makes the Cuban missile crisis look like a walk in the park.
In the face of this grave and gathering threat, Obama cancelled plans to deploy anti-ballistic missile shields in Poland and the Czech Republic. He has shunned the pro-American Honduran and Colombian governments in favor of Nicaragua and Venezuela. He has welcomed Brazil’s anti-American president to the White House. He cancelled the F-22. 
THE FACT that Obama fails to recognize the danger an Iranian nuclear arsenal poses to the US does not in and of itself prove that Obama would not attack Iran’s nuclear installations. After all, the US has fought many wars and launched countless campaigns in its history against foes that posed no direct threat to the US. In most of these cases, the US has fought on behalf of its allies. 
In the case of Iran’s nuclear weapons programs, because the Iranians have openly placed Israel first on their nuclear targeting list, US debate about Iran’s nuclear program has been anchored around the issue of Israel’s national security. Should the US attack Iran’s nuclear installations in order to defend Israel? 
Given the distorted manner in which the debate has been framed, the answer to that question hinges on Obama’s view of Israel. Recent moves by Obama and his advisors make clear that Obama takes a dim view of Israel. He views Israel neither as a credible ally nor a credible democracy. 
First there is the character of current US military assistance to Israel and to its neighbors. In recent months, the Obama administration has loudly announced its intentions to continue its joint work with Israel towards the development and deployment of defensive anti-missile shields. Two things about these programs are notable. First, they are joint initiatives. Just as Israel gains US financing, the US gains Israeli technology that it would otherwise lack. 
Second, as Globes reported last week, the Obama has actually scaled back US funding for these programs. For instance, funding for the Arrow 3 anti-ballistic missile program – intended to serve as Israel’s primary defensive system against Iranian ballistic missiles — was cut by $50 million. 
The defensive character of all of these programs signals an absence of US support for maintaining Israel’s capacity to preemptively strike its enemies. When the Pentagon’s refusal to permit Israel to install its own avionics systems on the next generation F-35 warplanes is added to the mix, it is difficult to make the argument that the US supports Israel’s qualitative edge over its enemies in any tangible way.
An assessment that the US has abandoned its commitment to Israel’s qualitative edge is strengthened by the administration’s announcement this week of its plan to sell Saudi Arabia scores of F-15 and F-16 fighter jets for an estimated $30 billion. While the US has pledged to remove systems from the Saudi aircraft that pose direct threats to Israel, once those jets arrive in the kingdom, the Saudis will be able to do whatever they want with them. If one adds to this equation the reduced regional stature of the US in an Iranian nuclear age, it is clear that these guarantees have little meaning. 
Obama’s moves to reduce Israel’s offensive capacity and slow its acquisition of defensive systems goes hand in hand with his rejection of Israel’s right to self-defense and dismissive attitude towards Israel’s rule of law. These positions have been starkly demonstrated in his administration’s treatment of Israel in the wake of the IDF’s takeover of the Turkish-Hamas Mavi Marmara terror ship on May 31. 
In the face of that blatant display of Turkish aggression against Israel as it maintained its lawful maritime blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza’s coastline, Obama sided with Turkey and Hamas against Israel. Obama demanded that Israel investigate its handling of the incident. Moreover, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed that Israel was incapable of credibly investigating itself and so required Israel to add non-Israeli members to its investigative committee. 
Yet even Israel’s acceptance of this US humiliation was insufficient for Obama. His UN envoy Susan Rice then demanded that Israel accept a UN investigative panel that is charged with checking to see if the Israeli committee has done its job. And if the UN panel rejects the Israeli commission’s findings, it is empowered to begin its own investigation. 
As to the UN, as former Obama and Clinton administration officials Ray Takeyh and Steven Simon explained in an article in the Washington Post last week, Obama’s national security strategy effectively revolves around subordinating US national security policy to the UN Security Council. In the remote scenario that Obama decided to use force against Iran, his subservience to the UN would rule out any possibility of a surprise attack. 
 Although in theory the US military’s capacity to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities is much greater than Israel’s, given its practical inability to launch a surprise attack, in practice it may be much smaller. 
ALL OF these factors constitute overwhelming evidence that there are no conceivable circumstances under which Obama would order a US strike on Iran’s nuclear installations to forestall Iran’s development of nuclear weapons. And this reality should lead Israel’s leaders to three separate conclusions. 
First, and most urgently, Israel must attack Iran’s nuclear installations. Iran’s nuclear ambitions must be set back at least until 2017, the latest date at which a new — and hopefully more rational — US administration will certainly be in office. 
Second, given the fact that the US will not take action against Iran’s nuclear installations, there is no reason for Israel to capitulate to US pressure on lesser issues. The Obama administration has nothing to offer Israel on this most important threat and so Israel should not do anything to strengthen its position. Among other things, this conclusion has clear implications for Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, Israel’s future responses to Lebanese aggression, as well as for Israel’s continued cooperation with the UN probes of the Turkish-Hamas terror ship. 
Finally, Obama’s behavior is a clear indication that Israel was wrong to allow itself to become militarily dependent on US military platforms. Former defense minister Moshe Arens wrote recently that Israel should strongly consider abandoning plans to purchase the F-35 and restore the scrapped Lavi jetfighter to active development. Arens suggested that in doing so, Israel may find willing collaborators in the Indians, the French and even the Russians. 
No, the US has not become Israel’s enemy – although the Obama administration has certainly struck an adversarial chord. Polling data suggests that most Americans disagree with Obama’s treatment of Israel and recognize that Iran is a threat to the US.
 
But polls aside, the answer to Israel’s desperate queries is that it is up to us. If the Obama administration teaches us anything, it teaches us that we must rely first and foremost on ourselves. 
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Change we must believe in

Change has come to the Middle East. Over the past several weeks, multiple press reports indicate that Turkey is collaborating militarily with Syria in a campaign against the Kurds of Syria, Iraq and Turkey.
Turkey is a member of NATO. It fields the Western world’s top weapons systems.
Syria is Iran’s junior partner. It is a state sponsor of multiple terrorist organizations and a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction.
Last September, as Turkey’s Islamist government escalated its anti-Israel rhetoric, Ankara and Damascus signed a slew of economic and diplomatic agreements. As Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu made clear at the time, Turkey was using those agreements as a way to forge close alliances not only with Syria, but with Iran.
"We may establish similar mechanisms with Iran and other mechanisms. We want our relationship with our neighbors to turn into maximum cooperation via the principle of zero problems," Davutoglu proclaimed.
And now those agreements have reportedly paved the way to military cooperation. Syrian President Bashar Assad has visited Istanbul twice in the past month and then two weeks ago, on the Kurdish New Year, Syrian forces launched an operation against Kurdish population centers throughout the country.
On Wednesday, Al-Arabiya reported that hundreds of Kurds have been killed in recent weeks.
The Syrian government media claim that 11 Kurds have been killed.
There are conflicting reports as well about the number of Kurds who have been arrested since the onslaught began. Kurdish sources say 630 have been arrested. The Turkish media claims 400 Kurds have been arrested by Syrian security forces.
Al-Arabiya also claimed that the Syrian campaign is being supported by the Turkish military.
Turkish military advisers are reportedly using the same intelligence tool for tracking Kurds in Syria as they have used against the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq: Israeli-made Heron unmanned aerial vehicles.
Even if the Al-Arabiya report is untrue, and Turkey is not currently using Israeli-manufactured weapons in the service of Syria, the very fact that Syria has military cooperation of any kind with Turkey is dangerous for Israel. Over the past 20 years, as its alliance with Turkey expanded, Israel sold Turkey some of the most sensitive intelligence- gathering systems and other weapons platforms it has developed. With Turkey’s rapid integration into the Iranian axis, Israel must now assume that if Turkey is not currently sharing those Israeli military and intelligence technologies and tools with its enemies, Ankara is likely to share them with Israel’s enemies in the future.
OBVIOUSLY, THE least Israel could be expected to do in this situation is to cut off all military ties to Turkey. But amazingly and distressingly, Israel’s leaders seem not to have recognized this. To the contrary, Israel is scheduled to deliver four additional Heron drones to Turkey next month.
Even more discouragingly, both the statements and actions of senior officials lead to the conclusion that our leaders still embrace the delusion that all is not lost with Turkey. Speaking to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee earlier this month, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.- Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi told lawmakers, "What happens in Turkey is not always done with the agreement of the Turkish military. Relations with the Turkish army are important and they need to be preserved. I am personally in touch with the Turkish chief of staff."
As Turkish columnist Abdullah Bozkurt wrote last week in Today’s Zaman, Ashkenazi’s claim that there is a distinction between Turkish government policies and Turkish military policies is "simply wishful thinking and do[es] not correspond with the hard facts on the ground."
Bozkurt explained, "Ashkenazi may be misreading the signals based on a personal relationship he has built with outgoing Turkish military Chief of General Staff Gen. Ilker Basbug. The force commanders are much more worried about the rise in terror in the southeastern part of the country, and pretty much occupied with the legal problems confronting them after some of their officers, including high-ranking ones, were accused of illegal activities. The last thing the top brass wants is to give an impression that they are cozying up with Israelis…"
As described by Michael Rubin in the current issue of Commentary, those "legal problems" Bozkurt referred to are part of a government campaign to crush Turkey’s secular establishment.
As the constitutionally appointed guarantors of Turkey’s secular republic, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamist government has targeted the military high command for destruction.
Two years ago, a state prosecutor indicted 86 senior Turkish figures including retired generals, prominent journalists, professors and other pillars of Turkey’s former secular leadership for supposedly plotting a coup against the Islamist regime.
By all accounts the 2,455-page indictment was frivolous. But its impact on Turkey’s once allpowerful military has been dramatic.
As Rubin writes, "Bashed from the religious Right and the progressive Left, the Turkish military is a shadow of its former self. The current generation of generals is out of touch with Turkish society and, perhaps, their own junior officers. Like frogs who fail to jump from a pot slowly brought to a boil, the Turkish General Staff lost its opportunity to exercise its constitutional duties."
And yet, rather than come to terms with this situation, and work to minimize the dangers that an Iranian- and Syrian-allied Turkey poses, Israel’s government and our senior military leaders are still trying to bring the alliance with Turkey back from the dead. Last month’s disastrous "top secret" meeting between Industry, Trade and Labor Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and Davutoglu is case in point.
Far from ameliorating the situation, these sorts of gambits only compound the damage. By denying the truth that Turkey has joined the enemy camp, Israel provides Turkey with credibility it patently does not deserve. Israel also fails to take diplomatic and other steps to minimize the threat posed by the NATO member in the Iranian axis.
OUR LEADERS’ apparent aversion to accepting that our alliance with Turkey has ended is troubling not only for what it tells us about the government’s ability to craft policies relevant to the challenges now facing us from Turkey. It bespeaks a general difficulty that plagues our top echelons in contending with harsh and unwanted change.
Take Egypt for example. Over the past week, a number of reports were published about the approaching end of the Mubarak era. The Washington Times reported that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is terminally ill and likely will die within the year. The Economist featured a 15- page retrospective on the Mubarak era in advance of its expected conclusion.
There are many differences between the situation in Egypt today and the situation that existed in Turkey before the Islamists took over in 2002.
For instance, unlike Turkey, Egypt has never been Israel’s strategic ally. In recent years however, Egypt’s interests have converged with Israel’s regarding the threat posed by Iran and its terror proxies Hizbullah and Hamas – the Palestinian branch of the Mubarak regime’s nemesis, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. These shared interests have paved the way for security cooperation between the two countries on several issues.
All of this is liable to change after Mubarak exits the stage. In all likelihood the Muslim Brotherhood will have greater influence and power than it enjoys today. And this means that a successor regime in Egypt will likely have closer ties to the Iranian axis. Despite the Sunni-Shi’ite split, joined by a common enmity toward the Mubarak regime, the Muslim Brotherhood has strengthened its ties to Iran and Hizbullah of late.
Recognizing the shifting winds, presidential hopefuls are cultivating ties with the Brotherhood.
For instance, former International Atomic Energy Agency chief and current Egyptian presidential hopeful Mohamed El-Baradei has been wooing the Brotherhood for months. And in recent weeks, they have been getting on his bandwagon. Apparently, El-Baradei’s support for Iran’s nuclear program won him credibility with the jihadist group even though he is not an Islamic fanatic.
If and when the Brotherhood gains power and influence in Egypt, it is likely that Egypt will begin sponsoring the likes of Hamas, al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations. And the more powerful the Brotherhood becomes in Egypt, the more likely it is that Egypt will abrogate its peace treaty with Israel.
It is due to that peace treaty that today Egypt fields a conventional military force armed with sophisticated US weaponry. The Egyptian military that Israel fought in four wars was armed with inferior Soviet weapons. Were Egypt to abrogate the treaty, a conventional war between Egypt and Israel would become a tangible prospect for the first time since 1973.
Despite the flood of stories indicating that the end of the Mubarak era is upon us, publicly Israel’s leaders behave as though nothing is the matter. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s routine fawning pilgrimage to Mubarak this week seemed to demonstrate that our leaders are not thinking about the storm that is brewing just over the horizon in Cairo.
TURKEY’S TRANSFORMATION from friend to foe and the looming change in Egypt demonstrate important lessons that Israel’s leaders must take to heart. First, Israel has only a very limited capacity to influence events in neighboring countries.
What happened in Turkey has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with the fact that Erdogan and his government are Islamist revolutionaries. So, too, the changes that Egypt will undergo after Mubarak dies will have everything to do with the pathologies of Egyptian society and politics, and nothing to do with Israel. Our leaders must recognize this and exercise humility when they assess Israel’s options for contending with our neighbors.
Developments in both Turkey and Egypt are proof that in the Middle East there is no such thing as a permanent alliance. Everything is subject to change. Turkey once looked like a stable place. Its military was constitutionally empowered – and required – to safeguard the country as a secular democracy. But seven years into the AKP revolution the army cannot even defend itself.
So, too, for nearly 30 years Mubarak has ruled Egypt with an iron fist. But as Israel saw no distinction between Mubarak and Egypt, the hostile forces he repressed multiplied under his jackboot.
Once he is gone, they will rise to the surface once more.
Moving forward, Israel must learn to hedge its bets. Just because a government embraces Israel one day does not mean that its military should be given open access to Israeli military technology the next day. So, too, just because a regime is anti-Israel one day doesn’t mean that Israel cannot develop ties with it that are based on shared interests.
Whether it is pleasant or harsh, change is a fact of our lives. The side that copes best with change will be the side that prospers from it.
Our leaders must recognize this truth and shape their policies accordingly.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Alternatives to surrender

To the roaring cheers of the local media, on Sunday the Schalit family embarked on a cross-country march to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s residence. They set out two days after the fourth anniversary of IDF Sgt. Gilad Schalit’s captivity.
Outside their home in the North on Sunday, Gilad’s father Noam Schalit pledged not to return home without his son. The Schalit family intends to camp out outside of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s home until the government reunites them with Gilad.
For weeks the local media – and especially Ma’ariv and Yediot Ahronot – have portrayed the Schalit family’s trek to Netanyahu as a reenactment of Moses’ journey to Pharaoh. Like Pharaoh, the media insinuates that Netanyahu is evil because he refuses to free Gilad from bondage.
The only drawback to this dramatic, newspaper-selling story is that it is wrong. Gilad Schalit is not a hostage in Jerusalem. He is a hostage in Gaza. His captor is not Netanyahu. His captor is Hamas. 
And because the story is wrong, the media-organized cavalcade of ten thousand well intentioned Israelis is moving in the wrong direction. And not only is it going in the wrong direction, it is doing so at Gilad Schalit’s expense.
The truth that Yediot and Ma’ariv’s marketing departments ignore is that Schalit’s continued captivity is a function of Hamas’s growing strength. To bring him home, Israel shouldn’t release a thousand terrorists from prison. It shouldn’t strengthen Hamas.
To bring Gilad Schalit home a free man, Israel must weaken Hamas. And this is an eminently achievable goal. Gilad’s father Noam knows it is an achievable goal. That is why last week Noam Schalit was the most outspoken critic of Netanyahu’s decision to abandon Israel’s economic sanctions against Hamas-controlled Gaza. That is why over the past four years the Schalit family has staged countless protests against Israel’s massive and continuous assistance to Hamas-controlled Gaza.  
If anything positive is to come from this march, then when the Schalit family arrives in Jerusalem they should abandon the newspapers’ demand that Israel surrender to all of Hamas’s demands. They should acknowledge that doing so will only guarantee that more Israelis will be kidnapped and murdered by Hamas and its allies. 
If the Schalits wish to criticize the government, they should criticize Netanyahu and his government for the steps they have taken to strengthen Hamas. The Schalits should demand that the government reinstate and tighten Israel’s economic sanctions against Gaza. They should demand that Israel end its supply of electricity and gasoline to Gaza and take more effective action to block smuggling into Gaza through the tunnels along the Gaza-Egypt border. All of these actions will weaken Hamas, and so contribute to the prospect of Hamas being forced by the Gazans themselves to release Schalit to his family. 
ONE OF the important truths ignored by Israel’s pathological media is that Hamas and its Iranian sponsor are not all powerful. They are vulnerable to criticism from their own publics. And Israel is capable of fomenting such criticism. 
For example, the imprisoned terrorists whose release Hamas demands in exchange for releasing Schalit have consistently responded rationally to Israeli threats. The Knesset is slowly debating a bill that would worsen prison conditions of terrorists. And the terrorists are worried. Their worry provoked them to demand that Hamas be more forthcoming with Schalit. 
By the same token, were Israel to cut off electricity to Gaza – an act that is not merely lawful, but arguably required by international law – we could expect residents of Gaza to express a similarly rational demand to Hamas. That is, were Israel to weaken public support for Hamas, Hamas would be more likely to bow to Israel’s will. 
And if Hamas is vulnerable to public criticism, the Iranian regime is downright terrified of public criticism. Take the regime’s behavior in the wake of the Turkish-Hamas flotilla campaign. In the days that followed Israel’s bungled May 31 takeover of the Mavi Marmara terror ship, Iran announced it was sending two of its own ships to Gaza. Israel responded rationally and forthrightly. The government warned that any Iranian ship would be viewed as an enemy ship and Israel would respond in accordance with the rules of war. 
As Iran expert Michael Ledeen has argued repeatedly, the Iranian regime is terrified of getting the Iranian people angry over its radical foreign policy. In light of its precarious standing with its own public, Israel’s forthright threat of war brought the regime to its knees. 
Last Thursday Hossein Sheikholdslam, the Iranian regime functionary responsible for the Gaza-bound ships told the Iranian news service IRNA that plans to send the ships were scrapped because Israel "sent a letter to the United Nations saying that the presence of Iranian and Lebanese ships in the Gaza area will be considered a declaration of war on [Israel] and it will confront it." 
During the war with Iran’s Hizbullah proxy in 2006, thousands of Iranians demonstrated against Hizbullah. They demanded that the regime invest its money in the local economy and not in Hizbullah and the Palestinians. Were Israel to present Schalit as an Israeli victim of the Iranian regime, it could provoke a similar popular outcry against Iran’s support for Hamas.
  
The media-manipulated Schalits are not the only ones acting precisely against their own interests. The government is acting with similar madness in its relations with the Obama administration. Indeed, Netanyahu ended Israel’s lawful economic sanctions against Hamas-controlled Gaza, (sanctions that served, among other things as a bargaining chip for freeing Schalit), because the Obama administration placed overwhelming pressure on him to do so. 
Not wishing to let the Mavi Marmara crisis go to waste, US President Barack Obama has used it as a means to weaken Israel against Hamas. Obama announced that he is giving Hamas-controlled Gaza $400 million in US aid. He forced Netanyahu to end Israel’s economic sanctions against the illegal Hamas regime. And he continues to threaten to abandon US support for Israel at the UN. Moreover, according to remarks by a senior Hamas terrorist to the London-based al Quds al Arabi newspaper on Friday, the Obama administration maintains direct ties to the Hamas leadership in Syria.
   
When Netanyahu entered office last spring his desire to appease Obama was understandable. At the time, he was operating under the hope that perhaps Obama could be appeased into ending his onslaught against the Jewish state. But the events of the past year have made clear that Obama is unappeasable . Every concession Israel has made to Obama has merely whetted the US President’s appetite for more.
 
The policy implications of this state of affairs are clear. First, Israel must strive to weaken Obama. Since Israeli concessions to Obama strengthen him, Israel must first and foremost stop giving him concessions. 
Weakening Obama does not involve openly attacking him. It means Israel should act in a way that advances its interests and forces Obama to reconsider the desirability of his current foreign policy.
Regionally, Israel should make common cause with the Kurds of Iran, Iraq and Syria who are now being assaulted by Iran, Turkey and Syria. Doing so is not simply the moral thing to do. It weakens Iran, Syria and Turkey and demonstrates that Obama’s appeasement policies are harming those who love freedom and empowering those who hate it. 
By the same token, Israel should do everything it can to strengthen the Iranian Green movement. Every anti-regime action in Iran – regardless of its size – harms the regime and therefore helps Israel. And every anti-regime action in Iran exposes the moral depravity and strategic idiocy of Obama’s policy of appeasing the mullocracy.
As for the US domestic political realm, in Ambassador Michael Oren’s all but schizophrenic recent statements about the Obama administration’s policy towards Israel we may at last be witnessing an embrace of political sanity on the part of the government. For the past several months, Oren has acted as the Obama administration’s most energetic cheerleader to the US Jewish community. Oren has repeatedly and wrongly reassured US Jewish audiences that Obama is a great friend of Israel, that his Democratic Party remains loyal to the US-Israel alliance and that the Republicans are wrong to claim that there is a difference between the two major US political parties when it comes to supporting Israel. 
The pinnacle of Oren’s pro-Obama campaign came with his interview last week with the Jerusalem Post. There he brought all of these false and counter-productive claims into the public realm. Apparently Oren’s decision to make his adulation of the Obama administration public finally forced his bosses in Jerusalem to order him to cease, desist and do an about face. 
And so, last week, Oren told a closed audience of Israeli diplomats the truth. Under Obama, Oren whispered, there has been a "tectonic rift" in US relations with Israel. While some of Obama’s advisors are sympathetic to Israel, these advisors have no influence on Obama’s positions on Israel. No doubt recognizing how silly his about face made him look, Oren tried to deny his statements at the Foreign Ministry. But it is hard to imagine anyone will take him seriously. 
During his visit to the White House next week, Netanyahu should follow the path set by Oren’s quickly leaked remarks. Netanyahu should abstain from praising Obama for his friendship and speak instead about the fact that the US-Israel alliance is vital for both countries’ national security. 
NETANYAHU SHOULD insist on the right to call on questioners at his joint appearance with Obama. And he should use those questions and those appearances to discuss why Israel’s actions are not only legal and necessary for Israel, but vital for US national security. During his stay in the US, Netanyahu should discuss the global jihad, Islamic terrorism, the freedom loving Kurds and the freedom loving Iranian people every chance he gets. Indeed, he should create opportunities to discuss them.
Here we see a crucial point of convergence between the Schalit family march to Jerusalem and Netanyahu’s trip to Washington. To increase the effectiveness of their efforts on behalf of Gilad, ahead of Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, the marchers should split into two groups. 
The first group should continue to Jerusalem and demand that Israel take a firmer stand against Hamas. The second group should walk to Tel Aviv and camp out outside the US Embassy. There they should demand that the administration end its contacts with Hamas, end its pressure on the Israeli government to strengthen Hamas, cancel Obama’s plan to give an additional $400 million dollars in aid to Hamas and use the US’s position on the UN Security Council to condemn Turkey for its material support for Hamas. 
For too long, by allowing themselves to be led by our deranged media, Israeli citizens and governments alike have ignored the basic fact that the answer to every question is not more Israeli concessions. Contrary to what our tabloids would have us believe, surrender is only one option among many. It is time we try out some alternatives.   
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post

The high price of coalition stability

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his colleagues are doing their best to put a pretty face on an ugly situation. After nearly three weeks of deliberations, Netanyahu and his government caved in to massive US pressure to ease, if not end, Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza.
On Sunday the government announced that all economic sanctions on Gaza will be immediately lifted. Henceforth, Hamas-controlled Gaza will have an effectively open economic border with Israel. Israel will only prohibit the transfer of military material. Even dual-use items, like cement, will be allowed in if international officials claim that they are to be used in their humanitarian projects.
Netanyahu and his colleagues argue that these new concessions have now given Israel the international legitimacy it needs to maintain its naval blockade of the Gaza coast. But this is untrue. Even as he welcomed Netanyahu’s latest capitulation, US President Barack Obama made clear that he expects Israel to continue making unreciprocated concessions to Hamas.
Following the government’s announcement, the White House declared, "We will work with Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the Quartet and other international partners to ensure these arrangements are implemented as quickly and effectively as possible and to explore additional ways to improve the situation in Gaza, including greater freedom of movement and commerce between Gaza and the West Bank."
In plain English that means that the administration doesn’t trust Israel. It will escalate its pressure on Israel by among other things, pressuring it to provide members of the illegal Hamas regime in Gaza greater access to Judea and Samaria.
AS IF anticipating its next capitulation, government spokesmen told the media that in addition to ending economic sanctions on Gaza, Israel is now considering permitting the EU to station inspectors at its land crossings into Gaza. That is, Israel is considering a move that will constitute a first step towards surrendering its sovereign control over its borders.
The economic sanctions the government is now cancelling were not simply legal, they were required by international law. Binding UN Security Council resolution 1373 requires states and non-state actors to deny support of any kind to terrorist organizations. And here, in a bid to win international "legitimacy" for its lawful blockade of Gaza, Israel has bowed to US pressure to unlawfully facilitate the economic prosperity of an area controlled by an illegal terrorist organization.
There is something pathetic about the Prime Minister’s office’s protestations that by bowing to White House pressure the nations of the world will now accept our right to defend ourselves from an Iranian-controlled terrorist organization committed to the genocide of the Jewish people. After all, we have heard these hollow words many times before.
This notion that unilateral Israeli capitulation to terrorists would bring Israel international "legitimacy" is of course how former prime minister Ariel Sharon justified his strategically indefensible decision to cede Gaza – and the international border between Gaza and Egypt – to Palestinian terrorists.
If they attack us after we leave, he claimed, we’ll have all the international support in the world to really destroy them.
Today, the government argues, all we have to do is sell them spaghetti and cilantro and the international community will suddenly rally to our side.
According to sources close to the cabinet, the main advocate for the latest capitulation was Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Barak is the serial bungler. Ten years ago, he argued that his decision to relinquish Israel’s security zone in south Lebanon to Hizbullah guaranteed that Israel would have international legitimacy to really take it to the Iranian proxy army if it dared to attack us after we left.
Barak is also the deep strategic thinker who brought us the Palestinian terror war.
Barak promised that if Yasser Arafat rejected his offer at Camp David and so demonstrated that his commitment to destroy the Jewish state trumped his interest in establishing a Palestinian state, that the international community would rally around Israel and we’d have all the international legitimacy we needed to defeat the PA.
And in the lead-up to the Mavi Marmara fiasco, it was reportedly Barak who decided it would be a terrific idea to outfit the naval commandos with paintball guns. Doing so, he promised would convince the Obama administration to support Israel against Hamas.
A key question that needs to be considered is what makes policymakers like Barak advance such colossally stupid and dangerous policies time after time. Israel’s history since 1993, when then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and then foreign minister Shimon Peres opted to embrace Arafat and the PLO, bring thousands of PLO terrorists to the outskirts of Israel’s major cities and give them weapons and international legitimacy indicates that three factors come into play.
First there is the fact that many of Israel’s leading politicians are simply not that smart.
They are happy to be led by an ideologically radical media that have insisted since the 1980s that Israel must withdraw to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines.
Not only are they happy to be led by the media, they are loath to dispute its misrepresentation of reality. And so the second cause of serial bungling on the part of politicians like Barak is that they are, in the end, sheep, not leaders.
THE FINAL major cause of Israel’s strategic idiocy is corruption. On Monday morning, the police announced that they recommend indicting Sharon’s sons Omri and Gilad Sharon for soliciting bribes on behalf of their father.
After an eight-year investigation, the police said they believe that Sharon received $3 million in bribes from former Stasi-aligned Austrian banker Martin Schlaff.
Schlaff, whose former attorney Dov Weisglass served as Sharon’s chief of staff, was the majority share owner in the Jericho casino. He also reportedly intended to build another casino on the ruins of the destroyed Israeli community Elei Sinai in the northern Gaza Strip if and when Israel expelled its residents.
There can be no doubt that Sharon’s alleged corruption and his fear of the far-left legal fraternity that investigated his alleged corruption played a significant role in his decision to abandon his campaign pledge to voters, toss strategic sanity to the seven winds, expel ten thousand Israelis from their homes and transfer the Gaza Strip lock, stock and barrel to Hamas and Fatah terrorists.
Like Sharon, Barak has been the subject of several corruption probes. Barak is also known to have had strong indirect connections to Schlaff. For instance, during his tenure as prime minister, Barak sent shock waves through the country when, with no prior warning, he announced that he was ceding Israel’s rights to the natural gas deposits discovered off the Gaza shore. Barak’s move precipitated a deal between the PA and British Gas to develop the gas deposits.
Media reports exposed that Schlaff and Arafat’s economic bag man Muhammed Rashid were major shareholders in British Gas.
During his stint as a private citizen, in 2006 Barak sought to lobby Shin Bet Director Yuval Diskin to permit Orascom, the Egyptian telecom provider, to expand its ten percent ownership share in Partner, Israel’s second-largest cellular telephone company.
Israeli law prohibits foreign entities from owning more than a ten percent share in Israeli telecommunications firms. Diskin refused to meet with him and banned the deal. Rashid and other Schlaff associates are reportedly major shareholders in Orascom.
Barak and Sharon are only the tip of the iceberg.
Schlaff’s connections to Israeli politicians run far and wide. Most of the leading founders of Kadima, including Ehud Olmert and Haim Ramon have personal ties to Schlaff. So too does former Shas leader Aryeh Deri. The ongoing criminal probes against Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman include, among other things, investigations into his allegedly prolific business ties to Schlaff.
REGARDLESS OF whether these ties to agents of corruption are criminal or not, it is obvious that they have influenced the policy preferences of more than one major politician in Israel. And regardless of what stands behind his poor judgment, the fact is that it is this judgment that is driving Israel’s strategic direction.
It is also apparent, that Barak is being handsomely rewarded by the Obama administration for his actions.
Barak is currently on yet another junket to Washington where he is being given the red carpet treatment. While the premier is forced to conduct international diplomacy with Quartet chairman Tony Blair, Barak is feted by the White House, State Department and Pentagon on a regular basis. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Obama administration agreed to end its public campaign to overthrow the Netanyahu government in exchange for Netanyahu’s effective concession of control over national policy to Barak.
Barak has used this control to force the government to accede to every American demand. So far, he has convinced Netanyahu to take a back seat to Obama on Iran; to end Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria at least until September; to effectively ban Jewish construction in northern, southern and eastern Jerusalem; to embrace the cause of Palestinian statehood; to accept US mediated indirect negotiations with Fatah; and to pretend that the Obama administration is a credible ally to Israel.
Before heading to Washington, Barak reportedly gave Netanyahu an ultimatum: Either make massive concessions to Fatah that will allow Obama to claim victory in the peace process, or Labor will bolt the coalition.
So too, Barak is reportedly behind Netanyahu’s latest bid to bring Kadima, led by Tzipi Livni into his government.
Netanyahu and his spokesmen defend both Barak’s primacy in the government, and their interest in bringing Kadima into the coalition by noting that the Left’s partnership ensures political stability. If Labor were to bolt from the coalition, the government would be less likely to survive until the next scheduled election in 2013.
There is certainly truth to this assertion. With Labor inside the coalition, Kadima has no relevance.
So too, rightist parties are unable to bring down the coalition.
This would be a decisive argument if coalition stability enabled Netanyahu to govern more effectively. But the opposite is true.
Netanyahu knows the folly of his decisions.
He recognizes Obama’s hostility to Israel. He also knows that the US president is not going to do a thing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
Stability should be a means to an end, not an end unto itself. Netanyahu did not seek the premiership to achieve the goal of overseeing a stable government. He sought to lead the country to secure and strengthen it. As his latest concession to Barak makes clear, the price of governing stability is the abandonment of his leadership goals.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Hamas rises in the West

Since the navy’s May 31 takeover of the Turkish-Hamas flotilla, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his advisors have deliberated around the clock about how to contend with the US-led international stampede against Israel. But their ultimate decision to form an investigatory committee led by a retired Supreme Court justice and overseen by foreign observers indicates that they failed to recognize the nature of the international campaign facing Israel today.

Led by US President Barack Obama, the West has cast its lot with Hamas against Israel.

It is not surprising that Obama is siding with Hamas. His close associates are leading members of the pro-Hamas Free Gaza outfit. Obama’s friends, former Weatherman Underground terrorists Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayres participated in a Free Gaza trip to Egypt in January. Their aim was to force the Egyptians to allow them into Gaza with 1,300 fellow Hamas supporters. Their mission was led by Code Pink leader and Obama fundraiser Jodie Evans. Another leading member of Free Gaza is former US senator from South Dakota James Abourezk.

All of these people have open lines of communication not only to the Obama White House, but to Obama himself.

Obama has made his sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood clear several times since entering office. The Muslim Brotherhood’s progeny include Hamas, al Qaida and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, among others. Last June, Obama infuriated the Egyptian government when he insisted on inviting leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood to attend his speech at Al Azhar University in Cairo. His administration’s decision to deport Hamas deserter and Israeli counter-terror operative Mosab Hassan Yousef to the Palestinian Authority where he will be killed is the latest sign of their support for radical Islam.

Given Obama’s attitude towards jihadists and the radical leftists who support them his decision to support Hamas against Israel makes sense. What is alarming however is how leaders of the free world are now all siding with Hamas. That support has become ever more apparent since the Mossad’s alleged killing of Hamas terror master Mahmoud al Mabhouh at his hotel in Dubai in January.

In the aftermath of Mabhouh’s death, both Britain and Australia joined the Dubai-initiated bandwagon in striking out against Israel. Israel considers both countries allies, or at least friendly and has close intelligence ties with both. Yet despite their close ties with Israel, Australia and Britain expelled Israeli diplomats who supposedly had either a hand in the alleged operation or who work for the Mossad.
It should be noted that neither country takes steps against outspoken terror supporters who call for Israel to be destroyed and call for the murder of individual Israelis.

For instance, in an interview last month with the Australian, Ali Kazak, the former PLO ambassador to Australia effectively solicited the murder of the Jerusalem Post’s Palestinian affairs correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh. Kazak told the newspaper, "Khaled Abu Toameh is a traitor."

Allowing that many Palestinians have been murdered for such accusations, Kazak excused those extrajudicial murders saying, "Traitors were also murdered by the French Resistance, in Europe; this happens everywhere."

Not only did Australia not expel Kazak or open a criminal investigation against him. As a consequence of his smear campaign against Abu Toameh, several Australians cancelled their scheduled meetings with him.

AND OF course, this week we have the actions of Germany and Poland. Germany and Poland are considered Israel’s best friends in Europe today, and yet acting on a German arrest warrant, Poland has arrested a suspected Mossad officer named Uri Brodsky for his alleged involvement in the alleged Mossad operation against master Hamas terrorist Mabhouh. Israel is now caught in a diplomatic disaster zone where its two closest allies – who again are only too happy to receive regular intelligence updates from the Mossad – are siding with Hamas against it.

And then of course we have the EU’s call for Israel to cancel its lawful blockade of the Gaza coast. That is, the official position of the EU is that Israel should allow an Iranian proxy terrorist organization to gain control over a Mediterranean port and through it, provide Iran with yet another venue from which it can launch attacks against Europe.

For their part, the Sunni Arabs are forced to go along with this. The Egyptian regime considers the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood took over Gaza a threat to its very survival and has been assiduously sealing its border with Gaza for some time. And yet, unable to be more anti-Hamas than the US, Australia and Europe, Mubarak is opening the border. Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa’s unprecedented visit to Gaza this week should be seen as a last ditch attempt by Egypt to convince Hamas to unify its ranks with Fatah. Predictably, the ascendant Hamas refused his entreaties.

As for Fatah, it is hard not to feel sorry for Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas these days. In what was supposed to be a triumphant visit to the White House, Abbas was forced to smile last week as Obama announced the US will provide $450 million in aid to his sworn enemies who three years ago ran him and his Fatah henchmen out of Gaza.

So too, Abbas is forced to cheer as Obama pressures Israel to give Hamas an outlet to the sea. Such a sea outlet will render it impossible for Fatah to ever unseat Hamas either by force or at the ballot box. Hamas’s international clout demonstrates to the Palestinians that jihad pays.

THERE ARE three plausible explanations for the West’s decision to back Hamas. All of them say something deeply disturbing about the state of the world today. The first plausible explanation is that the Americans and the rest of the West are simply naïve. They believe that by backing Hamas against Israel, they are advancing the cause of Middle East peace.

If this is in fact what the likes of Obama and his European and Australian counterparts think, then apparently, no one in the West is thinking very hard these days. The fact is that by backing Hamas against Israel, they are backing Hamas against Fatah and they are backing Iran, Syria, Turkey, Hamas and Hizbullah against Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia as well as against Israel. They are backing the most radical actors in the region – and arguably in the world – against states and regimes they have a shared strategic interest in strengthening.

There is absolutely no way this behavior advances the cause of peace.

The second plausible explanation is that the West’s support for Hamas against Israel is motivated by hatred of Israel. As Helen Thomas’s recent remarks demonstrated, there is certainly a lot of that going around.

The final plausible explanation for the West’s support for Hamas against Israel is that the leaders of the West have been led to believe that by acting as they are, they will buy themselves immunity from attack by Hamas and its fellow Iranian axis members.

As former Italian President Francesco Cossiga first exposed in a letter to Corriere della Serra in August 2008, in the early 1970s then Italian prime minister Aldo Moro signed a deal with Yassir Arafat that gave the PLO and its affiliated organizations the freedom to operate terror bases in Italy. In exchange the Palestinians agreed to limit their attacks to Jewish and Israeli targets. Italy maintained its allegiance to the deal – and the PLO against Israel – even when Italian targets were hit.

Cossiga told the newspaper that the August 1980 bombings at the Bologna train station – which Italy blamed on Italian fascists — was actually the work of George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Eighty-five people were murdered in the attack, and still Italy maintained its agreement with the PLO to the point where it prosecuted and imprisoned the wrong people for the worst terrorist attack in Italian history.

Cossiga alleged that the deal is still in place today and that Italian forces in UNIFIL have expanded the deal to include Hamas’s fellow Iranian proxy Hizbullah. It isn’t much of a stretch to consider the possibility that Italy and the rest of the Western powers have made a similar deal with Hamas. And it is no stretch at all to believe that they will benefit from it as greatly as the Italian railroad passengers in Bologna did on August 2, 1980.

True, no one has come out an admitted that they support Hamas against Israel. So too, no one has expressed anything by love for Israel and the Jewish people. But the actions of the governments of the West tell a different tale. Without one or more of the explanations above, it is hard to understand their current policies.

Since the flotilla incident, Netanyahu and his ministers have held marathon deliberations on how to respond to US pressure to accept an international inquisition of the IDF’s lawful enforcement of Israel’s legal blockade of the Gaza coast. Their deliberations went on at the same time as Netanyahu and his envoys attempted to convince Obama to stop his mad rush to give Hamas an outlet to the sea and deny Israel even the most passive right of self defense.

It remains to be seen if their decision to form an investigative panel with international "observers" was a wise move or yet another ill-advised concession to an unappeasable administration. What is certain however is that it will not end the West’s budding romance with Hamas.

The West’s decision to side with Hamas against Israel is devastating. But whatever the reasons for it, it is a fact of life. It is Netanyahu’s duty to swallow this bitter pill and devise a strategy to protect Israel from their madness.

 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The plain truth about Israel

In other times, Hearst Newspapers White House Correspondent Helen Thomas’s demand that the Jews "get the hell out of Palestine," and go back to Poland, Germany and America would have been front page news in every newspaper in the US the day after the story broke. 

In other times, had the dean of the White House Correspondents Association expressed such hatred for the Jews, the White House would have immediately removed her accreditation rather than wait three days to criticize her. 
In other times, the White House Correspondents Association would have expelled her.  In other times, her employer – Hearst Newspapers – would have fired her. 
But in our times, it took days for anyone other than Jews and conservatives to condemn Thomas’s vile statements to Rabbi David Nesenoff. And she was not fired. She was allowed to retire.
Our times are times of Jew hatred. Our times are times where hatred breeds strategic madness. Our times are times when we need to recall basic truths about Israel and the Jewish people. Specifically, we must remember that the US is privileged to count Israel as an ally – whether Americans like Jews and our state or hate us. 
This week, Anthony Cordesman from respected Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies joined the bandwagon of Israel bashers. In an article titled, "Israel as a Strategic Liability?" 
Cordesman asserted that Israel "is a tertiary US strategic interest." And given its alleged insignificance, Israel must "become far more careful about the extent to which it test[s] the limits of US patience and exploits the support of American Jews."
Cordesman argued that Israel is only an asset to the US when it is giving its land away to its neighbors. He called for Israel to constrain its military actions and demanded that Israel "not conduct a high-risk attack on Iran in the face of the clear US ‘red light’ from both the Bush and Obama administrations."
The fact that Cordesman’s article reflects an increasingly popular school of thought in the US is not testimony to its accuracy. Indeed, his arguments are completely wrong.
The plain truth is that Israel is the US’s greatest strategic asset in the Middle East. Indeed, given the strategic importance of the Middle East to the US national security, Israel is arguably the US’s greatest strategic asset outside the US military.
Cordesman allows that "Israel is a democracy that shares virtually all of the same values as the United States." But he fails to recognize the strategic implications of that statement. As a democracy, unlike every Arab state, the US does not need to worry a change in leadership in Jerusalem will cause Israel to abandon its alliance with the US. This of course is what happened in Iran – which until 1979, was the US’s most important ally in the Persian Gulf. As Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak ages, the US faces the prospect of a post-Mubarak Egypt led by the Muslim Brotherhood similarly abandoning its alliance with America. 
The fact that the US and Israel share the same foundational values also guarantees that the alliance is stable. No government in Jerusalem will ever sway the Israeli people away from America as has happened in Turkey since the Islamist Erdogan government took office in 2002. 
Cordesman grudgingly allowed that Israel provides intelligence to the US. But he refused to acknowledge how important Israel’s intelligence has been for the US. Since Sept. 11, 2001, US military and intelligence officials have repeatedly admitted that Israeli intelligence has been worth its weight in gold for US security operations in the region and around the world. 
Cordesman also noted that Israeli technology has contributed to US defense, but again, he undervalued its significance. The very fact that pilotless aircraft – first developed by Israel – are the lead force in the US campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan gives lie to his tepid admission of Israel’s technological contribution to US security.
Like many on the Left, Cordesman ignored the fact that Israel’s enemies are the US’s enemies. But his failure to note that the same people who call for Israel to be destroyed also call for the US to be destroyed does not make this fact any less true. And since the US and Israel share the same foes, when Israel is called on to fight its enemies, its successes redound to the US’s benefit.
In many ways, Israel – which has never asked the US to fight its wars — has been the catalyst for the US’s greatest triumphs. It was the Mossad that smuggled out Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech acknowledging Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Communist Party Conference in 1956. The publication of Khrushchev’s speech in the West was the first turning point in the Cold War. 
So too, Israel’s June 1982 destruction of Syria’s Soviet-made anti-aircraft batteries and the Syrian air force was the first clear demonstration of the absolute superiority of US military technology over Soviet military technology. Many have argued that it was this Israeli demonstration of Soviet technological inferiority that convinced the Reagan administration it was possible to win the Cold War.
Beyond politics and ideology, beyond friendship and values, the US has three permanent national security interests in the Middle East.
  • Ensuring the smooth flow of affordable petroleum products from the region.
  • Preventing the most radical regimes, sub-state and non-state actors from acquiring the means to cause catastrophic harm.
  • Maintaining its capacity to project its power in the region. 
A strong Israel is the best guarantor of all of these interests. Indeed, the stronger Israel is, the more secure these primary American interests are. Three permanent and unique aspects to Israel’s regional position dictate this state of affairs. 
First, as the first target of the most radical regimes and radical sub-state actors in the region, Israel has a permanent, existential interest in preventing these regimes and sub-state actors from acquiring the means to cause catastrophic harm. 
Israel’s 1981 airstrike that destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor prevented Iraq from acquiring nuclear weapons. Despite US condemnation at the time, the US later acknowledged that the strike was a necessary precondition to the success of Operation Desert Storm ten years later. As Richard Cheney has noted, if Iraq had been a nuclear power in 1991, the US would have been hard pressed to eject Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait and so block his regime from asserting control over oil supplies in the Persian Gulf. 
Second, Israel is a non-expansionist state and its neighbors know it. In its 62 year history, Israel has only controlled territory vital for its national security and territory that was legally allotted to it in the 1922 League of Nations Mandate which has never been abrogated or superseded.
Israel’s strength, which it has used only in self-defense, is inherently non-threatening. Far from destabilizing the region, a strong Israel stabilizes the Middle East by deterring the most radical actors from attacking. 
In 1970, Israel blocked Syria’s bid to use the PLO to overthrow the Hashemite regime in Jordan. Israel’s threat to attack Syria not only saved the Hashemites then, it has deterred Syria from attempting to overthrow the Jordanian regime ever since. 
Similarly, Israel’s neighbors understand that its purported nuclear arsenal is a weapon of national survival and hence they view it as non-threatening. This is the reason Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal has never spurred a regional nuclear arms race. 
In stark contrast, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, a regional nuclear arms race will ensue immediately. Indeed, it has already begun. Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other states have all signed contracts to develop nuclear installations. 
Although they will never admit it, Israel’s non-radical neighbors feel more secure when Israel is strong. On the other hand, the region’s most radical regimes and non-state actors will always seek to emasculate Israel. 
Finally, since as the Jewish state Israel is the regional bogeyman, no Arab state will agree to form an open alliance with it. Hence, Israel will never be in a position to join forces with another nation against a third nation. 
In contrast, the Egyptian-Syrian United Arab Republic of the 1960s was formed to attack Israel. Today, the Syrian-Iranian-Turkish alliance is an inherently aggressive alliance against Israel and the non-radical Arab states in the region. Recognizing the stabilizing force of a strong Israel, the moderate states of the region prefer for Israel to remain strong. 
From the US’s perspective, far from impairing its alliance-making capabilities in the region, by providing military assistance to Israel, America isn’t just strengthening the most stabilizing force in the region. It is showing all states and non-state actors in the greater Middle East it is trustworthy. 
But every time the US seeks to attenuate its ties with Israel, it is viewed as an untrustworthy ally by the nations of the Middle East. US hostility towards Israel causes Israel’s neighbors to hedge their bets by distancing themselves from the US lest America abandon them to their neighboring adversaries.
The Obama administration’s willingness to effectively back Turkey and Hamas against Israel at the UN Security Council last week forced Vice President Joseph Biden to drop everything and fly to Egypt this week. Watching the US abandon Israel and strengthen the most radical actors in the region, the Egyptians are terrified that they can no longer believe in US security guarantees. 
A strong Israel empowers the relatively moderate actors in the region to stand up to the radical actors in the region because they trust Israel to keep the radicals in check. When Israel is weakened the radical forces are emboldened. Regional stability is thrown asunder. Wars become more likely. Attacks on oil resources increase. The most radical sub-state actors and regimes are encouraged to strike. 
Cordesman claims that Israel only advances US strategic interest when it works towards the creation of a Palestinian state. But this is wrong. To the extent that the two-state solution assumes that Israel must contract itself to within the indefensible 1949 ceasefire lines and allow a hostile Palestinian state allied with terrorist organizations to take power in the areas it vacates, the two-state solution is predicated on making Israel weak and empowering radicals. In light of this, the two-state solution as presently constituted is antithetical to America’s most vital strategic interests in the Middle East. 
In our times, when Jew hatred has become acceptable and strategic blindness and madness are presented as nuanced sophistication, it is essential to maintain a firm grip on the truth. And that truth is that love the Jews or hate us, the US’s alliance with Israel has been and remains America’s most cost-effective national security investment since World War II.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Israel’s daunting task

The ferocity and speed of the current international assault on Israel has left the government in a daze. Statements from our leadership are marked by confusion. This reaction is understandable. Everywhere Israel turns it is met with hostility.

Turkey — which just a decade ago was Israel’s most important regional ally – has taken a leadership position next to Iran in the Islamist and global assault against the Jewish state.

Under President Barack Obama’s stewardship, the US has joined the international bandwagon against Israel. Ireland – never a friend — is now openly siding with Hamas against Israel. And as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu noted on Wednesday evening, Britain, France and Germany and the rest of the Western democracies calling for Israel to end its blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza’s coast are effectively arguing that Israel should give Iran – which controls Hamas – a seaport on the Mediterranean.

The footage of the IDF’s celebrated naval commandos falling prey to an Islamic lynch mob on the deck of the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara on Monday morning serves as a perfect simile for the national mood. The commandos boarded the ship armed with paintball guns expecting to be greeted by hostile, but non-violent humanitarian activists. Instead they were accosted by a murderous mob.

Similarly, the Israeli public feels that when we go out of our way to show our peaceful intentions and nature to the world, we are greeted with an international lynch mob. Rather than listen to us, the world shouts us down with mendacious propaganda in act after act of political theater.

In a situation when everything seems hopeless and futile, it is important to take a step back and consider what stands behind the assault. Only by understanding why what is happening is happening will Israel’s leaders be able to formulate a strategy for navigating the country through the current straits.

TODAY’S GLOBAL campaign against the Jewish state is the product of three recent developments: The waning of traditional Arab power relative to the waxing of non-Arab Islamic states including Iran, Pakistan and Turkey; the concomitant rise of anti-Semitic incitement throughout the Islamic world; and the US’s attenuation of its ties with its allies generally and the US abandonment of its support for Israel specifically.

Since the fall of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia have been the widely recognized leaders of the Islamic world. Over the past several years, their power has diminished and it is now being overwhelmed by the rising non-Arab Islamic states Iran, Pakistan and Turkey.

Pakistan – so far the only Islamic country with a nuclear arsenal — is the home base of the wildly popular al Qaida movement. Despite its nuclear and jihadist cachet, Pakistan’s ability to challenge the power of Arab governments is limited. Its financial dependence on Saudi Arabia, its strategic ties with the US and the ongoing war between its government and the Taliban/al Qaida have all rendered Pakistan – for now – unable to compete with the Arab world for the mantle of Islamic leadership.

But Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal has helped place Iran on the verge of regional domination. Iran’s long-held nuclear aspirations only became realistic when Pakistan shared its nuclear and ballistic missile technologies with the mullocracy. Iran’s nuclear weapons program is the stick it now wields to coerce the Arab world to bow to its will.

Iran isn’t all about threats and coercion though. It also offers the Arab world an attractive carrot. Since the US invasion of Iraq and even more forcefully since the 2006 war between Israel and Hizbullah, Iran has taken the lead in fighting the great enemies of the Arab world: the US and Israel.

In 2006, the Arab masses rallied to Iran’s side as Israel fought its Shiite Arab proxy to a draw in Lebanon. Hamas’s willingness to serve as Iran’s Palestinian proxy has given Iran complete control over the most active fronts against the hated Jews.

Since the radical Islamic AKP party took over Turkey in 2003, its leader Prime Minister Recip Erdogan has presided over the thorough brainwashing of the Turkish people. According to repeated polling data, the majority of Turks believe that Israel and America are demonic, murderous nations that kill innocent people for entertainment.

Erdogan has cultivated anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism for two reasons. First, doing so enables him to divert his people’s attention away from his government’s economic failures. Stirred into frenzies of hatred, the Turks willingly rally behind their leader who is saving them from the Jewish and Yankee beasts.

Then there is Erdogan’s goal of reasserting Turkish regional dominance and reclaiming the lost power of the Ottomans as the leader of the Islamic world. His decision in 2006 to be the first world leader to host Hamas terror masters on an official visit after their victory in the Palestinian elections was a clear bid to win popularity for Turkey among the Arab masses.

Iran and Turkey understand that attacking the Jewish state is the fastest route to the top of the Muslim world.

For decades two things limited the salience of Jew hatred as a political force in the Muslim world. First, Israel’s reputation as a regional power deterred Arab states from attacking it. And second, the US’s Middle East policy of rewarding states that lived at peace with Israel and spurning those that did not made attacking Israel a less attractive option for most Muslim states. The likes of Iran and Syria were punished for their support for terrorism and their refusal to make peace with Israel. Then too, Turkey’s rise in prominence in the US in the 1990s owed a great deal to its close strategic ties with Israel.

Israel’s reputation as a regional power was diminished by its 2000 withdrawal from south Lebanon and its less than stellar performances in the 2006 war.

As for the US, in the year and a half since Obama took office he has fundamentally restructured US foreign policy in a manner that rewards US enemies at the expense of US allies. From Honduras and Columbia to Britain, Poland, and the Czech Republic, to Japan and India to Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama has treated US allies with contempt and hostility. At the same time, his repeated bids to woo US adversaries have rewarded the leaders of Iran, Venezuela, Russia and others for their aggression.

Israel of course is the US’s most threatened ally. And Obama’s treatment of Israel has been uniquely shabby– and dangerous. Guided by his ideological worldview which argues that US support for Israel is the root of the Arab and Islamic world’s animus towards the US, Obama has advanced a policy of punishing Israel and wooing its worst enemies that has radically changed the Islamic power calculus. By seeking to appease Iran and Syria for their aggressive behavior and by courting an ever more radical Turkish regime, Obama has humiliated Egypt and Jordan that signed peace treaties with Israel. In so doing, he has convinced the Arabs that the only way to retain and expand their power is by attacking Israel.

THIS BRINGS US to Israel’s current quandary about how to respond to the international campaign against it. Israel of course can do nothing to change the potency of Jew hatred in the Islamic world. It can also do nothing to change American behavior. For as long as Obama is president, US foreign policy can be expected to remain on its current trajectory. That is, for at least the next two and a half years, the US will continue to play a destabilizing and hostile role in the region.

What this means is that Israel should adopt a strategy that minimizes the international lynch mob’s ability to get close to it and maximizes Israel’s ability to knock the mob off balance.

Take for instance the UN Security Council call for an independent investigation of the Mavi Marmara incident. Israel rightly rejected such a UN inquiry understanding that its aim is to diminish Israel’s sovereign right to self defense. On the other hand, on Thursday morning Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman offered that Israel could establish its own judicial inquiry and that there was no reason for international investigators not to be members of the Israeli committee.

This idea is ill-advised for two reasons. First by its very nature, a judicial inquiry would place Israel in the role of criminal defendant. And second, given the nature of the international assault on Israel, no international observers or investigators can be given any role in investigating the Mavi Marmara episode.

In contrast, Israel could benefit from a domestic investigation of the operational and diplomatic aspects of its handling of the Turkish-Hamas flotilla. It is in these areas– rather than the legal areas– that Israel has failed and must learn the lessons of those failures. Moreover, appointing a committee would buy Israel time in the face of the anti-Israel campaign now sweeping the globe.

And as to that campaign, it is time for Israel to launch a counter-offensive. Its representatives at the UN should demand an investigation into Turkey’s illegal sponsorship of the pro-Hamas flotilla. They should raise such protests at every UN forum and continue to protest until they are thrown out of the meetings and then return, the next day to relaunch their protests.

The Justice Ministry should issue international arrest warrants against the flotilla’s organizers and participants and prepare indictments against them for trial in Israeli courts. Israel’s embassies throughout the world should call for their host governments to outlaw organizations involved in the Gaza flotilla movement.

No, these Israeli efforts will not change anyone’s vote in any UN forum. But they will place these wholly corrupt institutions on the defensive. For decades Israel has taken for granted that the UN is hopelessly hostile and left things at that. Israel’s willingness to declare defeat has emboldened UN officials. By putting them on the defensive, Israel will force them to devote time to staving off Israeli attacks and so have less time available for initiating new assaults against Israel.

IN LOS ANGELES on Monday, a crowd of Muslims carrying signs calling for Israel’s destruction gathered outside the Israeli Consulate. As they shouted Allahu Akhbar, a lone Jewish high school student carrying an Israeli flag appeared on the scene. Suddenly, the protesters forgot that they were supposed to be demonstrating against the State of Israel and began threatening this single Jewish boy who held his head high and waved the Israeli flag.

As they converged around him, a cordon of policemen headed them off and surrounded the young Jewish boy who refused to be intimidated. Speaking to reporters, clearly moved by his courage, the boy said, "I came out because I want to defend Israel." Asked if he was affiliated with any group, he responded, "Just Judaism and Israel."

Israel’s task is daunting and the stakes couldn’t be higher. But our cause is great and it is far from lost. 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

How wars begin

In hindsight, it will probably be obvious that the missteps of the Obama administration vis a vis Israel were critical catalysts to a war that today seems ever more likely to engulf the Middle East, and perhaps the world more generally. Assuming such an outcome is neither the intention of the President and his team, nor desired by them, American course corrections must be urgently taken.

To be sure, as is often the case in the moment, a different narrative is operating. The rising tensions in the region are widely seen as the fault of the Jewish State. Most recently, Israel is being portrayed as the villain of the bloody interception of a "humanitarian flotilla" bringing relief aid to the Gaza Strip.

Before that, the Jewish State has been serially excoriated for: engaging in: "illegal" construction of homes in Jerusalem; exercising "disproportionate force" in military action in Gaza, including by some accounts "war crimes"; and being intransigent with respect to the sorts of territorial, strategic and political concessions needed to advance the "peace process" with the Palestinians.

In each case, the Obama administration has either strongly endorsed these memes or acted fecklessly to challenge them. Throughout their seventeen months in office, the President and his senior subordinates have been at pains to demonstrate a more even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and to "engage" the Muslim "world."

The practical effect, however, has been to excuse, empower and embolden those hostile not just to Israel but to the United States, as well. Consider just a few ominous examples:

The Iranian regime has understood that the Obama administration will do nothing to defeat the realization of Tehran’s longstanding ambitions to acquire nuclear weapons.  Instead, the United States is now focused on how it will "live with" a nuclear-armed Iran by trying to "contain" it. Meantime, the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency says Tehran has enough enriched uranium to make two atomic weapons.  If true, it will be a matter of a relatively short time before such material is sufficiently processed to be ready for that purpose.

The Syrians have, presumably at Iran’s direction and with its help, transferred dangerous Scud missiles to the mullah’s re-armed terrorist proxy, Hezbollah.  Particularly if equipped with chemical or biological weapons (which the Syrians and Iranians have in abundance), such missiles would pose a mortal threat to Israel and her people.

Egypt has recently conducted offensively oriented war games in the Sinai Peninsula. Their clear purpose:  Honing the Egyptian military’s capabilities for renewed attacks on Israel.  The government of Hosni Mubarak has also failed to halt the massive network of smuggling tunnels into Gaza that are supplying another of Iran’s terrorist surrogates, Hamas, with an array of ever-more-deadly weapons in preparation for when (not if) hostilities are resumed with Israel.

Even before last weekend’s conflict over the blockade-running "aid flotilla," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had effectively terminated the close ties Israel once had with his country.  Erdogan’s accelerating Islamicization of the once-secular Turkey has been accompanied by his intensifying rapprochement with Iran and Syria.

Notably, the Turks recently joined Brazil for the transparent purpose of running interference for Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.  It remains to be seen whether these three nations will succeed in sabotaging Team Obama’s latest bid to secure a new UN sanctions resolution against the mullahs.

Last week, a powerful new weapon in the campaign to delegitimize the Jewish State was spawned by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference.  It mandated negotiations to start in 2012 with the aim of ridding the Middle East of nuclear weapons.  Israel was the only nation named.  It would also likely be the only one disarmed if the transnationalists (both the secular UN types and Shariah-adherent ones) have their way.

These developments have two things in common:  First, particularly when taken together, they constitute the greatest existential threat to Israel since 1973.  And second, they reflect– and powerfully reinforce– a growing perception that the United States has cut Israel loose.

Israel’s many friends in this country – particularly a number of American Jews critical to Democratic electoral prospects this fall – finally seem to have awakened to these realities.  Hence, Team Obama’s feverish effort last week to have the President seen with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a man it had humiliatingly spurned and publicly upbraided just a few months ago. (Mr. Netanyahu’s decision to head home to deal with the Flotilla crisis spared both men the obvious PR challenges associated with the former making a Washington visit at this juncture.)

Unfortunately, matters have reached the point where such calculated exercises in Potemkin political rehabilitation will not suffice.  Ditto rhetorical pledges of unseverable bilateral ties.

Unless and until President Obama gives comprehensive and tangible expression to America’s commitment to Israel– in terms of reliable military assistance, unstinting diplomatic support and wide latitude to act in its self-defense– the forces that have been unleashed by him and others will assuredly translate in due course into war.  It is certainly harder to do such prophylactic things today than it would have been at the outset of the Obama presidency.  But such costs are nothing compared to those that will be incurred by freedom-loving people in the Middle East and elsewhere, including here, if he fails to undertake these necessary course-corrections.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy, a columnist for the Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program "Secure Freedom Radio" heard in Washington weeknights at 9:00 p.m. on WTNT 570 AM.

Ending Israel’s losing streak

These words are being written before the dust has had a chance to settle on Monday night’s naval commando raid of the Gaza-bound Turkish flotilla of terror supporters. The raid’s full range of operational failures still cannot be known. Obviously the fact that the mission ended with at least six soldiers wounded and at least ten Hamas supporters dead makes clear that there were significant failures in both the IDF’s training for and execution of the mission.

The Navy and other relevant bodies will no doubt study these failures. But they point to a larger strategic failure that has crippled Israel’s capacity to contend with the information war being waged against it. Until this failure is remedied, no after-action investigation, no enhanced training, no new electronic warfare doodad will make a significant impact on Israel’s ability to contend with the next Hamas flotilla that sets sail for Gaza.

In the space of four days, Israel has suffered two massive defeats. A straight line runs between the anti-Israel resolution passed last Friday at the UN’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference and the Hamas flotilla. And in both cases, Israeli officials voiced "surprise," at these defeats.

Given the months-long build-up to the NPT review conference, and the weeks-long build-up to the Turkish-Hamas flotilla, that surprise cannot be attributed to a lack of information. What it points to rather is a cognitive failure of Israel’s leaders – from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu down – to understand the nature of the war being waged against us. And it is this fundamental failure of cognition that has landed six soldiers in the hospital, Israel’s international reputation in tatters and Israeli spokesmen – from Netanyahu down – searching for a way to describe a reality they do not understand and explain how they will cope with challenges that confound them.

The reality is simple and stark. Israel is the target of a massive information war that is unprecedented in scale and scope. This war is being waged primarily by a massive consortium of the international Left and the Arab and Islamic worlds. The staggering scale of the forces aligned against Israel is demonstrated by two things.

The Hamas abetting Free Gaza website published a list of some 222 organizations that endorsed the terror-supporting flotilla. The listed organizations hail from the four corners of the earth. They include Jewish anti-Israel groups as well as Christian, Islamic and non-religious anti-Israel groups. It is hard to think of any cause other than Israel-bashing that could unite such disparate forces.

The second indicator of the scope of the war against Israel is far more devastating than the list of groups that endorsed the pro-Hamas flotilla. That indicator is the fact that at the UN on Friday, 189 governments of 189 countries came together as one to savage Israel. There is no other issue that commands such unanimity. The NPT review conference demonstrated that the only way the international community will agree on anything is if its members are agreeing that Israel has no right to defend itself. The NPT review conference’s campaign against Israel shows that the 222 organizations supporting Hamas are a reflection of the will of the majority – not a minority – of the nations of the world.

This war against Israel is nothing new. It has been going on since the dawn of modern Zionism 150 years ago. In many ways, it is just the current iteration of the eternal war against the Jewish people.

The Red-Green alliance’s aims are twofold. It seeks to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist and it seeks to make it impossible for Israel to defend itself. If these aims are met, Israel’s destruction will become an historic inevitability.

Until US President Barack Obama took office, Israel’s one steady asset in this war was the US. Until last year, the US consistently refused to join the Red-Green alliance because its leaders recognized that the alliance’s campaign against Israel was part and parcel of the Red-Green campaign against US superpower status in the Middle East and throughout the world. Indeed, some US leaders recognized that the Red-Green alliance’s animus towards Israel stemmed from the same source as its rejection of American exceptionalism.

Dismally, what the US’s vote in favor of the NPT review conference’s final anti-Israel and by default pro-Iranian resolution makes clear is that under President Barack Obama, the US is no longer Israel’s reliable ally. Indeed, what the US’s vote shows is that the Obama administration’s ideological preferences place it on the side of the Red-Green alliance against Israel. No amount of backpedalling by the Obama administration can make up the damage caused by its act of belligerence against Israel at the NPT review conference.

If Israel’s leaders were better informed, in the lead-up to the NPT conference they would have recognized a number of things. They would have realized that Obama’s anti-nuclear conference in April, his commitment to a nuclear-free world, as well as his general ambivalence – at best – to US global leadership rendered it all but inevitable that he would turn on Israel at the NPT review conference. The truth is that Egypt’s call for the denuclearization of Israel jibes with Obama’s own repeatedly held views both regarding Israel and regarding the US’s own nuclear arsenal.

Armed with this basic understanding of Obama’s inclinations, Israel should have taken for granted that the NPT conference would target Israel. Consequently, in months preceding the conference, Israel should have stated loudly and consistently that as currently constituted the NPT serves as the chief enabler of nuclear proliferation rather than the central instrument for preventing nuclear proliferation it was supposed to be. North Korea exploited its status as an NPT signatory to develop its nuclear arsenal. Today Iran exploits its status as an NPT signatory to develop nuclear weapons. Unless the NPT is fundamentally revised it will continue to serve as the primary instrument for nuclear proliferation.

Had this been Israel’s position, it would have been able to undercut US arguments in favor of signing onto the anti-Israel final resolution. So too, such a position would have prepared Israel to cogently explain its rejection of the final resolution without sounding hypocritical.

And that is the thing of it. The Red-Green alliance’s aim at the NPT conference was to discredit Israel’s deterrent capacity while delegitimizing its right to take preemptive action against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Now, due to Israel’s failure to make its case against the NPT in the months leading up to the conference, as Israel’s enemies use the US-supported final resolution to claim that Israel’s opposition to Iran’s nuclear weapons program is hypocritical, Israel lacks a cognitive framework for responding.

The fact that Israel still doesn’t get the point is made clear by the government’s response to the decision. Israel’s denunciation of the resolution makes no mention of the fact that the NPT regime itself has become the chief institutional enabler of nuclear proliferation today. So too, disastrously, in a clear bid to pretend away Obama’s treachery, Israel actually applauded Obama for emptily criticizing the resolution he voted for. This Israeli response compounds the damage and ensures that the assault will continue and grow stronger.

As to the flotilla, the challenge it presented Israel was nothing new. Israel has been confronted by suicide protestors for a decade now. The fact that these pro-Hamas activists intended to commit suicide in order to discredit Israel on camera was made clear by the fact that the Turkish organizers named the lead ship Rachel Corrie – after the most famous pro-Hamas suicide protestor.

So too, the fact that Israeli forces boarding the ships would be met by trenchant, violent opposition was knowable simply by looking at Turkey’s role in the operation. First of all, the Turkish government-supported NGO behind the operation is IHH. As the US government, the Turkish government in the 1990s, the Investigative Project on Terrorism and countless other sources have proven, the IHH is a terrorist organization. It has direct links to al Qaida and Hamas. Its members have been involved in terrorist warfare from Chechnya and Bosnia to Iraq and Israel. The notion that IHH organizers would behave like radical leftist anti-Israel demonstrators on university campuses is simply ridiculous.

Moreover, there is Turkey’s behavior to consider. Since Obama took office, Turkey’s gradual slide into the Iranian axis has sped up considerably. Turkey’s leading role in the flotilla, and the Erdogan government’s ostentatious embrace of IHH which just a decade ago Turkey banned from earthquake relief efforts in light of its violent, jihadist mission made clear that the Erdogan regime would use the violence on board the ships as a way to strike a strategic blow at Israel’s international standing.

In view of all of this, it is clear that Israel’s information strategy for contending with the flotilla was ill-conceived. Rather than attack Turkey for its facilitation of terrorism, and openly prepare charge sheets against the flotilla’s organizers, crew and passengers for their facilitation of terrorism in breach of both Israeli domestic law and international law, Israel’s information efforts were largely concentrated on irrelevancies. Israeli officials detailed all the humanitarian assistance Israel has provided Hamas-controlled Gaza. They spoke of the Navy’s commitment to use non-lethal force to take over the ships.

And now, in the aftermath of the lethal takeover of the flotilla, Israel’s leaders stammer. Rather than demand an apology from the Turkish government for its support for these terrorists, Defense Minister Ehud Barak called his Turkish counterpart to talk over what happened. Rather than demand restitution for the terrorist assault against Israeli troops, Israel has defended its troops’ moral training in non-violent crowd control.

These efforts are worse than worthless. They make Israel appear whiny rather than indignant. And more depressingly, they expose a dangerous lack of basic comprehension about what has just occurred and a concomitant inability to prepare for what will most certainly follow

Israel is the target of a massive information war. For Israel to win this war it needs to counter its enemies’ lies with the truth.

The NPT has been subverted by the very forces it was created to prevent from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Hamas is a genocidal terrorist organization ideologically indistinguishable from al Qaida. International law requires all states and non-state actors to take active measures to defeat it.

Israel is the frontline of the free world. Its ability to defend itself and deter its foes is the single most important guarantee of international peace and security in the world. A strong Israel is also the most potent and reliable guarantor of the US’s continued ability to project its power in the Middle East.

This is the unvarnished truth. It is also the beginning of a successful Israel campaign to defang and neutralize the massive coalition of nuclear proliferation- and terrorism- abettors aligned against it. But until our leaders finally recognize the nature of the war being waged against our country, these basic facts will remain ignored as Israel moves from one stunning defeat to the next.  

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Netanyahu, Obama’s newest prop

The Democratic Party is feeling the heat for US President Barack Obama’s hostility towards Israel. In an interview with Channel 10 earlier this month, Democratic Party mega-donor Haim Saban characterized the Obama administration as ideologically aligned with the radical Left and harshly criticized its treatment of Israel.

Both Ma’ariv and Yediot Aharonot reported this week that Democratic congressmen and senators are deeply concerned that the administration’s harsh treatment of Israel has convinced many American Jews not to contribute to their campaigns or to the Democratic Party ahead of November 2’s mid-term elections. They also fear that American Jews will vote for Republican challengers in large numbers.

It is these concerns, rather than a decision to alter his positions on Israel specifically and the Middle East generally, that now drive Obama’s relentless courtship of the American Jewish community. His latest move in this sphere was his sudden invitation to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to visit him at the White House for a "warm reception" in front of television cameras next Tuesday.

It is clear that electoral worries rather than policy concerns are behind what the White House has described as a "charm offensive," because since launching this offensive a few weeks ago, Obama not changed any of his policies towards Israel and the wider Middle East. In fact, he has ratcheted up these policies to Israel’s detriment.

TAKE HIS goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. On Friday, the UN’s monthlong Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference is scheduled to adopt a consensual resolution before adjourning. According to multiple media reports, Israel is set to be the focus of the draft resolution that will likely be adopted.

The draft resolutions being circulated by both Egypt and the US adopt Egypt’s demand for a nuclear-free Middle East. They call for a conference involving all countries in the region to discuss denuclearization. The only difference between the Egyptian draft and the US draft on the issue is that the Egyptians call for the conference to be held in 2011 while the US calls for the convening of the conference in 2012-2013. The draft resolution also calls for all states that are not members of the NPT – Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea – to join the NPT as non-nuclear powers.

So while Iran is not mentioned in the draft resolution – which must be adopted by consensus – in two separate places, Israel’s purported nuclear arsenal is the target of an international diplomatic stampede.

In 2005, Egypt circulated a draft resolution that was substantively identical to its current draft. But in stark contrast to today’s conclave, the NPT review conference in 2005 ended without agreement, because the Bush administration refused to go along with Egypt’s assault on Israel.

Particularly in light of Iran’s nuclear weapons program and the Iranian regime’s expressed goal of destroying Israel, the Bush administration preferred to scuttle the conference rather than give any credence to the view that Israel’s purported nuclear arsenal is a greater threat to global security than Iran’s nuclear program – which, as in today’s draft, wasn’t mentioned in Egypt’s resolution five years ago. The Obama administration has no problem going along with Cairo.

Obama’s willingness to place Israel’s nuclear program on the international agenda next to Iran’s is par for the course of his utterly failed policy for contending with Iran’s nuclear program. After his diplomatic open hand policy towards Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was met with a clenched fist, Obama’s attempt to convince the UN Security Council to pass "smart sanctions" against Iran has been checkmated by Iran’s nuclear deal with its newest strategic allies, Turkey and Brazil.

That deal, which facilitates rather than impedes Teheran’s nuclear weapons program, has ended any prospect that the Security Council will pass an additional sanctions resolution against Iran in the near future. But then, in order to secure the now weakened Russian support for his sanctions resolution, Obama exempted Russia from the sanctions and turned a blind eye to continued Russian and Chinese nuclear proliferation activities in Syria, Turkey and Pakistan. Furthermore, Obama agreed to make most of the remaining provisions non-binding.
In the meantime, and in spite of the fact that his sanctions bid is in shambles, Obama has asked congressional Democrats to stall their sanctions bills for another month. So, too, Obama prevailed on his Democratic colleagues in Congress to exempt Russia and China from their sanctions bills.

AS PART of the administration’s attempt to woo American Jews back into the Democratic Party fold despite its anti-Israel policies, last week a group of pre-selected pro-Obama rabbis was invited to the White House for talks with Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and with Dan Shapiro and Dennis Ross, who hold the Palestinian and Iran dossiers on Obama’s National Security Council, respectively. According to a report of the meeting by Rabbi Jack Moline that has not been refuted by the White House, the three men told the Democratic rabbis that the administration has three priorities in the Middle East. First Obama seeks to isolate Iran.

Second, he seeks to significantly reduce the US military presence in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq. And third, he seeks to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

These priorities are disturbing for a number of reasons. First, isolating Iran is not the same as preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. By characterizing its goal as "isolating" Iran, the administration makes clear that preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is not its goal. Moreover, as Iran’s deal with Brazil and Turkey makes abundantly clear, Iran is not isolated. Indeed, its foreign relations have prospered since Obama took office.

In his write-up of the meeting, Moline indicated that Ross and Emanuel view Obama’s rejection of Israel’s right to build homes for Jews in Jerusalem as motivated by his goal of isolating Iran. So in the view of Obama’s Jewish advisers, his preferred method of isolating Iran is to attack Israel.

Add that to his third priority of establishing a Palestinian state by the end of next year and you have a US president for whom bashing Israel is his first and third priority in the Middle East.
When one factors in his willingness to put Israel’s purported nuclear arsenal on the international chopping block, it is clear that there is no precedent for Obama’s hostility towards Israel in the history of US-Israel relations.

THIS BRINGS us to Obama’s meeting next Tuesday with Netanyahu. Obama’s continued commitment to his anti-Israel policies indicates that there are two possible scenarios for next week’s meeting. In the best case, the meeting will have no substance whatsoever. It will be nothing more than a public display of presidential affection for the Israeli premier.

The more likely scenario is that Obama will use the meeting as an opportunity to pressure Netanyahu not to attack Iran’s nuclear installations; not to attack Hizbullah’s and Syria’s missile depots, launchers and silos; and to extend the prohibition on Jewish building in Judea and Samaria beyond its September deadline and expand the prohibition to Jewish home construction in Jerusalem.

Regarding the latter scenario, it can only be hoped that Netanyahu has learned from his previous experiences with Obama. In December, in the hopes of alleviating US pressure, Netanyahu announced an unprecedented 10-month ban on Jewish building in Judea and Samaria. For his efforts, Netanyahu was rewarded with an escalation of American pressure against Israel.

After he pocketed Netanyahu’s concession on Judea and Samaria, Obama immediately launched his poisonous assault on Israeli rights to Jerusalem.

Likewise, Netanyahu’s willingness to outwardly support both Obama’s effort to appease Iran and his efforts to pass anti-Iran sanctions in the Security Council gained Obama a year and a half of quiet from Jerusalem. During that time, Iran has moved within months of the bomb and the US has abandoned its goal of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. This experience has one clear lesson: If Obama seeks policy concessions from Israel during their meeting, Netanyahu must reject his entreaties. In fact, it may even be counterproductive for Netanyahu to abstain from responding in the hopes of buying time.

If on the other hand, Obama avoids discussion of substantive issues and devotes his meeting with Netanyahu to a discussion of Michelle Obama’s war on obesity, Netanyahu should consider what Obama did to the family of slain Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl while the president signed the Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act last week.

Pearl was decapitated in 2002 by jihadists in Pakistan. Among other things, his killers claimed he had no right to live because he was Jewish. At the ceremony, Obama barred Pearl’s father, Judea Pearl, from speaking. In so doing Obama reduced Daniel Pearl’s family to the status of mere props as Obama vapidly and reprehensibly proclaimed, "Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is."

This appropriation of Pearl’s murder and denial of what it represented served Obama’s purpose of pretending that there is no jihad and that radical Islam is not a threat to the US. And by silencing Pearl’s father, the president turned him into an unwilling accomplice.

Netanyahu should take two lessons from Obama’s behavior at the ceremony. First, Netanyahu must do everything he can to avoid being used as a prop. This means that he should insist on having a joint press briefing with Obama. He must also insist on having a say regarding which journalists will be included in the press pool and who will be permitted to ask the two leaders questions.

Second, Netanyahu must not become Obama’s spokesman. As part of his unsuccessful bid to convince Obama to change his policies towards Israel, Netanyahu and his advisers have gone on record praising Obama for his support for Israel. These statements have stymied attempts by Israel’s US supporters to pressure Obama to change those policies.

The Israeli official who has been most outspoken in his praise for Obama and his denial that Obama’s policies are hostile towards Israel has been Ambassador Michael Oren. Oren has repeatedly praised Obama for his supposedly firm support for Israel and commitment to Israel’s security – most recently in an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday. Moreover, according to eyewitness reports, in a recent closed-door meeting with American Jews, Oren criticized the Republican Party for attacking Obama for his animosity towards Israel.

This quite simply has to end. As foreign officials, Israeli diplomats should not be involved in US partisan politics. Not only should Israeli officials not give Obama undeserved praise, they should not give Republicans undeserved criticism.

At the end of the day, American Jews have the luxury of choosing between their loyalty to the Democratic Party and their support for Israel. And in the coming months, they will choose.
The government of Israel has no such luxury. The government’s only duty is to secure Israel and advance Israel’s national interests in every way possible. Netanyahu must not permit Obama’s public relations campaign to divert him from this mission.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.