Tag Archives: Egypt

Hizbullah on the homefront

Last week Lebanese commentator Tony Badran published an article on the Now Lebanon Web site discussing the Iranian way of war. In "The shape of things to come," he discussed the significance of the breakup of a Hizbullah cell in Kuwait and the deportation of Hizbullah agents from Bahrain. Badran explained that like the Hizbullah ring arrested last year in Egypt, the Hizbullah cells in Persian Gulf states demonstrate how Iran uses Hizbullah to extend its regional power.

Badran noted that Iran’s cultivation of fifth columnists in target countries through Hizbullah puts paid to the notion that it will be possible to contain a nuclear Iran. Armed with both nuclear weapons and armed agents in states throughout the region, Iran will be well positioned to bend all regional states to its will.

US security guarantees will be worthless. Living under the threat of the Iranian bomb, neighboring states will be unable to take steps to curb Iranian agents subverting their governments from within their sovereign territory.

For Israel, the threat is obviously more acute. Whereas states like Kuwait and Bahrain will be able to suffer through an Iranian Middle Eastern hegemony, Israel will have no such luxury. Iran has made clear that in an Iranian-ruled Middle East, there will be no room for Israel. And so Israel must act soon to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

But then there is the homefront.

With each passing day, it becomes more and more apparent that as is the case in Kuwait, Bahrain and Egypt, through Hizbullah, Iran has established cells of sympathizers among Israeli Arabs. This means that as Israel prepares to strike Iran, it must minimize Iran’s ability to retaliate from fifth column bases inside the country.

According to Badran, among the Hizbullah agents rounded up in Kuwait were several officers in the Kuwaiti military. This means that Iran/Hizbullah is not operating at the margins of Kuwaiti society. They are part of the Kuwaiti mainstream.

ISRAEL FACES a similar situation. Indeed, in many ways it is worse. Here Hizbullah agents are found in the top echelons of Israeli Arab society. Last week’s announcement that Ameer Makhoul and Omar Said Abdo are under arrest for allegedly serving as Hizbullah agents is a case in point.

Until his arrest, Makhoul served as head of Ittijah, the umbrella organization of Israeli Arab NGOs. His brother Issam Makhoul is a former member of Knesset. Abdo is a professional organizer for the Balad political party. These men are not just leading members of the local Arab hierarchy. They are tightly connected to the Israeli and international Left as well.

Makhoul and Abdo are not unique. Former MK and Balad leader Azmi Bishara fled the country in 2007 to avoid being arrested for serving as a Hizbullah spy in the 2006 war. Bishara is suspected of transferring targeting information to Hizbullah officers.

Since the Second Lebanon War, a number of Israeli Arabs have been arrested and convicted of spying for Hizbullah. All of them were accomplished individuals from respected families.

Last month Rawi Sultani, the son of a prominent Israeli Arab attorney, was convicted of collecting intelligence information for Hizbullah concerning the whereabouts of Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi. Sultani was a member of Ashkenazi’s health club in Kfar Saba.

Sultani was drafted into the service of Hizbullah while he participated in a pan-Arab youth conference in Morocco organized by Balad.

Khaled Kashkoush was a student in Germany who promised his Hizbullah handler that he would get a job at Rambam Medical Center in Haifa. Kashkoush’s plan was to develop relations with wounded soldiers hospitalized there and transfer information he gained to Hizbullah.

In 2008 Sgt.-Maj. Louai Balut, the first Christian Arab tracker to serve in the IDF, was sentenced to 11 years in jail for transferring information about troop deployments in the North to Hizbullah.

Earlier this month, MK Massoud Ghanem of the United Arab-Ta’al party gave an interview to the Nazareth newspaper Kul el-Arab in which he expressed his hope to one day see Israel destroyed and replaced with an Islamic caliphate.

Ghanem also said that in the event of war between Israel and the Iran-Syria-Hizbullah-Hamas axis, he would side with the axis. As he put it, "The Iran-Hizbullah-Syria axis represents the line of resistance and refusal to surrender, and naturally, I support this axis."

Hizbullah’s popularity among Israeli Arabs has grown immensely since the Second Lebanon War. Whereas before the war, one would rarely see public displays of support, since the war Hizbullah flags are routinely flown at Israeli Arab political events and protests. Hizbullah’s growing popularity goes hand in hand with a deep radicalization of Israeli Arab society that has gone largely unaddressed by state authorities.

OVER THE weekend, thousands of Israeli Arabs participated in so-called Nakba rallies. The Nakba, or "catastrophe," is how the Arab world refers to Israel’s establishment on May 15, 1948.

Until the onset of the Oslo peace process with the PLO in 1993, May 15 was generally overlooked by Israeli Arabs. But since then, each year, commemorations of the so-called Nakba have steadily increased in scope and radicalism.

This year, the central demonstration was held in Kafr Kanna, the same Galilee town Abdo calls home. The keynote speaker at the event was Islamic Movement leader Raed Salah. His speech could easily have been given by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah.

Speaking to a crowd of thousands, Salah threatened Israel with war if it dares to take action against Arabs like Abdo and Makhoul. In his words, "If you think that with this arrest you will take revenge against political groups in our society like Balad, you are wrong. Balad, the Islamic Movement, Hadash and the Higher Arab Monitoring Committee – all share one hope, one pain, one future, and one present. Those who go against one of us, go against everyone. We are all Omar Said, we are all Ameer Makhoul."
He went on to promise that all the descendents of Arabs who left in 1948 would return. He called Israeli communities "cancers" that will be removed.

Finally, Salah called on Fatah and Hamas to unite in war against Israel: "From here, from the Galilee, we call on you to unite against the occupation until the state of Palestine is established with Jerusalem as its capital."

Ahead of his Nakba day diatribe, last week Salah was acquitted of rioting charges. The indictment was filed against him in 2007 following a speech he gave at a demonstration in Jerusalem in which he accused Israel of seeking to destroy the Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount.

As he waved a Syrian flag, in that speech Salah proclaimed "it is now the duty of every Arab and Muslim to launch an intifada from one end to another to save Jerusalem and the Aksa Mosque. We are not the ones who allowed ourselves to eat a meal of bread and cheese soaked in children’s blood."

He was acquitted due to what Jerusalem District Court claimed were contradictions in the prosecution’s testimony.

Salah’s statements, like those of his colleagues in Israeli Arab leadership echelons invariably provoke angry responses from politicians. Indeed, in response to Salah’s Nakba speech, on Sunday Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz called for his citizenship to be revoked.

But headline-generating statements aside, politicians and the rest of the country’s leadership – including the police and the courts – have refused to actually do anything. Our leaders have failed to adopt any consistent measures to counteract the fact that today there are no Israeli Arab leaders who do not routinely make statements either rejecting the country’s right to exist or inciting treason against the state, or both. Similarly, they have taken no effective measures against reports of massive arms caches in Arab villages.

In March, the sensationalist Debkafile Web site published a hair-raising report claiming that Hizbullah has raised five brigades – all trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps – whose mission is to invade northern Israel in the next war. According to the report, one of the brigades is tasked with invading three Arab villages along the Acre-Safed highway and using them as a bridgehead to spark an armed insurrection in Arab towns throughout the North.

Debkafile’s report was not sourced and was widely ignored as a consequence. But in recent weeks, several IDF sources have confirmed the gist of the story.

Over the weekend Channel 1 military correspondent Yoav Limor reported that heightened concern about war has brought near unanimity in the defense community that Israel should make a last ditch effort to negotiate the surrender of the Golan Heights to Syria in the hope of cajoling it out of the Iranian axis. If true, this position indicates that the top echelons of the security establishment are in a state of panic.
If Limor’s report is accurate, our leaders need to get a hold of themselves. The times are dire, but they are not hopeless. There is no reason for anyone to lose his head.

To prevail, our leaders and security authorities need to stop talking and start acting. They need to move now to break up enemy organizations like Balad and the Islamic Movement, arrest their leaders and seize their assets. There are laws already on the books to enact such policies.

So too, the police, with assistance from the IDF if necessary, needs to uncover and seize illegal arms caches. Hostile villages like Kafr Kanna and Umm el-Fahm, and border towns like Deir el-Asad and Majd el-Kurum should be rigorously patrolled.

There is very little good news coming out of neighboring states these days. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to Syria last week raised the threat level against Israel to soaring heights amid reports that he has agreed to sell massive quantities of advanced weapons to Iran’s Arab client state.
But Israel can handle this situation. We just need to start acting and stop talking.

Originally published in the Jerusalem Post.

Time to plan for war

So much for US President Barack Obama’s famed powers of persuasion. At the UN’s Nuclear Non-Poliferation Treaty review conference which opened this week, the Obama administration managed to lose control over the agenda before the conference even started.

Obama administration officials said they intended to use the conference as a platform to mount international pressure on Iran to stop its illicit nuclear proliferation activities. But even before the conference began, with a little prodding from Egypt, the administration agreed that instead of focusing on Iran, the conference would adopt Iran’s chosen agenda: attacking Israel for its alleged nuclear arsenal.

Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that US officials were conducting negotiations with Egypt about Egypt’s demand that the NPT review conference call for sanctions against Israel for refusing to join the NPT as a non-nuclear state. The Journal quoted a senior administration official involved in the discussions saying, "We’ve made a proposal to them [Egypt] that goes beyond what the U.S. has been willing to do before."

Among other possibilities, that proposal may have included a US agreement to appoint a UN envoy responsible for organizing a UN conference calling for the Greater Middle East to become a nuclear-free zone. In diplomatese, "Middle East nuclear-free zone" is a well-accepted euphemism for stripping Israel of its purported nuclear capability while turning a blind eye to Iranian, Syrian and other Islamic nuclear weapons programs. Egypt’s demand, which it convinced more than a hundred members of the Non-Aligned bloc to sign onto, is for Israel to open its nuclear installations to international inspectors as a first step towards unilateral nuclear disarmament.

On Wednesday the US joined the other four permanent members of the Security Council in signing a statement calling for a nuclear-free Middle East and urging Israel, Pakistan and India to accede to the NPT as non-nuclear states. Following the US’s lead, on Thursday Yukiya Amano, the new Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency wrote a letter to IAEA member states asking for their suggestions for how to convince Israel to sign the NPT.

So as Iran — an NPT signatory — makes a mockery of the treaty by building nuclear weapons in contempt of its treaty obligations, the US has actively supported Iran’s bid to use the NPT review conference as yet another UN forum for bashing Israel.

It bears recalling that the primary goal of the NPT is to prevent nuclear proliferation. From the amount of attention Israel is receiving at the NPT review conference, you could easily get the impression that Israel’s purported nuclear arsenal is the gravest proliferation threat in the world today. But history shows that this is nonsense.

Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal, which it has reportedly fielded for four decades, has not led to a regional nuclear arms race. Notwithstanding their protestations to the contrary, Israel’s neighbors fully recognize that the purpose of Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal is to guarantee Israel’s survival and consequently only threatens those who would attack the Jewish state with the intention of annihilating it. This is why although it is four decades old; Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal has never caused a regional nuclear arms race. It has never harmed or called into question the relevance or usefulness of the NPT’s international non-proliferation agenda. Moreover, as a non-signatory to the NPT, Israel has the right to develop a nuclear program.

Iran on the other hand gave up that right when it joined the NPT regime. So too, in sharp contrast to Israel’s alleged program, it is clear that Iran’s nuclear project is aggressive rather than defensive. Consequently, it is universally recognized that if Iran becomes a nuclear power, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other states will begin developing their own nuclear arsenals in short order. That is, it is absolutely clear that if the NPT is to have any relevance in the coming years, if there is to be any hope that counter-proliferation regimes can be useful; preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons must be its signatories’ chief aim.

But due to the Obama administration’s diplomatic fecklessness and ideological blinders, administration officials were incapable of making these points. And so, instead through its actions, the administration has advanced the cause of nuclear proliferation. The US has now joined the ranks of fools who claim that nuclear weapons in the hands of states like the US and Israel are as problematic as nuclear weapons in the hands of states like Iran and North Korea.

BUT THEN, in the end it makes no difference that the US has followed Iran’s lead at the NPT conference. Even if the administration had managed to make Iran’s nuclear weapons program the focus of debate, it wouldn’t have mattered because diplomacy is no longer a relevant tool for preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Appeasement has failed. Sanctions are dead in the water in the Security Council. 
And even if the Security Council passes a sanctions resolution, they will have no impact on Iran’s behavior. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made that much clear in his speech on Monday and in subsequent remarks to the media. As he put it, "While we do not welcome sanctions, we do not fear them either. Sanctions cannot stop the Iranian nation."

What all of this demonstrates is that the diplomatic track – from appeasement to sanctions – is irrelevant for contending with Iran’s nuclear program. The only way to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear bombs is to use military force to destroy or severely damage its nuclear installations.

And this of course is something Obama will do. His begging-to-shake-hands policy towards Iran and the one hand and his iron fist policy towards Israel on the other makes it absolutely clear that Obama will do nothing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. Rather than correct his abysmal failures, Obama seeks to hide them by minimizing the seriousness of the threat.

In remarks to the media this week, a White House official downplayed the Iranian threat. He told the Financial Times that Iran’s "nuclear clock has slowed down. They are not making dramatic technical progress given the difficulties they are facing in their [uranium] enrichment program and the fact that their efforts to build secret facilities have been disclosed."

The fact that the US’s published intelligence estimates of Iran’s nuclear program contradict this claim didn’t seem to faze the official.

The US’s abdication of its responsibility as the leader of the free world to prevent the most dangerous regimes from acquiring the most dangerous weapons means that the responsibility for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons has fallen on Israel’s shoulders. Only Israel has the means and the will to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. And the message the NPT follies convey is that Israel must develop contingency plans for attacking Iran as quickly as possible.

Daily reports of weapons build-ups and military exercises in Iran and among Iran’s clients Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas expose the contours of their war plans.

Syria and Iran have armed Hizbullah with some 40,000 missiles and rockets, including hundreds of Scud missiles and guided surface-to-surface solid fuel M600 missiles with a 250 km range and. This week Hizbullah threatened to attack Israel with non-conventional weapons. Syria itself has a formidable chemical and biological arsenal as well as a massive artillery and missile force at its disposal.

As for Hamas, since Operation Cast Lead Iran’s Palestinian proxy Hamas has expanded its own missile arsenal. Today it reportedly has projectiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv and beyond.

As for Iran, as its seemingly endless military exercises make clear, the mullocracy has the capacity to use conventional weapons to imperil global oil shipments from the Persian Gulf. So too, this week’s report that Osama Bin Laden may have decamped to Iran in 2003 merely served to underline Iran’s ability to utilize jihadist terror forces throughout the world.

From the open preparations for war that Iran and its clients have undertaken, it is clear that if they initiate the next round of fighting they will fight a four front war against Israel. That war will be dominated by missile attacks against the entire country aimed at breaking the will of the Israeli people while forcing the IDF to divert vital resources away from Israel’s primary target – Iran’s nuclear installations – to contend with Iran’s proxies’ missile stores.

AS THEY CONSIDER Israel’s options going forward, Israel’s political and military leaders have to take two considerations into account. First, the side that initiates the conflict will be the side that controls the battle space. And second, there is a real possibility that the Obama administration will refuse to resupply Israel with vital weapons systems in the course of the war. The fact that Israel will be roundly condemned by the UN and its component parts is a certainty regardless of who initiates the conflict and therefore is irrelevant for operational planning.

Armed with these understandings, it is apparent that Israeli contingency plans for war must have limited goals and should be guided by the overarching aim of beginning and ending the war quickly. Luckily, Israel excels at limited, swift campaigns.

Responding to one of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s recent threats, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman promised last month that if Assad attacks Israel, Israel will bring down his regime. While bringing about the utter defeat of Iran’s regional proxies is a reasonable goal, it cannot be Israel’s goal in the coming war.

In the coming war, Israel will have only one goal: to destroy or seriously damage Iran’s nuclear installations. Every resource turned against Iran’s proxies must be aimed at facilitating that goal. That is, the only thing Israel should seek to accomplish in contending with Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas is to prevent them from diverting Israeli resources away from attacking Iran’s nuclear installations.

This means that Israel must launch a preemptive strike against Hizbullah’s missiles and missile launchers, Syria’s missiles, artillery and launchers, and Hamas’s missiles and launchers. As for their short-range rockets, Israel should do its best to intercept them and otherwise hunker down to weather the storm of Katyushas and Qassams. Life of the homefront won’t be easy. But it won’t be impossible either, as we saw in 2006. 

Almost every assessment of a possible Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear installations has assumed that Israel will use its air force to strike. All that can be said of that analysis is that, just as there is more than one way to skin a cat, so there is more than one way to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. An Israeli strike should utilize all of them to keep the Iranians off balance and on the defensive.

These are dangerous times. Iran, which seeks to position itself as a regional superpower, has been emboldened by the Obama administration’s abdication of US global leadership. Only Israel can prevent Iran from endangering the world. But time is of the essence.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Convenient moral blindness

Moral blindness in the face of evil is depravity. But in the upside-down moral universe of our world today, moral blindness has become a badge of honor. If you refuse to call evil by its name, then you are a moderate. And if you stand up to evil, you are yourself an extremist.

The embrace of moral blindness as an emblem of sophistication is nowhere more apparent than among American Jews. Take recent events on US college campuses. This week the Washington Times reported that a large and vocal group of Brandeis University students are organizing to protest the university’s decision to invite Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren to give this year’s commencement address.

In a Facebook initiative led by a student named Jonathan Sussman, several hundred students have joined the demand to disinvite Oren. Sussman claims that by inviting him, Brandeis is siding with "a rogue state apologist, a defender of (among other things) the war crimes and human rights abuses of the war on Gaza."

Sussman gained notoriety earlier this year when he sought to organize students to disrupt former UN ambassador Dore Gold in a debate the university hosted between Gold and Richard Goldstone. Sussman, a self-proclaimed Communist is a member of the anti-American Students for Democratic Society.

For their part, pro-Israel students have defended the administration’s decision to invite Oren on technical grounds. In a dedicated Facebook page, Brandeis student Nathan Mizrachi wrote that protesting Oren is a "waste of time." While allowing that Oren is controversial, Mizrachi argued against protesting his speech by claiming, "anyone who is consistently contributing to our worldview in a dignified, widely respected manner – instead of idiots like Michael Moore or Fox News – is someone who merits our attention."

Mizrachi couldn’t bring himself to argue that Brandeis was right to invite Oren. He couldn’t be bothered to note that everything Sussman wrote is a lie. The most ringing endorsement of Oren’s appearance that Mizrachi could muster in response to Sussman’s latest attack was to say that it was a waste of time to protest his appearance and that  it "would truly be a disgrace to our university," if protesters were to shout Oren down at commencement.

No offense to Mizrachi but his Facebook counteroffensive is not exactly what most people would call a particularly heroic defense of Oren, Brandeis or Israel.

Unfortunately, this is more often than not what passes as a pro-Israel message these days in the US Jewish circles. Following the example communicated by the US Jewish leadership, supporters of Israel often act as if shouting down Israel advocates is wrong only because doing so is an assault on freedom of speech. It isn’t that Israel is in the right and the Palestinians are in the wrong. It isn’t that Israel is a just and moral society. It isn’t that the IDF fights justly and morally and only in self-defense. It isn’t that the Palestinians have taken all the lands Israel has given them and transformed them into terrorist enclaves or that they democratically elected Hamas – a genocidal terrorist organization — to lead them. It isn’t that there is not now and never was a Palestinian leadership willing to accept Israel’s right to exist.

It’s just that it isn’t right to silence Israel advocates. It’s against the First Amendment. Zionists have a right to express themselves too. 

But then, not all Zionists. And not too many of them. Take the Jerusalem Post’s Khaled Abu Toameh for example. Abu Toameh was scheduled to speak at Tufts University last month. His talk, sponsored by Honest Reporting and CAMERA, was supposed to be held under the auspices of Tufts Friends of Israel. At the last minute, Friends of Israel cancelled his lecture. Abu Toameh was informed that the pro-Israel student group cancelled his talk as a preemptive move to avoid criticism from campus Arab groups. Tufts Hillel Director Rabbi Jeffrey Summit later wrote him claiming that the talk was cancelled due to an overabundance of pro-Israel speakers on campus.

The situation at Tufts and Brandeis, where pro-Israel students can’t figure out why Israel should be defended and don’t want to overload themselves with too many speakers defending Israel is downright wonderful in comparison to the situation at Berkeley. There Jewish students and faculty were galvanizing forces behind the divestment from Israel drive that passed overwhelmingly in the Berkeley student senate in March.

The divestment initiative, which called on the university administration to divest from General Electric and United Technologies for their joint projects with the IDF, was vetoed by the senate president. His veto was narrowly sustained in a later vote last week. In the meantime, the divestment drive has expanded to UC San Diego.

In an article published last month on the American Thinker website, UC Santa Cruz and UCLA professors Tammi Rossman-Benjamin and Leila Beckwith wrote that the divestment campaigns and the overwhelmingly anti-Israel atmosphere on campuses has made life extremely difficult and often frightening for Jewish students on campuses.

And yet, there has been no divestment of major Jewish donors from these institutions. There has been no demand that Hillel replace ineffective or anti-Israel administrators. There has been no demand that campuses fire professors like Berkeley Hebrew Professor Ruth Adler or Talmud Professor Daniel Boyarin who force their students to undergo anti-Zionist indoctrination in their classrooms.

Again and again, the official Jewish community and pro-Israel students’ response to anti-Israel campaigns and often violent onslaughts is to mumble out a protest against their infringement on the freedom of expression. That is, for many US Jewish leaders and Jewish campus activists, the biggest problem with the Red-Green alliance of leftists and Muslims is that they deny pro-Israel students and speakers the right to express themselves.

The mendacity of the Red-Green alliance’s claims against Israel, the bigotry of their increasingly open calls for Israel’s destruction, their denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination or even our right to define ourselves as a people all goes unopposed.

This is not a sustainable line of defense. This is not even the beginning of a defense – of Israel or of the rights of American Jews. But this state of affairs does explain very well why according to recent polling data, a half of American Jews under 35 would be okay with a world without Israel.

Some argue that what happens on the campuses is not important. What really matters is what happens in the grown-up world. Unfortunately, today we see that the depraved moral blindness of the classroom has brought about a situation where political leaders cannot recognize the moral depravity of the international community. And sophisticated grownups – and particularly American Jewish grownups — cannot or will not make their leaders pay a price for their depraved support for evil.

Take Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s decision to travel to New York this week to participate in the UN’s Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference. It is clear that Ahmadinejad’s purpose in travelling to New York is to ensure that the conference is a circus. Ahmadinejad means to make certain that to the extent a distinction is made between Iran’s nuclear weapons program and Israel’s purported nuclear arsenal, the distinction will claim that whereas Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal needs to be destroyed, Iran’s interest in nuclear weapons is a justified response to Israeli badness.

Apparently anticipating his move, according to the Wall Street Journal US President Barack Obama has been discussing Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal with Egypt. According to the newspaper’s account, the US is discussing Egypt’s demand that the Middle East become a nuclear-free zone. A senior US official claimed, "We’ve made a proposal to them [Egypt] that goes beyond what the US has been willing to do before."

Some US Jewish groups have called for a protest of Ahmadinejad outside the UN building. Others have called on state delegations to stage a mass walkout during his speech.

But none have attacked the administration for agreeing to the false moral equivalence between Iran’s nuclear program and Israel’s nuclear program. None have condemned Obama for discussing Israel’s purported nuclear program at a time when Iran — that has declared its intention to destroy Israel — is racing towards the nuclear finish line.

Then too, the American Jewish community is silent as Obama strong arms Israel into indirect, Obama administration-mediated talks with the Palestinians. It is silent even as it is widely reported that Obama has threatened Israel that if the Jewish state builds homes for Jews in Jerusalem or refuses to accept a Palestinians state by next year, Obama will impose his own "peace plan," on Israel. That is, the American Jewish community is all but mute as Obama does to Israel what Berkeley is doing to Israel.

The fact of the matter is that defending Israel against its enemies isn’t a freedom of speech issue. It is an issue of right vs. wrong. Israel is the state of the Jewish people. It is a great ally of the US. Judea and Samaria and Jerusalem were legally allocated to the Jewish people by the League of Nations Mandate in 1922 and that allocation has never been cancelled or superseded. Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and neighborhoods in united Jerusalem are not illegal. The IDF did not commit war crimes in Gaza or anywhere else. Arabs are full citizens in Israel. When Israel fights, it fights to defend itself from aggression.

The aggression launched against Israel is conducted by societies and states that refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist. It is launched by societies and states that ignore the laws of war, that refuse to respect even the most basic human rights of their own citizens let alone of Israelis. The Palestinians have yet to find even one leader who is willing to accept Israel’s right to exist or the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in our land.

This is the truth. This is where the defense of Israel begins. And it is the absence of this truth and this defense from the lexicon of Jewish American students and community leaders in recent years that has brought about a situation where the only reason not to attack Israel is because it is "a waste of time."

It is the absence of this truth and this defense that has enabled a situation where the President of the United States can maintain the support of the American Jewish community while allowing others to equate Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal with Iran’s nuclear program, and while treating Israel as if it were the root of all the pathologies of the Arab world.

And if the truth about Israel continues to be ignored by American Jews, not only will Israel be imperiled. The sustainability of their own community — that has embraced moral blindness in the name of moderation and sophistication — will be called into question.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Barreling on, regardless

If safeguarding international security is the chief aim of US President Barack Obama’s foreign policy, then at some point he can be expected to change course in the Middle East. For today, Obama faces the wreckage of every aspect of his Middle East policies. And largely as a consequence of his policies, the region moves ever closer to war.

In Iraq, Obama’s pledge to withdraw all combat forces from the country by the summer has emboldened the various forces vying for control of the country to set it ablaze once more. In Afghanistan, Obama’s surge and leave policy has left would-be US allies hedging their bets, at best. And it has caused the US’s NATO partners to question the purpose of their deployment in that country.

Then there is Iran. Last week’s report by The New York Times that this January Defense Secretary Robert Gates penned a memo to National Security Advisor James Jones warning that the Obama administration has no effective policy for dealing with Iran’s nuclear weapons program exposed the bitter truth that in the face of the most acute foreign policy problem they face, Obama and his crew are out to lunch. Gates’s attempt to mitigate the story’s impact by claiming that actually, the White House is weighing all its option only made things worse. Even before the ink on his correction note was dry, his Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy was telling reporters in Singapore that the military option, "is not on the table in the near term."

Iran for its part continues to escalate its menacing behavior. Last week its naval forces reportedly interdicted a French ship and an Italian ship navigating through the Straits of Hormuz.

President Shimon Peres’s announcement last week that Syria has transferred Scud missiles to Hizbullah in Lebanon was a sharp warning that Iran and its underlings are diligently preparing for war with Israel. It also demonstrated that the Obama administration’s attempts to use diplomacy to coddle Syria away from Iran have failed completely. 
Administration officials’ statements in the wake of Peres’s bombshell make clear that Syria’s bellicose actions have not caused the US President to reconsider his failed policy. Obama’s advisors responded to the news by irrelevantly boasting that their policy of "engagement" enabled them to bring the matter up with their Syrian interlocutors three times before Peres’s announcement and once more after he made the statement.

And that’s not nearly the end of it. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced last week, soon the Obama administration will expand its dialogue with Syria by returning the US ambassador to Damascus for the first time since Syrian President Bashar Assad ordered the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri five years ago. That is, Obama has chosen to respond to Syria’s open brinkmanship by rewarding Assad with newfound legitimacy and panache.

And that’s still not the worst of it. What is worst is that Obama’s advisers openly admit that they have no idea why Syria remains a rogue state despite their happy talk. As one administration official told Foreign Policy, understanding why Syria – Iran’s Arab client state – is acting like Iran’s Arab client state is, "the million dollar question."
"We do not understand Syrian intentions. No one does, and until we get to that question we can never get to the root of the problem," the official told the magazine.

But while they wait for the Oracle at Damascus to decode itself, they are content to continue wooing Assad as he provokes war.

Then there are the Palestinians. After rejecting Obama’s envoy George Mitchell’s latest plea to conduct indirect negotiations with Israel, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas explained that Obama’s own statements have convinced the Palestinians that there is nothing to negotiate about.

As he put it, "Since you, Mr. President, and you, the members of the American administration, believe in [the urgent need for a Palestinian state] it is your duty to call for the steps in order to reach the solution and impose the solution. Impose it. But don’t tell me it’s a vital national strategic American interest… and then not do anything."

Finally there is Israel. In the same week that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael Mullen refused to rule out the possibility that the US will shoot down Israeli jets en route to attack Iran’s nuclear installations, and Obama again blamed Israel for the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, Jim Jones tried to reassure Jewish Democrats that despite the administration’s hostile actions and statements, it is not hostile to Israel.

Jones’s speech was part of a very public outreach plan the administration adopted last week in the face of a groundswell of American Jewish anger at Obama for his adversarial posture towards Israel. Given that American Jews have been the Democratic Party’s most secure voting bloc since 1932, recent polls showing that the majority of American Jews oppose Obama’s treatment of Israel are a political earthquake.

According to a Quinnipiac poll published last week, a whopping 67 percent of American Jews disapprove of Obama’s handling of the situation between Israel and the Palestinians. A poll of American Jews taken by John McLaughlin earlier this month showed that a plurality of American Jews would consider voting for a candidate other than Obama in the next presidential elections.

And on Israel, American Jewish disapproval of Obama is fully consonant with the views of the general public. As the Quinnipiac poll shows, only 35 percent of Americans approve of his treatment of Israel.

Jones’s speech before the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy was a friendly affair. He waxed on dreamily about how wonderful the US’s alliance with Israel is and how much Obama values Israel. And the crowd rewarded him with a standing ovation.

But the substance of his speech made absolutely clear that while Obama and his advisors are concerned that for the first time in 80 years a significant number of American Jews may abandon the Democratic Party, they are unwilling to pay even the slightest substantive price to keep the Jews loyal to their party.

After he finished his declarations of love and his joke about crafty Jewish businessmen in Afghanistan, Jones made clear that the Obama administration continues to view Israel’s refusal to surrender more land to the Palestinians as the key reason its efforts to convince Iran to give up its nuclear program, the Syrians to quit the Iranian axis, the Palestinians and the Lebanese to quit the terror racket and the Iraqis and the Afghans to behave like Americans have all failed.

As he put it, "One of the ways that Iran exerts influence in the Middle East is by exploiting the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict. Iran uses the conflict to keep others in the region on the defensive and to try to limit its own isolation. Ending this conflict, achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and establishing a sovereign Palestinian state would therefore take such an evocative issue away from Iran, Hizbullah, and Hamas."

Jones, Obama and the rest of their gang must have been asleep when the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians and the rest of the Arabs told them that Iran is unrelated to the Palestinian issue and that Iran must be stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons regardless of the status of Israeli-Palestinian relations. This after all has been the main message communicated to Obama and his advisers since January 2009 by every Sunni-majority state in the region as well as by many Iraqi Shiites.

They must have been at the golf course when their generals in Iraq and Afghanistan warned them about Iran providing weapons and training to irregular forces killing US servicemen.

The fact that even as he faced a Jewish audience, Jones couldn’t resist the temptation to repeat the central fallacy at the root of the administration’s failed policies in the Middle East makes clear that the Obama administration fundamentally does not care that the American people as a whole and the American Jewish community specifically oppose its policies. They will continue to push their policies in the face of that opposition no matter what. And if American Jews want to leave the party, well, they shouldn’t slam the door on their way out.

The Obama administration’s treatment of New York Senator Charles Schumer this week is case in point. Schumer has been one of Obama’s most loyal supporters. If as expected Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid loses his reelection bid in November, Schumer is in line to replace him as the Democratic leader in the Senate.

Yet this week, responding to what has likely been an enormous outcry from his constituents, Schumer blasted Obama for his shabby and dangerous treatment of Israel. Rather than respond graciously to Schumer’s criticism, Obama’s spokesman Robert Gibbs dismissed it sneeringly saying, "I don’t think that it’s a stretch to say we don’t agree with what Senator Schumer said in those remarks."

In his interview last week with Channel 2, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said he has no doubt that if Obama wishes to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons he is capable of doing so. As he put it, "Barack Obama demonstrated his determination with regard to issues he felt were important, and his determination was quite impressive.  I think President Obama can show that same determination with regard to Iran."

No doubt Netanyahu is correct. Moreover, the politics of such a move would make sense for him. Whereas Obama’s decision to ram the nationalization of the US healthcare industry through Congress against the wishes of the American public caused his personal ratings and those of his party to plummet, were Obama to decide to take on Iran, he would win the overwhelming support of the American public. Indeed, a determined and successful bid by Obama to block Iran’s nuclear aspirations could potentially block what is currently looking like a midterm election catastrophe for his party in November.

But as Gates’s memo about Iran, Clinton’s announcement that the administration will go ahead with its plan to dispatch an ambassador to Damascus, Mitchell’s latest failure with the Palestinians, Jones’s newest accusation against Israel, and the US’s strategic incoherence in Iraq and Afghanistan all show, mere politics are irrelevant to Obama. It doesn’t bother him that his most loyal supporters abandoning him. It doesn’t matter that his policies have endangered the Middle East and the world as a whole.

Obama’s refusal to acknowledge his own failures make clear that his goal is different than that of his predecessors. He is here to transform America’s place in the world, not to safeguard the world. And he will move ahead with his transformative change even if it means abetting war. He will push on with his transformative change even if it means that Iran becomes a nuclear power. And he will push on with his transformative change even if it means that US forces are forced to leave Afghanistan and Iraq in defeat. 

 

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

Strategic foundations of the US-Israel alliance

In an effort to influence debate and educate on this topic, "Strategic Foundations of the US-Israel Alliance" is also available for distribution in print here (PDF).

 

Israel’s status as the US’s most vital ally in the Middle East has been so widely recognized for so long that over the years, Israeli and American leaders alike have felt it unnecessary to explain what it is about the alliance that makes it so important for the US.

Today, as the Obama administration is openly distancing the US from Israel while giving the impression that Israel is a strategic impediment to the administration’s attempts to strengthen its relations with the Arab world, recalling why Israel is the US’s most important ally in the Middle East has become a matter of some urgency.

Much is made of the fact that Israel is a democracy. But we seldom consider why the fact that Israel is a representative democracy matters. The fact that Israel is a democracy means that its alliance with America reflects the will of the Israeli people. As such, it remains constant regardless of who is power in Jerusalem.

All of the US’s other alliances in the Middle East are with authoritarian regimes whose people do not share the pro-American views of their leaders. The death of leaders or other political developments are liable to bring about rapid and dramatic changes in their relations with the US.

For instance, until 1979, Iran was one of the US’s closest strategic allies in the region. Owing to the gap between the Iranian people and their leadership, the Islamic revolution put an end to the US-Iran alliance.

Egypt flipped from a bitter foe to an ally of the US when Gamal Abdel Nasser died in 1969. Octogenarian President Hosni Mubarak’s encroaching death is liable to cause a similar shift in the opposite direction. Instability in the Hashemite kingdom in Jordan and the Saudi regime could transform those countries from allies to adversaries.
Only Israel, where the government reflects the will of the people is a reliable, permanent US ally.

America reaps the benefits of its alliance with Israel every day. As the US suffers from chronic intelligence gaps, Israel remains the US’s most reliable source for accurate intelligence on the US’s enemies in the region.

Israel is the US’s only ally in the Middle East that always fights its own battles. Indeed, Israel has never asked the US for direct military assistance in time of war. Since the US and Israel share the same regional foes, when Israel is called upon to fight its enemies, its successes redound to the US’s benefit.

Along these lines it is important for us to recall Israel’s June 1982 destruction of Syria’s Soviet-made anti-aircraft batteries and the Syrian air force. Those stunning Israeli achievements were 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.

In both military and non-military spheres, Israeli technological achievements-often developed with US support-are shared with America. The benefits the US has gained from Israeli technological advances in everything from medical equipment to microchips to pilotless aircraft are without peer worldwide.

Beyond the daily benefits the US enjoys from its close ties with Israel, the US has three fundamental, permanent, vital national security interests in the Middle East. A strong Israel is a prerequisite for securing all of these interests. America’s three permanent strategic interests in the Middle East are as follows: Ensuring the smooth flow of affordable petroleum products from the region to global consumers through the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Aden and the Suez Canal; preventing the most radical regimes, sub-state and non-state actors from acquiring the means to cause catastrophic harm; and maintaining the US’s capacity to project its power to the region.

A strong Israel is the best guarantor of all of these interests. Indeed, the stronger Israel is, the more secure these vital American interests are. Three permanent and unique aspects to Israel’s regional position dictate this state of affairs.

1. 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. Dick Cheney—who served as Secretary of Defense during Operation Desert Storm—has stated that if Iraq had been a nuclear power in 1991, Washington would have been hard pressed to eject Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army from Kuwait and so block his regime from asserting control over oil supplies in the Persian Gulf.

2. 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.

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.

3. Since as the Jewish state Israel is the regional bogeyman, no Arab state will agree to form a permanent 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 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. On the other hand, 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.

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. Today’s regional balance of power in which the moderates have the upper hand over the radicals is predicated on a strong Israel.

On the other hand, when Israel is weakened the radical forces are emboldened to threaten the status quo. Regional stability is thrown asunder. Wars become more likely. Attacks on oil resources increase. The most radical sub-state actors and regimes are emboldened.

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.
When we bear in mind the foundations for the US’s alliance with Israel, it is obvious that US support for Israel over the years has been the most cost-effective national security investment in post-World War II US history.

 

 

 
 

Israel the strong horse

What does Jordan’s King Abdullah want from Israel? This week Abdullah gave a long and much cited interview to the Wall Street Journal. There he appeared to be begging US President Barack Obama to turn up the heat still further on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. As he has on a number of occasions, Abdullah argued that the Palestinian conflict with Israel is the cause or the justification of all the violence and emerging threats in the region. By his telling, all of these threats, including Iran’s nuclear threat, will all but disappear if Israel accepts all of the Palestinian, (and Syrian), demands for land.

Abdullah’s criticism of Netanyahu dominated the news in Israel for much of the week. Commentators and reporters piled on, attacking Netanyahu for destroying whatever remains of Israel’s good name. In their rush to attack the premier, none of them stopped to consider that perhaps they were missing something fundamental about Abdullah’s interview.

But they were missing something. For there is another way to interpret Abdullah’s complaints. To understand it however, it is necessary to consider the strategic constraints under which Abdullah operates. And the Israeli media, like the Western media as a whole, are incapable of recognizing that Abdullah has constraints that make it impossible for him to say what he means directly.

Abdullah is a Hashemite who leads a predominantly Palestinian country. His country was carved out by the British as a consolation prize for his great-grandfather after the Hashemites lost Syria to the French. As a demographic minority and ethnic transplant, the Hashemites have never been in a position to defend themselves or their kingdom against either their domestic or foreign foes. Consequently they have always been dependent out outside powers – first Britain, and then Israel, and to a lesser degree the US – for their survival.

When Abdullah’s strategic predicament is borne in mind, his statements to the Journal begin to sound less like a diatribe against Israel and more like a plea to Israel to be strong. For instance, his statement, "In a way, I think North Korea has better international relations than Israel," can be interpreted as a lament.

Abdullah fears war and he recognizes that the Iranian axis – which includes Syria, Lebanon, and elements of the Palestinian Authority and elements of Iraq – is the biggest threat to his regime. Syria, which dispatched the al Qaida bombers that blew up the hotels in Amman in 2005, threatens Jordan today almost as menacingly as it did in 1970, when it supported the PLO in its bid to overthrow Abdullah’s father. Back then, Israel stepped in and saved the Hashemites.

Abdullah’s preoccupation with Iran was clear throughout the interview. Indeed, much of his criticism of Israel needs to be viewed through the prism of his obvious fear that Iran’s race to regional dominance will not be thwarted.

The reason that Israel’s media – like the American and European media – failed to consider what was motivating Abdullah to speak as he did is because both Israelis and Westerners suffer from an acute narcissism that prevents them from noticing anything but themselves. So rather than view events from Abdullah’s perspective and consider what might be motivating him to speak, they interpret his statements to serve their own ideological purposes. In the case of the leftist dominated media, Abdullah’s statements were pounced upon as further proof that Israel, and particularly Netanyahu, are to blame for all the pathologies of the Arabs and all the threats in the Middle East. If Israel could only be coerced into giving up land, everything would be fine.

Much of what the West misses about the Arab world is spelled out for us in a new and masterful book. The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations by Lee Smith, is a unique and vital addition to the current debate on the Middle East because rather than interpret the Arabs through the ideological lenses of the West, Smith describes them, their cultural and political motivations as the Arabs — in all their ethnic, religious, ideological, national and tribal variations — themselves perceive these things.

Smith, a native New Yorker, was the literary editor of The Village Voice when Arab hijackers brought down the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Propelled by the attacks, he headed to the Middle East to try to understand what had just hit his city. Smith moved to Cairo where he studied Arabic and drank in the cultural and political forces surrounding him. After a year, he moved to Beirut where he remained for another three years.

The Strong Horse speaks to two Western audiences, the Left, or the self-proclaimed "realists," who ascribe to the belief that the Arabs have no particular interests but are rather all motivated to act by external forces and specifically by the US and Israel; and the neo-conservatives who believe that at heart, the Arabs all yearn for Western-style liberal democracy.

Smith rejects both these notions out of hand. Instead, by recounting the stories of men and women he met during his sojourn in the region, and weaving them into the tales of Arab cultural, religious and political leaders that have risen and fallen since the dawn of Islam 1,400 years ago Smith presents a few basic understandings of the Arab world that place the actions of everyone from Osama bin Laden to Jordan’s King Abdullah in regional and local contexts. The localization of these understandings in turn opens up a whole new set of options for Westerners and particularly for Israelis in seeking ways to contend with the region’s pathologies that involve policies less sweeping than grand, yet futile designs of peace making, or fundamental restructuring of the social compacts of Arab societies.

Smith develops six central insights in his book.

Arab political history is a history of the powerful ruling the weak through violence.

Islamic terror and governmental tyranny are the two sides of the coin of Arab political pathology.

Liberal democratic principles are unattractive to the vast majority of Arabs who believe that politics is and by rights ought to remain a violent enterprise and prefer the narrative of resistance to the narrative of liberty.

Liberal Arab reformers are unwilling to fight for their principles.

The 1,400 year period of Sunni dominance over non-Sunni minorities is now threatened seriously for the first time by the Iranian-controlled Shiite alliance which includes Syria, Lebanon, and Hamas.

And finally, that it is intra-Arab rivalries and the desire to rule and be recognized as the strong horse that motivates jihadists to wage continuous wars against Israel and the West and against regimes in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia alike.

As Smith explains, today, Arab leaders view Israel as a possible strong horse that could defeat the rising Shiite axis that threatens them. And now, as the US under Obama abdicates its leadership role in world affairs by turning on its allies and attempting to appease its foes while scaling back America’s own military strength, Israel is the Sunnis’ only hope for beating back the Shiite alliance. If Israel does not prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, then the likes of Kings Abdullah of Jordan and Saudi Arabia and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak are going to be forced to accept Iran as the regional hegemon.

When seen against the backdrop of Smith’s analysis, it is clear that as his father did when he supported Saddam Hussein against Saudi Arabia in the lead-up to the 1991 Gulf War, Abdullah was hedging his bets in his interview with the Journal. If Israel fails to act, he wants to be on record expressing his animosity towards the Jewish state and blaming it for all the region’s problems. On the other hand, he used the interview as an opportunity to again send a message to anyone willing to listen that he wants Israel to assert itself and continue to protect his kingdom.

The recognition that a strong Israel is the most stabilizing force in the region is perhaps the main casualty of the Left’s land for peace narrative and the two-state solution paradigm which wrongly promote the weakness of Israel as the foremost potential contributor to stability in the region. Because Israel is everyone’s convenient bogeyman, it cannot form permanent alliances with any of its neighbors and as a consequence, it cannot gang up against another state. Because it will always be the first target of the most radical actors in the region, Israel has a permanent interest in defeating them or, at a minimum denying those actors the means to cause catastrophic harm. Finally, although no one will admit it, everyone knows that Israel has neither the ability nor desire to acquire and rule over Arab lands and therefore there is no reason for anyone to fear its strength. For the past 62 years, Israel has only used force to protect itself when it was convinced it had no other option and it holds only territories designated for the Jewish homeland by the League of Nations 90 years ago and lands vital for its self-defense.

Smith was living in Beirut when Hizbullah launched its war against Israel in July 2006. As he tells the story, "When the government of Ehud Olmert decided to make war against Hizbullah in the summer of 2006, all of Washington’s Arab allies…were overjoyed. With the Americans having taken down a Sunni security pillar – Saddam – and then getting tied down in Iraq, Riyadh, Cairo and the rest sensed the Iranians were gaining ground and that they were vulnerable. Even though they were incapable of doing anything about it themselves, the Sunni powers…wanted to see the [Iranian] bloc rolled back."

Unfortunately for them, Olmert and his government were incompetent to lead Israel in war and within weeks showed that they had no idea how to accomplish their stated aim of crushing Hizbullah. When this reality sunk in, and the Arab masses rallied behind Iran, Hizbullah and Syria against their own governments, "the Sunni regimes could abide no longer and demanded the United States move to a ceasefire immediately."

No doubt, in part as a consequence of their disappointment with Israel’s military performance in Lebanon and subsequently in Gaza, today leaders like Abdullah of Jordan are pessimistic about the future. But there is also no doubt who they are rooting for. And this has profound significance for Israel, not only as it prepares its plans to contend with Iran but also as it considers it national priorities.

For too long, Israel’s leaders have believed that to thrive regionally, it needs to convince the West to support it politically. But the fact is that Israel is in Asia, not in Europe or North America. To survive and thrive, Israel needs to rebuild the faith of the likes of Jordan’s Abdullah that it is the strong horse in the region. And once it does that, with or without formal peace treaties, and with or without democracies flourishing region-wide, Israel will facilitate regional peace and stability for the benefit of all.  

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

When rhetoric rules the roost

There is something pathetic about what passes as European foreign policy these days. Quite simply, more often than not, the concerted positions of the EU member nations have nothing to do with any of their national interests.

Take the EU’s initial response to the killing of Hamas terror-master Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on January 19. A senior terrorist engaging in the illegal purchase of illicit arms from Iran for Hamas-controlled Gaza is killed in his hotel room. The same Dubai authorities who had no problem with hosting a wanted international terrorist worked themselves into a frenzy condemning his killing. And of course, despite the fact that any number of governments, (Egypt and Jordan come to mind), and rival terrorist organizations, (Fatah, anyone?) had ample reason to wish to see Mabhouh dead, Dubai’s police chief Lt.-Gen. Dahi Khalfan Tamim blamed Israel.

Not only did he blame Israel, to substantiate his claims, Tamim released what he said was video footage of alleged Mossad operatives who entered Dubai with European and Australian passports.

Relying only on Tamim’s allegations, EU leaders went into high dudgeon. Ignoring the nature of the operation, the basic lack of credibility of the source of information, and the interests of Europe in defeating jihadist terrorism in the Middle East and worldwide, the chanceries of Europe squawked indignantly and threatened to cut off intelligence cooperation with Israel.

In Britain for instance, Foreign Office sources told the Daily Telegraph, "If the Israelis were responsible for the assassination in Dubai, they are seriously jeopardizing the important intelligence-sharing arrangement that currently exists between Britain and Israel."

It reportedly took the intervention of the highest echelons of Europe’s intelligence agencies to get their hysterical politicians and diplomats to stop blaming and threatening Israel. After being dressed down, on Monday, the chastened EU foreign ministers abstained from mentioning Israel by name in their joint condemnation of the alleged use of European passports by the alleged operatives who allegedly killed the terrorist Mabhouh.

And lucky they held their tongues. Because on Tuesday, Tamim claimed that after the hit, at least two of the alleged members of the alleged assassination team departed Dubai for Iran. It’s hard to imagine Mossad officers feeling safer in Iran than in Dubai at any time and certainly it is hard to see why they would flee to Iran after killing an Iranian-sponsored terrorist.

What the initial European reaction to Tamim’s allegations shows is that blaming Israel has become Europe’s default foreign policy. It apparently never occurred to the Europeans that Israel might not be responsible for the hit. And it certainly never occurred to them that cutting off intelligence ties with Israel will harm them more than Israel.

They didn’t think of the latter, of course, because Europe has no idea of what its interests are. All it knows is how to sound off authoritatively.

THIS HAS not always been the case. It was after all Europe that brought the world the art of rational statecraft. Once upon a time, Europe’s leaders understood that a nation’s foreign policy was supposed to be based on its national interests. To advance their nation’s interests, governments would adopt certain policies. And to facilitate the success of those policies they developed rhetorical arguments to explain and defend them.

Contemporary European statecraft stands this traditional foreign policy model on its head. Today, rhetoric rules the roost. If actions are taken at all, they are adopted in the service of rhetoric. As for national interests, well, the Lisbon Treaty that effectively bars EU member states from adopting independent foreign policies took care of those.

With national interests subordinated to the whims of bureaucrats in Brussels, Europe does little of value in the international arena. As for its rhetoric, as the EU’s rush to threaten Israel for allegedly killing a terrorist shows, it is cowardly, ineffectual and self-defeating.

If the Mossad did in fact kill Mabhouh, then the operation was an instance in which Israel distinguished itself from its European detractors by acting, rather than preening.

Unfortunately, such instances are increasingly the exception rather than the rule. Over the past 16 years or so, Israel largely descended into the European statecraft abyss. Rather than use rhetoric to explain policies adopted to advance its national interests, successive Israeli governments have adopted policies geared toward strengthening their rhetoric that itself stands in opposition to Israel’s national interests.

Take Israel’s positions on Iran and the Palestinians, for instance. Regarding the Iranians, Israel’s national interest is to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Today, the only way to secure this interest is to use force to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.

Given Iran’s leaders’ absolute commitment to developing nuclear weapons, no sanctions – regardless of how "crippling" they are supposed to be – will convince them to curtail their efforts to build and deploy their nuclear arsenal.

Beyond that, and far less important, the Russians and the Chinese will refuse to implement "crippling sanctions," against Iran.

IN LIGHT of these facts, it is distressing that Israel’s leaders have made building an international coalition in support of "crippling" sanctions against Iran their chief aim. And this is not merely a rhetorical flourish. Over the past several weeks and months, Israel’s top leaders have devoted themselves to lobbying foreign governments to support sanctions against Iran.

Last week Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu went to Moscow to gin up support for sanctions from the Russian government. This week, Defense Minister Ehud Barak traveled to the UN and the State Department and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon flew off to Beijing just to lobby senior officials to support sanctions.

It isn’t simply that this behavior doesn’t contribute anything to Israel’s ability to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. It harms Israel’s ability to do so, if only by diverting our leaders’ focus from where it should be: preparing the IDF to strike and preparing the country to withstand whatever the aftereffects of such a strike would be. Moreover, by calling for sanctions, Israel contributes to the delusion that sanctions are sufficient to block Iran’s race to the nuclear finish line.

As for the Palestinian issue, it is fairly clear that at a minimum, Israel’s interest is to secure its control over the areas of Judea and Samaria that it requires to protect its Jewish heritage and its national security. But it is hard to think of anything the government has done in its year in office to advance that basic interest.

It is argued that Israel’s interest in maintaining good relations with the US administration trumps its interest in strengthening its control over areas in Judea and Samaria that it deems vital. The problem with this argument is that it takes for granted that Israel can determine the status of its relations with the US administration. In the case of the Obama administration, it is abundantly clear that this is not the case.

President Barack Obama and his senior advisers have demonstrated repeatedly that they are interested in weakening – not strengthening – the US alliance with Israel. This week the administration condemned Israel for defining the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem as national heritage sites. The fact that they are national heritage sites is so obvious that even President Shimon Peres defended the move.

Moreover, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, reiterated for the millionth time this week that he opposes military strikes against Iran’s nuclear installations. That is, for the millionth time, the top US military officer effectively said that he prefers a nuclear armed Iran to an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear installations.

In the interest of strengthening Israel’s ties with a hostile administration, the Netanyahu government has adopted rhetoric on the Palestinian issue that is harmful to Israel’s national interests. It declared its support for a Palestinian state, despite the fact that such a state will define itself through its devotion to Israel’s destruction.

It has outlawed Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria, despite the fact that the move simply legitimizes the Palestinians’ bigoted demand that Jews be barred from living in Judea and Samaria.

And it has advocated on behalf of Palestinian leaders like Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad who refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist.

Indeed, if Israel were to reject the current European model and craft a foreign policy that advanced its national interests, one of its first acts would be to point out that the unelected Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad is not a man of peace.

Just this week, Fayyad threatened to respond with a religious war to Israel’s classification of the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb as national heritage sites. Last Friday he joined rioters at Bil’in to attack Israel’s security fence. Fayyad has taken a lead role in the campaign to implement an international boycott of Israeli products. Over the past couple of years he has sought to take control over the PA’s security forces not to fight terror, but to prevent Israel from fighting terror. Finally, since the Hamas victory in the PA legislative elections in 2006, he has overseen the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas.

In short, Fayyad, a former World Bank employee, is not a "moderate," as his supporters in the US and Europe claim. He is a fiscally sound terror financier and sponsor, actively waging war against Israel.

RECENT REPORTS indicate that IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi – who strangely received a nice medal from Mullen two years ago – is the main opponent of an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations. If this is true, then Ashkenazi must either be forced to change his position or lose his job. The Iranian threat is too great to place in the hands of a commander the US reportedly views as its "friend" in Israel’s decision-making circles.

As for the Palestinians, the situation will not be remedied simply by firing a few incompetent office holders. For 16 years, in the interest of enhancing the country’s ties with Europe, and to a lesser degree with the US, successive Israeli governments have ignored Israel’s vital national interest in maintaining its control over Judea and Samaria. Indeed, they have preferred Euro-friendly, and Israel-unfriendly rhetoric to the sober-minded pursuit of Israel’s national interest.

Yet as Europe’s immediate response to the Dubai operation makes clear, Europe itself has abandoned the sober-minded pursuit of its own interests, in favor of cowardly, feckless, self-defeating rhetoric. Obviously Europe should favor Israel over a Hamas terrorist. But in its current state of strategic imbecility, no European leader can acknowledge this basic fact. Consequently, Europe may well be doomed.

To avoid Europe’s encroaching fate, Israel must abandon its current course. The purpose of rhetoric is to support policies adopted in the pursuit of a nation’s interests. And Israel has interests in need of urgent advancement.

Code Red on Code Pink

Oh the shame of it all. Last month, 1,300 pro-Palestinian activists from the US and Europe came to the region in the name of peace and social justice to demonstrate their solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza. Led by the self-declared feminist, antiwar group Code Pink, the demonstrators’ plan was to enter Gaza from the Egyptian border at Rafah and deliver "humanitarian aid" to the Hamas terrorist organization.

But it was not to be. Led by Code Pink founder and California Democratic fund-raiser Jodie Evans, the demonstrators were not welcomed by Egyptian authorities. Many were surrounded by riot police and barbed wire as they demonstrated outside the US and French embassies and the UN Development Program’s headquarters. Others were barred from leaving their hotels.

Those who managed to escape their hotels and the bullpens outside the embassies were barred from staging night protests in solidarity with Hamas on the Nile. In the end, as the militant Israeli pro-Palestinian activist Amira Hass chronicled in Haaretz last week, all but 100 of them were barred from travelling to Gaza.

The lucky few allowed into the Strip included neither Evans nor her friends, former Weather Underground terror leaders Bernadine Dohrn and William Ayres. But they bore no grudge against Egypt. The Egyptians were mere puppets of the real culprit: Israel. As Evans said, "It’s obvious that the only reason for [Egypt’s treatment of the demonstrators] is to make Israel happy. Israel is behind the refusal [to allow the demonstrators into Gaza] – what other excuse could there be?"

Dohrn, the woman who has called for a "revolutionary war" to destroy the US, felt that the Egyptian authorities’ behavior was nothing but an unfortunate diversion from their mission. As she wrote in a blog post from Cairo, "We find ourselves unwillingly in Cairo, drawn into clashes with authorities and one another on side issues, when what we most want is to keep our eyes on the Palestinian people."

Unfortunately for the lucky 100 who were permitted to enter Hamastan, the diversions didn’t end at the Egyptians border. Hamas immediately placed them under siege. The Palestinian champions had planned to enjoy home hospitality from friends in Gaza. But once there they were prohibited from leaving the Hamas-owned Commodore Hotel and from having any contact with local Gazans without a Hamas escort.

Rather than being permitted to judge the situation in Gaza for themselves, they were carted onto Hamas buses and taken on "devastation tours" of what their Hamas tour guides claimed was damage caused by the IDF during Operation Cast Lead. And then these international protesters were forced to participate in a Hamas-organized march to the Erez crossing.

As Hass tells it, in "a slap to many feminist organizers and participants," no Palestinian women were allowed to participate in the march, which "turned into nothing more than a ritual, an opportunity for Hamas cabinet ministers to get decent media coverage in the company of Western demonstrators."

But they didn’t really mind. Reacting to her effective imprisonment in the Hamas-owned hotel, one of the demonstrators, an American woman named Poya Pakzad, cooed on her blog that the Commodore Hotel was "the nicest hotel I’ve ever stayed at, in my life."

Pakzad did complain, however, about what she acknowledged was the "farce" devastation tour she was taken on. She claimed that her Hamas guides were ignorant. In her studied view, they understated the number of Palestinians rendered homeless by the IDF counterterror offensive last year by some 60 percent.

Pakzad is something of a Hass groupie. She wrote that on the bus to Gaza, still smarting from the rough treatment the group received from the Egyptian authorities, Hass "made me realize why I came in the first place: to break the siege!"

Hass’s participation in the pro-Hamas propaganda trip is a bit surprising. In November 2008, she was forced to flee from Gaza to Israel after Hamas threatened to kill her. At the time, Hass appealed to the Israeli military – which she has spent the better part of her career bashing – and asked to be allowed to enter Israel from Gaza, after sailing illegally to Gaza from Cyprus on a ferry chartered by the pro-Hamas Free Gaza outfit.

Hass’s behavior is actually more revealing than surprising. The truth is that Hass and her fellow demonstrators were willing to be used as media props by Hamas precisely because it isn’t the Palestinians’ welfare that concerns them. If they cared about the Palestinians they would be demonstrating against Hamas, which prohibited local women from participating in their march to the Israeli border, and which barred non-Hamas members from speaking with them. It would offend their sensitivities that Hamas goons beat women for not covering themselves from head to toe in Islamic potato sacks. It would bother them that Hamas executes its political opponents by among other things throwing them off the roofs of apartment buildings.

The demonstrators did not come to Gaza to demonstrate their support for the Palestinians, but rather their hatred for Israel and for their own Western governments that refuse to join Hamas in its war against Israel. As one of the organizers told Hass as she sat corralled by Egyptian riot police outside the UNDP offices in Cairo, "In our presence here, we are saying that we are not casting the blame on Egypt. The responsibility for the shameless and obscene Israeli siege on Gaza rests squarely with our own countries."

By happily collaborating with Hamas in its propaganda extravaganza, these demonstrators demonstrated that the rights of Palestinians are not their concern. Their concern is waging war against their own societies and against Israel. They are more than happy to have their pictures taken with the likes of Hamas terror master Ismail Haniyeh. And while they will never acknowledge that his organization’s terror war against Israel is illegal and immoral, or care that Hamas’s founding charter explicitly calls for the genocide of Jewry, they will demonstrate from today till doomsday against their governments’ recognition of Israel.

IN THIS, the Free Gaza movement members are but a chip off the old psychopathic block of nearly a century of far-left Western activists whose hatred for their own countries motivated them to hide the crimes of mass murderers from Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong to Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh to Daniel Ortega and Saddam Hussein. As Jamie Glazov chronicles in his recently published book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, their attraction to mass murderers – from Stalin to Osama bin Laden – and their concomitant hatred of their own societies "is a secular religion."

These fanatics are usually dismissed as fringe elements. But the truth is that during the late 20th century, the distance between these true believers and the centers of state power has not been very great. Glazov notes, "The tragedy… is that the Left has shaped much of the cultural and political consciousness of our time. The Left’s agenda mattered immensely during the Vietnam War: even former North Vietnamese officials have admitted that the antiwar movement in American can take credit for communism’s victory in South Vietnam and, therefore, for the tragic bloodbath that followed."

Likewise, these radical movements’ extremism today has not marginalized them politically. Since it was formed in 2002, Code Pink has openly sided with US enemies against the US and its allies. Evans and its other leaders have met with Hamas leaders in Gaza and Syria. They have visited with Hizbullah in Lebanon. They have met with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in New York and Teheran. They have supplied Iranian-backed insurgents in Iraq, and before the US-led invasion in 2003, they organized a solidarity-with-Saddam Hussein mission to Baghdad. And this month, fresh from Egypt and Gaza, Code Pink launched an advertising campaign on the Muslim Brotherhood’s English-language Web site.

At home in the US, as documented by Web sites like Big Government and Atlas Shrugs, Code Pink’s members have launched psychological warfare operations against American soldiers outside of military bases with the aim of persuading them to desert. They have taunted and frightened children of US servicemen. They have harassed Bush administration officials, their family members and Republican Party leaders.

In Israel, counterparts to Code Pink like Uri Avineri’s Gush Shalom acted as human shields to protect Yasser Arafat and his fellow terrorists from the IDF during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002. Anarchists Against the Fence stage violent riots against IDF soldiers every week. Four Mothers successfully compelled the Barak government to surrender south Lebanon to Hizbullah.

Traditionally, the far left’s ability to shape national policy in Israel and the US alike has owed largely to the sympathetic coverage they have garnered from fellow-travelling media outlets. In the US, the anti-war movement probably would have failed in its mission of transferring South Vietnam to Communist control if The New York Times and CBS News hadn’t supported their efforts. So, too, the Barak government would likely not have withdrawn the IDF from south Lebanon if Four Mothers hadn’t been ardently supported by state-owned Israel Radio.

WHILE BOTH the Israeli and American media continue to promote the agendas of far left groups, by among other things, not reporting their open ties to terrorist organizations, today some of these groups have direct access to the halls of power.

Code Pink, for instance, is welcome at the Obama White House. Its leader Evans was an official fund-raiser for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Evans visited the White House after travelling to Gaza last June. While there she met with Hamas leaders who gave her a letter for Obama. Evans met Obama himself at a donor dinner in San Francisco last October where, while standing in front of cameras, she gave him documents she received in Afghanistan, where she met with Taliban officials.

Then, too, among the board members of the Free Gaza movement is former US senator James Abourezk. Abourezk is reputedly close to Obama and according to knowledgeable sources has been a key figure in shaping Obama’s policy towards Israel.

Then, too, like Evans, Dohrn and her husband, Ayres, are also friendly with the president of the United States. Dohrn and Ayres have been Obama’s political patrons since he launched his first campaign for the Illinois state Senate in 1996. In White House visitors’ logs, Ayres is listed as having twice visited the building since Obama’s inauguration.

Israeli authorities tend to treat groups like Code Pink and its Israeli allies as nothing more than nuisances. Since unlike Egypt and these self-proclaimed human rights champions themselves, Israel actually does care about human rights, it would never occur to anyone to treat these demonstrators as Egypt did. At the same time, the Egyptian authorities’ actions were clearly informed by their understanding that, with their ties to Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbullah, Syria and Iran, Code Pink and its friends are active collaborators with the jihad war machine.

With their open ties to our jihadist enemies on the one hand, and their direct line to the White House on the other, Israel ignores them at our peril.

A low and dishonest decade

Upon returning from Cairo on Tuesday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu proclaimed, "It’s time to move the peace process forward."

The most sympathetic interpretation of Netanyahu’s proclamation is that he was engaging in political theater. It was a low and dishonest statement uttered at the end of what has been, in the immortal words of W.H. Auden, "a low and dishonest decade."

Everyone with eyes in their heads knows that there is no chance of making peace with the Palestinians. First of all, the most Israel is willing to give is less than what the Palestinians are willing to accept.

But beyond that, Gaza is controlled by Hamas, and Hamas is controlled by Iran.

For its part, Fatah is not in a position to make peace even if its leaders wished to. Mahmoud Abbas and his deputies know that just as Hamas won the 2006 elections in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, Hamas would win elections today. To maintain even a smudge of domestic legitimacy, Fatah’s leaders have no choice but to adopt Hamas’s rejection of peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state.

Clearly, now is not the time "to move the peace process forward."

No less than what it tells us about Netanyahu, his statement is notable for what it tells us about Israel. Our continued willingness to ensnare ourselves in the rhetoric of peace processes demonstrates how little we have progressed in the past decade.

In 1999, Netanyahu was ejected from office by an electorate convinced that he was squandering an historic opportunity for peace between Israel and its neighbors. A majority of Israelis believed that Netanyahu’s signature policies of demanding that the Palestinians abide by their commitments to Israel, and maintaining the IDF’s security zone in south Lebanon were dooming all hope for peace.

His successor, Ehud Barak, promised to remove IDF troops from Lebanon and forge a final peace with the Palestinians and with Syria within a year. After winning the election, Barak famously promised a swooning crowd at Rabin Square that the "dawn of a new day has arrived."

Barak lost no time fulfilling his campaign promises. He withdrew the IDF from south Lebanon in May 2000.

He launched talks with Syria in December 1999. For four months he begged Syrian dictator Hafez Assad to accept the Golan Heights, stopping only after Assad harshly rebuffed him in March 2000.

And in July 2000 at Camp David, Barak offered Yasser Arafat Gaza, 90 percent of Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem in exchange for peace. After Arafat rejected his offer, Barak sweetened it at Taba in September 2000, adding another 5% of Judea and Samaria, the Temple Mount, and extra lands in the Negev, only to be rejected, again.

Barak made these offers as the wisdom of appeasement exploded before his eyes. Hizbullah seized the withdrawal from Lebanon as a strategic victory. Far from disappearing as Barak and his deputy Yossi Beilin had promised it would, Hizbullah took over south Lebanon and used the area as a springboard for its eventual takeover of the Lebanese government. So, too, with its forces perched on the border, Hizbullah built up its Iranian-commanded forces, preparing for the next round of war.

Similarly, Barak’s desperate entreaties to Assad enhanced the dictator’s standing in the Arab world, to the detriment of Egypt and Jordan.

To the extent he required encouragement, the ascendance of Hizbullah, Syria and Iran made it politically advantageous for Arafat to reject peace. Buoyed by their rise, Arafat diverted billions of dollars in Western aid from development projects to the swelling ranks of his terror armies. Instead of preparing his people for peace, he trained them for war.

Arafat responded to Barak’s beggary at Camp David and Taba by launching the largest terror offensive Israel experienced since the 1950s. The Palestinians’ orgiastic celebration of the mass murder of Israelis was the final nail in Barak’s premiership, and it seemed at the time, the death-knell of his policies of appeasement.

A year and a half after he took office, the public threw Barak from power. Likud leader Ariel Sharon – who just a decade earlier had been taken for dead – was swept into power with an electoral landslide. To the extent the public vote was for Sharon, rather than against Barak, the expectation was that Sharon would end Barak’s appeasement policies and defeat Arafat and the terror state he had built in Gaza, Judea and Samaria.

But this was not to be.

Rather than abandon Barak’s policies, Sharon embraced them. He formed a unity government with Labor and refused to fight. He didn’t fight after 22 teenagers were massacred outside the Dolphinarium nightclub in June 2001. He did not fight after the September 11, 2001, attacks and the Palestinian celebrations of the slaughter in New York and Washington.

Sharon did not order the IDF to fight until the carnage of March 2002 that culminated in the Seder massacre at Netanya’s Park Hotel forced his hand. Had he not ordered the IDF to dismantle the Palestinian terror infrastructures in Judea and Samaria at that time, he faced the sure prospect of being routed in the Likud leadership race scheduled for November of that year.

Operation Defensive Shield was a textbook example of what you get when you mix weak politicians with a strong society. On the one hand, during Defensive Shield, the IDF took control of all the major towns and cities in Judea and Samaria and so enabled Israel to dismantle Palestinian terror networks by remaining in place in the years that followed.

On the other hand, Sharon refused to allow the IDF to launch a parallel operation in Gaza, despite repeated entreaties by the army and residents of the South. Most important, Sharon barred the IDF from toppling the PA or even acknowledging that it was an enemy government. And he maintained that the Palestinian jihad began and ended with Arafat, thus absolving all of Arafat’s deputies – who were then and today remain deeply involved in the terror machine – of all responsibility.

In acting as he did, Sharon’s signaled that he was not abandoning appeasement. Indeed, he made clear that his aim was to re-embrace appeasement as his national strategy as soon as it was politically feasible.

Most Israelis explained away Sharon’s behavior in his first term as the price he was forced to pay for his coalition government with Labor. So when in 2003 Sharon, Likud and the political Right won an overwhelming mandate from the public to lead the country without the Left, the expectation was that he would finally let loose. He would finally fight for victory.

Instead, Sharon spat on his party, his coalition partners and his voters and adopted as his own the policies of the Left that he had condemned in his campaign.

To implement those policies, Sharon dismantled his government and his party and formed a coalition with the same Left the nation had just overwhelmingly rejected.

The past decade’s major policies: the withdrawal from Gaza, the construction of the security fence, the acceptance of the road map peace plan, the Annapolis Conference, Operation Defensive Shield, the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead all shared one central feature. They were all predicated on ignoring the lessons of the failure of appeasement in 2000.

Whereas Defensive Shield’s strategic success was owed to Israel’s decision to maintain control over the territory the IDF seized in the fighting, in launching the wars with Hizbullah and Hamas, Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, ignored that success and chose instead to emulate the operation’s failures.

To further his government’s appeasement policies, Olmert refused to order the IDF to seize south Lebanon or Gaza. By the same token, like Sharon in Defensive Shield, Olmert announced at the outset that he had no interest in defeating Israel’s enemies. He limited the goals of the campaigns to "teaching them a lesson." And of course by not seeking victory for Israel, Olmert enabled both Hizbullah and Hamas to claim victory for themselves.

By opting not to defeat Hizbullah or Hamas, Olmert communicated the message that like Sharon before him, his ultimate strategic aim was to maintain the political viability of appeasement as a national strategy. He was fighting to protect appeasement, not Israel.

As we move into the second decade of this century, we need to understand how the last decade was so squandered. How is it possible that in 2010 Israel continues to embrace policies that have failed it – violently and continuously for so many years? Why, in 2010 are we still ignoring the lessons of 2000 and all that we have learned since then?

There are two main causes for this failure: The local media and Sharon. Throughout the 1990s, the Israeli media – print, radio and television – were the chief propagandists for appeasement. When appeasement failed in 2000, Israel’s media elites circled the wagons. They refused to admit they had been wrong.

Misleading phrases like "cycle of violence" were introduced into our newspeak. The absence of a security fence – rather than the presence of an enemy society on the outskirts of Israel’s population centers – was blamed for the terror that claimed the lives of over a thousand Israelis. Palestinian propagandists and terrorists such as Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti were treated like legitimate politicians. Palestinian ties to Iran, Syria, Iraq and the nexus of global jihad went unmentioned or uncommented upon.

At the same time, opponents of appeasement – those who had warned of the dangers of the Oslo process and had spoken out against the withdrawal from Lebanon and a potential withdrawal from the Golan Heights and Gaza – were not congratulated for their wisdom. They remained marginalized and demonized.

This situation prevails still today. The same media that brought us these catastrophes now derides Likud ministers and Knesset members who speak out against delusion-based policies, while suddenly embracing Netanyahu who – with Barak at his side – has belatedly embraced their pipe dreams of appeasement-based peace.

Then there is Sharon. The man who built the settlements, who removed the PLO from Lebanon, who opposed Oslo, Camp David and the withdrawal from Lebanon; the man who opposed the security fence and pledged to remain forever in Gush Katif. As Israel’s leader for most of the past decade, more than anyone else Sharon is responsible for Israel’s continued adherence to the dishonest, discredited and dishonorable dictates of appeasement.

Whether due to his alleged corruption, his physical enfeeblement, his fear of the State Department, or his long-held and ardent desire to be accepted by the Left, Sharon betrayed his voters and his party and he undermined Israel’s ability to move beyond failure.

Auden’s "low and dishonest decade" was the 1930s. It was the West’s obsession then with appeasement that set the world on course for the cataclysm of World War II.

As Israel enters the new decade, we must redouble our efforts to forestall a repeat of the cataclysm of the 1940s. Disturbingly, Netanyahu’s call for a fraudulent peace process shows that we are off to an ignoble, untruthful start.

Reconsidering the Suez Campaign

It is hard to seize the initiative. The consequences of acting are frightening. It is always better to let others go first. But sometimes that is impossible. Today it is becoming clear that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has no choice but to lead.

The stakes have never been higher. Every day we are beset by an avalanche of evidence that Iran is on the verge of becoming a nuclear armed state. From the secret uranium enrichment facility in Qom, to Iran’s solid fuel missile test this week to the disclosure that Iran is developing a trigger device to detonate nuclear bombs, it is clear that Teheran is building a nuclear arsenal and that – at a minimum – it is determined to use it to force the nations of the Middle East to bend to its fanatical will.

Until now, as Israel faced this growing threat, it has tried to avoid leading by seeking to convince the US to act against Iran. Since US President Barack Obama took office 11 months ago, Israel’s desire to convince the US to act against Iran has driven Netanyahu to take drastic steps to appease the White House.

Netanyahu has bowed to American pressure and announced his support for the establishment of a Palestinian state in Israel’s heartland, even as the Palestinians themselves made clear that they reject Israel’s right to exist.

He bowed to US pressure and is implementing a draconian freeze on all Jewish building in Judea and Samaria, despite the fact that the Palestinians refuse to even discuss peace with Israel.

Netanyahu has allowed Defense Minister Ehud Barak to unravel national unity still further by picking fights with yeshiva heads who oppose the wholly theoretical possibility that IDF soldiers will be ordered to expel Jews from their homes in Judea and Samaria in the framework of a peace treaty with the Palestinians.

As for Iran itself, the government and the IDF are loudly expressing Israel’s support for US-backed sanctions, despite their sure knowledge that those proposed measures will have no significant impact on Teheran’s will or capacity to build nuclear bombs.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu’s appeasement efforts have not brought a US payoff. The Obama administration continues to downplay the urgency of the Iranian nuclear threat and its calls for sanctions are half-hearted and will not prevent the Islamic Republic from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Moreover, the Obama administration remains stridently opposed to using military force to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. This was made clear during a high-level war game at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government earlier this month. At Harvard, former US undersecretary of state Nicholas Burns played Obama and former UN ambassador Dore Gold played Netanyahu. At the end of the game, the US had disavowed its strategic alliance with Israel because Jerusalem refused to give Washington veto power over its right to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. On the other hand, America had failed to get Russia and China to support sanctions and Iran was three months away from the bomb.

The Harvard game came just a few months after the real-world CIA Director Leon Panetta made what was supposed to be a secret visit to Israel and demanded that Israel not attack Iran without US permission.

All of this makes clear that Israel cannot depend on the US to defend it from Iran. Indeed, it makes clear that a breach of relations with the US is unavoidable.

IN LIGHT of this harsh reality, the time has come for Netanyahu to take the lead. While frightening, there may be a silver lining in this cloud.

If Israel moves boldly, others may support it. This was the message of an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday authored by Olivier Debouzy, a former French diplomat specializing in intelligence and nuclear military affairs, titled, "How to Stop Iran."

In 2007, President Nicolas Sarkozy appointed Debouzy to France’s Defense and National Security White Paper Commission. A private attorney, Debouzy is well connected to Sarkozy and his national security team.

Debouzy opened with a recap of what is already known. Iran "is not serious about negotiating in good faith," and in all likelihood, it has, "for more than a decade now, concealed a significant part of what appears to be a major nuclear military effort."

He then explained what is at stake for the West. Western failure to stop Iran will convince the Persian Gulf states that they cannot trust Western security guarantees and are best served by developing their own nuclear arsenals. All semblance of a nuclear nonproliferation regime will be cast to the seven winds.

Given the stakes, Debouzy concludes that it is time for the US, France, Britain and Israel to "try to reach an agreement on how to terminate the Iranian nuclear program militarily." He suggests first taking an example from the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and imposing a quarantine on Iranian shipping in the Persian Gulf while compelling Iran’s neighbors to desist from all trade and financial transactions with it.

If this doesn’t work, Debouzy acknowledges, "It might be necessary to go beyond that and actually resort to force to prevent the Iranians from achieving nuclear military capabilities." To this end, he proposes planning "for a massive air and missile attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities."

While Debouzy invoked the Cuban Missile Crisis, given the Obama administration’s position on Iran, a more apt analogy is the 1956 Suez Crisis. Whereas in 1962 the US acted alone against the threatened Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba, in 1956, France, Israel and Britain acted against Egypt without US permission to limit the harm that then-Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser could cause to their separate strategic interests.

Today, the Obama administration’s treatment of US allies and enemies alike bears far more resemblance to the Eisenhower administration’s policies than to those of the Kennedy administration. And in turn, the administration’s behavior presents allied governments with options reminiscent to those they faced in 1956.

To the extent that Debouzy’s article represents a significant thought stream in France and perhaps in Britain, it tells us three important things. First, it tells us that a significant constituency in Europe believes the time has come to act militarily against Iran’s nuclear installations. Second it tells us that influential voices in France have lost patience with Obama. Sarkozy himself all but accused Obama of living in Fantasy Land at the UN Security Council meeting four months ago, in light of Obama’s support for global nuclear disarmament and his cavalier attitude towards Iran’s nuclear program.

Finally, by including Israel in a theoretical military alliance against Iran, Debouzy’s article suggests that in spite of its anti-Israel positions on issues related to the Palestinians, France may be willing to assist Israel if Netanyahu decides to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. That is, his article lends the impression that if Israel is willing to act boldly, it may not have to act alone.

THE LAST time that Israel acted militarily with others without US support was during the Suez Crisis. Debouzy’s suggestion of French support for an Israeli strike against Iran should provoke our leaders to reconsider the lessons of that campaign.

At the time, Britain and France joined forces with Israel because their national interests were harmed by Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal. Nasser’s move imperiled the British-allied Hashemite regimes in Iraq and Jordan. It opened the door for Soviet influence in Egypt and throughout the Middle East. And it endangered the flow of oil to Europe through the Suez Canal.

Nasser’s move harmed Israel by threatening to permanently close the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping. Israel also stood to benefit from a joint attack against Egypt because it afforded Israel the opportunity to severely weaken Nasser’s regular forces in the Sinai and his fedayeen terror cells in Gaza.

Despite Nasser’s escalating ties with the Soviet Union, the Eisenhower administration opposed ejecting him from the Suez Canal for a host of reasons. The US wished to please its Saudi ally which, like Egypt, sought to weaken the British-allied Hashemite regimes in Iraq and Jordan. The US wished to quash Britain and France’s residual post-war capacities to act without US support as Washington solidified its position as the unquestioned leader of the Western alliance against the Soviet Union. Washington was politically inconvenienced by the need to support the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt as it condemned the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Finally, the Eisenhower administration opposed a strong Israel.

Although all three countries achieved their military goals, the US’s decision to side with Egypt against them caused them all tremendous political damage. Washington forced Israel to withdraw from Sinai and it threatened Britain with economic devastation until then-prime minister Anthony Eden agreed to remove British forces from the area. France was similarly humiliated into withdrawing.

America’s brutal reaction caused many Israeli analysts to conclude that Israel must never again go to war without US permission. And from David Ben-Gurion on, all Israeli leaders have given the US a de facto veto over nearly all of Israel’s military moves.

While Israel’s fear of angering America is understandable, it is far from clear that its interests were ever served by this policy. The fact is, while Israel was forced to withdraw from Sinai, the benefit it gained from the Suez Campaign still far outweighed the cost. Through the war, Israel secured its maritime rights in the Suez Canal and weakened significantly Egypt’s regular and irregular forces in Sinai and Gaza.

What is clear is that 53 years ago it made no sense to get into an open conflict with Dwight Eisenhower. As the former Allied commander in Europe, Eisenhower’s strategic credentials were unassailable both at home and abroad. Then, too, in 1956 the US was enjoying unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. Politically – at home and abroad – Eisenhower was immune to criticism.

Obama is no Eisenhower. The US is suffering its worst economic decline since the Great Depression. After just 11 months in office, Obama’s approval ratings have sunk to 50 percent. His lack of credibility in foreign affairs came though clearly this month when a mere 26% of Americans said they believe he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize.

At the same time, Israel has never faced a threat as grave as that of a nuclear-armed Iran. There can be little doubt that if Ben-Gurion and Eisenhower were in charge today, Ben-Gurion wouldn’t hesitate to again defy Eisenhower and attack Iran – with or without France and Britain. Certainly, Netanyahu cannot justify placing Israel’s fate in Obama’s hands.

Fortunately, as Netanyahu’s moment of decision rapidly approaches, we see that if he seizes the reins, he is likely to be surprised to find many other leaders offering him a helping hand.