IT must have been the viewing angle: The despots who run Iran somehow missed the halo gracing President Obama during his recent sermon to the Muslim world.
The ruling mullahs’ contemptuous handling of Iran’s presidential election was their response to "the Cairo effect" announced a tad prematurely by the White House.
Our president’s public flagellation of America only emboldened the junta in Tehran — leaving Iran’s power brokers more defiant, determined and dismissive than they’ve been in years.
And the strongest response Obama can muster to the blood in Tehran’s streets is: "I am deeply troubled by the violence that I’ve been seeing on television." How bold, how manly, how inspiring . . .
Our president’s speechwriters made the same mistake no end of diplomats and pundits made before them: They didn’t pause to consider the enemy’s viewpoint. Like Obama himself, they didn’t bother trying to understand the mullahs’ logic for acting as they do.
Obama believed that his rhetoric would change the strategic environment — and his White House apostles wasted no time before declaring that his Cairo speech was responsible for Hezbollah’s electoral setback in Lebanon a few days later.
Then administration spokespersons panted to take credit for the "inevitable" election of Mir Hossein Mousavi in Iran. But the men who run Iran didn’t play along: Every Basij (regime-thug) baton cracking a demonstrator’s skull in Tehran is a — distinctly clenched — fist shoved in Obama’s face.
Mousavi may have won the most votes: Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad probably didn’t receive the landslide majority announced two hours after the polls closed — in a country that’s barely progressed beyond the abacus. We’ll never know the real tally of ballots.
Now we have the cynical charade of a "review" of the election results by the Iranian authorities. (The Persian cat really enjoys toying with the mice.)
But the point really isn’t whom the voters chose. It’s that Iran’s entrenched interests read Obama’s meant-to-be-conciliatory remarks as a confession of weakness, a signal that the United States is at the end of its strategic rope.
The result was that the mullahs and state corporatists no longer saw a need to play pretend. Bush worried them. Obama doesn’t. They judged, correctly, that Washington wouldn’t so much as issue a tough-minded statement in response to this mockery of an election. And they were right.
For its part, the administration appears stunned, still unable to believe that its self-abasement toward the Middle East didn’t inaugurate the Age of Aquarius.
Well, consider the view from Tehran (or from Qom, Iran’s religious capital): Improved relations with the United States would rob the religious junta of the justification for much of what it does, from looting the country in the name of righteousness to pursuing nuclear weapons.
The rulers in Tehran need us as an enemy (along with Israel). A demonized foe is essential to their grip on power. And all that rhetoric about the impending end of time and the return of the Hidden Imam? A key faction — which includes President Ahmadinejad — believes it.
Of course, a president who feels that one religion’s as easy to disbelieve in as another can’t fathom the depths of faith in a Muslim fanatic any more than he can grasp the benign devotion of an American Roman Catholic, Baptist or Jew.
Ahmadinejad believes that his faith alone will rule after the any-day-now apocalypse. Obama believes in… Obama.
This is not an even match, folks. No man preoccupied with his personal destiny can beat the man ablaze with revelation: This contest features the carnival barker vs. the suicide bomber.
My money’s on Ahmadinejad, not Obama, to trigger change in the Middle East. And it’ll be change you can believe in.
Meanwhile, the Saudis, our paramount enemies, just sit back and smirk after making a court eunuch of yet another American president. The stillborn hopes of greater freedom lie buried in the sand.
Obama’s penitential Cairo sermon betrayed those Middle Easterners who embraced our ideals, who struggled for human rights and democracy, suffering prison, torture and death. Perceived as a confession of weakness and guilt, Obama’s rhetoric electrified our enemies.
There has been a "Cairo effect." We just saw it. In Iran.
Now we face our bloodiest year in Afghanistan. Iraq’s exciting progress has ground to a halt. All Palestinian factions just rejected an attempted opening by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And al Qaeda has awakened from its coma.
The desert’s a lousy place to walk on water.
Ralph Peters was recently a guest on the first episode of Securefreedom Radio. Listen to that memorable interview here.
Whatever the outcome of Iran’s presidential election tomorrow, negotiations will not soon — if ever — put an end to its nuclear threat. And given Iran’s determination to achieve deliverable nuclear weapons, speculation about a possible Israeli attack on its nuclear program will not only persist but grow.
So what would such an attack look like? Obviously, Israel would need to consider many factors — such as its timing and scope, Iran’s increasing air defenses, the dispersion and hardening of its nuclear facilities, the potential international political costs, and Iran’s "unpredictability." While not as menacingly irrational as North Korea, Iran’s politico-military logic hardly compares to our NATO allies. Central to any Israeli decision is Iran’s possible response.
Israel’s alternative is that Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs reach fruition, leaving its very existence at the whim of its staunchest adversary. Israel has not previously accepted such risks. It destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor in 1981 and a Syrian reactor being built by North Koreans in 2007. One major new element in Israel’s calculus is the Obama administration’s growing distance (especially in contrast to its predecessor).
Consider the most-often mentioned Iranian responses to a possible Israeli strike:
1) Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz. Often cited as Tehran’s knee-jerk answer — along with projections of astronomic oil-price spikes because of the disruption of supplies from Persian Gulf producers — this option is neither feasible nor advisable for Iran. The U.S. would quickly overwhelm any effort to close the Strait, and Iran would be risking U.S. attacks on its land-based military. Direct military conflict with Washington would turn a bad situation for Iran — disruption of its nuclear program — into a potential catastrophe for the regime. Prudent hedging by oil traders and consuming countries (though not their strong suit, historically) would minimize any price spike.
2) Iran cuts its own oil exports to raise world prices. An Iranian embargo of its own oil exports would complete the ruin of Iran’s domestic economy by depriving the country of hard currency. This is roughly equivalent to Thomas Jefferson’s 1807 embargo on American exports to protect U.S. shipping from British and French interference. That harmed the U.S. far more than the Europeans. Even Iran’s mullahs can see that. Another gambit with no legs.
3) Iran attacks U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some Tehran hard-liners might advocate this approach, or even attacks on U.S. bases or Arab targets in the Gulf — but doing so would risk direct U.S. retaliation against Iran, as many U.S. commanders in Iraq earlier recommended. Increased violence in Iraq or Afghanistan might actually prolong the U.S. military presence in Iraq, despite President Barack Obama’s current plans for withdrawal. Moreover, taking on the U.S. military, even in an initially limited way, carries enormous risks for Iran. Tehran may believe the Obama administration’s generally apologetic international posture will protect it from U.S. escalation, but it would be highly dangerous for Iran to gamble on more weakness in the face of increased U.S. casualties in Iraq or Afghanistan.
4) Iran increases support for global terrorism. This Iranian option, especially stepping up world-wide attacks against U.S. targets, is always open. Assuming, however, that Mr. Obama does not further degrade our intelligence capabilities and that our watchfulness remains high, the terrorism option outside of the Middle East is extremely risky for Iran. If Washington uncovered evidence of direct or indirect Iranian terrorist activities in America, for example, even the Obama administration would have to consider direct retaliation inside Iran. While Iran enjoys rhetorical conflict with the U.S., operationally it prefers picking on targets its own size or smaller.
5) Iran launches missile attacks on Israel. Because all the foregoing options risk more direct U.S. involvement, Tehran will most likely decide to retaliate against the actual attacker, Israel. Using its missile and perhaps air force capabilities, Iran could do substantial damage in Israel, especially to civilian targets. Of course, one can only imagine what Iran might do once it has nuclear weapons, and this is part of the cost-benefit analysis Israel must make before launching attacks in the first place. Direct Iranian military action against Israel, however, would provoke an even broader Israeli counterstrike, which at some point might well involve Israel’s own nuclear capability. Accordingly, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards would have to think long and hard before unleashing its own capabilities against Israel.
6) Iran unleashes Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel. By process of elimination, but also because of strategic logic, Iran’s most likely option is retaliating through Hamas and Hezbollah. Increased terrorist attacks inside Israel, military incursions by Hezbollah across the Blue Line, and, most significantly, salvoes of missiles from both Lebanon and the Gaza Strip are all possibilities. In plain violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, Iran has not only completely re-equipped Hezbollah since the 2006 war with Israel, but the longer reach of Hezbollah’s rockets now endangers Israel’s entire civilian population. Moreover, Hamas’s rocket capabilities could easily be substantially enhanced to provide greater range and payload to strike throughout Israel, creating a two-front challenge.
Risks to its civilian population will weigh heavily in any Israeli decision to use force, and might well argue for simultaneous, pre-emptive attacks on Hezbollah and Hamas in conjunction with a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Obviously, Israel will have to measure the current risks to its safety and survival against the longer-term threat to its very existence once Iran acquires nuclear weapons.
This brief survey demonstrates why Israel’s military option against Iran’s nuclear program is so unattractive, but also why failing to act is even worse. All these scenarios become infinitely more dangerous once Iran has deliverable nuclear weapons. So does daily life in Israel, elsewhere in the region and globally.
Many argue that Israeli military action will cause Iranians to rally in support of the mullahs’ regime and plunge the region into political chaos. To the contrary, a strike accompanied by effective public diplomacy could well turn Iran’s diverse population against an oppressive regime. Most of the Arab world’s leaders would welcome Israel solving the Iran nuclear problem, although they certainly won’t say so publicly and will rhetorically embrace Iran if Israel strikes. But rhetoric from its Arab neighbors is the only quantum of solace Iran will get.
On the other hand, the Obama administration’s increased pressure on Israel concerning the "two-state solution" and West Bank settlements demonstrates Israel’s growing distance from Washington. Although there is no profit now in complaining that Israel should have struck during the Bush years, the missed opportunity is palpable. For the remainder of Mr. Obama’s term, uncertainty about his administration’s support for Israel will continue to dog Israeli governments and complicate their calculations. Iran will see that as well, and play it for all it’s worth. This is yet another reason why Israel’s risks and dilemmas, difficult as they are, only increase with time.
John Bolton, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is the author of "Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad" (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
Last week opposition leader and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni published a very odd op-ed in The New York Times. She regurgitated Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s position that there is a difference between democratic processes – like elections – and democratic forces, which are dedicated to liberty and freedom. The latter need democratic processes to rise to power and secure their freedom. But both democrats and tyrants can and do make good use of democratic processes, like elections, to gain power.
Livni’s article was strange for two reasons. First, throughout her tenure as a senior minister in both the Sharon and Olmert governments, she never distinguished herself as a champion of democratic forces, either in Israel or in the Arab world. As justice minister under Ariel Sharon in the lead up to the mass expulsions of the Jews from their homes and communities in Gaza and Samaria in August 2005, Livni oversaw the enactment of draconian, patently unconstitutional restrictions on the rights of her political opponents to demonstrate their opposition to the government’s policies. She approved moves that prohibited lawful protests, arrested without charge and held without bail thousands of lawful citizens simply on the basis of their political convictions and curtailed the freedom of movement and property rights of tens of thousands on the basis of their political views by interdicting private buses and cars on highways and expropriating property.
As for the Arabs, in 2005, Livni had nothing to say in favor of the Lebanese March 14 movement which successfully forced the Syrian military to withdraw from Lebanon. Far from supporting these champions of democracy and freedom, Livni held her tongue and was identified with the Israeli view that we were better off with Syria in charge than with the instability wrought by freedom. By the same token, she also had nothing to say about Syrian dissidents rotting in Syrian prisons for advocating freedom.
Throughout her tenure as foreign minister, Livni never had a word to say about the democratization of Iraq. She never took the time to defend Mithal Alousi, the Iraqi liberal democrat whose sons were assassinated in retribution for his visit to Israel and his outspoken championing of peace between Iraq and Israel.
She never said a word to encourage Egypt’s democracy forces or to distinguish between Egyptian liberal opponents of President-for-life Hosni Mubarak’s regime and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Finally, and most importantly, Livni never discussed or evinced the slightest interest in democracy among the Palestinians. She did not oppose the Bush administration’s decision to permit Hamas to participate in the 2006 Palestinian elections. She never seriously objected to Fatah repression of liberal forces in Palestinian society. She never even credibly objected to the rampant anti-Jewish propaganda put out by Fatah-controlled media, mosques, schools or universities.
LIVNI’S DECISION to pen an article for a major American newspaper about an issue she has never championed was all the more bizarre given the current focus of US-Israel relations. As her article was hitting the presses, the Obama administration had already begun openly denying the existence of one of her self-proclaimed great achievements in office. In recent years, Livni has repeatedly claimed that as justice minister in Sharon’s government, she played a central role in convincing the Bush administration to agree to support the permanent retention of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria as part of an eventual peace deal with the Palestinians.
The agreement with the administration was publicly announced in May 2004 by then president George W. Bush at the White House following his meeting with Sharon and published in a public letter from Bush to Sharon. Bush’s letter recognized that Israel would not return to the 1949 armistice lines and that major communities and blocs of settlements in areas within its domestic consensus like the Adumim bloc, the Ariel bloc and the Etzion bloc would remain under Israeli control in perpetuity. The same is true for areas like the Jordan Valley which are essential for ensuring that our borders are defensible.
Sharon upheld the Bush letter as an "unprecedented achievement" in a speech before the Knesset. And he, his chief of staff Dov Weisglass, Livni, and Ehud Olmert all presented it as the payoff for leaving Gaza.
IN RECENT MONTHS, Elliot Abrams, Bush’s deputy national security adviser has published several articles making public the fact that Bush’s letter formed the basis of a detailed agreement between the administration and Israel relating to construction within the settlement blocs. None of Abrams’ colleagues have gone on record to dispute his disclosures.
It was on the basis of both Bush’s letter and this more detailed agreement that both the Sharon and Olmert governments agreed to permit the US to act as an arbiter of Israel’s implementation the so-called road map peace plan. Based on these side agreements, which were undertaken as formal US commitments, both the Sharon and Olmert governments believed they had secured US backing for further building in Judea and Samaria and the permanent presence of Israeli communities there, even in the event that a Palestinian state is established.
At the time, commentators like myself, and Likud leaders like Netanyahu criticized Sharon, Livni and Olmert as naïve for believing Israel could trust a foreign government – no matter how friendly – to act as a guarantor for its national security. While the Bush administration may have been a trustworthy ally, given the fact that the US is a democracy, there was no way to know that obligations undertaken by the Bush White House would survive Bush’s tenure in office. Livni’s blindness at the time to the nature of shifting national interests and to the perils of placing our national security in the hands of others bespoke her foolishness.
BUT FAR WORSE than her earlier naïve bravado about her supposed diplomatic acumen is her current silence in the face of the Obama administration’s dishonest denials of the existence of the agreements she and her colleagues concluded. Today, in the face of repeated and patently false statements by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton asserting that no agreements on this issue were ever reached, Livni has opted to say nothing. And here she is not being foolish. She is demonstrating a pernicious opportunism that is frankly dangerous for the well-being of the country.
By refusing to insist on the existence of agreements that just months ago she trumpeted as her great claim to fame, Livni is lining up behind the Obama administration as it seeks to blame the absence of peace in the region on the Netanyahu government’s refusal to accept obligations that she herself never accepted. In her bid to destabilize the Netanyahu government in the hopes that by doing so she will advance her own fortunes, Livni is collaborating with an American assault on the democratically elected government of her country in spite of the fact that this assault is predicated on false allegations against her own policies in office.
No less significant than what Livni’s perfidious collaboration with the administration against her own government tells us about her character is what the nature of the Obama administration’s assault on the Netanyahu government tells us about Livni’s central strategic platform.
Both today and during her tenure in power, she has advocated a national security strategy based on subcontracting vital national security interests to outside forces. Just as the US was supposed to act as a guarantor for the settlement blocs, so, from Livni’s perspective, Fatah forces and an international force comprised of European and perhaps US military units were supposed to protect Israel from Gaza in the aftermath of withdrawal from the area. This was also her vision for a post-withdrawal Judea and Samaria.It was also her position on how the country should secure its interests regarding Lebanon and Hizbullah. And it is also her position that we should trust the international community to protect us from the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran. As far as Livni is concerned, there is no vital interest that Israel cannot trust outside forces to secure for it.
Both today and during the time she was in office, we have been witness to instance after instance where Livni’s strategic rationale was proven wrong. From Hizbullah’s postwar emergence not as an international pariah but as a legitimate force in Lebanese politics, recognized by the likes of Britain even as it works to transform Lebanon into an Iranian colony and overthrow the regimes in Egypt and Morocco, to the Obama administration’s decision not to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, her view is exposed as folly.
From the administration’s acceptance of the Hamas regime in Gaza as manifested by its $900 million pledge of humanitarian assistance to Gaza and Obama’s demand that Israel open its borders with the Iranian proxy terror enclave, Livni’s position has been a demonstrated failure.
From the US’s commitment to building a Palestinian army to its patently mendacious denial of the Bush administration’s formal commitments to Israel’s rights in Judea and Samaria, Livni’s strategic framework has been shown to be not simply foolish, but dangerous to the country.
All of this is important for both the public and the Netanyahu government to bear in mind in the coming days, weeks and months. Today the local print and broadcast media are putting massive, unrelenting pressure on the government to bow to US pressure and come to some sort of an agreement with the Obama White House. Yet what the administration’s denial of previous US commitments and the crisis these denials have provoked show is that such deals and accommodations are completely worthless.
Then too, Livni’s own behavior towards both the government and the Obama administration tells both the public and the government something very important about her willingness to behave as the loyal opposition. Very bluntly, Livni’s silence in the face of the administration’s lies about her own record shows that she is more loyal to her parochial political interests than to national interests.
During his visit to Dresden, Obama remarked that with Jerusalem’s current governing coalition, it will be difficult for Netanyahu to bow to his will and stop allowing Jewish building beyond the indefensible 1949 armistice lines.
In making this point, Obama was clearly signaling that the White House would be happy to see Kadima join the government and compel Netanyahu to adopt its strategic view that Israel is better off empowering outsiders to secure its national interests. But what Livni has shown – both through her political behavior and her strategic outlook – is that the country and the Netanyahu government are better off without an agreement with the Americans and without Kadima and its leader in the government. Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
US President Barack Obama claims to be a big fan of telling the truth. In media interviews ahead of his trip to Saudi Arabia and Egypt and during his big speech in Cairo on Thursday, he claimed that the centerpiece of his Middle East policy is his willingness to tell people hard truths.
Indeed, Obama made three references to the need to tell the truth in his so-called address to the Muslim world.
Unfortunately, for a speech billed as an exercise in truth telling, Obama’s address fell short. Far from reflecting hard truths, Obama’s speech reflected political convenience.
Obama’s so-called hard truths for the Islamic world included statements about the need to fight so-called extremists; give equal rights to women; provide freedom of religion; and foster democracy. Unfortunately, all of his statements on these issues were nothing more than abstract, theoretical declarations devoid of policy prescriptions.
He spoke of the need to fight Islamic terrorists without mentioning that their intellectual, political and monetary foundations and support come from the very mosques, politicians and regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt that Obama extols as moderate and responsible.
He spoke of the need to grant equality to women without making mention of common Islamic practices like so-called honor killings, and female genital mutilation. He ignored the fact that throughout the lands of Islam women are denied basic legal and human rights. And then he qualified his statement by mendaciously claiming that women in the US similarly suffer from an equality deficit. In so discussing this issue, Obama sent the message that he couldn’t care less about the plight of women in the Islamic world.
So, too, Obama spoke about the need for religious freedom but ignored Saudi Arabian religious apartheid. He talked about the blessings of democracy but ignored the problems of tyranny.
In short, Obama’s "straight talk" to the Arab world, which began with his disingenuous claim that like America, Islam is committed to "justice and progress, tolerance and the dignity of all human beings," was consciously and fundamentally fraudulent. And this fraud was advanced to facilitate his goal of placing the Islamic world on equal moral footing with the free world.
In a like manner, Obama’s tough "truths" about Israel were marked by factual and moral dishonesty in the service of political ends.
On the surface, Obama seemed to scold the Muslim world for its all-pervasive Holocaust denial and craven Jew hatred. By asserting that Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism are wrong, he seemed to be upholding his earlier claim that America’s ties to Israel are "unbreakable."
Unfortunately, a careful study of his statements shows that Obama was actually accepting the Arab view that Israel is a foreign – and therefore unjustifiable – intruder in the Arab world. Indeed, far from attacking their rejection of Israel, Obama legitimized it.
The basic Arab argument against Israel is that the only reason Israel was established was to sooth the guilty consciences of Europeans who were embarrassed about the Holocaust. By their telling, the Jews have no legal, historic or moral rights to the Land of Israel.
This argument is completely false. The international community recognized the legal, historic and moral rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel long before anyone had ever heard of Adolf Hitler. In 1922, the League of Nations mandated the "reconstitution" – not the creation – of the Jewish commonwealth in the Land of Israel in its historic borders on both sides of the Jordan River.
But in his self-described exercise in truth telling, Obama ignored this basic truth in favor of the Arab lie. He gave credence to this lie by stating wrongly that "the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history."
He then explicitly tied Israel’s establishment to the Holocaust by moving to a self-serving history lesson about the genocide of European Jewry.
Even worse than his willful blindness to the historic, legal and moral justifications for Israel’s rebirth, was Obama’s characterization of Israel itself. Obama blithely, falsely and obnoxiously compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to white American slave owners’ treatment of their black slaves. He similarly cast Palestinian terrorists in the same morally pure category as slaves. Perhaps most repulsively, Obama elevated Palestinian terrorism to the moral heights of slave rebellions and the US civil rights movement by referring to it by its Arab euphemism, "resistance."
BUT AS disappointing and frankly obscene as Obama’s rhetoric was, the policies he outlined were much worse. While prattling about how Islam and America are two sides of the same coin, Obama managed to spell out two clear policies. First, he announced that he will compel Israel to completely end all building for Jews in Judea, Samaria, and eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem. Second, he said that he will strive to convince Iran to substitute its nuclear weapons program with a nuclear energy program.
Obama argued that the first policy will facilitate peace and the second policy will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Upon reflection, however, it is clear that neither of his policies can possibly achieve his stated aims. Indeed, their inability to accomplish the ends he claims he has adopted them to advance is so obvious, that it is worth considering what his actual rationale for adopting them may be.
The administration’s policy toward Jewish building in Israel’s heartland and capital city expose a massive level of hostility toward Israel. Not only does it fly in the face of explicit US commitments to Israel undertaken by the Bush administration, it contradicts a longstanding agreement between successive Israeli and American governments not to embarrass each other.
Moreover, the fact that the administration cannot stop attacking Israel about Jewish construction in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, but has nothing to say about Hizbullah’s projected democratic takeover of Lebanon next week, Hamas’s genocidal political platform, Fatah’s involvement in terrorism, or North Korean ties to Iran and Syria, has egregious consequences for the prospects for peace in the region.
As Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas made clear in his interview last week with The Washington Post, in light of the administration’s hostility toward Israel, the Palestinian Authority no longer feels it is necessary to make any concessions whatsoever to Israel. It needn’t accept Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. It needn’t minimize in any way its demand that Israel commit demographic suicide by accepting millions of foreign, hostile Arabs as full citizens. And it needn’t curtail its territorial demand that Israel contract to within indefensible borders.
In short, by attacking Israel and claiming that Israel is responsible for the absence of peace, the administration is encouraging the Palestinians and the Arab world as a whole to continue to reject Israel and to refuse to make peace with the Jewish state.
The Netanyahu government reportedly fears that Obama and his advisers have made such an issue of settlements because they seek to overthrow Israel’s government and replace it with the more pliable Kadima party. Government sources note that White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel played a central role in destabilizing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s first government in 1999, when he served as an adviser to then president Bill Clinton. They also note that Emmanuel is currently working with leftist Israelis and American Jews associated with Kadima and the Democratic Party to discredit the government.
While there is little reason to doubt that the Obama administration would prefer a leftist government in Jerusalem, it is unlikely that the White House is attacking Israel primarily to advance this aim. This is first of all the case because today there is little danger that Netanyahu’s coalition partners will abandon him.
Moreover, the Americans have no reason to believe that prospects for a peace deal would improve with a leftist government at the helm in Jerusalem. After all, despite its best efforts, the Kadima government was unable to make peace with the Palestinians, as was the Labor government before it. What the Palestinians have shown consistently since the failed 2000 Camp David summit is that there is no deal that Israel can offer them that they are willing to accept.
So if the aim of the administration in attacking Israel is neither to foster peace nor to bring down the Netanyahu government, what can explain its behavior?
The only reasonable explanation is that the administration is baiting Israel because it wishes to abandon the Jewish state as an ally in favor of warmer ties with the Arabs. It has chosen to attack Israel on the issue of Jewish construction because it believes that by concentrating on this issue, it will minimize the political price it will be forced to pay at home for jettisoning America’s alliance with Israel. By claiming that he is only pressuring Israel to enable a peaceful "two-state solution," Obama assumes that he will be able to maintain his support base among American Jews who will overlook the underlying hostility his "pro-peace" stance papers over.
OBAMA’S POLICY toward Iran is a logical complement of his policy toward Israel. Just as there is no chance that he will bring Middle East peace closer by attacking Israel, so he will not prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons by offering the mullahs nuclear energy. The deal Obama is now proposing has been on the table since 2003, when Iran’s nuclear program was first exposed. Over the past six years, the Iranians have repeatedly rejected it. Indeed, just last week they again announced that they reject it.
Here, too, to understand the president’s actual goal it is necessary to search for the answers closer to home. Since Obama’s policy has no chance of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it is apparent that he has come to terms with the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran. In light of this, the most rational explanation for his policy of engagement is that he wishes to avoid being blamed when Iran emerges as a nuclear power in the coming months.
In reckoning with the Obama administration, it is imperative that the Netanyahu government and the public alike understand the true goals of its current policies. Happily, consistent polling data show that the overwhelming majority of Israelis realize that the White House is deeply hostile toward Israel. The data also show that the public approves of Netanyahu’s handling of our relations with Washington.
Moving forward, the government must sustain this public awareness and support. By his words as well as by his deeds, not only has Obama shown that he is not a friend of Israel. He has shown that there is nothing that Israel can do to make him change his mind.
We at the Center for Security Policy take great pride in our long-standing relationship with Caroline Glick– our Senior Middle East Fellow–who recieved the Guardian of Zion Award this year in Jerusalem.
The Ingeborg Rennert Foundation’s Guardian of Zion Award has been awarded since 1997 to Elie Wiesel, Herman Wouk, A.M. Rosenthal, Sir Martin Gilbert, Charles Krauthammer, Daniel Pipes, Norman Podhoretz, and others. Recieving the Award is a distinct honor; we at the Center consider it fitting for Ms. Glick to be in such illustrious and brilliant company.
Caroline Glick, the Center’s Senior Middle East Fellow, gave the following extraordinary address on her acceptance of the Ingeborg Rennert Foundation’s 2009 Guardian of Zion Award in Jerusalem. Listen to the audio or read the text below.
Good evening. Members of Knesset, President Moshe Kaveh of Bar Ilan, Professor Benzion Netanyahu, former Guardian of Zion award winners Prof. Elie Wiesel and Arthur Cohn, and honored guests, thank you all for coming here today.
I would also like to thank some very important people who made a special trip to join me here this evening. Thank you to my parents, Sharon and Gerald Glick who came here from Chicago. Thank you to Frank Gaffney, the President of the Center for Security Policy in Washington and my dear colleague, and his wife Marisol for flying in from Washington to be here.
Thank you to Professor Avi Bell from Bar Ilan University Law School, my friend and intellectual sounding board for delaying your flight to New York where you’ll be presenting a paper at a law conference tomorrow, to be here with me tonight.
Thank you to Prof. Joshua Schwartz from the Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies at Bar Ilan and your staff for organizing this event.
And finally and most importantly, thank you Mr. and Mrs. Ira and Inga Rennert. Thank you for bringing my parents and the Gaffneys to Jerusalem for this event. Thank you for your extraordinary support for my work. And thank you for being such amazing Jews who give of yourselves everyday for Israel, for Jerusalem and for the Jewish people throughout the world. I am privileged to know you and we are blessed as a people to have you among our leading lights.
I take enormous satisfaction from receiving this award. For nearly as long as I can remember, the image of the watchman on the gates of Jerusalem has been the singular image of Jewish strength for me. It is has always been to the Jewish watchmen, ever vigilant, to whom we have owed our lives, and our survival as a people.
Today these watchmen preserve our freedom in our land. For fifty generations in exile, it was the memory of those Jewish Centurions, manning the barricades that inspired us to keep faith with our traditions, our God, our law, and our land.
I believe that it is an honor beyond measure that Bar Ilan University and the Rennert Center would deem it proper to cast me among the ranks of our greatest defenders and champions. I know I do not deserve this distinction. I certainly do not believe that I have earned it. But I do know that since childhood I have strived to emulate the image of the watchman – or watchwoman — on the walls of Zion. And I pledge that I will continue throughout my life to strive to earn the distinction you bestow on me tonight.
THE WATCHMAN at the gates is a powerful image. But of course the defense of Jerusalem cannot begin at the gates. And guarding Jerusalem is not simply a matter of physical strength. It requires spiritual commitment and wisdom as well. Indeed, defenders of Zion require a greater mix of physical and spiritual strength than any defenders of any spot on earth.
Both our recent and ancient history as a people is one continuous testament to this truth.
And it is this aspect of Jerusalem – the eternal and temporal front line of the Jewish people – that I wish to discuss with you tonight.
If you drove to Jerusalem this evening from Tel Aviv, as the coastal plain suddenly ended 25 kilometers from the city at Shaar Haguy or Bab el Wahd, you reached the starting point of the siege of Jerusalem from 1947. It was from this gauntlet that the British-commanded Jordan Legion sought – with the help of the Arabs of Jerusalem and surrounding villages – to cut the Jews of the city off from the rest of the country and so to conquer the nascent Jewish state.
As you began ascending through the hills to Jerusalem you could see the remnants of some of the most fearsome and bloody battles of the war. They came in the form of the reverentially preserved hulks of armored personnel carriers used by Haganah and Palmach units sent in front of the Jordanian snipers in a continuous attempt to bring reinforcements and food to the besieged Jews of Jerusalem.
As the hills — covered on both sides by JNF forests — rose to meet you, you passed the Latrun fortress on your right. It was the British decision to transfer control over Latrun – with its command over the road below – to the Jordan Legion, that all but guaranteed the fall of Jerusalem by preventing reinforcements from aiding its undermanned defenders.
Wave after wave of Jewish soldiers threw themselves against the guns of the Jordan Legion in a desperate attempt to break its chokehold on Jerusalem.
If you came to this hotel from the center of town, you may have gone by Davidka Square. There you would have passed by one of the primitive mortars used by the Harel Brigade in the battle for Jerusalem.
The Davidka was grossly ineffective as a killing machine. But between its thunderous noise and the rumor mill, it proved an effective tool of psychological warfare against the enemy. Even more than in traditional conflicts, the psychological aspect of the War of Independence played a pivotal role in determining its outcome.
The Jews, who just three years before had been incinerated in European crematoria were an object of wonder no less than hatred for our enemies. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, for many Arabs there was a sense that supernatural powers were at work as the new Jewish state rose from the ruins of Jerusalem.
For their part, schooled in the martial traditions of Joshua and Gideon, the Jews of 1948 blended seamlessly the psychological and the metaphysical with armor and steel.
The Davidka monument is just as much a reminder of what this uniquely Jewish military doctrine can achieve as the unwalled city of Jericho.
If you came this way from the Old City, you most likely walked through the Jewish Quarter. It was to the 1,700 Jews who lived there in 1948 and their 150 defenders that the eyes of the citizens of nascent Jewish state were turned. The future security of the country was dependent on their ability to withstand the Arab siege. They had to be assisted and they had to hold their ground if the war was to end in a resounding victory for the Jews.
Tragically, the spiritual strength that sustained us 61 years ago was not matched by sufficient physical strength to hold the city.
As Jerusalem commander Dov Yosef instructed the starving and desperate Jews within the walls about the nutritional benefits of various leaves that they could eat in the absence of food, and as wave after wave of Jewish fighters fell to their deaths on the roads ringing the city — at Latrun, the Castel, Har Adar and Gush Etzion – in their bid to relieve the Jerusalemites — the British-commanded Jordanians delighted in our suffering. Arab snipers picked off any Jew within range.
In the end, the Jews of the Old City held out for 6 months. Last week marked the 61st anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem on May 27, 1948. Of the Jewish Quarter’s 150 defenders, only 43 survived until the Hurva synagogue was destroyed by the Jordan Legion. It was the destruction of the venerable old synagogue that finally forced the hands of the rabbis within the walls. After the Hurva was destroyed, the rabbis began negotiating the surrender of the Old City to the Arabs.
If you walked to the King David Hotel today from the Old City, and exited through the Jaffa Gate, you certainly took note of the gentrified neighborhood of Mamila. Today, as you walk through the new upscale shopping plaza, it is hard to believe, that from May 27, 1948 through June 7, 1967 Mamila was Israel’s frontline. It was Sderot and Kiryat Shemona of its time.
The Jews of the neighborhood lived in constant fear of Jordanian snipers who took pot shots from the walls of the conquered city at the Jews down below. The buildings you passed were once surrounded by sandbags. The Jews who lived inside them would run, not walk across the street. Any hesitation could spell their death.
But then, on the third day of the Six Day War, their long nightmare ended. After 19 years, the IDF succeeded in liberating the capital city. Paratroopers from kibbutzim danced with yeshiva buchers as they stood in awe before the remnant of the Second Temple. In June 1967, the proper balance between our spiritual and physical defenses had finally been struck.
After 2000 years, we were again a free people.
EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, on May 27, 1991, the 43rd anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem, and the 24th anniversary of its liberation, tens of thousands of Jews from Ethiopia were airlifted to the Jewish state. As then prime minister Yitzhak Shamir said, the Ethiopian aliyah marked the first time in history where Africans were liberated from slavery by being taken out of Africa.
The entire country celebrated the arrival of these Jews, who had maintained their allegiance to Zion for thousands of years often in complete isolation from the rest of the people of Israel.
The next day, May 28, 1991, I stepped off an El Al plane at Ben Gurion Airport, and before reaching the passport check, I walked up the stairs of the old terminal building to the Ministry of Absorption’s offices and officially made aliyah. A friend picked me and my massive immigrant suitcases up and a few hours later, I began my new life in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem that greeted me 18 years ago was almost entirely free from fear. It was hard for me to imagine that the city had ever been endangered as I rode the buses, walked along the streets, sat in cafes, hiked in the forests, shopped in supermarkets and clothing stores.
As I moved without fear through Arab neighborhoods, and traversed the old and new city, it rarely occurred to me that I was walking on contested ground. The Palestinian uprising, which had begun in 1988 and had instigated a period of self-segregation and renewed hostility towards Israel among the city’s Arab residents, had been defeated in the wake of the Gulf War.
But unbeknownst to me and to my fellow Jerusalemites, all of this was set to change just two years later. When, as part of the implementation of the Oslo peace process with the PLO, the government of Israel allowed for an Arab armed force to be deployed on the outskirts of the city, fear returned to Jerusalem.
Within just a few weeks of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Jerusalem again became the front line of the country as terrorists from Ramallah, Hebron, Beit Lehem and beyond converged on Jerusalem to terrorize its people in shooting attacks and suicide bombings. What the people of Sderot experience today was first suffered by residents of Gilo.
I moved away from Jerusalem at the end of 1991, after I joined the army. I returned to the city in 2002. By that time, the sense of safety I had felt here during my first months in the country had been obliterated. Every day brought a new atrocity or attempted atrocity. My own street became the scene of carnage as a bus was bombed just a half a block from my front door. My neighbors’ mangled bodies were strewn before me as I ran out of my home with some vague notion that I could help someone.
While there was no hunger among the city’s residents in 2002 as there had been during the siege in 1948, the chronic, continuous sense that at any moment you could be killed filled the air with similar dread and foreboding.
It was only after the government finally unleashed the Israel Defense Force in Judea and Samaria that a semblance of normality returned again to the city. It was only after Operation Defensive Shield returned our soldiers to the streets of Ramallah, Beit Lehem, Shehem, Jenin, Kalkilya and Hebron, and vastly curtailed the powers of the Palestinian armed forces, that we could feel safe going out to dinner and riding the bus again.
DURING THE YEARS THAT Jerusalem came under physical threat, it also became politically threatened. Israel’s acquiescence to the PLO’s military presence on the outskirts of the city began a process of unraveling Israel’s own claim to the city. As Yassir Arafat ordered his forces to march on Jerusalem, and denied that the Jewish people have any rights to the city, successive Israeli governments found themselves on the diplomatic defensive.
Just as our leaders allowed Jerusalem’s physical wellbeing to be threatened, so they enabled its political unity to come under assault. Rather than insist that the world recognize our sovereign rights to our capital, at best, our leaders spoke of the strategic importance of Jerusalem to our physical security.
The element of metaphysical power embodied by the tactically worthless Davidka was absent from discussions of how Israel needed Tzur Bahar and Jabel Mukaber to defend Armon HaNatziv or how our control over Shoefat and Beit Hanina is necessary to defend Ramot, Neve Yaakov and Pisgat Zeev.
Happily today Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat have abandoned this defensive posture and are waging strident campaigns against all who demand that we again surrender our eternal capital.
But for much of the past 15 years, the full expanse of Jewish history and identity was narrowed to a discussion of isolated neighborhoods, as if they were what this is all about.
Jerusalem’s importance is far greater than the sum total of its neighborhoods. In ignoring this basic truth, our leaders did more to imperil the city’s neighborhoods than legions of our enemies could hope to accomplish.
Even more devastating than what we said to the world is what we said to ourselves. For much of the past 15 years, our national leaders scornfully and contemptuously worked to limit our expectations and accused us of being greedy for assuming we had a right to our capital.
When did King David live in Abu Dis, they sneered. Why were we needlessly upsetting the Arabs by moving back to Ir David, they hissed. The underlying message was clear. We were provoking our enemies by asserting our rights, which we were told, were unimportant.
In general, since 1994, to greater and lesser degrees, our leaders abandoned Jerusalem as our metaphysical frontline and reduced the rationale of our control over our eternal capital to a security argument.
This argument is fine for as far is it goes. We explained – correctly – that without Israeli control over Jerusalem, the entire country would be under threat. And this is true. Indeed it has always been true.
Among other reasons, King David chose Jerusalem as his capital city because of its strategic importance. Were foreign forces to take control over Jerusalem and surrounding areas today, everything from Ben Gurion Airport to Tel Aviv to Beersheva to Tiberias would be placed under threat.
As Shaar Haguy in 1948 and Beit Jalla in 2000 showed, with foreign forces on the outskirts of the city, Jerusalem is cut off from the rest of the country. To secure the city is to secure the country. And to abandon the city – whether by surrendering control of the road to Tel Aviv or by relinquishing Judea and Samaria — is to imperil the country.
Specifically, placing foreign forces in Jerusalem or on its doorstep would mean importing Gaza into the heart of the country.
Jerusalemites would find ourselves living in bomb shelters like our brothers and sisters in Sderot. Tel Aviv would find itself, like Ofakim, within range of enemy rockets. Terrorists with simple portable weapons could sit on the hills of Jerusalem and shoot down civilian jetliners landing at Ben Gurion airport. In wartime, terrorists with primitive artillery could shut down the country’s vital traffic arteries, preventing reservists from reaching the fronts to defend the state.
Although inarguably accurate, Israel’s security arguments for its sovereignty over Jerusalem have fallen on deaf ears. Neither the Americans – who demand that we cease asserting our sovereignty over eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem, not to mention Judea and Samaria — nor the Arabs consider Jerusalem primarily a military issue.
The Americans prefer to ignore the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of the city’s frontline status as they push for an Israeli retreat to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. For them, the issue of Jerusalem is no more than a petty real estate squabble.
But our enemies know better. For them the question of who controls Jerusalem is rightly recognized as the core issue – as the issue upon which Israel rises or falls as a state and as a people. Earlier this month, this point was made clearly by one of Israel’s sworn enemies.
In a television interview on May 7, the PLO’s Ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki explained that from the PLO to the Iranian mullahs, Jerusalem is seen as the metaphysical key to Israel’s wellbeing. As he put it,
"With the [implementation of the] two-state solution, [involving an Israeli relinquishment of Jerusalem], in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made – just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward."
As a wayward Jew once said, "The truth will set you free."
We owe the likes of Zaki — and the Iranians who call their most prestigious terrorist unit the Jerusalem Brigade – a big thank you for reminding us of who we are and what we need to survive. For even as our leaders tried to forget what we as a people have always known, our history – both ancient and modern – is testament to the truth of Zaki’s statement.
WE MARK THE END of Jewish control over the Land of Israel as having occurred not with the Roman invasion in 63 BCE, nor from the defeat of Bar Kochba’s rebellion 182 years later in 135. We mark the hurban, the destruction of our sovereignty as having occurred with the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE.
And why is this the case? It is because people do not fight for strategically significant hilltops. They fight for ideas like freedom. They fight for symbols, for abstractions like flags. They fight for their beliefs. They fight for their way of life.
They do not fight for strategic advantage.
We Jews know this better than any other people. We were the first people to self-consciously define ourselves at Mt. Sinai as a nation committed to an abstract principle of an invisible God, an abstract code of law, and an abstract, yet-to-be-seen promised land.
Josef Trumpeldor is not remembered as a great hero for having said, "It is good to die for strategically significant hilltops," – although that is what he died defending.
Trumpeldor is remembered as a great hero for declaring, "It is good to die for our country."
Even further back, we remember that the only reason the Kingdom of Judea did not suffer the same fate as the Kingdom of Israel in the end of the 8th century BCE is because as the ten tribes of Israel were expelled into oblivion, King Hezkiyahu saved Jerusalem from the Assyrians.
Due to his failed attempt to purge Judea of Assyrian influence, Hezkiyahu lost Lachish and Gat and dozens of other cities and villages and was forced to fall back on Jerusalem. There, against all odds, Hezkiyahu kept Jerusalem free. He breached the Assyrian siege by digging his famous water tunnel under the city.
Assyrian King Sennacherib, who destroyed the Kingdom of Israel and deported the ten tribes, went home empty-handed. His conquest of all the other cities and villages meant little without Jerusalem. By saving Jerusalem, Hezkiyahu saved Jewish independence and through it, he saved the Jewish people.
As Isaiah had promised in Chapter 37, verses 32-35:
"From Jerusalem and Mt. Zion the people will be renewed. And so God said to the King of Assyria, you will not enter this city, you will not shoot your arrows upon it, you will not breach its defenses, your cannons will not reach it. You will go back the way you came. You will not enter this city, God decreed. I defended this city to save it for me and for David my servant."
Our history as a people – both ancient and modern – has always been tied to Jerusalem. On Hanukah we remember the Maccabean revolt in a very telling way. The Maccabees began their revolt against the Greeks in 167 BCE. The fighting lasted for 23 years until Jonathan was crowned king.
But we remember the revolt for an event that occurred two years into the fighting. We celebrate the revolt not because it established the Maccabean dynasty. We celebrate it because in 165, Judah Maccabi liberated the Temple and so reinstated our sovereignty as a nation and our hope for national renewal. Again – from Jerusalem and Mt. Zion, the people were renewed.
Just as Zaki, Arafat, Nasrallah, and Ahmadinejad remind us every day, from the outset of our nationhood here in Israel four thousand years ago, throughout the centuries of our dispersion and to this day, our fate as a nation – both physically and spiritually – has always been tied directly to our control, or lack of control over Jerusalem. Jerusalem has always been our front line both physically and spiritually.
Rabbi Akiva knew, as he gazed at the destroyed Temple from Mt. Scopus that one day our control over the city would be restored and so our national wellbeing would be renewed. This is why he laughed as he watched foxes entering and exiting the Holiest of Holies.
Perhaps if he had known then that it would take nearly 2,000 years for that to happen, he would have joined his colleagues in their tears instead of shocking them with his laughter and gaiety.
But still, today we know that Rabbi Akiva was right. Our return to Jerusalem did presage our national rebirth with the renewal of our sovereignty in 1948 and 1967.
The modern Zionist movement, which officially began with Hovevei Tzion in 1882, came after the Jewish repopulation of Jerusalem. By 1850, Jews again comprised the majority of the city’s population. And it was our strong presence here that emboldened the early Zionists to believe that a mass return to Zion was finally possible. It was because we had returned again to Jerusalem that our hope and so our strength were finally renewed after 2000 years of stateless wandering and persecution.
LET US RETURN for a moment to 1967. There were many glorious events that occurred during those six days in June. I said before that it was only in 1967 that we wrought the proper balance between physical and spiritual strength. I would like to consider that statement at somewhat greater length.
In June 1967, Israel was transformed from a threatened, vulnerable Jewish statelet into a mighty state to be reckoned with. But who celebrated — then or since — the conquest of Gaza and Kalkilyah? Who remembers the great battles in the Sinai or even the Golan Heights?
The images of that war that have entered our collective consciousness – never to leave – are the images of our paratroopers on the Temple Mount, of Mota Gur crying "Har Habayit b’Yadeinu!" "the Temple Mount is in our hands!," of our young soldiers praying at the Western Wall.
The convergence of Jerusalem as our frontline of physical security and spiritual security was palpable in those days.
IN HONOR of Yom Yerushalayim this month, a documentary was aired on Israel Television about the signals battalion in the Paratroopers Brigade. The battalion played a major role in the fighting – first taking over the Rockefeller Museum, then the Temple Mount, then the Kotel, then the walls of the city.
In the documentary, the heroes who liberated Jerusalem were brought together forty years later to celebrate its renewal and to recall their fight. They told a stunning story.
After the city was liberated, they situated themselves in the abandoned Jordanian police station just inside the Jaffa Gate. The same station now houses the Israel police. In one of the rooms, they found a large quantity of musical instruments. Apparently, the Jordanian police band was stationed at the site and stored its instruments there.
The men took one of the drums and climbed up the walls of the Old City overlooking Mamila. There the Jews had been huddled beneath the streets in their bomb shelters for several weeks.
As they ascended the walls, the paratroopers began pounding the drum. It must have been a terrifically strange noise since they all claimed to have had no idea how to play the drums.
As the men told it, and as a woman who had been hiding in the shelters with her family recalled, the civilians became perplexed at the new sound that replaced the familiar staccato pop of gun bursts and cannon fire. Slowly, they began emerging from the shelters to find out what was happening.
There above them, they saw the flag of Israel flying. They saw Jewish watchmen on the walls, beating the drums of victory in a half-mad boom, boom, boom.
And at the site of the Guardians of Jerusalem above them, the Jews of Mamila began to dance as in times of old. They danced and danced, and walked to the walls, first tentatively, and then with a massive convulsion of joy and relief, of hope and ecstasy as for the first time in 2000 years the city was secured. The Jews were free of fear as we returned to the Temple Mount, to Mt. Zion, to Jerusalem from whence our strength was renewed.
Our enemies are right in choosing their targets. They are right because they know who we are. We are the children of Jerusalem, of Zion. Our physical and spiritual survival is dependent on our willingness to dedicate our lives in every generation to guarding both the physical and spiritual walls of this city. It is only by guarding Zion, that we guard its people.
I am humbled and honored beyond words to have been chosen from among so many of my fellow Jews for this singular honor of being named a Guardian of Zion. For me, more than anything, what this means, is that people I respect for their defense of our people accept me as a loyal daughter of this eternal city.
It is all I have ever wished to be.
It is all I wish for my children to become.
And with God’s help, it is something I will be blessed to remain all the days of my life.
Thank you. God bless the people of Israel and our eternal capital city.
Last Sunday, the head of Israel’s military intelligence reported that Iran has mastered the nuclear fuel cycle and can rapidly move from low-grade uranium enrichment to weapons-grade uranium enrichment. He also said that the next 18 months will be "critical" for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
There is a national consensus in Israel that preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is the most important and urgent national-security challenge facing the country. Even if Iran refrains from using the weapons directly against Israel, a nuclear-armed Iran will accelerate its efforts to destabilize and destroy the Jewish state by using its proxies in the Palestinian Authority, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq to wage constant, unrelenting terror, guerrilla and conventional warfare.
A nuclear arsenal will likewise help Iran to expand its sphere of influence by empowering it to escalate its efforts to overthrow the Jordanian and Egyptian regimes, and accelerate Hamas’ takeover of the Palestinian Authority, scuttling peace negotiations and peace treaties with Israel. Other Arab states – including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, and Kuwait – will also see their regimes threatened or overthrown by radical forces operating under Iran’s nuclear umbrella.
And this is the best-case scenario.
It is no wonder, then, that Israelis of all political stripes are deeply disturbed by the Obama administration’s Middle East policies. Since taking office, President Obama has made it clear that preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is not a major concern for him. Rather, he strives to open diplomatic relations with Iran in the inexplicable hope that Iran can be appeased out of a nuclear program that has already brought it to the cusp of regional hegemony.
Over the last several weeks, as part of the buildup to tomorrow’s meeting between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the administration has ratcheted up its rhetoric against Israel. Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, national security adviser James Jones, and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel are among those who have stated that Israel cannot expect the United States to support its aim of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons unless Israel first makes concessions to the Palestinians. That is, if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Israel will be to blame.
Israelis are mystified by this position. With Iran’s proxy Hamas in charge of Gaza, and ascendant in the West Bank, it is clear that any Palestinian state that is established in the near future will be an Iranian-aligned terror state at war with Israel. That is, while administration officials claim "the only solution is a two-state solution," Israelis recognize that the rapid establishment of a Palestinian state will only cause more war, terror, and regional instability.
Moreover, statements by Biden and Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressing the administration’s opposition to an Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear installations, together with Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller’s recent call for Israel to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, have led many Israelis to perceive a strategic and moral blindness informing the administration’s views about Israel and Iran. Apparently, for the administration, there is no difference between Israel, a stalwart U.S. ally and fellow democracy, and Iran – a terror-supporting, human-rights-violating, self-declared enemy of the United States that has been attacking U.S. citizens, interests, and allies since the 1979 Islamic revolution, and has repeatedly called for Israel to be eradicated.
A poll taken earlier this month by Bar Ilan University showed that only 38 percent of Israelis view Obama as friendly toward Israel. Moreover, 66 percent of Israelis support a military strike on Iran’s nuclear installations, and only 15 percent say they believe Israel should cancel an attack on Iran if the United States opposes the operation.
These data are important for understanding how Israelis are responding to the Obama administration’s apparent hostility toward Israel and its perceived preference for a nuclear-armed Iran over any concerted action by the United States or Israel to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. What the administration is signaling Israelis – and their government – is that Washington is no longer Israel’s trusted ally. Indeed, it is becoming clear to the Israeli public that, for the administration, it doesn’t matter what Israel does or what its enemies do. As far as Obama and his advisers are concerned, Israel’s refusal to make further concessions to the Palestinians will be the cause for whatever transpires.
In this state of affairs, on the eve of the Obama-Netanyahu meeting, more and more Israelis have come to the conclusion that there is little point in taking Washington’s views into consideration. If Washington is going to blame Israel anyway, we are better off being blamed for preemptively removing the threat of a new Holocaust than for allowing that threat to become a fact of life.
Like nature, Israel’s strategic relations abhor a vacuum. In the wake of the Obama administration’s decision to drastically curtail the US’s strategic alliance with Israel in the interest of American rapprochement with Iran and Syria, the Netanyahu government has been moving swiftly to fill the void.
On Monday, with Pope Benedict XVI’s arrival and with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at Sharm e-Sheikh, two potential strategic alliances came into view.
Building effective alliances with the Vatican and Egypt is a delicate process. Each side wants more from the other than the other can reasonably provide. But each side also has much to gain even if it doesn’t achieve everything it wants. The art of alliance building is making the new ally both happy with what it gets and comfortable with not getting everything it wants. This is the task that presents itself today, as Netanyahu and his colleagues engage with both the pope and with Mubarak.
The strategic goal that Israel wishes to advance through an alliance with the Vatican is the strengthening of its international position as the sole sovereign in Jerusalem. The strategic goal it wishes to advance with Egypt is the prevention of Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
UNDER POPE BENEDICT XVI, the possibility of winning the support of the Catholic Church for Israel’s position that Jerusalem will never again be partitioned and will remain under perpetual Israeli sovereignty is greater than it was under his predecessors. Unlike his predecessors, Benedict has been outspoken in his concern for the plight of Christian minorities in Islamic countries. During his visit to Amman he made a point of speaking out for the protection of Iraqi Christians who are under attack from all quarters. Since he replaced Pope John Paul II, Benedict has made repeated calls for religious tolerance and freedom in Islamic countries – most notably in his 2006 speech at Regensberg where he quoted a Byzantine emperor from the Middle Ages criticizing Islam for seeking to spread its message by the sword.
After his words sparked murderous violence throughout the Islamic world, Benedict expressed his regret for the hurt his statement caused. But he never retracted it. Moreover, during his visit to the King Hussein Mosque in Amman on Saturday, Benedict indirectly reasserted his 2006 message. When he said, "It is the ideological manipulation of religion, sometimes for political ends, that is the real catalyst for tension and division, and at times even violence in society," Benedict was reinforcing – if cryptically – his basic criticism of Islam.
The pope’s obvious recognition of the danger jihadist Islam constitutes for Christians puts the Vatican, under his leadership, in a position where it could be more interested than it was in the past in working with Israel to secure the Christian holy sites in Jerusalem by supporting Israeli control of the city.
The pope made this possibility even more apparent in his homily at Mount Nevo. Standing on the mountain where Moses gazed at the Land of Israel, Benedict spoke of "the inseparable bond between the Church and the Jewish people." As he put it, "From the beginning, the Church in these lands has commemorated in her liturgy the great figures of the patriarchs and prophets, as a sign of her profound appreciation of the unity of the two Testaments. May our encounter today inspire in us a renewed love for the canon of sacred Scripture and a desire to overcome all obstacles to the reconciliation of Christians and Jews in mutual respect and cooperation in the service of that peace to which the word of God calls us!"
In saying this, the pope made clear that he views the preservation of Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem as essential for Christian heritage. The Islamic Wakf, which would control the city’s holy sites in the event of its partition, has already gone to great lengths to systematically destroy the ruins of the Temple Mount and the Jewish and Christian heritage of the holy basin through archeological theft, illegal building and digging.
ISRAEL’S ABILITY to embrace the Vatican as an ally and so advance an alliance with the Church regarding Jerusalem is constrained from its perspective by the legacy of the Church’s behavior during the Holocaust. Politically, this constraint is manifested in the Vatican’s stated desire to canonize Pope Pius XII.
Quite simply, no government in Jerusalem has the moral right to ignore weighty allegations that Pope Pius XII collaborated with the Nazis during the Holocaust. It is because of this moral imperative to remain vigilant in seeking justice for our murdered brethren that successive governments have strained relations with the Vatican by objecting to Pius XII’s canonization.
What the government can do is encourage Holocaust historians and Yad Vashem to engage their Catholic counterparts in a joint study – through conferences and research – of the allegations against Pius XII. Such discussions have taken place between Vatican scholars and Yad Vashem over the years, most recently in March. Israel should offer to institutionalize them.
Specifically worthy of a joint study are the revelations made in January 2007 by Lt.-Gen. Ion Pacepa, the former head of the Romanian KGB, that the allegations against Pius XII were the brainchild of the KGB. In an article published in National Review, Pacepa, who when he defected to the US in 1978 became the highest ranking Soviet-bloc defector, claimed that in the late 1950s the KGB began perceiving the Catholic Church as the primary threat to its control over Eastern Bloc countries. Consequently, in 1960 the KGB decided to wage a campaign to destroy its moral authority. Since Pius had died two years earlier, the decision was made to castigate him as a Nazi collaborator. Already dead, he was in no position to defend himself.
Pacepa alleged that the 1964 play The Deputy, which opened the floodgates of criticism against Pius, was written by the KGB and that its presumed author, Rolf Hochhuth, was a communist fellow traveler. He claimed that the basis for the play was documents that Romanian KGB agents disguised as Catholic priests had purloined from the Vatican archives. Those documents, he alleged, were then doctored at KGB headquarters in Moscow.
Former CIA director James Woolsey has vouched for Pacepa’s personal credibility. Pacepa’s memoir Red Horizons formed the basis for the indictment and conviction of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was executed in 1989.
At the same time, it is impossible to fully accept Pacepa’s assertions in light of the Vatican’s refusal to open its wartime archives.
If Israeli scholars are willing to engage Catholic counterparts in an open exchange of information on Pius XII’s wartime record that allows for new verifiable information to be fairly assessed, whatever the eventual results of the research, Israel would be able to clear some of the acrid air that makes it difficult to gain Vatican cooperation on pressing concerns like strengthening its diplomatic standing on the issue of Jerusalem. And again, this is in the Church’s own strategic interest since it wishes to preserve and ensure free access to Christian and Jewish holy sites there.
THEN THERE IS EGYPT. In his videotaped address to the AIPAC conference last week Netanyahu made the case for a strategic alliance with Egypt when he said, "For the first time in my lifetime… Arabs and Jews see a common danger… There is a great challenge afoot. But that challenge also presents great opportunities. The common danger is echoed by Arab leaders throughout the Middle East; it is echoed by Israel repeatedly… And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it is this: Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons."
Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza in 2006, Egypt has demonstrated repeatedly that it supports Israel in its fight against Iran and its proxies. Both Egypt and Saudi Arabia supported Israel in the war against Iran’s Hizbullah proxy in Lebanon in 2006. They supported it in its war against Iran’s Hamas proxy in Gaza in Operation Cast Lead this past December and January.
Egypt helped Israel by keeping its border with Gaza closed and by allowing the IAF to overfly Egyptian airspace en route to attacking Iranian weapons convoys in Sudan destined for Gaza. Moreover, with Egypt’s rejection last week of the Obama administration’s attempt to link action against Iran’s nuclear weapons installations to Israeli concessions to the Palestinians, Mubarak and his associates in Cairo have made clear that they will support Israeli military action against Iran’s nuclear installations.
On the other hand, as the self-proclaimed leader of the Arab world, Egypt is a main sponsor of the Palestinian war against Israel and a leader in the campaign to delegitimize Israel internationally. The Mubarak regime may risk its own domestic stability it if is perceived as supporting Israel since the overwhelming majority of Egyptians are hateful toward Israel and Jews. Furthermore, today Egypt has Jordan to consider.
The Obama administration has clearly enlisted King Abdullah II to act as its proxy in the Arab world for coercing Egypt and the Gulf states to deny support for Israel on Iran for as long as it maintains its refusal to give more of its land to the Palestinians. Given Jordan’s new role, Egypt and the Gulf states have been put in an even more awkward situation vis-à-vis Israel and Iran.
To contend with this situation, the Netanyahu government would do well to hew very closely to the line that Netanyahu set out in his address to AIPAC. There he made clear that there will be no chance of peace with the Palestinians as long as Iran and its proxies remain ascendant.
Netanyahu would also do well to recall that the reason that Egypt and Saudi Arabia ended up accepting Hizbullah control over Lebanon and Hamas control over Gaza is because under the Olmert government, Israel failed to defeat them. Had Israel routed Hizbullah in 2006 and Hamas this past December and January, Egypt may have adopted a different position relating to the Palestinians.
So too, like Israel, today Egypt views preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and weakening its Hizbullah and Hamas proxies as a paramount national interest. If, with Egyptian assistance Israel is able to successfully prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the regional dynamic relating to the Palestinians – who support Iran – as well as the political standing of the Obama administration – which is enabling Iran to acquire nuclear weapons – may change. So Israel’s best practice regarding Egypt is to buy time on the Palestinian issue while successfully preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Building alliances is difficult business. And recognizing their limitations as well as their potential requires courage and patience. But today the opportunity to build new relationships is clear. Israel’s great challenge going forward then is to seize the moment.
On June 7 Hizbullah will likely take over Lebanon and formally bring the oldest Arab democracy into the Iranian axis.
Iran’s stalking horse will not become the ruler of the largely pro-Western, non-Shi’ite majority country through a violent revolution. Lebanon will become yet another Iranian vassal state through ballots, not bullets. On June 7, Hizbullah and its allied parties are set to win a smashing popular victory in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections.
Hizbullah’s projected victory in these elections is of course not an isolated event. It is part of an Islamist electoral sweep in democratic elections throughout the region. Indeed, Islamists have won every free or partially free election in the region for the past six years.
Beginning with Turkey’s Islamist AKP party’s first electoral victory in 2003 – followed by its even more decisive reelection in last year’s race; moving to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election in the relatively free, (although not open), presidential elections in his country in 2005, to the Muslim Brotherhood candidates’ sweep of nearly all electoral races they were permitted to contest in Egypt’s 2005 parliamentary elections, to Hamas’s electoral victory in the Palestinian Authority’s legislative elections in 2006, the Islamist candidates and parties have been victorious in state after state.
The only outlier in this pattern is Iraq. But then, Iraq is the only country in the region where the West overthrew an enemy regime and retained an empowered military force in the country in the years that followed. What will happen in Iraq once US forces are withdrawn is an open question.
Generally speaking, Western analysts have attributed the Islamists’ victories to their well-run welfare programs for the poor, and to the fact that unlike their secular opponents, Islamist parties and politicians are perceived as honest.
No doubt, economic interests have played a role in their election. But the fact is that people who voted for the likes of Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Ahmadinejad, and those who are poised to vote for Hizbullah are not blind and they are not disengaged from the ideological currents of their societies. They know full-well what these parties and their leaders represent and seek.
Turkish voters, for instance, know that Prime Minister Recep Erdogan wishes for Turkey to be an Islamic state and a leader in the Islamic world. Palestinian voters did not vote for Hamas just because it runs the best soup kitchens. They supported Hamas because they support its goal of destroying Israel.
Iranian voters chose Ahmadinejad over former president Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani not merely because Rafsanjani was corrupt, but because of Ahmadinejad’s outspoken extremism. Muslim Brotherhood supporters in Egypt know that the jihadist movement calls for the overthrow of the government and its replacement with a caliphate and that the group spawned both al-Qaida and Hamas. And in Lebanon, voters know that a vote for Hizbullah is a vote for war against Israel and the West and a vote for placing Lebanon under effective Iranian control.
They know all this, and still they vote for these parties and leaders. And once in office, these leaders do not disappoint them. In addition to expanding welfare benefits for their supporters, they have worked steadily and aggressively to Islamify their societies internally and to strengthen their alliances with likeminded governments against the West in foreign affairs. At home, through patronage, repression of political opponents, introduction of Islamic laws, and incitement against the West, these democratically elected regimes have been moving their people further and further away from secularism.
AS FOR the burgeoning alliances between and among these likeminded jihadist states, events of the past week alone make clear that backed by popular support at home, these governments are steadily expanding their military and commercial ties in a naked bid to challenge and defeat the West.
Buffeted by US President Barack Obama’s warm embrace of Turkey earlier in the month, Erdogan has moved swiftly to consolidate his place as a central pillar in the new regional jihadist axis spearheaded by Iran, which includes Syria, Lebanon and the PA. Over the past week, his government signed a military pact with Lebanon committing Turkey to providing arms and training for the Lebanese army – a force which is already largely subservient to Hizbullah and will likely come under its complete control on June 7.
It signed a defense agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Defense, and even more provocatively conducted a three-day joint land forces exercise with the Syrian military. This was the first joint exercise between Syria and a NATO member.
As for Iran, Turkey signed a trade agreement with the mullocracy that is slated to double bilateral trade between the two countries within five years. Even more significantly, Ankara gave a green light to Iranian gas exports to Europe through the Nabucco gas pipeline which runs from Turkey to Austria. The Nabucco pipeline was supposed to bypass both Iran and Russia and increase instead gas exports from the former Soviet republics to Europe. Iran’s access to the pipeline will earn it billions of dollars annually and increase its political power as Europe increases it dependence on Iranian gas.
BOTH THE popularity of Islamist parties and their behavior after being popularly elected have confounded conventional Western reasoning – particularly in the US. Quite simply, successive administrations in Washington have been unable to provide an accurate explanation of what drives the populations of these countries, and increasingly of the Islamic world in general to support Islamist parties and movements.
In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the Bush administration came to the conclusion that it isn’t that these parties and movements are popular. It is just that people are intimidated into supporting them. Were the people given the freedom to choose, they would choose to be led by liberal political forces interested in living at peace with the West. For former president George W. Bush and his advisers, the root of Islamic extremism was authoritarianism and the solution was Westernization through open elections.
When time after time the citizens of these countries or societies voluntarily elected jihadists, the Bush administration was confounded. Rather than seek an alternative explanation to understand what was happening, the administration alternatively denied reality – as in the case of Turkey where it pretended that the AKP was a moderate, pro-Western Islamist party in the face of incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Or they claimed that the people were simply voting against corruption and showered them with money – as has been the case with the Hamas-supporting Palestinians. Or, as in the case of Egypt and Iran, they have simply ignored the fact that elections took place.
The same of course occurred after Hizbullah’s violent coup last May. Rather than cut off ties with the Saniora government – which had been compelled to accept Hizbullah control over its affairs – the Bush administration continued to support Saniora and increased US military assistance to the Lebanese army – hoping that it could pretend away the problem.
SINCE HIS first moments in office, President Barack Obama has embarked on a policy course which rejects Bush’s belief that the quest for freedom is universal as so much American chauvinism. For Obama, Islamic hostility towards the West is caused by American arrogance, not the absence of freedom. And because American arrogance is the root of the problem, the solution must be American contrition. It is this view that propels Obama from one international apology tour to the next and causes him to air the CIA’s laundry in public. As far as he is concerned, the more apologetic he is, the more contrition he expresses for the actions of his predecessors, the greater the payoff will be.
And yet, as we see from the behavior of Lebanon, Turkey, Syria and Iran over the past week alone, Obama’s apologetics are not winning them over, but emboldening them to take more aggressive positions against the West. How can this be explained?
There is an alternative explanation for the behavior of the peoples of the Islamic world that actually can explain events, and has successfully forecast them. It has even engendered policy recommendations that might have mitigated both the popularity of Islamist parties and deterred these parties, once elected, from taking provocative steps against Western states and interests. Unfortunately, every time this explanation is raised, Western policy-makers head for the hills.
This explanation is really nothing more than an observation. It observes that the populations of Islamic countries and societies support Islamist parties like the AKP and Hizbullah and Hamas because they support what they stand for. This explanation notes that tens and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, Turks, Egyptians and others voluntarily congregate in public venues and swoon when Islamist leaders tell them that Islam will defeat the West and promise the death of America and the death of Israel.
The jihadist message resonates with them. Their hearts and minds have already been won over. Contrary to what Western leaders as distinct as Bush and Obama believe, the hearts and minds of the Islamic world are not presently in play. From Beirut to the Taliban-controlled Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan, jihadists enjoy public support because the public supports their aim of defeating the West with bullets, with bombs, and with ballots.
It is too early to know how Obama will react when he like Bush is no longer able to deny that his strategy for winning over the hearts and minds of the Islamic world has failed. We don’t know if like Bush before him, he will simply ignore reality and pretend that nothing has happened; if he will blame his political opponents or Israel for not joining him in his contrition; or if he will cast about for another central organizing principle that will explain hostile Islamic behavior.
What is clear is that in the absence of Western – and specifically American – willingness to consider the possibility that what is happening in the Islamic world has next to nothing to do with either what the West embodies or what it has done, and everything to do with the resonance of the Islamist message within the Islamic world, events like the expected loss of Lebanon in June will continue to be met with incoherent prattling and confusion.
It is a strange situation when Egypt and Jordan feel it necessary to defend Israel against American criticism. But this is the situation in which we find ourselves today.
Last Friday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee that Arab support for Israel’s bid to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is contingent on its agreeing to support the rapid establishment of a Palestinian state. In her words, "For Israel to get the kind of strong support it’s looking for vis-a-vis Iran, it can’t stay on the sidelines with respect to the Palestinians and the peace efforts." As far as Clinton is concerned, the two, "go hand-in-hand."
But just around the time that Clinton was making this statement, Jordan’s King Abdullah II was telling The Washington Post that he is satisfied with the Netanyahu government’s position on the Palestinians. In his words, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has "sent a message that he’s committed to peace with the Arabs. All the words I heard were the right words."
As for Egypt, in spite of the Israeli media’s hysterical reports that Egypt won’t deal with the Netanyahu government and the Obama administration’s warning that Israel can only expect Egypt to support its position that Iran must be denied nuclear weapons if it gives Jerusalem to the PLO, last week’s visit by Egypt’s intelligence chief Omar Suleiman clearly demonstrated that Egypt wishes to work with the government on a whole host of issues. Coming as it did on the heels of Egypt’s revelation that Iranian-controlled Hizbullah agents were arrested for planning strategic attacks against it, Suleiman’s visit was a clear sign that Egypt is as keen as Israel to neutralize Iranian power in the region by preventing it from acquiring nuclear weapons.
And Egypt and Jordan are not alone in supporting Israel’s commitment to preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear power. American and other Western sources who have visited the Persian Gulf in recent months report that leaders of the Gulf states from Bahrain – which Iran refers to as its 14th province – to Saudi Arabia to Kuwait and, of course, to Iraq – are praying for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities and only complain that it has waited so long to attack them.
As one American who recently met with Persian Gulf leaders explained last week, "As far as the Gulf leaders are concerned, Israel cannot attack Iran fast enough. They understand what the stakes are."
UNFORTUNATELY, THE nature of those stakes has clearly eluded the Obama administration. As the Arabs line up behind Israel, the Obama administration is operating under the delusion that the Iranians will be convinced to give up their nuclear program if Israel destroys its communities in Judea and Samaria.
According to reports published last week in Yediot Aharonot and Haaretz, President Barack Obama’s in-house post-Zionist, White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, told an American Jewish leader that for Israel to receive the administration’s support for preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, it must not only say that it supports establishing a Palestinian state in Judea, Samaria, Jerusalem and Gaza, it must begin expelling its citizens from their homes and communities in Judea and Samaria to prove its good faith.
With just months separating Iran from either joining the nuclear club or from being barred entry to the clubhouse, the Obama administration’s apparent obsession with Judea and Samaria tells us that unlike Israel and the Arab world, its Middle East policies are based on a willful denial of reality.
The cold hard facts are that the Middle East will be a very different place if Iran becomes a nuclear power. Today American policy-makers and other opponents of using military force to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons compare the current situation to what the region could look like in the aftermath of an Israeli campaign against Iran’s nuclear installations. They warn that Hizbullah and Hamas may launch massive retaliatory missile attacks against Israel, Egypt, Jordan and other states, and that US military personnel and installations in the region will likely be similarly attacked by Iranian and Syrian proxies.
Indeed, proponents and opponents of an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear installations alike warn that Iran’s deployment of terror proxies from Beirut to Bolivia, from Managua to Marseilles, and from Gaza to Giza means that things could get very ugly worldwide in the aftermath of an Israeli attack.
But all of that ugliness, all of that instability and death will look like a walk in the park compared to how the region – and indeed how the world – will look if Iran becomes a nuclear power. This is something that the Arabs understand. And this is why they support and pray for an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear installations.
IF IRAN acquires nuclear weapons, the Obama administration can throw its hopes for Middle East peace out the window. Today, even without nuclear weapons, Iran is the major force behind the continued Palestinian war against Israel. Iran exerts complete control over Hamas and Islamic Jihad and partial control over Fatah.
In and of itself, Iran’s current control over Palestinian terror groups suffices to expose the Obama administration’s plan to force Israel to destroy its communities in Judea and Samaria as misguided in the extreme. With Iran calling the shots for the Palestinians, it is clear that any land Israel vacates will fall under Iranian control. That is, every concession the US forces Israel to make will redound directly to Iran’s benefit. This is why Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s claim that it will be impossible to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians without first neutralizing Iran rings so true.
If Iran acquires nuclear weapons, the situation will become even more destructive. A nuclear-armed Iran means that any chance of marginalizing these Iranian-controlled forces in Palestinian society will disappear. For Israel, the best case scenario in the age of a nuclear-armed mullocracy would involve continuous war with Iranian proxies – sort of expanded versions of the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead – in which it has little option for victory because the terror armies would fight under Iran’s nuclear umbrella.
Regionally, a nuclear-armed Iran would in short order compel both Egypt and Jordan to abrogate their peace treaties with Israel. The exposure of the Iranian sabotage ring in Egypt last week makes clear that Iran seeks to either overthrow or dominate the Arab world with its nuclear arsenal. If Iran becomes a nuclear power, roundups of Iranian agents like the one in Egypt will be inconceivable. Iranian agents will be given free reign both regionally and worldwide.
For Israel, the abrogation of its peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan would raise the danger of regional war to an all-time high. Goaded by Iran, and operating with Iran’s US- and Turkish-armed Lebanese proxy and Teheran’s Syrian slave, Egypt and Jordan may well be made to decide that the time has come to invade Israel again.
These scenarios, of course, are likely because they compare favorably to the worst case scenarios in which a nuclear-armed Iran decides to simply detonate its nuclear bombs over Israel, either in the form of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack or in the form of a direct nuclear strike. An EMP attack would not immediately kill anyone, but would destroy the country’s electricity grid and permanently paralyze its military and civilian infrastructures, rendering the population defenseless not merely from its neighbors, but from disease and starvation. If successful, a direct nuclear strike would likely kill between 50,000 and several million Israelis, depending on how many warheads reached their targets.
GLOBALLY OF COURSE, a nuclear-armed Iran would be well positioned to take over the world’s oil markets. With Saudi Arabia’s main oil installations located in the predominantly Shi’ite eastern provinces, it would be able to credibly threaten to destroy Saudi oil installations and so assert control over them. With Iran’s strategic alliance with Venezuela, once it controls Saudi oil fields, it hard to see how it would not become the undisputed ruler of the oil economy.
Certainly Europe would put up no resistance. Today, with much of Europe already within range of Iran’s ballistic missiles, with Iranian-controlled terror cells fanned out throughout the continent and with Europe dependent on Persian Gulf oil, there is little doubt of the direction its foreign policy would take in the event that Iran becomes a nuclear power. Obviously any thought of economic sanctions would disappear as European energy giants lined up to develop Iranian gas fields, and European banks clamored to finance the projects.
Finally, there is America. With Israel either barely surviving or destroyed, with the Arab world and Europe bowing before the mullahs, with much of Central and South America fully integrated into the Iranian axis, America would arguably find itself at greater risk of economic destruction and catastrophic attack than at any time in its history since the War of 1812. An EMP attack that could potentially send the US back to the pre-industrial age would become a real possibility. An Iranian controlled oil economy, financed by euros, would threaten to displace the dollar and the US economy as the backbone of the global economy. The US’s military options – particularly given Obama’s stated intention to all but end US missile defense programs and scrap much of its already aging nuclear arsenal – would be more apparent than real.
Yet what Clinton’s statements before Congress, Emmanuel’s statements to that American Jewish leader and Obama’s unremitting pandering to Teheran and its Syrian and Turkish allies all make clear is that none of these reasonable scenarios has made a dent in the administration’s thinking. As far as the Obama White House is concerned, Iran will be talked out of its plans for regional and global domination the minute that Israel agrees to give its land to the Palestinians. The fact that no evidence exists that could possibly support this assertion is irrelevant.
On Sunday, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland claimed that Obama will not publish his administration’s policy on Iran until after he meets with Netanyahu at the White House on May 18. It will be during that meeting, Hoagland wrote, that Obama will seek to convince Netanyahu that there is no reason to attack Iran.
The fact that Obama could even raise such an argument, when by Israel’s calculations Iran will either become a nuclear power or be denied nuclear weapons within the next 180 days, shows that his arguments are based on a denial of the danger a nuclear Iran poses to Israel and to global security as a whole.
It is true that you can’t help but get a funny feeling when you see the Arabs defending Israel from American criticism. But with the Obama administration’s Middle East policy firmly grounded in La La Land, what choice do they have? They understand that today all that stands between them and enslavement to the mullahs is the Israel Air Force and Binyamin Netanyahu’s courage.
Egypt’s recent actions against Hizbullah operatives are a watershed event for understanding the nature of the threat that Iran constitutes for both regional and global security. For many Israelis, Egypt’s actions came as a surprise. For years this country has been appealing to Egypt to take action against Hizbullah operatives in its territory. With minor exceptions, it has refused. Believing that its operatives threatened only us, the Mubarak regime preferred to turn a blind eye.
Then too, now seems a strange time for Egypt to be proving Israel correct. Senior ministers in the new Netanyahu government have for years been outspoken critics of Egypt for its refusal to act against Hizbullah and for its support for the Hizbullah/Iran-sponsored Hamas terror group. By going after Hizbullah now, Egypt is legitimizing both their criticism and the Netanyahu government itself. This in turn seems to go against Egypt’s basic interest of weakening Israel politically in general, and weakening rightist Israeli governments in particular.
But none of this seemed to interest Egyptian officials last week when they announced the arrest of 49 Hizbullah operatives and pointed a finger at Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah and his bosses in Teheran, openly accusing them of seeking to undermine Egypt’s national security.
The question is what caused Egypt to suddenly act? It appears that two things are motivating the Mubarak regime. First, there is the nature of the Hizbullah network it uncovered. According to the Egyptian Justice Ministry’s statements, the arrested operatives were not confining their operations to weapons smuggling to Gaza. They were also targeting Egypt.
The Egyptian state prosecution alleges that while operating as Iranian agents, they were scouting targets along the Suez Canal. That is, they were planning strategic strikes against Egypt’s economic lifeline.
The second aspect of the network that clearly concerned Egyptian authorities was what it showed about the breadth of cooperation between the regime’s primary opponent – the Muslim Brotherhood – and the Iranian regime. Forty-one of the suspects arrested are Egyptian citizens, apparently aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. This alignment is signaled by two things. First, many of them have hired Muslim Brotherhood activist Muntaser al-Zayat as their defense attorney. And second, Muslim Brotherhood spokesmen have decried the arrests.
For instance, in an interview with Gulf News last Thursday, Muslim Brotherhood spokesman Issam el-Erian defended Hizbullah (and Iran) against his own government, claiming that Nasrallah and the Iranian ayatollahs are right to accuse President Hosni Mubarak of being little more than an Israeli stooge.
In his words, "The Egyptian government must redraw its national security policies to include Israeli threats against Arab counties like Syria and Lebanon and to consider threats against Palestinians by Israelis as a threat against its national security."
In a nutshell then, both the Hizbullah network’s targets and its relationship to Egypt’s Sunni Islamist opposition expose clearly the danger the Iranian regime constitutes to Egypt. Iran seeks to undermine and defeat opponents throughout the world through both direct military/terrorist/sabotage operations and through ideological subversion. It is the confluence of both of these aspects of Iran’s revolutionary ambitions that forced Egypt to act now, regardless of the impact of its actions on the political fortunes of the Netanyahu government. And it is not a bit surprising that Egypt was forced to act at such a politically inopportune time.
THROUGHOUT the region and indeed throughout much of the world, Iran’s star is on the rise. Its burgeoning nuclear program acts as a second arm of a pincer-like campaign against its opponents. The asymmetric and ideological warfare it wages through its terror and state proxies are the campaign’s first arm. Together, these two strategic arms are raising the stakes of Iran’s challenge to its neighbors and to the West to unprecedented and unacceptable heights. Morocco is so concerned about Iranian subversion of its Sunni population that last month it cut off diplomatic ties with Teheran.
Iran’s great leap forward has been exposed by recent events. Last month’s Arab League summit in Doha exemplified how Iran has successfully split the Arab world between its proxies and its opponents. For the past three years, and particularly since the 2006 war between Israel and Iran’s Hizbullah in Lebanon, Arab League states have been increasingly polarized around the issue of Iran. The country has used its satellite states of Syria, Sudan and Qatar, as well as its burgeoning alliances with Muslim Brotherhood branches in Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and elsewhere, to legitimize its rapidly escalating assaults on Sunni regimes throughout the region.
Although Egypt and Saudi Arabia successfully blocked Qatar from inviting Iran and Hamas to the summit, by using the good offices of Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Thani and Syrian President Bashar Assad, the Iranians were able to get their anti-Saudi/Egyptian platform passed. As the Middle East Media Research Institute chronicled in a report on the proceedings, Assad successfully abrogated the so-called Saudi peace plan that the Arab League adopted in 2002. According to a new Syrian-backed resolution, any Arab rapprochement with Israel would be contingent on Israel first destroying itself by withdrawing into indefensible borders and being overwhelmed by millions of hostile foreign Arab immigrants.
Sensing what awaited him at the summit, Mubarak chose to stay home and send a junior emissary in his place. Saudi King Abdullah said nothing throughout the two-day Arab love-fest with Iran. Both leaders emerged weakened and humiliated.
In recent years, Iran has expanded its sphere of influence to strategic points around the region. Two recent additions to Iran’s axis are Eritrea and Somalia. Iran and Eritrea signed a strategic alliance last year that grants Iranian Revolutionary Guard units basing rights in the strategically vital Bab al-Mandab strait that controls the chokepoint connecting the Indian Ocean with the Red Sea. As for Somalia – whose position along the Gulf of Aden provides it a similarly critical maritime posture – Iran has been exploiting its condition as a failed state for several years.
In 2006, the UN reported that some 720 Somali jihadists aligned with al-Qaida fought with Hizbullah in Lebanon during its war against Israel. According to an analysis of Iran’s coopting of Somali jihadists published in November 2006 by the on-line Long War Journal, in exchange for the Somali operatives’ assistance, Iran and Syria provided advanced military training to the Somalis who had just established the al-Qaida-affiliated Islamic Courts Union regime in the country. Teheran equipped the ICU with anti-aircraft missiles, grenade launchers, machine guns, ammunition, medicine, uniforms and other supplies both before and after it took control of Somalia.
The UN report also linked the ICU to Iran’s nuclear program. Its alleged that Iranian agents were operating in ICU chief Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys’s hometown of Dusa Mareb, where they sought to buy uranium.
Beyond the Horn of Africa, of course, Iran has been consistently expanding its influence in Iraq and Afghanistan. In both countries the mullahs simultaneously sponsor the insurgencies and offer themselves as the US’s indispensible partner for stabilizing the countries they are destabilizing.
What is perhaps most jarring about Iran’s ever-expanding influence is the disparate responses it elicits from Israel and Sunni regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia on the one hand, and the West on the other. Whereas Israel and the Sunni Arab states warn about Iran daily, far from acknowledging or confronting this ever-expanding Iranian menace, the US and the Europeans have been alternatively ignoring it and appeasing it. If the US were taking the Iranian threat seriously, the Obama administration would not be begging Iran to negotiate with it after Teheran demonstrated that it has complete control over the nuclear fuel cycle.
If the US were interested in contending with the danger Iran constitutes to global security, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would not be absurdly arguing that the US cannot verify whether Iran’s announcement that it is now operating 7,000 centrifuges and its opening of another nuclear site signify an increase in its nuclear capacity.
Were the US taking Iran seriously, it would not be asking Iran to help out in Afghanistan and Iraq. It would not be treating Somali piracy as a strategically insignificant nuisance. It would not be ignoring Eritrea’s newfound subservience to Iran. It would not be maintaining the Central Command’s headquarters in Qatar. And, of course, it would not be permitting Iran to move forward with its nuclear weapons program.
THEN there is Britain. Last week Michael Ledeen from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies reported that Britain’s decision to recognize Hizbullah is part of a deal it struck with Iran and Hizbullah in exchange for five Britons who have been held hostage in Iraq by Hizbullah/Iran-affiliated terrorists for two years. According to the deal, in exchange for the British hostages, London agreed to recognize Hizbullah and the US agreed to release a number of Shi’ite terrorists its forces in Iraq have captured.
As Tariq Alhomayed, the editor of Asharq al-Awsat, noted in response to the news, the deal puts paid Nasrallah’s contention that Hizbullah does not operate outside Lebanon except to wage war against Israel. But it also points to a severe problem with the West.
If Britain was willing to acknowledge and contend with the grave threat Iran constitutes for global security, it would not accept the authority of Hizbullah or Iran to negotiate the release of British hostages in Iraq. Instead it would place responsibility for achieving the release of the British hostages on the sovereign Iraqi government and use all the means at its disposal to strengthen that government against agents of Iranian influence in the country.
So, too, rather than participate in the deal, the US would seek to destroy the Iranian-controlled operatives holding the hostages and discredit and defeat the Iraqi political forces operating under Iranian control. Certainly if the US were taking the Iranian threat seriously, it would announce that any withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq will be linked to the complete defeat of agents of Iranian influence in Iraq.
The West’s refusal to contend with the burgeoning Iranian menace no doubt has something to do with the West’s physical distance from Iran. Whereas Middle Eastern countries have no choice but to deal with Iran, the US and its European allies apparently believe that they can still pretend away the danger. But of course they cannot.
From the Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden to Hizbullah cells from Iraq to Canada; from Iranian agents in British universities to Hizbullah and Iranian military advisers in South and Central America, the West, like the Middle East, is being infiltrated and surrounded.
Egypt’s open assault on Hizbullah is yet another warning that concerted action must be taken against the mullocracy. Unfortunately, the absence of Western resolve signals that this warning, too, will go unheeded.
