Landau: “The bluffer isn’t bluffing.”

Landau is the same guy who asked America to “rape” Israel. He is a strong believer in the two state-solution, yet he makes it clear that “The bluffer isn’t bluffing.” and that Netanyahu will take Iran out if he has to. Ted Belman

World must believe Netanyahu on Iran
David Landau, former editor-in-chief of Haaretz.

A too-frank exchange between Barack Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy, inadvertently caught on microphone, about Benjamin Netanyahu being a liar has provoked distinctly negligible outrage around the world. Even in Israel, people tended to shrug.

Credibility is not the Prime Minister’s strong suit – witness the hollow ring of his much-trumpeted pronouncement in 2009 that he favours the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Two years have passed, and the direly needed solution has receded.

But Obama, Sarkozy, and the rest of the world would be profoundly wrong to apply the same dismissive scepticism to Netanyahu’s repeated and consistent admonitions that, in the last resort, he would bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities to prevent that nation getting the bomb. He means what he says.

He does not want to go down in history as the leader on whose watch a fanatical enemy achieved the means to cow, terrorise and threaten to destroy the Jewish state while the rest of the world stood by and Israel itself did nothing.

Many Israelis, by no means all groupies of Netanyahu, know exactly where he is coming from in this fraught and frightening saga. And they feel the same way he does. They still hope the world collectively will act to neutralise this threat, but if it doesn’t, they believe Israel must use its considerable military power.

A recent poll showed the nation split down the middle over whether Israel should act unilaterally against Iran. It did not show the even wider angst, never far beneath the surface, that keeps ordinary Israelis awake at night as they churn over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s chilling threats and the ominous International Atomic Energy Agency’s reports on Iran’s nuclear program. The Iranian president, spewing forth Holocaust denial while threatening another Holocaust, has pressed all the wrong buttons on Israel’s sensitive national psyche.

The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem is not just the place visiting statesmen are required to visit and make appropriately sad and contrite comments. It is still, nearly 70 years on, the raw nerve of the nation, the unhealed scar.

Israel was created from the ashes of Auschwitz. Its primary mission is ”never again”. That, at any rate, is how millions of Israelis see themselves and their country. A mass subjective perspective can become objective political reality. The world needs to recognise that Netanyahu authentically articulates that perspective and that reality.

Granted, there are many opponents of it, particularly in the Israeli defence establishment. Top generals and intelligence officials stress the inevitable limits of any unilateral Israeli air strikes on Iran. The nuclear facilities are spread around the country. Some are buried deep underground.

The most Israel could achieve might be to damage Tehran’s nuclear program and delay it. But the cost could well be heavy and sustained missile attacks on Israel, not only from Iran but from its much more proximate clients: Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Lebanon and Hamas, the radical Islamist movement that rules Gaza. Syria, too, long Iran’s ally, might seek respite from its domestic strife by joining the fray against Israel.

Iran, moreover, would doubtless lash out at US forces and shipping in the Gulf, which would immediately precipitate an oil crisis. Israel would be blamed, especially if the Iranian nuclear threat were merely deferred.

Against all that is the calculation, carefully unspoken but present nevertheless, that a unilateral Israeli strike would trigger massive American intervention against Iran’s nuclear program. This could come in response to Iranian retaliation against American targets, or because Washington would have an overwhelming interest in ”finishing the job” that Israel began. In the post-Libya climate, France and Britain might well be moved to come in alongside the US.

Against the naysayers, too, is the calculation that goes beyond strategy, the calculation that says to an Israeli prime minister, with 3000 years of Jewish history on his shoulders, that inaction is not an option.

Netanyahu has at his side, as Defence Minister, his former army commander in the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, Ehud Barak. Himself a former prime minister, Barak is now a politician without a party. Most of his Labour colleagues broke away from him, leaving him doomed, say the polls, to terminal oblivion at the next election.

Why, then, does Netanyahu keep him on? Because Barak’s military prowess and authority can counter the naysayers if the fateful decision on Iran needs to be made.

Of course, Netanyahu’s drum-beating is intended to ensure that moment never comes. The fear of Israel going it alone is intended to instil anxiety and urgency into international sanctions against Tehran. Sanctions, rigorously applied, can still work.

Washington is urging its allies, Australia among them, to join in a new round, targeting Iran’s banking and petrochemical industries, as well as its nuclear ambitions. The regime in Tehran is deeply unpopular and may yet implode. Netanyahu’s drum-beating is tactically impeccable.

But it’s not just tactics. The bluffer isn’t bluffing. Let’s hope Obama, Sarkozy and the rest are hearing him loud and clear.