Push has come to shove

T. Belman. I question this thesis. Israel had no reason to believe that the US was going to allow Iran to get the bomb, not because of Israel’s interests but because of America’s interest. The US always stood for non-proliferation. So we didn’t have to avoid confrontation on the “peace” process.

By Sarah Stern, ISRAEL HAYOM

In 1994, while sitting on the patio of a friend’s home, I interviewed a rather distinguished and well-known Israeli news anchor. I asked him why I, an American citizen with nothing more than the Internet, seemed to be more aware than the average Israeli of the constant and steady stream of incitement emanating directly from the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat on down, and their continuous violations of the Oslo Accords. I asked further why the Israeli media wasn’t paying more attention to this issue.

His face took on an ashen hue and his eyes became solemn.

“I was just at a briefing at Israeli intelligence,” he said, “and I know that there is a much graver threat coming from the east. We can handle the occasional terrorist attack by the Palestinian Authority or Hamas. What we might not be able to handle is the threat of a nuclear bomb emerging from Iran. We will need Uncle Sam’s help, when it comes to that.”

This premise has guided Israeli foreign policy for years. It prompted Israel’s decision not to blow the whistle on years and years of constant and steady incitement to hatred on which the Palestinian populace had been nurtured, or on the extolling of the virtues of martyrdom, of homicide bombings, and of the blatant naming of town squares, streets, athletic contests and even schools after “shuhada” (martyrs), and all of the years of bloodshed targeting innocent Israel civilians.

This premise prompted Israel to prematurely abort successive wars. These wars were all defensive, launched when Hamas missiles or Hezbollah missiles were directed at Israeli population centers. Each time, under U.S. counsel, Israel aborted the wars when it was just shy of achieving victory. This was also among the reasons that the Israeli military waged these wars with one hand tied behind its back.

Through the years, successive Israeli governments must have been aware that by refraining from publicly acknowledging the Palestinian incitement and violations of the Oslo Accords they were in fact empowering the Palestinian cause in the court of international public opinion, and they were doing so to their own detriment.

But they elected to restrain themselves because they knew that the American State Department would never budge from the formulation of “land for peace,” despite mounting evidence that it was not working. They did this because they assumed that when that critical moment came to defend Israel against the existential threat of an Iranian nuclear bomb, Uncle Sam would be there for them.

Meanwhile, during all those years, U.S. support for Israel had begun to wane steadily, for a variety of reasons. Critical among them was the fact that Israel refused to go on the offensive in the court of public opinion, despite mounting evidence that he Palestinians were anything but partners in peace. In fact, by not going on the offensive, Israel succumbed to being portrayed as thieves in what became an international obsession (after all who gives “back” something that does not belong to them?). Since Israel obediently played along with the role of the antihero, over the past two decades, Israel’s image among the international community shifted from being that of a tiny independent brave and courageous “David” into a reviled “Goliath.”

As a result, we have witnessed an unparalleled obsession and scrutiny of every single moral decision that Israel has taken in order to survive in the tough neighborhood of the Middle East. No one seems to care that over 260,000 Syrians have been slaughtered at the hands of their fellow Muslims, or that tens of thousands of Christians have been slaughtered by Muslims in Africa and in the Middle East.

This peculiar obsession is just one of the many factors that set the stage for the rapidly metastasizing international BDS movement. These long years of absorbing the attacks on Israel’s image, of refusing to take off the silk gloves and put on the boxing gloves, both in war and in the international arena, were based on the premise that the United States would be there when the critical moment came.

It is this premise that has led successive Israel governments to make internally gut-wrenching withdrawals from settlements, despite the assurances made by then-President George W. Bush in a letter addressed to then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on April 14, 2004. In the letter, Bush pledged that “in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of these final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.”

It is this premise that kept the prime minister of Israel from attacking the Iranian nuclear installations when it became apparent that the United States and the Iranians had become involved in secret negotiations. In fact, stories began to leak to the press that in 2014, when U.S. President Barack Obama was informed through U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that Israel might attack some of Iran’s nuclear installations, the United States threatened to shoot down Israeli planes.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu therefore did not attack the Iranian installations and was rewarded by being called a “chickenshit” by a high-ranking official in the Obama administration (as reported in The Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg in October 2014). Israel would never engage in such a low level of discourse, or respond in kind.

Israel has always been acutely aware of its tiny geography and of its miniscule place in a hostile neighborhood. As Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah famously said, “Israel is a one-bomb country,” and “the Jews did us a favor by gathering in Israel. It will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

So for over 22 years of Oslo, successive Israeli governments held their tongues, knowing they would need the United States at that critical moment.

That critical moment has arrived. Israel is now forced to confront the greatest single existential threat to its existence since 1948 — a nuclear bomb coming from the ruthless, theocratic, totalitarian dictatorship of the Islamic Republic of Iran.