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Imagine You're the Prime Minister of Israel

(Atlantic Monthly) Ambassador Michael Oren - Michael Oren, Israel's ambassador to the U.S., delivered the following sermon at Washington synagogues on Yom Kippur: Israel today is threatened with two major terror organizations: Hamas in Gaza and, in Lebanon, Hizbullah. Both are backed by Iran and both call openly for Israel's destruction. Over the past five years, both have acted on that call by firing nearly 15,000 rockets at Israeli towns and villages. You know that in order to keep those thousands of rockets out of Hamas' hands you need to blockade Gaza from the sea. The policy is liable to make you very unpopular in the world. But you have to choose between being popular and watching idly while a million Israelis come under rocket fire. You have to choose between popular and being alive. In Lebanon, Hizbullah has bigger, more accurate rockets, with a range that can reach every Israeli city. Hizbullah has positioned those rockets under homes, hospitals, and schools, confident that if Israelis try to defend themselves from those missiles, they will be branded war criminals. Do you wait until Hizbullah finds a pretext to fire those rockets or do you act preemptively? Do you risk having much of the country being reduced to rubble or having that same country reduced to international pariah status? An even thornier case is posed by the peace process. You know that to create that neighboring state that you're going to have to give up some land, not just any land, but land regarded as sacred by the majority of the Jewish people for more than three thousand years. You know that a great many of your countrymen have made their homes in these areas and that numerous Israelis have given their lives in their defense. You know that Israel has in the past withdrawn from territories in an effort to generate peace but that it received no peace but rather war. And, lastly, you know that many Arabs view the two-state solution as a two-stage solution in which the ultimate stage is Israel's dissolution. You could opt for maintaining the status quo, with the risk of deepening Israel's international isolation, or you could specify a vision of peace that significantly reduces its perils. You could, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has done, insist that the future Palestinian state be effectively demilitarized, without an army that could bombard Israeli cities. You could insist that the Palestinian state reciprocally recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, and so put an end to all future claims and conflicts. Even then, what do you do if, a week after the peace treaty is signed, a rocket falls on Tel Aviv? The leaders of radical, genocidal Iran regularly call for Israel's annihilation and provide terrorists with the means for accomplishing that goal. This is the Iran that undermines governments throughout the Middle East and even South America, and an Iran that shoots its own people protesting for freedom. Iran does all this without nuclear weapons - imagine what it would do with the nuclear arms it is assiduously developing.
2010-09-24 09:42:23
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