So now we get the news that Israel’s Prime Minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu, has publicly criticized the Obama Administration, and
England’s David Cameron, for not giving an ultimatum—drawing a “red line” in
the sand—to Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons’ program. The man known as
“Bibi” said yesterday that no one had a “moral right” to prevent Israel from
acting against what he alleges is a “mortal threat” from Iran.
In
an election year, these are fighting words. They are more than that: they
are blackmail—because Netanyahu knows full
well that his “good friend” Mitt Romney has already tried to score political
points against an Obama administration that he charges is too weak on the
Middle East, and too faint in its support of Israel. This is not because Americans
in general want Obama to draw “red lines” in a Middle East that is already
convulsed with wars and rebellions and still reeling from America’s unprovoked
war on Iraq and its endless war in Afghanistan. No, this is about Florida.
Because Mitt Romney absolutely must win Florida to have any chance to win the
election, and if Florida’s retired Jewish population can be convinced that
Obama is “weak” on Israel, it could be decisive. Netanyahu knows all this, of
course, and so he is quite willing to incite a bidding war between Obama and
Romney over who is most eager to “defend” Israel from those terrible Iranians
or Arabs or Muslims or whatever they are.
So
the Bibi, without a shred of embarrassment or shame, talks about his “moral
right” to respond to what he calls “mortal threats” from a country that has no
nuclear capability whatsoever—whereas Bibi’s country, Israel, is known to have
well over 200 and perhaps as many as 300 of the latest nuclear weapons, plus
rocket delivery systems, and even nuclear submarines from which to launch them.
All this in an Israel, alone among nations with such weapons, refusing to sign
the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—which it accuses Iran of violating. The
hypocrisy is massive, it is sickening, it is an outrage.
Nor
is it just the hypocrisy. It’s the sheer chutzpah—that’s “gall” or “effrontery” in Yiddish—of a nation as small as
Israel, with a mere 5 million people, publicly blackmailing the United States
with a population of 300 million and a military larger than most of the rest of
the world's combined. Where does this pipsqueak of a country come off ordering
the U.S. to do anything?
It
all comes down, as every half-alive observer has noted endlessly, to the power
of the Jewish lobby in the United States. Not just U.S. presidents, but the
entire U.S. Congress quakes with fear when the Israeli lobby known as AIPAC
questions the commitment of any office holder to towing the Israeli line. They
quake when wealthy Jewish donors take the same questioning stance. And mostly,
like Obama, they prostrate themselves, humiliate themselves with expressions of
fealty to protecting poor little Israel from those big bad Arabs. This is what
Israel—and its Jewish (and fundamentalist Christian) supporters in America—have
come to expect. So when Hillary Clinton refused on Monday to set a red line,
saying that America was “not setting deadlines for Iran,” and earlier last
month when a British official secretly visited Israel to deliver a warning to
Israel not to attack Iran, Bibi got the
message. The two most critical nations he needs to back him if he does try, or
threaten to try an attack against Iran, were essentially telling him to back
off. Whence his angry statements about Israel’s “moral rights”—i.e. to obliterate
anyone it chooses. That is the moral right Israel claims. And it has acted on
those “moral” rights more than any other nation on earth. It has slaughtered and
ethnically cleansed Palestinians with regularity, always claiming its moral
right to self defense. And now, now that its two biggest backers tell it to
wait for sanctions—the worst sanctions ever enacted against Iran, sanctions
which cripple its people—to do their work, Netanyahu responds: “And I ask: wait for what? Until
when? Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before
Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel.”
Israel,
that is, the mad dog of the Middle East, armed to the teeth with nuclear as
well as conventional weapons, claims the “moral right” to attack any time it
perceives another nation as even approaching the possibility of being able to stand up to its bullying. That is
the real issue. Iran’s nuclear program—which it has always claimed is for
peaceful purposes—might allow it to build a weapon or two; and that might allow
it to neutralize the threat of Israel’s being able to utterly destroy it with a
nuclear strike; and that is a mortal threat in Israel’s terms. As is the
position of the United States and England in refusing to back Israel’s threat
to strike, or, more important, the refusal of the United States to attack Iran
itself. That’s what the “red line” really signifies: if Iran crosses a
U.S.-imposed red line, the U.S. military, with its capability to penetrate the
deep sites where Iran’s nuclear program is hidden, will attack; and short of
that, will provide backup for Israel if it attacks.
So
the situation is now this. Israel is publicly trying to blackmail the United
States (and England) into war. Israel is trying to use the presidential
election to force the President of the United States to threaten another
country, a country which has attacked no one, with annihilation. Israel would
have the United States commit itself, its American sons and daughters, and the
entire world, to yet another conflagration in the Middle East.
I
don’t know about you, but this turns me, as it is apparently turning even
Netanyahu’s defense minister, Ehud Barak, against him. It turns me against this
situation—of a nation which the U.S. has supported and defended and built up
with arms and aid for 60 years now—turning on its benefactor and trying to
influence its domestic politics in the most blatant way imaginable. And to me,
anyone in this country, any U.S. citizen who supports this kind of blackmail by
a foreign country, is virtually engaging in treason. If America does not come
first for Americans, if the safety and security of the United States is not the
primary concern of its leaders and representatives, then they, too, are guilty
of treason.
Bibi
Netanyahu must be told in no uncertain terms that he has gone too far. He must
be told to butt out of American politics, and American elections. He must be
told that American support is not automatic, nor is it endless; but rather
that, especially with what is being called its deficit crisis, America’s aid to
Israel can come, and will come to a certain and definitive halt. According to
Reuters, Israeli leaders less rabid than Netanyahu have already been making
this point. If he has any backbone at all, Obama should make it even more
forcefully. Blackmail by an ally—and it is notable that Israel has refused to
enter into a formal alliance with the United States, mainly because that would
mean it would have to set firm borders to its nation, which, as an avidly expansionist
power, it has always refused to do—simply cannot, must not, and will not be
tolerated.
Lawrence DiStasi
