certain states want it to happen or let it happen.”
The influence on U.S. policy of Netanyahu’s great insight has been both profound and lamentably limited. When George W. Bush responded to 9/11 by finally dropping the cops-and-robbers model of fighting terrorism, focusing instead on punishing the Taliban, the state sponsors of 9/11, he was following Netanyahu’s prescription. Far more so than the pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the exemplary termination of the Taliban regime was the crucial response to 9/11, defining the risk to any state sponsors contemplating attacks on the United States.
Missing Netanyahu’s message and perpetuating the myth of stateless terrorism is the U.S. practice of declaring war on something called “terror” while continuing to offer foreign aid and prestige to the very governments that enable and sponsor actual terrorist acts. Apart from drug dealing, none of the terrorist organizations have any substantial means of internal support. None of them is capable of running a country that partakes of the productive activities of humankind. Most of them run front organizations as shells for the collection of money from the West in a kind of global shakedown racket. As Michael Yon shows in his devastating portrait of al-Qaida in his book,
Sustaining this terrorist network of states is largely foreign aid to governments, together with environmental bars to energy production in the West that endow despots with economic power. Terrorism will continue as long as these literally suicidal Western policies continue. Without the support of the United Nations and U.S. foreign aid, many of the mendicant oppressor states of the third world would wither away, liberating their people to join the adventure of productive capitalism.
Netanyahu’s message is that terrorist nations are not strong. They are pathetically weak. His counsel is to “oppose the bad things when they are small.” Libya during the Qaddafi era was perhaps the leading perpetrator of terrorism, financing assassinations and bombings around the globe and killing Libyan exiles in the West. An effective program of sanctions against Libya coupled with the exclamation point of a bombing led to a rapid, albeit impermanent, change in Libyan policy by persuading Khaddafi to give up his nuclear weapons.
Terrorists gain all their power and momentum from the compulsive “negotiations,” the multipronged founts of foreign aid, the “peace-keeping” forces, and the legal contortions of the cowering West. As Netanyahu points out, “Terrorism has the unfortunate quality of expanding to fill the vacuum left to it by passivity or weakness.” But this murderous momentum, feeding on the pacifist flailing and self-abuse and outflung alms and oblations of the West, will rapidly reverse when faced with resolute resistance. He writes: “Once the terrorists know that virtually the entire population will stand behind the government’s decision never to negotiate with them, the possibility of actually extracting political concessions [from the West] will begin to look exceedingly remote.” The terrorist afflatus will dissipate and the momentum can be reversed.
In a bold moment during a joint press conference with President Obama, Netanyahu performed a Churchillian role. He told the President and the American people:
We’ve been around for almost 4,000 years. We have experienced struggle and suffering like no other people. We’ve gone through expulsions and pogroms and massacres and the murder of millions.
But I can say that even at the dearth of — even at the nadir of the valley of death, we never lost hope and we never lost our dream of re-establishing a sovereign state in our ancient homeland, the land of Israel. And now it falls on my shoulders as the prime minister of Israel at a time of extraordinary instability and uncertainty in the Middle East to work with you to fashion a peace that will ensure Israel’s security and will not jeopardize its survival.
I take this responsibility with pride but with great humility, because, as I told you in our conversation, we don’t have a lot of margin for error and because, Mr. President, history will not give the Jewish people another chance.
America’s enemies understand deeply and intuitively that no U.S. war aims or resources in the Middle East are remotely as important as Israel, with its ever growing panoply of technical, economic, moral and military assets.
Under the leadership of Netanyahu, Israel cruised through the global slump with scarcely a down quarter and no deficit or stimulus package. It is steadily increasing its global supremacy, behind only the U.S., in an array of leading-edge technologies. During a period of water crises around the globe, it is incontestably the world leader in water recycling and desalinization. During an epoch when all the world’s cities, from Seoul to New York, face a threat of terrorist rockets, Israel’s newly battle tested “Iron Dome” provides a unique answer based on original inventions in microchips that radically reduce the weight and cost of the interceptors. Israel is also making major advances in longer range missile defense, robotic warfare, and unmanned aerial vehicles that can stay aloft for days. In the face of a global campaign to boycott its goods, and an ever-ascendant shekel, it raised its exports 19.9% in 2010’s fourth quarter and 27.3% in the first quarter of 2011 and continued to expand its prowess through the new decade.
Leading U.S. companies, from General Electric and Johnson Johnson to IBM and Berkshire Hathaway, continue to rely on Israeli labs and inventions for some of their fastest growing products and most promising projects. In 2012, Monsanto, the U.S. leader in agri-science, moved much of its RD to Israel and invested $38 million in Martin Gerstel’s agricultural biotech leader Evogene (a spinoff from Gerstel’s pioneering Com-pugen). ATT met a capacity crunch on its wireless networks by using virtualization technology from Intercell of Ra’anana, Israel.
Vital to the U.S. economy and military capabilities, tiny Israel’s unparalleled achievements in industry and intellect have conjured up the familiar anti-Semitic frenzies among all the economically and morally failed societies of the socialist and Islamist Third World, from Iran to Venezuela. They all imagine that by delegitimizing, demoralizing, defeating or even destroying Israel, they could take a major step toward bringing down the entire capitalist West.
To most sophisticated Westerners, the Jihadist focus on Israel seems bizarre and counterproductive and their dreams of wider conquest simply demented. But on the centrality of Israel the Jihadists have it right. Unmoored from the paramount goal of deterring attack on Israel or defending it against the common enemy, U.S. Mideast strategy is sliding into incoherence. It drifts from a futile and confusing funambulism among the tribes of Afghanistan to arming the Hezbollah-linked Lebanese Army with sophisticated night fighting gear, enhancing the Palestinian police forces with a hundred million dollars worth of new equipment and training assistance, and propping up the new virulently anti-Israel Egyptian regime, all while supposedly guaranteeing military superiority to Israel. This quixotic balancing act is sure to boomerang in the case of a new war that such a Janus-faced policy will make both more likely and more lethal.
Stultifying all U.S. policy has been President Obama’s crippling preoccupation with the claimed grievances of the Palestinians and their supposed right to a state of their own in the West Bank and Gaza. But history moves on and at a certain point becomes irretrievable. When the U.S. and the UN endorsed and financed Yassir Arafat’s return from Tunisia in 1993 and delivered the territories into the sanguinary hands of a Jihadist cult led by this fervent admirer of Hitler’s
As current Palestinian leaders continue to name city squares after the most murderous suicide bombers, continue to indoctrinate generations of Palestinian youth in school with a genocidal ideology that reduces Jews to a subhuman status of “rodents and vermin”, we can finally say we get the message. Regardless of what Netanyahu may have said in his ritual attempts to placate Obama, Israel cannot allow a Palestinian state to be embedded in its heart like a tumescent malignancy.
If the Palestine Authority wants to make a deal, it should try negotiating with Jordan, already a dominantly Palestinian state four times larger than Israel and with one tenth the population density. Or they can try to shake down Syria or Egypt. The Israelis are moving on. We should follow.
For the U.S., moving on means a sober recognition that Israel is not too large but too small. A booming
