Israel Matzav

Since world public opinion will blame the Israelis for whatever they do preemptively to save themselves, they might as well do what's needed and what works. As soon as it is clear that further nonmilitary pressures upon Iran are useless. Israel must, with or without American help, strike first and strike successfully. It must take out not only Iran's nuclear weaponry, but its delivery systems and command and control centers as well, because it is always better for Jews to be alive and condemned, than dead and eulogized.

An Israeli attack upon Iran will be condemned by the Arabs, the Muslims, the anti-Semites, the anti-Zionists, the anti-Americans, the appeasers. the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, the Pope, the Quakers, and the "war-can-never-be-an-option-in-the-twenty-first-century" postmodernists in academia and elsewhere.

Much of the criticism will be phony, however. In 1981, when Israel destroyed Saddam Hussein's French-built Osirak reactor, located 18 miles south of Baghdad, the Saudi students in my Middle East politics class at Temple University condemned Israel roundly. But the next day, they all came to my office and asked me to tell my secretary to leave. They then insisted that I close the door. Only when he was assured of complete privacy, did the leader of the group, whose English was impeccable, say to me: "Thank God that the Israelis bombed Iraq yesterday. For only God knows when that crazy Iraqi would have used a nuclear bomb against Saudi Arabia, with which he contests the leadership of the Arab world?"

When I asked him why he and his compatriots didn't say so in class, he answered: "We were afraid to. At the least, our fellowships from ARAMCO (the Arab-American Oil Company) would have been revoked. And at the most, we would have been ordered home to be imprisoned or killed."