Israel Matzav

Who'd a thunk it?

I am sure that many of you remember David Landau, the former editor-in-chief of Haaretz who once asked Condoleezza Rice to rape Israel. Well, it turns out that Landau actually 'gets' Prime Minister Netanyahu and is warning all who will listen that he's not bluffing about Iran.

But Obama and Sarkozy, and indeed the entire international community, would be profoundly wrong if they applied the same dismissive scepticism to Netanyahu's repeated, consistent and recently ratcheted-up admonitions that, in the last resort, he would bomb Iran's nuclear facilities to prevent that nation getting the bomb. He means what he says.

He does not want to go down in Jewish history as the leader on whose watch a fanatical enemy achieved the means to cow, terrorise and threaten to destroy the Jewish state while the rest of the world stood by and Israel itself did nothing.
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Many Israelis, by no means all of them groupies of Netanyahu, know exactly where he's coming from in this fraught and frightening saga. And they feel the same way he does: they still hope that the world collectively will act to neutralise this threat; but they believe that if it doesn't, Israel must use its own considerable military power to try to do so.

A recent poll, asking an obviously still-hypothetical question, showed the nation split down the middle over whether Israel should act against Iran unilaterally.

It did not show the even wider angst, never far below the surface, that keeps ordinary Israelis awake at night as they churn over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's chilling threats and the ominous significance of the International Atomic Energy Agency's reports on Iran's nuclear program. The Iranian President, spewing forth Holocaust denial while threatening another Holocaust, has pressed all the wrong buttons on Israel's sensitive national psyche.

The Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem is not just the place that visiting statesmen are required to visit and make appropriately sad and contrite comments. It is still, nearly 70 years on, the raw nerve of the nation, the unhealed scar.

Israel was created out of the ashes of Auschwitz. Its primary mission is ''Never Again''. That, at any rate, is how millions of Israelis see themselves and their country. A mass subjective perspective can become objective political reality. The international community needs to recognise that Netanyahu authentically articulates that perspective and that reality.

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Netanyahu's drum-beating is tactically impeccable. But it's not just tactics. The bluffer isn't bluffing. Let's hope Obama, Sarkozy and the rest are hearing him loud and clear.

Read the whole thing and make sure to check out the cartoon as well. Landau actually gets it.

Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, David Landau

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 2:53 PM