Gerecht on the Israel-US Meeting
As Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to meet with Barack Obama in Washington DC, former CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht has a good piece in the Wall Street Journal on the storm brewing in the Middle East over Iran’s nuclear aspirations: Netanyahu and Obama Have a Shared Interest in Iran.
We shouldn’t be surprised if the Israelis reach a conclusion at odds with Washington’s near-consensus against pre-emptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In 1981, Jerusalem certainly surmised that a raid against Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor could make Saddam Hussein furious and that he possessed conventional and unconventional means of getting even. But they went ahead and destroyed the reactor.
The consensus in Israel is just as widespread about the correctness of last year’s strike against the secret North Korean-designed reactor at Dir A-Zur in Syria — a project that may well have had Iranian backing. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered the attack although the Bush administration opposed it. And in 1967, Israelis believed that pre-emptive action saved their nation from an Arab-initiated, multifront offensive that could have proved lethal.
For the Israelis today, Iran has become an unrivalled threat. Although anti-Semitism has been widespread in the Middle East since the 1930s, the strain among Tehran’s ruling elite is akin to what European Jews observed in Austria, Germany and Russia in the early 20th century.
Americans and Europeans don’t like to dwell on the problem of anti-Semitism in the region, preferring to see it as tangential to geopolitics and economics and treatable by the creation of a Palestinian state. But Israelis are acutely conscious that unrelenting anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism are important factors in the Shiite Islamic Republic’s increasing popularity among Arab Sunni fundamentalists — especially in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood would probably triumph in a free election. In Iran, the anti-Jewish passion among the revolutionary elite appears to have actually increased as ordinary Iranians have soured on theocracy and state-sanctioned ideology.
Never before have the Israelis had to confront a rabidly anti-Semitic enemy with nuclear weapons and a long track record of supporting deadly killers such as Hezbollah and Hamas. Americans and Europeans can seem to Israelis all-too-nonchalant about the challenge they face — and Western counsel to calm down and get used to the idea of mullahs with nukes doesn’t sit well with a people who have already lived through the unthinkable.
