Devoir de mémoire, devoir de faire tomber l’axe Iran-Syrie-Liban

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, cannot accept any agreement that Iran has agreed to. Conversely, the only nuclear accord that Israel can live with is one that Tehran can’t.

Actually, nothing short of complete and utter dismantlement of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure can convince Israel that the mullahs in Tehran have changed their ways. That Iran has given up its quest for nuclear weapons. That Tehran is no longer pursuing a bomb with which to achieve regional hegemony and to threaten Israel with extinction.

In his book “A Place Among The Nations,” Netanyahu wrote about the Iranian drive for nuclear weapons. In this very context, he noted that a “deep cultural and psychological distortion” of Islamic fundamentalism has turned it into a “cancerous tumor that threatens modern civilization”. You don’t treat cancer by reasoning with it. You need to stop it in its tracks, and then eradicate it altogether.

In Netanyahu’s eyes, Iran’s fanatic regime is no more capable of reversing its raison d’etre than the National Socialists were in Germany or the Bolshevik communists in the Soviet Union. The only realistic way of neutralizing the clear and present danger presented by Iran is by using the methods that worked so well against similar evil tyrannies in the past: subjugation or regime change or both. The Allies vanquished the Nazis by using brute military force, while the United States caused the collapse of the Soviet Union by bringing its overwhelming economic and technological superiority to bear.

It follows, therefore, that any accommodation with the ayatollahs is, by definition, weak-kneed appeasement, a clear indication of Western naiveté, an act of capitulation to rival Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 surrender to Adolf Hitler.

Declarations by Iranian President Hassan Rohani that Iran is not seeking a nuclear bomb are as worthless as Hitler’s signature on Chamberlain’s infamous “piece of paper” in which the two leaders proclaimed “their desire never to go to war with one another again.” And under the surface of U.S. pledges to safeguard Israel’s security one can hear distant echoes of Chamberlain’s blunt words to the British Parliament: “However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbor, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account.”

Indeed, Netanyahu’s harsh reaction to reports of the impending agreement in Geneva were but an unrehearsed, gut-instinct rendition of a speech from which he is sure to quote if such a deal is ultimately concluded: “We have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road,” as Winston Churchill told the House of Commons a few days after the Munich Agreement was signed. And as he told Chamberlain: “You were given the choice between dishonor and war. You chose dishonor, but you will have war.”

The analogy may seem contrived, lopsided or farfetched to many and perhaps even most outside observers, but for Netanyahu, indeed for many Israelis, the concept of “Western Betrayal” has a deep and enduring resonance that is pertinent and prominent to this very day. In fact, its impact has probably increased exponentially in recent decades, as the Holocaust has claimed an ever-growing presence in Israel’s educational system, political discourse and national psyche.

The Munich precedent has consistently featured as a staple of Netanyahu’s core beliefs. In “A Place Among the Nations”, written in 1995, Netanyahu devotes significant space to the Hitler-Chamberlain analogy, comparing Israel to pre-War Czechoslovakia, Judea and Samaria to the German-speaking Sudetenland, a generic Arab monolith to Nazi Germany, and the Palestinian claims of human rights abuses and demand for self-determination to the irredentist provocations of the Sudeten Nazis led by Konrad Henlein.

“It is small wonder that like in other anti-Israeli schemes, the Arabs are implementing important chapters from the propaganda strategy of the Nazis,” Netanyahu wrote. “But what is surprising and disappointing is that fact that elitist circles in the West were quick to ‘swallow’ this transparent fraud.”

Unlike Menachem Begin, Netanyahu has made only rare public comparisons between Yasser Arafat and Hitler, but he was far less restrained when it came to the Iranian regime and former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In a 2006 Knesset speech, Netanyahu said that the Iranian president was even worse than the Nazi Fuehrer. « Hitler went out on a world campaign first, and then tried to get nuclear weapons. Iran is trying to get nuclear arms first. Therefore, from that perspective, it is much more dangerous, » he said.

And if Iran is Nazi Germany, and its nuclear plans are but an updated version of the Final Solution, then it follows that U.S. Jews are now being given a chance to atone for their self-inflicted silence during the Holocaust. This was the undisguised gist of Netanyahu’s audacious “I will not be silenced” statement this week at the Jewish General Assembly in which he called on American Jews to fight the proposed deal in Geneva: “When the Jewish people were silent on matters relating to our survival, you know what happened. This is different,” he said.

That leaves U.S. President Barack Obama with a choice of alternatively being cast as history’s ultimate Patsy Chamberlain or as America’s thirty-second president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But this is not your Jewish grandfather’s FDR who saved the American economy from collapse and the world from Fascist domination. This is the FDR who “abandoned the Jews,” who succumbed to the anti-Semites in his midst, whose public image has been slowly evolving in recent years from being a hero of the Jews to a misguided leader who was callous about their tragic fate.

These will be the popular Israeli terms of reference, no matter what is ultimately concluded in a nuclear accord with Iran. Even under much improved stipulations, Netanyahu’s scrutiny of such an agreement will be filtered through a 75-year-old prism and a direct line will be drawn from Geneva to Munich and back.

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“Never again” was the statement Menachem Begin made after sending a wave of F-16s against Iraq’s nuclear reactor. « There won’t be another Holocaust in History. Never again. »

No such language could have been used by President Obama in respect of the agreement reached in Geneva. In plain English, the best that could be said of it is that — for the time being — the mullahs can keep their crematoria, so to speak, on standby.

That may sound harsh. But feature the fact that President Obama has been saying for years that he has Israel’s back. What this turns out to mean is that he will treat with Israel’s enemies behind Israel’s back, enter a partnership with them on terms to which the freely elected government in Jerusalem objects, and in boasting about the betrayal declare that Israel has good reason to be skeptical of Iran’s intentions.

The intentions about which this deal raises questions are Obama’s — and not just his. The concerns of those of us who opposed the elevation of John Kerry to Secretary of State go way beyond Tehran. This, after all, is not the first time Kerry went to Europe to treat with an American enemy and emerged to put the gloss on the enemy’s position. He began his political career by traveling to Paris in 1970 to meet with envoys of communist Vietnam.

It took fewer than five years between Kerry’s trip to Paris as a young reserve officer in the Navy and the decision of the 94th United States Congress to abandon free Vietnam. People tend to forget the particulars. There were no American combat troops in Vietnam when the Congress voted to cut off all aid to Saigon. It just decided to pivot out of Indochina and move on, ignoring the pleas of President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger. The devil took the hindmost.

We’re a long way from that in respect of Israel. But President Obama clearly understood what he was doing when he picked Kerry as state secretary. And picked, in Charles Hagel, a defense secretary who had also turned against the war in Vietnam. A lot of patriotic Americans turned against the war in Vietnam. All the more reason to remember the consequences. The last negotiation for which Kerry plumped plunged a population the size of Eastern Europe’s into the darkness of communism.

Neither Kerry nor Obama were alive at the time of Munich. But the catastrophe of 1938 was well marked on Sunday by Israeli MK Moshe Feiglin, who called the handshake at Geneva this weekend “the Iranian version of the Munich Agreement.” He noted that like the doughty Czechs in 1938, Israel was not a party to the parley. “Israel today watches from the sidelines,” is the way he put it.

One could but add that there was one difference between Geneva today and Munich in 1938. The envoys of the free European governments knew deep down that they had blundered at Munich. “Imbeciles” was the word Prime Minister Daladier of France famously muttered when, on his arrival back at Paris, he was cheered by throngs of his countrymen. Where is the self-awareness in the Western leadership today?

We are but 15 years after India stunned the world by disclosing that it had an A-bomb. Yet “after spending billions of dollars,” the New York Times spumed in its astonishment, our spies “inexplicably gave President Clinton no warning that India was ready to test nuclear weapons.” It and the rest of the Left was almost inchoate with surprise when the North Koreans betrayed their assurances in respect of their own atomic bomb.

It is too soon to tell what the Republicans in Washington will make of the deal in Geneva. But there is a faction that reckons the problem in Iran is not only the weapons but the regime, which for years has been operating against us, surreptitiously in combat, the same as it has against Israel. This faction reckons that Reagan would have long since either found a way to bolster Iran’s democratic opposition or helped found a government-in-exile of Iran that could have levied a revolution. That is the surest way to put the “never” in the phrase “never again.”

Seth Lipsky is editor of The New York Sun. He was a foreign editor and a member of the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal, the founding editor of The Forward and its editor from 1990 to 2000. His books include “The Citizen’s Constitution: An Annotated Guide,” and most recently “The Rise of Abraham Cahan.”

La juiverie sioniste admet qu’Israël détient un arsenal nucléaire et prétend que sa survie en dépend! C’est pour cette raison que ses voisins ont été forcés eux aussi de se munir de telles armes ou du moins d’armes chimiques.

NYTimes Mentions Israeli Nukes

The NYT article by Anne Barnard reported, “Some government supporters — and indeed, some rebel fighters — have criticized the deal as giving up weapons that belong to the Syrian people and are needed as a deterrent against Israel, which maintains an undeclared nuclear arsenal. But Syrian officials said that the weapons were of little practical use and that giving them up allowed them to claim new moral standing and draw attention to the push for the elimination of Israel’s nuclear weapons.”

Iran calls for global nuclear disarmament 

Un Moyen-Orient sans nucléaire et sans armes chimiques, c’est surtout pas Israël qui veut ça! C’est la Syrie et l’Iran. Israël a accumulé un important arsenal chimique et nucléaire, soi-disant pour assurer sa survie. En voyant Israël faire ça et les menacer en plus, les autres pays qui environnent Israël ont été forcés de se procurer un arsenal chimique.

Selon Peter Novick, pour reprendre contact avec la réalité et retrouver leur confiance envers le monde, les juifs doivent comprendre qu’il n’y a aucune leçon particulière à apprendre de la « Shoah »…