WarSclerotic

Such a speech should have been delivered by the leader of the free world. But to our disgrace, the leading nations, with the U.S. at the helm, have grown tired of the struggle for freedom.

“If Israel is forced to stand alone,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Israel will stand alone. Yet in standing alone, Israel will know that we will be defending many, many others.” This wasn’t a threat. It was a moral statement about the responsibility borne by the Jewish people and their state to rouse the world to action — a role it has carried for many years.

“I have made you a watchman for the house of Israel” (Ezekiel 33:7). Well, the watchman has sounded the alarm not to surrender quietly. After all, it’s not just Israel that’s in danger, but the entire free world.

The foundations of Netanyahu’s speech echoed Winston Churchill’s historic words before the House of Commons on June 4, 1940. As large swaths of Europe were coming under occupation, Churchill said, “We shall never surrender … [we] will carry on the struggle until in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, sets forth to the liberation and rescue of the Old.”

History has its own methods of teaching us humility. It’s startling that, even today, several elements of the international community are still under occupation, a conscious occupation. Netanyahu’s speech offered a simple truth around which the whole world can come together, if people would just open their eyes and recognize the facts.

It’s not for nothing that Netanyahu quoted a bloated New York Times editorial from 2005 that said, following the agreement with North Korea to dismantle the country’s nuclear program: “Diplomacy, it seems, does work after all.” North Korea violated the deal and tested a nuclear weapon a year later. We in Israel can add to the list several childish editorials during the Oslo Accords and the disengagement from the Gaza Strip that obfuscated the facts with delusion.

Despite clear evidence pointing to the Iranian regime’s murderous acts — involvement in the Syrian massacre, funding global terrorism, building facilities right under inspectors’ noses, Rouhani’s explicit statement about Tehran’s diplomacy trader’s wisdom, exploiting European awkwardness to gain valuable time for its nuclear-weapons program — the Western elite refuses to hear the facts. This group is backed by the dominant liberal media, which scorns the warnings and assessments of its political rivals, and fastening an ideological and romantic ideal suitable only to the politically correct minds of its coterie.

Perhaps the world forgot the historical lessons of the 20th century, but the Jewish nation has not forgotten. We carry the living memory of history in our bodies, our heritage, our culture. This is our fate. Netanyahu recalled the return to Zion and fulfilling the prophetic visions of the Bible.

“And I will plant them upon their soil never to be uprooted again” (Amos 9:15). With that, we have returned to history only to remind the world of what it wants to forget.