WarSclerotic

Jerusalem (AFP) – Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Tuesday that Iran’s atomic drive “will be stopped”, a day after an interim agreement bringing sanctions relief for Tehran took effect.

“Iran’s military nuclear programme must be stopped, and Iran’s military nuclear programme will be stopped,” Netanyahu said at a joint news conference with his Canadian counterpart Stephen Harper, without saying how.

Israel has long warned that a nuclear Iran would pose an existential threat to the Jewish state, and has refused to rule out a military strike to prevent that from happening.

Netanyahu fought a major diplomatic campaign against the so-called Geneva Agreement which was hammered out in November between world powers and Iran, and on Monday he said the agreement would not succeed in stopping Tehran.

“The interim agreement which went into force today does not prevent Iran from realising its intention to develop nuclear weapons,” he told the Israeli parliament.

His remarks came just hours after the UN nuclear watchdog confirmed Iran had halted production of 20 percent enriched uranium, marking the entry into force of the landmark deal with the P5+1 group of world powers.

The international community also kept its part of the deal, with both the European Union and United States separately announcing they were easing crippling sanctions on Iran.

The deal, which was signed in Geneva, came about after nearly a decade of failed negotiations over its disputed nuclear programme, which the West believes is a front for building a military capability.

Tehran has denied the charge.

“A nuclear armed Iran would not just endanger Israel — it would threaten the peace and security of our region,” Netanyahu said on Tuesday.

“It would give Iran’s terrorist proxies a nuclear umbrella.

“It would launch a multilateral nuclear arms race in the Middle East, it could turn the Middle East into a nuclear tinderbox,” he said.

Netanyahu said the Iran nuclear issue, and the rise of Islamism across the Middle East, had united Israel and many Arab countries in their efforts to face these “twin challenges”.

“Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and the aggressive designs of the Muslim Brotherhood is what shapes many of the Arab world’s leading countries today,” he said.

“In meeting those twin challenges, these countries do not see Israel as their enemy but as being on the same side of a difficult conflict,” he said.

Commentators say the diplomatic effect of direct talks between Israel’s sworn enemy Iran and Western powers could see the Jewish state finding more in common with traditional Arab allies of the US, particularly Sunni Gulf kingdom Saudi Arabia.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s address to the Knesset was a historic moment in diplomacy over Israel and the Middle East. Harper’s profound speech should become a foundational document in global discourse about Israel. It should be studied carefully, everywhere.

What Harper laid out went far beyond a message of staunch support for Israel. In fact, the speech wasn’t about friendship for Israel. It was about defeating the campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel.

Harper articulated a moral worldview and an approach of principle that calls out the hypocrisies, and shames the injustices, of what passes today as “politically correct” policy regarding Israel.

His main thrust, as I understood it, was to explain why Canada refuses to be part of the international chorus (which, sadly, includes most of Europe) that singles out Israel for criticism on the international stage. In particular, he savaged the campaign to boycott and isolate Israel, and called the application to Israel of the term apartheid “nothing short of sickening.”

“In the world of diplomacy,with one, solitary, Jewish state and scores of others, it is all too easy ‘to go along to get along’ and single out Israel,” Harper said.

“But such ‘going along to get along,’ is not a ‘balanced’ approach, nor a ‘sophisticated’ one; it is, quite simply, weak and wrong. Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, we live in a world where that kind of moral relativism runs rampant. And in the garden of such moral relativism, the seeds of much more sinister notions can be easily planted.

“As once Jewish businesses were boycotted, some civil-society leaders today call for a boycott of Israel. On some campuses, intellectualized arguments against Israeli policies thinly mask the underlying realities, such as the shunning of Israeli academics and the harassment of Jewish students. Most disgracefully of all, some openly call Israel an apartheid state.

“Think about that. Think about the twisted logic and outright malice behind that: a state, based on freedom, democracy and the rule of law, that was founded so Jews can flourish, as Jews, and seek shelter from the shadow of the worst racist experiment in history, that is condemned, and that condemnation is masked in the language of anti-racism. It is nothing short of sickening.

“And so we have witnessed, in recent years, the mutation of the old disease of anti-Semitism and the emergence of a new strain. We all know about the old anti-Semitism. It was crude and ignorant, and it led to the horrors of the death camps. Of course, in many dark corners, it is still with us. But, in much of the Western world, the old hatred has been translated into more sophisticated language for use in polite society. People who would never say they hate and blame the Jews for their own failings or the problems of the world, instead declare their hatred of Israel and blame the only Jewish state for the problems of the Middle East.”

Harper emphatically concluded that, in this ugly environment, “support today for the Jewish state of Israel is more than a moral imperative. It is also of strategic importance, also a matter of our own long-term interests. Therefore, through fire and water, Canada will stand with Israel.”

Harper’s speech is, then, a sharp and courageous indictment of the intellectual assault on Israel. It is clarion call for integrity and justice for Israel. It is a bold and noble demand for morality in global policy on the Middle East.

It is, in my assessment, one of the most important ethical documents about Jews since the days of Cyrus the Great — a leader, like Harper, who viewed the Jewish return to the Land of Israel as a just, meta-historic and ultimately uplifting drama.

Thank you, Prime Minister Harper, for your visionary and valiant leadership.

Gloom is overtaking hope in U.S. President Barack Obama’s outlook on the Middle East. The chances of solving the problems of the region — including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — are “less than fifty-fifty,” Obama told The New Yorker magazine. If this is the case, what is there left for U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to do on the Jerusalem-Ramallah axis?

It is not clear why Obama expressed such public pessimism. Does he really believe what he said? Is he creating an alibi for the expected failure of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations? Was it a sophisticated ruse to try get both sides to summon up the strength to prove to him that his assessment of the future of the negotiations was wrong?

The necessary conclusion is that when the talks reach their end, there will not be an agreement on the table, but rather the recurring question from all previous rounds of talks — who is to blame for the failure?

It seems, based on Obama’s rather pessimistic outlook, that there is logic to former National Security Adviser Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror’s comments in the New York Times on the ongoing unrest in the Arab world. Amidror said that Israel has adopted a new strategy called “Wait, and keep the castle.” The Arab world is experiencing a series of earthquakes and what else can Israel do except button down and wait for its neighborhood to calm down and stabilize?

It appears that there is a much higher chance that when the talks with the Palestinians conclude, both sides will be playing the blame game rather than discussing a flourishing peace agreement. A main arena in the battle to come will be the European boycott of the Israeli economy.

The boycott campaign is conducted by enemies of Israel, who are helped by some Jews from the inside. Up to now, the Palestinians have tried all other means of fighting Israel. After Israel overcame regular Arab armies, the Palestinians turned to terror attacks. Israel was able to curb and stop Palestinian terror as well, but not before more than 1,000 Israelis were killed. The Palestinians then turned to rockets and missiles, and Israel also found an effective response. So now the Palestinians have changed direction again, toward the economic boycott path.

This is the most dangerous battle of all. Because Israel will not only be facing an array of Arab opponents, but also supposed friends, stricken with hypocrisy. They will also have partners inside Israel for their campaign. Israel’s enemies will even try to use the Israelis who, with the best of intentions, are going to the World Economic Forum in Davos to represent the Israeli economy. Israel will have to fight this battle on a number of fronts.

The extreme Right is calling for further settlement construction and Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett claims that the establishment of a Palestinian state would destroy the Israeli economy. Such statements do nothing but encourage the Europeans to boycott the Israeli economy. The establishment of a Palestinian state is the apple of Europe’s eyes. At the same time, the extreme Left is cooperating with those who seek to undermine the legitimate demands of the Israeli government in the peace talks with the Palestinians. For example, former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg, who wears a kippah and voted in the French elections, has no desire for Israel to remain a Jewish state.

Obama believes that at the end of the talks, there will not be an agreement, but rather recriminations. Israel must appear to be interested in reaching an agreement, so that it will have a chance of having the world’s understanding when the negotiations inevitably fail.

The eyes of all Western nations, particularly of their economic officials, will be on Israel’s conduct this week in Davos.