Three years earlier, Aumann concluded his Nobel lecture with a comment on Isaiah: “When Isaiah speaks of lions lying down with lambs and nations beating their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks and nations learning war no more, he is describing what can happen when a central government prevails — in the presence of a Lord recognized by all…
“In the absence of such a dominant hierarchical power, one can perhaps have peace — no nation lifting up its sword against another. But the swords must continue to be there — they cannot be beaten into plowshares — and the nations must continue to learn war, in order not to fight.”
This recognition is indispensable to the survival of Israel — and of the United States.
CHAPTER TEN
The Central Importance of Benjamin Netanyahu
Both in the United States and in Israel, the first decade of the 21st century ended with political change that brought the Israel test to the fore as the crucial conflict and major line of division in international affairs.
The United States elected Barack Obama, a charismatic exponent of Peace Now, tribune of nuclear disarmament, fervent protagonist of the economics of envy, a tireless and empathetic spokesman for Third World misery and Muslim grievances, and a prominent believer in the idea that among the greatest threats to the world is the impending increase of a couple of hundred parts per million (0.02 percent) in the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Under the influence of his community-activist mentor Saul Alinsky, Obama brings an unusual anti-capitalist perspective to the Oval Office, unique in its history.
One of Obama’s first acts as president was to remove from the Oval Office a bust of Winston Churchill, sculpted by Sir Jacob Epstein and loaned to President George W. Bush by British Prime Minister Tony Blair on behalf of the British people after 9/11. To the new American president, it is safe to assume, Churchill represents a retrograde imperial figure sullied by his support for the British occupation of the Obama family’s ancestral domains in Kenya.
Supported by 78 percent of American Jews, Obama’s election was a disaster for Israel redeemed only by the later election of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Like his predecessor, Bill Clinton, Obama is a lawyer who sees the world as a Churchillian struggle between good and evil only in the pinched and narrow confines of legal rights and torts, territorial claims and counterclaims, all ripe for negotiation and compromise. He is also afflicted with a Messianic view of himself as a charming and reasonable fellow who could seduce a cobra such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into the arms of Peace Now. All his Middle East foreign policy advisors — Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, George Mitchell, Dennis Ross, Susan Rice, Brent Scowcroft, et al. — believe in Palestinian statehood based on an Israeli amputation of “land for peace.” In this regard these advisors are utterly conventional, inidistinguishable — indeed admired by — the self-flagellating Jews in Peace Now and J Street movements, as well as the American leftist intelligentsia within the media and the academy. Not confined to Democrats, this deluded cohort includes the eminent Condoleezza Rice, who ended her stint as secretary of state under George W. Bush as an avid advocate of appeasement. The chief public defenders of Israeli resistance to gouges in Golan and Gaza and jettisons of Judea and Samaria are unfashionable but inconveniently pithy and popular gentile figures such as Sarah Palin, who displayed an Israeli flag in her office in Juneau; Thomas Sowell, in his lucid and visionary columns; Ann Coulter, in her defiant realism; Rush Limbaugh, in his daily radio broadcasts; George Will in his eloquent and incisive reports; and best-seller of all except Coulter, the Christian evangelical preacher, John Hagee.
Obama’s election victory with nearly 53 percent of the vote and a Democratic sweep of Congress has unleashed a resolute drive to create a Palestinian state in exchange for erection of a massive security barrier of legal documents between Israel and its murderous enemies.
While the United States moves toward the Left and Peace Now legalism, Israel veers toward the Right and militant self-defense. Its prime minister, Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, is the obverse of Obama in nearly every imaginable respect. Although his party won a smaller number of Knesset seats than his opponents combined, an additional 15 slots were taken by Bibi’s former chief of staff and intimate associate Avigdor (“Yvette”) Lieberman, who is now foreign minister. These seats give the right-wing parties nearly the same percent — 54 percent, in Israel’s case — won by Obama. Running to the right of the newly statesmanlike and circumspect Netanyahu, Lieberman exploited widespread Israeli indignation at visible Arab — Israeli support for Hamas during the 2008 war in Gaza. He received, and perhaps even deserved, bad press for his demagoguery, but he is a rational man with whom Bibi has frequently worked in the past. In any case, under Netanyahu, Israel’s leadership offers a striking and instructive contrast with America’s.
While the youthful Obama was a community-action organizer and sometime lawyer, who steered clear of any military service, Netanyahu was an anti-terrorist warrior. While Obama imagines that taxes in general are too low and inadequately progressive, Netanyahu is a sophisticated supply-side economist who believes that lower rates bring higher revenues and who opened his administration by advocating tax cuts. While in the past the United States has long offered a haven for frustrated Israeli entrepreneurs and other Jewish capitalists, Israel under Netanyahu will beckon as a land of hope and hospitality to frustrated American venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. While Obama believes that foreign aid is the answer to Palestinian poverty, Netanyahu knows that new opportunities opened up by Israeli enterprise are the only solution to the regional crisis.
While Obama believes that the United States has overreacted to the threat of terrorism, Netanyahu for nearly thirty years has championed and explained the war on terror in both the United States and Israel, in books, international meetings, and through the Jonathan Institute (named for his late older brother who died at 30 in the stunning Entebbe hostage rescue in Uganda). Netanyahu sees jihad as the single greatest threat to the West, and no other politician is so learned or so determined in combating it. While Obama thinks Churchill is a man whose time has passed, Netanyahu has read and pondered all of Churchill’s works and admires the British titan “above all other gentiles.” The time for Churchillian leadership, according to Netanyahu, is now.
Netanyahu offers far more than an ideological counterpoint to American liberalism. His life story and family legacy make his election a potential historic turning point in the relationship between the United States and Israel. Netanyahu is at once the most profoundly Zionist and the most deeply American of all Israeli leaders, having been educated in the United States as a child and in his undergraduate studies in architecture at MIT and earning his master’s degree at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His American English is flawless. In the increasingly global economy, facing an ascendant jihad, Netanyahu consummates the new capitalist Israel and incarnates an Israel — American partnership as deep and interdependent, and potentially as procreative, as any marriage. Out of it can emerge a new 21st-century Judeo — Christian alliance in economics, culture, military capabilities, and even religion.