Israel is not Czechoslovakia
Op-ed: The Jewish people can never again remain passive in the face of genocidal enemies. Passage of the Iran deal is not the end of the fight, but just its beginning.
But Israel is not alone. The Obama administration abandoned Israel, but the majority of the American public and the US Congress support it strongly. Despite Obama’s attempts to undermine American support of Israel for the last seven years and his many public frictions with Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a Gallup poll taken in February 2015, 70 percent of Americans view Israel favorably.
In fact, Israel's public image in the United States has been fairly strong and consistent since 2005, with an average 68 percent of Americans viewing it favorably. Moreover, the majority of the American public agrees with Israel on the Iran nuclear deal.
A recent CNN poll taken on August 20, found that 60 percent of Americans disapprove of how Obama is handling the Iran deal, and 56 percent believe that Congress should reject the deal. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, taken in August, a majority of the Americans oppose the Iran deal, by a 2 to 1 margin and, 58 percent think the deal makes the world less safe.
A majority of senators and congressmen sided with Israel in opposing the nuclear deal with 57 US Senators out of a 100 and over 60 percent of the House of Representatives against the deal. This includes all the Republicans in both houses. In addition, the overwhelming majority of Jewish organizations opposed it and was united in fighting it.
But much more important, Israel is not like the Czechoslovakia of 1938 and never will be. Israel is an independent military and nuclear power that intends to use its right of self -defense against Iran and its terrorist proxies whether “Emperor” Obama likes it or not, or tries to stop it.
Like Czechoslovakia in 1938, Israel is a small democracy surrounded by hostile nations, and like Czechoslovakia, it was excluded from negotiations that led to a diplomatic deal that shapes its fate and threatens its survival.
In 1938, the enlightened democracies in Europe decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a comfortable, temporary solution. The Munich Agreement was signed, when Britain and France believed that handing Czechoslovakia to Hitler was the only way to save the world from another war. It is regarded as the shameful culmination of the Allies refusal to confront Nazi aggression and gave Hitler what he wanted in exchange for his verbal promise of “peace in our time” as Neville Chamberlain called it.
In his biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, "Champion of Freedom," Conrad Black recalls the scene when the poor Czechoslovakian delegates were brought into the room to be informed of their nation’s fate as set out in the Munich Agreement.
"No Czech answer was requested. They were handed a fait accompli. The Czechs wept, and Hubert Masarik (a Czech diplomat attending the Munich conference) said, prophetically and justly: ‘They don’t know what they are doing to us or to themselves.’…These poor, good men were the final players in a macabre and shameful Gothic tragedy."
The Jewish state has for 67 years been mourning its beloved soldiers who have courageously died defending it from the evil regimes that surround it. However, it will never weep over a deal imposed on it by a morally bankrupt world. Those days of passivity were over when the enormity of the Holocaust was revealed. The Jewish state has been fighting for itself on its own since its independence.
Obama’s threats of a military attack on Iran, when violations of the deal occur, are not taken seriously by anyone and are a source of laughter for the Iranian regime. Israel does not need the US or any another party to save it but it does need for Obama and the world powers to move away from Israel’s path and let it do everything in its means to minimize the nuclear threat, and the more menacing conventional threat resulting from the hundreds of billions of dollars Iran and its terrorist proxies will get from the deal.
For the last two years, Obama has been trying to tie Israeli hands and prevent it from practicing its right to self- defense against Iran. Dan Raviv from CBS News reported in March 2014 that the Obama’s administration has asked Israel to stop killing key scientists in the Iranian nuclear program, while Obama has been negotiating.
In an August interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, implicitly warned that the assassinations could be renewed by Israel, saying: "I am not responsible for the lives of Iranian scientists."
But much worse, in Article 10 of the deal, Obama and world powers have agreed that they will assist Iran in thwarting attempts to undermine its nuclear program. The agreement stipulates that they, with the Iranians, will foster "cooperation through training and workshops to strengthen Iran’s ability to protect against and respond to, nuclear security threats, including sabotage, as well as to enable effective and sustainable nuclear security and physical protection systems."
Recent years have seen various mishaps befall the Iranian nuclear program, from powerful computer viruses to the death of the nuclear scientists, which world media outlets have often attributed to the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad.
According to an audio recording with former Defense Minister Ehud Barak, leaked to an Israeli television channel on August 22, Israeli leaders planned to attack military targets in Iran in 2010, 2011, and 2012 but were held back due to the opinions of other government and military leaders.
It is quite disturbing that the US as well as the UK, Russia, China, France and Germany will actively try to prevent covert actions against the Iranian nuclear program, as well as any potential military operation against Iran, making such options far more complicated and dangerous for a country like Israel. Congress should ask Obama whether he will order US jets to shoot down Israeli fighter jets intent on destroying an Iranian nuclear weapon facility.
The Democratic Party chose to repeat the mistakes of the past and sacrifice the future for the present. The Democrats chose to ignore Iranian aggression in the hopes of gaining an illusory peace. The vote for the deal is a vote for the beginning of the next war between Israel and Iran and its proxies.
The Jewish people can never again remain passive in the face of genocidal enemies. The passing of the deal is not the end of the fight but just its beginning.
Shoula Romano Horing is an attorney. Her blog can be found here: www.shoularomanohoring.com
