Herbert Zweibon

Increasingly Israel looks for its defense abroad. In Lebanon it relies upon a UN force, in Gaza upon EU monitors. Olmert looks to the Americans to take care of Iran’s nuclear threat to Israel.

Even worse, Israel looks to the EU and the U.S. for moral approval. To recognize how absurd and self-defeating this is one need only read the fine interview the Jerusalem Post’s Ruthie Blum conducted with Italian journalist Fianna Nirenstein, author of a surprise best-seller entitled Israele Siamo Noi (Israel is Us). Nirenstein describes a Europe in which anti-Semitism is rampant. The theme of her book is that Europeans should make Israel their model so as to repair their own sick societies.

Nirenstein (who needs bodyguards when she travels in Italy) tells Blum about teaching a Mideast history class at Luiss University in Rome: “I turned to the students and asked them, ‘If you were threatened like Israel is, would you go into the army?’ And they all said no. Then I asked them if their brother or sister were being threatened, would they go into the army, and they said no.” Nirenstein contrasts this with the attitudes of Israeli young people: “When you speak to Israeli boys and girls – even during this time of the Winograd Committee finding about the failures of the government and upper echelons of the IDF – you realize how unique they are. None of this stops them from wanting to serve in the army…Israel is special for the fantastic men it has created, which is why I feel so bad whenever I see it despised and destroyed by Israelis themselves.”

And there’s the rub. Suffering from a terrible failure of political and intellectual leadership, Israel fails to recognize its own moral stature, fails to press its own rights, fails to act forthrightly in its own defense. On a recent visit to Israel the courageous Moslem dissident Ayaan Hirsi Ali put it simply: “Israel first of all has to stand firm. A state’s primary responsibility is to guarantee the security of its citizens. If Israel doesn’t do that, its society is in danger.”

Israeli leaders once understood this obvious truth. Menahem Begin destroyed the nuclear reactor at Osirak despite universal condemnation. In 1976, with over 100 Israelis hijacked on an Air France plane, the Rabin-led government did not run to Western governments but launched the Entebbe raid. Now Israel does not even protect its own cities from missile assaults.

Instead Israel invites the contempt of friends and enemies alike by its relentless appeasement and apologies. In Cairo, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni groveled in an interview with Al Ahram, declaring that uprooting 7,000 Israelis from Gaza was intended to be a “message” concerning Israel’s love of peace, and that “in order to establish a Palestinian state we must withdraw from additional territories.” She pleads with the Egyptian public to understand how much Israel wants peace. In this issue we print an article by Nonie Darwish (yet another courageous Moslem woman) on a recent Egyptian film which she describes as “the vilest and most hateful example of Arab anti-Semitic propaganda I have ever seen.” Why did not Tzipi Livni use the Al Ahram interview to remind the Egyptian public that the 1977 treaty between Israel and Egypt called for an end to anti-Israel incitement in the media and that unless and until Egypt lived up to its promises, it should not expect Israel to seek more empty peace agreements with Arabs?

Israel’s enemies will not be moved by her self-abnegation and Israel will not be saved by a hostile “international community” itself in retreat before the Islamic tide. Benny Avni aptly notes in The New York Sun, “As for world opinion, it might not like Jewish power, but it will always back a winner.”