Monday, March 16, 2015

Bibi Netanyahu: The Right Man in Jerusalem

Mideast: Tuesday's elections in Israel might be the most important in history. A loss by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could, along with a bad Iranian nuclear deal, form a perfect storm of Islamist power.
The July 1984 Israeli elections resulted in a hung Knesset and an awkward Likud-Labor right-left coalition. Washington's reaction to the result indicated there would be no "bold steps" in the Palestinian "peace process."
Late liberal Irish diplomat and onetime editor of Britain's Observer, Conor Cruise O'Brien, questioned "the implicit assumption that there are any results at all likely in any general election in Israel, ever, that would lead to the taking of the desired 'bold steps.'"
O'Brien titled his long book on Israel's founding and future "The Siege" — a recognition that the Jewish state by its nature has always been, and continues to be today, under siege from hostile Islamic neighbors.
But today it is on the threshold of a new phase: a nuclear siege.
An island of Western civilization under continuous, existential siege requires, as it has in the past, a Winston Churchill. Bibi Netanyahu is that leader.
The challenger who in the run-up to the election appeared to have a growing lead on Netanyahu's Likud Party, socialist Yitzhak Herzog of the center-left Zionist Union, is in the mold of those who believe deal-making is the solution to the threats this country faces — a Palestinian pact to placate Hamas; an Iran pact to tame the ayatollah.
This is as much wishful thinking as Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. And even if a Netanyahu-Herzog coalition is the result Tuesday, a Churchill sharing power with a Chamberlain is not muscular enough for the Mideast's next few years.
Read the rest of this IBD Editorial HERE.

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