“Democracies tend to sleep until the jarring gong of danger wakes them up” is a favorite Churchill quote of Prime Minister Netanyahu, son of a major historian, and he repeated it today in an interview with Fox News. The message, both of the WWII-era sage and the Israeli leader who often leans on Churchill’s wisdom, is apt. So is Mr. Netanyahu’s observation that “sometimes it might not wake them up.”
In the 1930s, as dark clouds of war intensified over Europe, many on our side refused to process the rise of Hitlerism. “I bet they’re asleep in New York, I bet they’re asleep all over America,” Rick Blaine says in “Casablanca.” At London, Churchill was all but alone in opposing Chamberlain’s “peace in our time.” Mr. Netanyahu, similarly, has warned against President Obama’s nuclear deal that our doves still pine for.
President Trump, who bolted that deal in 2018, is now seeking a better pact that seems consistent with his oft-quoted claim to seek an end to wars, rather than starting ones. Yet, he’s also pushing back against Tucker Carlson-style appeasement. “You can’t have peace if Iran has a nuclear weapon,” the president told the Atlantic. “So for all those wonderful people who don’t want to do anything about Iran having a nuclear weapon — that’s not peace.”
Washington and Jerusalem often seem to disagree on strategy. “We’re fully coordinated,” Mr. Netanyahu said, adding, though, that Mr. Trump “understands that I, as the Prime Minister of Israel, the one and only Jewish state, must make the decisions that are important for the survival of my country, and he will do what is best for America. That is a relationship of mutual respect and mutual confidence.”
Mr. Trump seems eager to leverage the Israeli military action to make a deal with the ayatollahs, which, unlike in 2015, would steer Iran from a pathway to an atomic bomb. Mr. Netanayhu vows to end that threat militarily, but also calls on the Iranian people to use the moment to seek “freedom from an evil and oppressive regime.” Multiple reports today are claiming that Mr. Trump vetoed an Israeli plan that would have killed the ayatollah, Ali Khamenei.
Were those reports leaked by Washington as a warning to Israel, or, conversely, as a somewhat veiled threat to the supreme leader? For now, and even as the Islamic Republic is bleeding under sustained Israeli punishment, the regime is yet to show signs of accepting Mr. Trump’s demand to end uranium enrichment and its pursuit of a nuclear bomb. The mullahs consider an atomic weapon essential to their survival in power.
“For humanity, for the world, for Israel, and for America such a weapon must be eliminated,” Mr. Netanayhu says. Yet, Chamberlaine’s successors at London are so angry about Israel’s conduct in Gaza that unlike last October, they now say they won’t help intercept barrages of Iran’s missiles. France’s plan to promote a Palestinian state at the UN this week is postponed while President Macron urges Israel to “deescalate” in Iran.
Secretary General Guterres calls on Paris to find a new date for a conference that would reward Hamas with a state. Instead, “the UN’s only focus right now should be on stopping the Islamic Republic of Iran from becoming a destructive nuclear-armed state,” Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, tells our Benny Avni. “We will not allow the regime to get there, and we expect the UN to act accordingly.”
While many UN members are fully cognizant of the threat Iran presents to them, they prefer silently applauding Israel while, like Saudi Arabia, publicly condemning it. As in the last century, good persons are content feeding the crocodile in the hope that he’ll eat them last. Mr. Netanyahu urges others, beyond America, to join the fight. The ayatollahs’ priority, though, will be Jewish state. So if no one else hears Churchill’s “gong,” Israel will go it alone.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
