Israel is having its fate decided by the American government, in its negotiations with the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. If Iran becomes — has the “capability” of quickly becoming — a nuclear power, it is not the Americans who will suffer, not their country that will be destroyed, but Israel. That is why one should be put in mind of Czechoslovakia, and the wretched performance of Chamberlain and Daladier, in so misunderstanding both those they were dealing with, and what was at stake. Netanyahu knows the rulers — the clerics and military men — who control the Islamic Republic, and he knows what is at stake, for Israel, for the Middle East, and for the rest of the world.
The American negotiatiors have retreated far, very far, from their original position. And what is peculiar is that they have done this at the very time when the Islamic Republic of Iran is weaker than ever. The oil revenues have beenb cut in half in less than a year. The rainfall on which agriculture depends has not arrived, and the famous system of irrigation tubes that Iran has depended on for several millennia has not rescued the situation. Tens of thousands of Iranian girls now ply their trade as prostitutes in the Gulf, to rich Arab customers; millions of Iranian young people are drug addicts; the birth rate among educated Iranians has plunmeted; the dreams of some that Iran could “lead the Muslim world” have collapsed, for those who have eyes to see, because everywhere Sunnis are killing Shi’a, in Pakistan, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria, and not even an Iranian atomic weapon or two used against Israel will turn the Shi’a into full-fledged Muslims in Sunni eyes; they are, they have been, they will remain despised and, for some, Infidels, even “the worst kind of Infidels.” In such circumstances, it ought to have been the American government that hardened its positionm, and did not yield, but the reverse has occurred. Why?
John Kerr i, part of an administration that has continually treated Isreal with contumely (remember the comments during the Gaza campaign? Or, just the other day, the labelling of Israeli “settlement” activity as illegal, when it not only not illegal, but specificallly to be encouraged under the still-relevant terms of the Mandate for Palestine, which applies to the territories which Israel took possession of through force of arms in the Six-Day War, but to which it had a prior, an outstanding, legal, historic, and moral claim based on the Mandate itself, and on all the rules of warfare and post-bellum settlements since time began)a government that has failed to notice how weak the Islamic Republic of Iran has become, with its annual rainfall diminishing, its oil revenues cut in half, its borders worrisomely open to attack by Sunnis in Baluchistan and Kurds in Kurdistan. And there are Azeris, preferring to be independent of the Persians, looking to Azerbaijan.
And Kerry has the gall to declare that if the Israelis dare to drop hints as to the colossal and dangerous concessions that the Americans are now ready to make, have already agreed to make, that it is they who wll “have betryaed the trust.” This is not tolerable.
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One Response
“At Zion in this fateful hour
“I place all Heaven with its power
“And the sun with its brightness
And the moon with its whiteness
And the lightning with its rapid wrath
and the wind with its swiftness along its path
and the fire with all the strength it hath
and the sea with its deepness
and the rock with its steepness
and the earth with its starkness
all these I place
by God’s almighty help and grace
Between us all and the powers of darkness.”
(a free paraphrase – slightly adapted by me, using “Zion” instead of the “Tara” of the original – of part of the Rune of St Patrick, also called “The Deer’s Cry”, as found in Madeleine L’Engle’s novel “A Swiftly Tilting Planet”).