Meanwhile, In Israel The Election May Be Netanyahu's To Lose

That is David Hazony's take, based in part on 3 things that are going Netanyahu's way:

First, Likud has added to its ranks a series of impressive candidates with a reputation of integrity–Benjamin Begin, Dan Meridor, Moshe Yaalon, and others–setting the Likud off as a contrast against the corruption-tainted Kadima party currently in power.

Second, the global financial crisis has cause many Israelis to refocus their thoughts on the economy, and no party leader has Likud chairman Benjamin Netanyahu’s reputation for economic decisionmaking.

Finally, the election of Barack Obama may well be triggering a kind of hawkish backlash among Israelis. Fearing that the new administration will pressure Israel to make concessions, Israelis might increasingly see in Netanyahu the necessary bulwark against international pressure.

On the other hand, it may not be Obama that Israelis need to worry about. Just as Condoleezza Rice was the driving force behind Israeli concessions rather than Bush himself, it may very well be Obama's Secretary of State whom Israel should be concerned about--and that appears to be Hillary Clinton.

Jennifer Rubin notes:

Jeffrey Goldberg is counting on Hillary Clinton to pull off a Palestinian-Israeli peace deal. Conservatives are banking on her being smart enough to realize there is no deal remotely possible right now. We’ll find out who’s right soon enough.

Lisa Schiffren for instance, seems to tend towards the latter view:

In the Middle East, for instance, whatever sympathies she had, years ago, for Arafat and his pals, must have evolved as she watched the Palestinians devolve into terror factions in Gaza and the West Bank. She knows what they did to her husband's hopes of brokering that chimera of a "peace agreement."

The only matchup more intriguing than Netanyahu vs. Obama may very well be Netanyahu vs. Clinton.

But it's still a long way to February.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Netanyahu.

UN to Mourn 60 Years of Israel's Existence

Here we go again...

From a press release I received via email:

For Immediate Release: November 21, 2008

Contact:  Anne Bayefsky (917) 488-1558 anne@hudsonny.org

UN to Mourn 60 Years of Israel's Existence

NEW YORK - This Monday, November 24th, the UN will commemorate its annual International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People with a film depicting Jews as Nazi-equivalents and a public exhibit mourning the sixty years of Israel's existence. "The event is an annual reminder that the UN's real agenda is to delegitimize the birth - and the perseverance - of the state of Israel," said Anne Bayefsky, Editor of EYEontheUN.org.  Monday's observance marks November 29, 1947 - the day that the UN voted to establish a Jewish and an Arab state in Palestine - a decision accepted by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs. This year's observance is being held a week early due to scheduling conflicts. As in years past, there will be a formal meeting Monday morning of the Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, a film, an afternoon meeting of the General Assembly on the "Question of Palestine," and the opening of a public exhibit in the entrance to the UN's New York headquarters.  Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan referred to November 29th as "a day of mourning and a day of grief," and the usual procedure is for UN member state after UN member state to use the opportunity to grieve for the suffering of the Palestinian people at Israeli hands.  The General Assembly is scheduled to adopt another six resolutions condemning only Israel for violations of human rights. The total number of resolutions criticizing Israel expected to be adopted at this fall's General Assembly is 20, as compared to only four resolutions critical of human rights records in any of the remaining 191 UN member nations. The 2008 installment of what is in essence a repeat of the "Zionism = Racism" allegation, will be the public showing of the film "La Terre Parle Arabe" or "The Land Speaks Arabic." The film draws parallels between the Nazis' final solution and the alleged Zionist design for Palestinians. It is commonly billed with these words: "…the late-19th century Zionists…drew up plans, put them into practice, then…used… force, often brutal."  Here is some of the script for the UN public's edification:  "Christians and Muslims alike…unite in their hatred of Zionism…I preferred to die as a martyr rather than be governed by the Jews …We were against the Jews…The number of Jews increased constantly…The children cried …The Hagana had no mercy, no pity. Zionists! They were Zionists!… The Jews were shooting at us, they were facing us…The Jews yelled "turn around you bastards, you dogs." They machine gunned us…They started killing people who were asleep…[We]…found a poor woman…pregnant. They had killed her and the baby came out of the womb. They started slaughtering them until morning." The exhibit to be opened at 6 p.m. on Monday in the UN lobby - the public entrance through which school children from across the United States and tourists from around the world pass every day - is entitled "The Palestinians: 60 years of struggle and enduring hope." Bayefsky comments: "The "sixty years" of struggle is telling. It puts a lie to the alleged root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict as an "occupation" that began with the 1967 war. The real complaint is the alleged wrong of the creation of the State of Israel itself." She adds: "The carefully selected word "struggle" also speaks volumes. What the UN glorifies as a struggle is a series of wars launched by Arabs to annihilate the state of Israel beginning in 1948, and the ongoing "struggle" of Palestinian and other Arab terrorists dedicated to the same end."  Past UN Palestinian Solidarity Day observances have included: The display of a map in Arabic with the State of Israel missing altogether Flying only the flags of "Palestine" and the United Nations, and omitting the flag of the UN member state of Israel Opening the day with a moment of silence commemorating the death, among others, of suicide bombers or "all those who have given their lives for the cause of the Palestinian people..." Exhibits promoting terrorism and the alleged right of return while criticizing a host of non-violent efforts by Israel to prevent terrorism from checkpoints to a security fence - all of which are invariably presented as evil steps taken in a vacuum. "Anyone hoping to see an Israeli flag flown in addition to a Palestinian one in celebration of the UN partition plan that approved a two-state solution, should not hold their breath," said Anne Bayefsky, Editor of EYEontheUN.org. She continued, "the UN tradition of mourning the creation of the state of Israel continues."

Technorati Tag: Israel.

You Mean 'Change' Was Merely a Notion?

David Brooks notes:

Obama seems to have dispensed with the romantic and failed notion that you need inexperienced “fresh faces” to change things.

Sure, now Obama has dispensed with that notion--now that he doesn't need it anymore.

[Hat tip: Jonah Goldberg]

Technorati Tag: Obama.

Scowcroft and Brzezinski See Another Unique Opportunity For Peace In The Middle East

Shmuel Rosner writes about the column in today's Washington Post written by Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski. There is not much new in their approach that settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the key to peace in the Middle East.

What Rosner points out in particular is their conclusion that:

in many ways the current situation is such that the opportunity for success has never been greater, or the costs of failure more severe.

Naturally, since we are talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Scowcroft and Brzezinski are short on facts to back up their claim.

Maybe their writing is simply a result of how they see the Middle East.

Last year Brzezinski spoke at the America in the World Conference, where he spoke about the need to address

the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it is poisoning the political atmosphere in the Middle East. It is generating more and more hostility towards the United States. And only people in a state of denial would disagree with that because the fact is anyone you talk to in the Middle East finds that to be one of the reasons for this more pervasive anti-Americanism which al Qaeda and groups like it can exploit. [emphasis added]

But in contrast, at February's 5th Annual U.S.-Islamic World Forum, Tamara Cofman Wittes noted:

The lack of a fire-breathing Amr Moussa or Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi on the program certainly made a difference. But changes in the region and in U.S. policy also help explain the slackening of the resentment that has accompanied our past years’ discussions on America’s role in the Muslim Middle East.

More bizarre is a discussion noted in The Washington Post in October 2005:

Scowcroft, in his interview, discussed an argument over Iraq he had two years ago with Condoleezza Rice, then-national security adviser and current secretary of state. "She says we're going to democratize Iraq, and I said, 'Condi, you're not going to democratize Iraq,' and she said, 'You know, you're just stuck in the old days,' and she comes back to this thing that we've tolerated an autocratic Middle East for fifty years and so on and so forth," he said. The article stated that with a "barely perceptible note of satisfaction," Scowcroft added: "But we've had fifty years of peace." [emphasis added]

Fifty years of peace in the Middle East?

James Taranto wrote at the time:

Now let's see. Between 1953 and 2003, here are the Mideast wars we can think of off the top of our head: the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, the two Palestinian intifadas against Israel, the Algerian Civil War, the Yemen Civil War and two Sudanese civil wars. That doesn't even count acts of terror against non-Mideastern countries, from the Iranian invasion of the U.S. Embassy to the attacks of 9/11.

What do you call someone who describes this as "50 years of peace"? A "realist."

But let's go a step further and put aside wars involving Israel. Raphael Patai, in an updated chapter in his bookThe Arab Mind has his own list of Arab conflicts--not including Israel--taking into account just during the 13 years from 1970 to 1983:

1. Intermittent disputes involving border warfare and assassinations between South Yemen on the one hand, and North Yemen and Saudi Arabia, on the other since the early 1970's. A brief but fierce border war between the two Yemens took place as recently as March, 1979.

2. A major and bloody, albeit brief, conflict between Jordan and Palestinian guerrillas in 1970, complicated by Syrian intervention.

3. Fighting between the Kurds and the Iraqis, which lasted several years.

4. A bloody conflict between Northern and Southern Sudan, 1956-1972.

5. Clashes between South Yemen and Oman, linked to the Dhofar rebellion, 1972-1976.

6. A tripartite conflict between Algeria on the one hand and Morocco and Mauritania, on the other, over the control of the former Spanish Sahara, beginning in 1976 and subsequently transformed into guerrilla warfare against Morocco by the Polisario, the freedom fighters of the Western Sahara, supported by Algeria and Libya, which was still in progress in 1982.

7. Intermittent hostility, and actual border fighting, including air attacks, between Egypt and Libya in 1977.

8. The Lebanese civil war, which began in 1975, involving two outside parties, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization, still unresolved in early 1982.

9. The invasion of Chad by Libya in 1980.

10. The war between Iraq and Iran, which began in the fall of 1980, in which Iraq is supported by Jordan and Iran by Syria, making it in effect, an inter-Arab conflict. It was still in progress in early 1982.

11. In February, 1982, a conflict flared up between the Syrian government and Muslim fundamentalists in the Syrian city of Hama, in which several thousands were killed and major parts of Hama were destroyed. [p.357-358]

Scowcroft and Brzezinski share a worldview that appears to be based more on what they would like to see done in the Middle East than on the way things actually are. Or maybe their optimism for a unique opportunity for change in the Middle East is merely a case of Obama fever.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

Technorati Tag: Israel and Brzezinski and Scowcroft.

Proposition 8: ‘Married’ And The Mob

Concern for civil rights doesn't necessarily make people civil.

‘MARRIED’ AND THE MOB

Rabbi Avi Shafran


From the agitation and anger of the crowds, the din of the car horns and the shouts of “Civil rights now!” and “Bigots!” one would have been forgiven for thinking that the protesters were denouncing some horrific assault on human freedom.

But no, the demonstrations – and church vandalisms and business boycotts – were in protest of California voters’ passage of the November ballot measure known as Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to define marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Any two Californians can, as before, register as “domestic partners” and have the very same rights and responsibilities as married couples under state law. All Proposition 8 sought to do was preserve in law what the word “marriage” has meant for millennia.

Those, though, who were unhappy with the electorate’s decision wasted no time in taking to the streets of dozens of American cities and towns to rail against the audacity – the bigotry, as they proclaimed it – of considering gender germane to marriage.

In some cities, tens of thousands turned out for raucous rallies; in many instances, epithets were hurled at counterdemonstrators and even uninvolved bystanders. Although protesters claimed the mantle of the American civil rights movement, several black observers of the Los Angeles demonstration had what has been called the “N-bomb” dropped on them by infuriated demonstrators – a presumed tribute to the fact that blacks voted 2-1 in favor of the proposition. A San Diego family with a “Yes on 8” sign on their front lawn had their car’s tires slashed. A San Francisco area group launched a campaign to revoke the tax-exempt status of the Mormon Church because of its support of the marriage initiative. Graffiti was spray-painted on a Mormon church near Sacramento. A group of about 30 activists from a group called “Bash Back!” stormed into a Lansing, Michigan church, unfurled a rainbow flag at the pulpit and proceeded to disrupt services by banging on cans and shouting.

Some, even among those who assign meaning to traditional morality, are not greatly bothered by the push to expand the meaning of marriage. They are content to let people call things whatever they want, and regard the societal push to revamp social mores as benign. The vehemence, violence and general obnoxiousness that characterized some of the protests, though, should give them pause.

As should Scott Eckern’s forced resignation.

Mr. Eckern was the artistic director of the California Musical Theater. He no longer holds that position because anti-Proposition 8 activists uncovered and publicized the fact that he had made a contribution to the other side’s campaign. Mr. Eckern explained that his donation stemmed from his religious beliefs as a Mormon and expressed sadness that his “personal beliefs and convictions have offended others” and caused “hurt feelings.”

But neither his words nor resignation were enough to mollify the mob. An award-winning composer called Mr. Eckern to tell him that he would not allow his work to be performed in the theater with which the ex-director had been associated; and an actress called for a boycott of the institution.

It seems clearer than ever that gay activists are not, as was once thought, interested only on being left alone, or, as was later thought, on being granted the same privileges as others. They are fixated, in fact, on creating a society where traditional religious perspectives on homosexuality and marriage are regarded, in law and in social dialogue, as the equivalent of racial or ethnic bias.

The scenario of religious people – and institutions like churches, synagogues and mosques – being branded as bigoted simply for affirming deeply-held religious convictions is around the corner. And eventual prosecution of the same for voicing those convictions is only another corner or two away.

What began as a plea for “rights” is rapidly, and noisily, morphing into an assault on freedom of speech and conscience.

Jews who take their religious tradition seriously will not allow the shifting sands of societal mores to obscure the fact that the Torah forbids homosexual acts, and sanctions only the union of a man and a woman in matrimony. They know, further, that the Talmud and Midrash teach that a saving grace of human society throughout the ages has been its refusal to formalize unions between males.

Which made a scene at one of the recent protests particularly poignant. Rebecca Kaplan, a newly elected Oakland, California city council member, told those gathered outside City Hall how upset she was with the passage of Proposition 8. According to a news report, she “roused the crowd by blowing a shofar, a ram's horn blown as a wind instrument in Biblical times. She said it represented a call for solidarity.”

Only it doesn’t. It represents a call for teshuva, the Hebrew word for repentance, literally “return” – to the teachings of the Jewish religious tradition.

© 2008 AM ECHAD RESOURCES

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]

Technorati Tag: Proposition 8.

Rabbi Isaac Halevy Herzog and the Holy Father, Pius XII

Dr. Joel Fishman is a Fellow of a research center in Jerusalem.

Joel Fishman
Makor Rishon
21 November 2008

Rabbi Isaac Halevy Herzog and the Holy Father, Pius XII

The November 16, 2008 issue of Makor Rishon contains Ya'akov Bar-On's interview with former Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau who recently became Chairman of the Board of Yad Vashem. In this informative interview, Rabbi Lau spoke about the meeting in March 1946 between Chief Rabbi Isaac Halevy Herzog and Pope Pius XII.At this audience, Rabbi Herzog entreated the Pope to make a public declaration to churches, monasteries and Catholic families which had rescued Jewish children to return them to their people. "To this day," Rabbi Lau stated, "no such declaration has been made."

It is clear that the conversation went badly and that for Rabbi Herzog the encounter must have been distasteful. Lau related that, at the conclusion of his audience, the Chief Rabbi asked to be taken directly to the mikve teharah, the ritual immersion bath. A member of his entourage told that "he felt a need to immerse himself in purifying water." Meeting a clergyman of another faith is definitely not a reason for ritual immersion, so Herzog's request was original and extraordinary.Through this silent and symbolic deed, the Chief Rabbi revealed his feelings after being in the presence of Pope Pius XII.

Separately, we have an additional piece of fragmentary information indicating that Rabbi Herzog was profoundly shaken by this failure. During a lecture at the Darkhei No'am yeshiva in Jerusalem, Rabbi Beryl Wein, recounted that, shortly after his visit to Rome, Rabbi Isaac Halevy Herzog came to Chicago. There, Rabbi Herzog publicly wept because he had failed to recover the Jewish children in Catholic institutions.

Rabbi Herzog's efforts have not been generally known. One of the challenges for historians of this generation will be to discover more pieces of the larger story and asses their significance. Hopefully, new information will come to light so that we may learn more about the fateful struggle to recover the Jewish war orphans in Europe after the Holocaust. This was a contest which seems to have been lost.

_________________

Note: Rabbi Lau drew his information from the pamphlet, Mas'a ha-Hazalah(Journey of Rescue), published in Jerusalem in 1947. Yaakov Herzog, the Chief Rabbi's learned son, is believed to be its author. (Prof. Michael Marrus attributed Yitzhak Goldshlag as its editor.) The state of the art contribution on the subject is:Michael R. Marrus, "The Vatican and the Custody of Jewish Child Survivors after the Holocaust," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 21, no. 3 (Winter 2007): 378–403.

Technorati Tag: Rabbi Isaac Halevy Herzog and Pius XII.

Talking With Iran

Gordon G. Chang on Iran's refusal to communicate with the International Atomic Energy Agency:

Proponents of engagement take note, please! The Iranians have nothing to say to the U.N. organization to which they have a treaty obligation to speak. So will they really talk to you in good faith?

But of course!

Technorati Tag: Iran.

Netanyahu Takes The Lead

From Reuters:

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's opposition right-wing Likud party pulled ahead of Israel's ruling centrist Kadima party in opinion polls on Thursday, three months before a parliamentary election.

"Bibi is taking off," read a headline in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, using Netanyahu's nickname.

Its Yedioth/Dahaf survey gave Likud 32 seats in the 120-member parliament to 26 for Kadima, led by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

A poll in the Haaretz newspaper predicted Likud would win 34 seats to 28 for Kadima in the Feb. 10 election forced by the resignation of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in a corruption scandal and Livni's failure to form a coalition government.

Apparently, Netanyahu's lead is attributable in part to his campaign strategy:

Commentary accompanying the polls attributed Likud's lead to its recent recruitment of several widely respected figures in Israel, including the son of the late prime minister, Menachem Begin, and a retired chief of staff of the armed forces.

And to his presenting a new way to pursue peace with the Palestinian Arabs:

Netanyahu also has been increasingly vocal about his future approach to peace talks with the Palestinians, saying he would focus on ways to build up their economy rather than on territorial issues.

This would be a return to a policy that had been pursued with the Palestinian Arabs years ago. As recounted by Ephraim Karsh:

The larger part, still untold in all its detail, is of the astounding social and economic progress made by the Palestinian Arabs under Israeli "oppression." At the inception of the occupation, conditions in the territories were quite dire. Life expectancy was low; malnutrition, infectious diseases, and child mortality were rife; and the level of education was very poor. Prior to the 1967 war, fewer than 60 percent of all male adults had been employed, with unemployment among refugees running as high as 83 percent. Within a brief period after the war, Israeli occupation had led to dramatic improvements in general well-being, placing the population of the territories ahead of most of their Arab neighbors.

In the economic sphere, most of this progress was the result of access to the far larger and more advanced Israeli economy: the number of Palestinians working in Israel rose from zero in 1967 to 66,000 in 1975 and 109,000 by 1986, accounting for 35 percent of the employed population of the West Bank and 45 percent in Gaza. Close to 2,000 industrial plants, employing almost half of the work force, were established in the territories under Israeli rule.

During the 1970's, the West Bank and Gaza constituted the fourth fastest-growing economy in the world-ahead of such "wonders" as Singapore, Hong Kong, and Korea, and substantially ahead of Israel itself. Although GNP per capita grew somewhat more slowly, the rate was still high by international standards, with per-capita GNP expanding tenfold between 1968 and 1991 from $165 to $1,715 (compared with Jordan's $1,050, Egypt's $600, Turkey's $1,630, and Tunisia's $1,440).By 1999, Palestinian per-capita income was nearly double Syria's, more than four times Yemen's, and 10 percent higher than Jordan's (one of the better off Arab states). Only the oil-rich Gulf states and Lebanon were more affluent.

Under Israeli rule, the Palestinians also made vast progress in social welfare. Perhaps most significantly, mortality rates in the West Bank and Gaza fell by more than two-thirds between 1970 and 1990, while life expectancy rose from 48 years in 1967 to 72 in 2000 (compared with an average of 68 years for all the countries of the Middle East and North Africa). Israeli medical programs reduced the infant-mortality rate of 60 per 1,000 live births in 1968 to 15 per 1,000 in 2000 (in Iraq the rate is 64, in Egypt 40, in Jordan 23, in Syria 22). And under a systematic program of inoculation, childhood diseases like polio, whooping cough, tetanus, and measles were eradicated.

No less remarkable were advances in the Palestinians' standard of living. By 1986, 92.8 percent of the population in the West Bank and Gaza had electricity around the clock, as compared to 20.5 percent in 1967; 85 percent had running water in dwellings, as compared to 16 percent in 1967; 83.5 percent had electric or gas ranges for cooking, as compared to 4 percent in 1967; and so on for refrigerators, televisions, and cars.

Finally, and perhaps most strikingly, during the two decades preceding the intifada of the late 1980's, the number of schoolchildren in the territories grew by 102 percent, and the number of classes by 99 percent, though the population itself had grown by only 28 percent. Even more dramatic was the progress in higher education. At the time of the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, not a single university existed in these territories. By the early 1990's, there were seven such institutions, boasting some 16,500 students. Illiteracy rates dropped to 14 percent of adults over age 15, compared with 69 percent in Morocco, 61 percent in Egypt, 45 percent in Tunisia, and 44 percent in Syria.

All this, as I have noted, took place against the backdrop of Israel's hands-off policy in the political and administrative spheres [emphasis added].

The question then is whether Netanyahu would be able to replicate this kind of success. Based on his success in turning around the Israeli economy, if Israelis back the approach--they are likely to back Netanyahu as the one to carry it out.

If Netanyu wins, it will be because he is the candidate with an articulated plan and the experience to carry it through.

Netanyahu: The Anti-Obama.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

Technorati Tag: Israel and Netanyahu.

The Peres Guarantee!

Rick Richman of Jewish Current Issues is now writing for Contentions as well.

Today he has a post about Peres who talks favorably about the Saudi peace plan--and all we need to make it work are guarantees for Israel's security. You know, so we don't have a repeat of the disaster of The Disengagement.

Richman notes:

It is not clear what “guarantees” Peres has in mind: perhaps a “binding” UN resolution (like Res.1701, which required all UN members to stop the flow of weapons into Lebanon); or a “robust” international force (like the one that watched Hezbollah not only replenish but redouble its arsenal); or an explicit U.S. commitment (like George W. Bush’s April 14, 2004 Gaza disengagement letter, promising U.S-led efforts to “prevent areas from which Israel has withdrawn from posing a threat that would have to be addressed by any other means”).

Read the whole thing.

Like the saying goes: those who do not learn from history can usually be found pursuing politics in Israel.

As a counterpoint, Richman points to Gen. Moshe Ya’alon's Israel and the Palestinians: A New Strategy and Caroline Glick's Israel and the Palestinians: Ending the Stalemate.

Check them out--and check out Rick Richman's posts on Contentions.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

Technorati Tag: Israel.

The Logic Of Getting Israel To Get Rid Of Its Nuclear Weapons

Foreign Affairs has an article The Logic of Zero on the need for the US to lead the world in eliminating nuclear weapons. Naturally, you can't talk about eliminating nuclear weapons without talking about Israel. This is what the authors, Ivo Daalder and Jan Lodal, have to say:

Israel initially developed nuclear weapons out of the fear that its army could be overrun by the vastly larger Arab armies in the region. Today, Israel also faces the prospect of a nuclear-armed regime, Iran, that has openly called for its destruction — a critical reason to maintain a nuclear deterrent. But if strong pressure on Iran could succeed in reversing its nuclear program, Israel would have much less need for its nuclear weapons. Israel’s peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt, for all of their disappointments, have largely eliminated any conventional military threat to Israel’s existence, and Israel’s own conventional forces, with significant and continuing help from the United States, are now dominant in the region. Israel has also consistently stated — as recently as this year — that it favors an agreement that would make the Middle East a zone free of all weapons of mass destruction. As with Pakistan, if Israel can be assured that it will not face any nuclear threat from another state, it should prove possible to convince it to see the merits of joining a global effort to eliminate nuclear weapons and thus deny terrorists any opportunity to get the bomb.

Question:

1. Just how effective has pressure been on Iran till now to stop its nuclear program? Besides, considering that according to today's New York Times:

Iran has now produced roughly enough nuclear material to make, with added purification, a single atom bomb, according to nuclear experts analyzing the latest report from global atomic inspectors.

just how effective would pressure be now?

2. Even if Egypt and Jordan do not pose a conventional military threat to Israel, what about Hamas and Hizbollah. I mean, seriously--the article does not even mention Syria, where traces of uranium were found at the site of the facility where Israel bombed.

3. If Israel is really dominant in the region, please explain what happened in that little war they had with Hezbollah a few years back...

4. The authors think Israel can be convinced that it does not face a nuclear threat from another state? Well, considering the past leaders Israel has, that probably is true. At the very least, how would Olmert have reacted to sufficient pressure in that regard? As always, a lot is riding on the next election.

By all means, lets strive to get rid of all nuclear arms--but let's at least keep our eyes open to the current realities. Logic of Zero, indeed.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

[Hat: Shmuel Rosner]

Technorati Tag: Israel and Nuclear Arms.