In the shrieks from the international community — revealing once again what a bad idea it is to pursue popularity as a foreign policy — Charles Krauthammer decodes the real message:
The whole point of this relentless international campaign is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense. Why, just last week, the Obama administration joined the jackals and reversed four decades of U.S. practice, by signing onto a consensus document that singles out Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons — thus de-legitimizing Israel’s very last line of defense: deterrence. The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.
On one side are, as Krauthammer describes, “the blockade-busting flotilla of useful idiots and terror sympathizers, by the Turkish front organization that funded it, by the automatic anti-Israel Third World chorus at the United Nations, and by the supine Europeans who’ve had quite enough of the Jewish problem.” On the other is Israel and an iffy U.S. ally with a more energetic Jewish community than we’ve seen in recent years. There is very little cause for optimism.
This is the natural result of the administration’s choices and grievous errors. Obama telegraphed that America would stand apart from Israel, and Israel’s enemies have exploited that. Obama telegraphed that he was not out to confront or upend the Iranian regime, and now the regime runs rampant, bolstered by new allies and with old ones more eager to line up with the Iranian axis than with the U.S. The “international community” has waged a relentless war to delegitimize the Jewish state, hoping that this incident will be the nail in Israel’s coffin. Obama linked the non–peace process to progress on Iran, handing Iran the perfect gambit: disrupt the non–peace process, inflame the world, and the West will lose focus on Iran’s nuclear policy. And finally, we have abdicated our role as human rights defender and democracy promoter, allowing thugocracies and their pawns (e.g., Hamas-run Gaza) to claim equal footing with the democratic and free Israel.
So should it surprise us that Turkey now sounds like Iran? Or that Syria tests our resolve with Scud missiles? Or that the UN prepares for “The Goldstone Report: The Sequel”? The reality is setting in that this will all be infinitely worse after Iran gets the bomb. But at the root of this is the uncomfortable truth: without a stalwart American ally and vigorous American Jewish support, Israel is in peril. As Bibi often says, after one Holocaust, Israel reserves the right to defend itself against threats from the small to the existential. Now it may be the Jewish state’s only option.
