Netanyahu: 'I Have an Extortionate Warmongering Ultimatum'

It's generally accepted as a truism that even the most moderate of Israeli leaders are so ideologically hawkish on national defense and their neighbors that they have to look to the left just to catch a glimpse of George W. Bush. While this makes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's virtual ultimatum that he will "stop Iran's nuclear program if Obama doesn't" somewhat predictable, it fails to make it any less loathsome.

The ultimatum, reported yesterday in the Atlantic Monthly online, is of a dual nature, both in terms of logic and in terms of ultimata. First of all, it's a false dichotomy: Netanyahu presents the issue as one of choosing between America's or Israel's attack on Iran, as if it's a foregone conclusion that attack is the only alternative to everything else.

Second, another ultimatum follows quickly on its heels: "Netanyahu said he would support President Obama’s decision to engage Iran, so long as negotiations brought about a quick end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions." While a non-nuclear and non-violent solution is desired, it ultimately takes a backseat to a timetable that evidently has been established irrespective of the progress of any other action. In short, this is exactly the way to frame the urgency and the parameters of a crisis if you have equal or greater interest in preemptively justifying your own violent acts as you have in any other form of solution.

There's another, much larger and more critical issue at work here, but it encapsulates the dynamic of this piecemeal, disingenuous thinking better than it explains it. For now, how about some bold quote + reply to look at the mess that is this rhetoric.

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History teaches Jews that threats against their collective existence should be taken seriously, and, if possible, preempted, [Netanyahu] suggested. In recent years, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has regularly called for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” and the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, this month called Israel a “cancerous tumor.”
I've addressed as much earlier on this blog, but Arab, Palestinian and Iranian rhetoric is naturally and typically volatile and poetically warlike (at least in part because the Qur'an was written in a time of tribal warfare), but the determination of both the west and Israel to treat it literally serves only the aim of justifying equally bellicose rhetoric in response. The natural question one should always ask in reaction to quotes like these is whether they refer to Israel at all or whether to Israel as it exists today. Quite frankly, the secular west suffers no shortage of legal scholars or historians who will argue that:

• Israel as it exists should be wiped off the map, because:
• its current borders violate international agreements, and that:
• its acidic eating away at the West Bank, via settlements, violates countless binding agreements to which Israel was a voluntary signatory.

Interpreting this rhetoric solely in apocalyptic terms about "The Jews" or Israel qua any form of homeland only advances retributive violence while whitewashing the culpability Israel should bear in terms of creating an unlawful state and the attendant animosity that comes from doing so.


One of his chief security advisers, Moshe Ya’alon, told me that a nuclear Iran could mean the end of American influence in the Middle East. “This is an existential threat for Israel, but it will be a blow for American interests, especially on the energy front. Who will dominate the oil in the region—Washington or Tehran?”
This is, of course, another false dichotomy. America currently draws an abundance of antipathy for its support of Israel, and rubber-stamping its actions vis-à-vis Iran in this instance doubtless will create more. Cassandra cries from Tel-Aviv about America's interests being booted out of the region frame the issue in such a way as to make American interests indivisible from Israel's, when in fact Israeli actions can easily eradicate American influence in the area just as suddenly as a nuclear Iran theoretically could.


“I think the Iranian economy is very weak, which makes Iran susceptible to sanctions that can be ratcheted up by a variety of means.” When I suggested that this statement contradicted his assertion that Iran, by its fanatic nature, is immune to pressure, Netanyahu smiled thinly and said, “Iran is a composite leadership, but in that composite leadership there are elements of wide-eyed fanaticism that do not exist right now in any other would-be nuclear power in the world. That’s what makes them so dangerous.”
This statement is realpolitik at its lowest level of duplicity, because Netanyahu can't sell a tangible benefit to non-aggressive pressure without immediately undermining the apocalyptic depiction of Iran he's just proffered. Of course, this temporizing about the possible effectiveness of sanctions is itself undermined by the above ultimatum about a timetable to Iran's abandoning nuclear development. In a sense, this above quote represents a desire to have it three ways:

1. We should negotiate.
2. But it won't work, because they're fanatics.
3. Even if it appears to work, the clock is ticking anyway, so we have no time to verify anything. Bombs away!

Further, anyone of a mind to approach Israel's historic bellicosity toward its neighbors and its absolutist diplomatic demands (as well as its willingness to undermine the parties with which it negotiates, even during negotiation), could see their action here as another iteration of "wide-eyed fanaticism" — in this case, Zionism — expressed by a literal nuclear power. Thus, while the rhetoric might work three ways, it also cuts back in another. Hard.


He went on, “Since the dawn of the nuclear age, we have not had a fanatic regime that might put its zealotry above its self-interest. People say that they’ll behave like any other nuclear power. Can you take the risk? Can you assume that?”
This is somewhat rich to take from a country that effectively keeps the Samson Option on its books in everything but name only — and in that case merely because it also maintains the absolutely stupid fiction that it doesn't have nuclear weapons.


Netanyahu offered Iran’s behavior during its eight-year war with Iraq as proof of Tehran’s penchant for irrational behavior. Iran “wasted over a million lives without batting an eyelash … It didn’t sear a terrible wound into the Iranian consciousness. It wasn’t Britain after World War I, lapsing into pacifism because of the great tragedy of a loss of a generation. You see nothing of the kind.”
This is again difficult to swallow, for multiple reasons. First of all, Israel citing the Iran-Iraq war as an example of Iranian irrationality might pass the laugh test if Israel had not supported Iran during the war. Second, comparing the cultural impact of a war during the 1980s to the First World War defies any reasonable sense of perspective. The First World War was the first modern war in Europe; it shattered a half century of belief in inexorable progress; it killed more people than any conflict in history to that date; it transformed fairly libertarian economies into total command economies; it revolutionized the role of women in the economy, home and nation; it annihilated a generation theologically, philosophically, economically and morally; and it redrew the map of Europe while fomenting the disintegration of both concepts of empire and their economic systems. There was no new lesson the Iran-Iraq War could have taught anyone, and the only one it could teach its participants at all profoundly was that war sucks, which all leaders at least dimly know anyway and have to ignore when they believe war is necessary. Anyone, Jew, Arab or Gentile, who looks at a war in the 1980s expecting a shattering generational ennui that overthrows entire concepts of history or mankind in any way commensurate with what World War I did to hundreds of millions is irremediably fucking stupid.


The chief of Israeli military intelligence, Major General Amos Yadlin, said earlier this month that Iran has already “crossed the technological threshold,” and that nuclear military capability could soon be a fact: “Iran is continuing to amass hundreds of kilograms of low-enriched uranium, and it hopes to exploit the dialogue with the West and Washington to advance toward the production of an atomic bomb.”
Hey, where have I heard that same kind of we-can't-wait and we-will-find-proof rationale before? I think it was September, 2002:

ZAHN: Let's make a major assumption here, that in some way some sort of deadline will be set for inspectors to go back into Iraq. Do you have any faith that they will provide unfettered access to their sites?

NETANYAHU: I have complete faith that inspections will not uncover the myriad sites in which Saddam today can develop, can manufacture the critical mass of plutonium that he needs. He's changed his technology from a centralized plant of the kind that we took out in 1981 precisely because of that.

He now has this distributed in little sites, tiny sites, tiny centrifuges the size of washing machines, and they're hidden. Are you going to find them? Iraq is a very big country. He's got 50 palaces with secret trap doors. I mean it's not going to work. It doesn't work that way. It didn't work up to now, it's not going to work.

ZAHN: So there is no doubt in your mind that some kind of military action will be had -- have to be taken?

NETANYAHU: Absolutely. I said that well before September 11 and it's just been reinforced.

Note the completely sickening ending where he invokes September 11 just after discussing Saddam Hussein, remarking that his opinion has only been confirmed by those events and thus tacitly giving weight to the fatuity that Saddam was in any way related to them. Although, to be fair to him, he was somewhat right: no inspection uncovered the myriad of Saddam's sites he claimed existed. It's just unfortunate that "inspection" in this case turned out to mean "every search of every kind into every claim like this, whatsoever."


The Obama administration agrees with Israel that Iran’s nuclear program is a threat to Middle East stability, but it also wants Israel to focus on the Palestinian question. Netanyahu, for his part, promises to move forward on negotiations with the Palestinians, but he made it clear in our conversation that he believes a comprehensive peace will be difficult to achieve if Iran continues to threaten Israel, and he cited Iran’s sponsorship of such Islamist groups as Hezbollah and Hamas as a stumbling block.
What an utterly amazing and disgusting comprehensive demand to have: a self-fulfilling prophecy that precludes returning Palestinians to their legal sovereign territory while outright forbidding negotiation with Iran, because refusing to do both creates the justifications for refusing to do both. Iran believes Israel to be a legally illegitimate state and supports Palestinians who agitate (and, yes, fight) against it. The Palestinians live in ever-dwindling archipelagos of their own former territory in the West Bank and in a massive open-air prison in Gaza and turn to Iran for material assistance. Israel's insistence of solving one problem while ignoring the other ensures that both endure, while its refusal to entertain the notion that both problems extenuate from its own behavior guarantees that they will persist until enough people get fed up enough to want to start bombing the crap out of everything. It sometimes frustrates me to see Americans' disbelief at Arab accusations of "Israeli perfidy" over issues like this, because they don't quite grasp how important it is for a people who've repeatedly had their ass kicked by Israel to believe in a machiavellian Israeli program instead of the humiliating prospect that a nation so victorious could be so fucking dumb.


Ya’alon, a former army chief of staff who is slated to serve as Netanyahu’s minister for strategic threats, dismissed the possibility of a revitalized peace process, telling me that “jihadists” interpret compromise as weakness.
Note: this is a perfect rationalization for not compromising if you already don't want to. Also, this immediately demonizes your opponent as a savage who will take advantage of you and thus excuses you for already likewise believing that compromise is weakness.


Netanyahu suggested that he and Obama already see eye-to-eye on such crucial issues as the threat posed by Hamas. “The Obama administration has recently said that Hamas has to first recognize Israel and cease the support of terror. That’s a very good definition. It says you have to cease being Hamas.”
This bullshit admits of no shame nor fact:

1. Ismail Haniyeh, former Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority has already gone on record that Hamas is more than willing to recognize Israel if it demonstrates a good faith effort to return to the '67 borders and negotiate Palestinian property rights.

2. The American Council on Foreign Relations says, "'Approximately 90 percent of [Hamas'] work is in social, welfare, cultural, and educational activities,' writes the Israeli scholar Reuven Paz." The overwhelming monetary investment of Hamas is not support of terror, which makes Netanyahu's suggestion that abjuring terror requires their own self-destruction either ignorant, a lie or both.

3. This statement is doubtless made on the premise that all terror attacks originating from Hamas "controlled" territories are Hamas sponsored, which is a premise given the lie by the quotation marks just used. You cannot starve out, shut out and lock out a political party in an occupied area, thus effectively delegitimizing its authority and then, with a straight face, blame it for all actions that occur in the area you've locked it in. Israel gives the Palestinians little reason to believe that Hamas can speak for them at all — Netanyahu's above quotation says as much — yet indulges in the fiction that all Palestinian attacks extend from Hamas' influence. If you give a people no reason to believe that a political party's influence is strong enough to do peaceful good, then you cannot ascribe to them total control for violent evil. You cannot have it both ways. Your own intent belies that.

When I noted that many in Washington doubt his commitment to curtailing Jewish settlement on the West Bank, he said, in reference to his previous term as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999, “I can only point to what I did as prime minister in the first round. I certainly didn’t build new settlements.”
Fuck you.

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The rest of the article merely restates the same rhetoric in different ways, all of which requires cutting-and-pasting replies in such a way as to reformulate them to respond to the same assertions—only different. "America will lose its Middle East hegemony if...." "Israel will lack deterrence if..." And on and on.

Lost in Goldberg's interview with Netanyahu, however, is a pernicious and possibly inescapable act of leverage. As said above, Israel has issued dual ultimata about Iran. The latter ultimatum is one of timetable, which forces on the former an urgency that doesn't really exist. But again, as said, that first ultimatum involves a false dichotomy: either America must act, or Israel will be compelled to. The entire issue is engineered as an apologia for preemptive war: the clock is ticking, and if you don't help us, we'll have no choice.

What Goldberg staggeringly omits is the presence of 150,000 American troops in Iraq — a nation between Israel and Iran.

Picture the United States as if it were the entire world. Come on, as Americans, we all already do that anyway.

Picture California as "America." Now imagine Georgia is "Iran." Alabama is "Iraq." And Mississippi is "Israel." Let's say that California hates Georgia, loves Mississippi and is hanging around in Alabama for a while to try to fix it — because fuck knows it's already an undeveloped sectarian backwater that hates heresy and homosexuals and treats women like shit.

Now imagine what would happen if Mississippi engaged in a preemptive attack on Georgia, and most of our active armed forces were stuck in Alabama already. What do you think we'd do?

Barack Obama's first telephone call to an international leader, as president, was to the leader of Hamas. He was then, at least as far as American rhetoric is concerned, critical of Israel's intractability in coming to peaceful terms with the Palestinians after the recent conflict in Gaza. Following that, he intended to name Charles Freeman Chairman of the National Intelligence Council. Freeman had said, on the record:

Israel has had for 40 years land beyond its previously established borders to trade for peace. It has been unable to make this exchange except when a deal was crafted for it by the United States, imposed on it by American pressure, and sustained at American taxpayer expense. For the past half decade Israel has enjoyed carte blanche from the United States to experiment with any policy it favored to stabilize its relations with the Palestinians and its other Arab neighbors, including most recently its efforts to bomb Lebanon into peaceful coexistence with it and to smother Palestinian democracy in its cradle.

Pro-Zionist lobbies in the United States, most notably AIPAC and the ADL, castigated Freeman and provoked his withdrawal from the position.

Given that string of administration acknowledgements, comments and appointments, it's not hard to imagine how hardliners in Israel would see the Obama presidency as inherently unsympathetic to Israeli needs. And while I know it might ring hollow to pro-Zionists to say that I don't think this is some sort of "International Jewish Conspiracy," and while I realize that I open myself to all manner of cheap claims to anti-Semitism, I think it's extremely naïve not to consider the realpolitik possibility that this current Iranian issue has been artificially inflated while American troops lie between two states that might be in conflict.

Deployment of troops is costly and slow. There is an inertia to rousing a lumbering beast. If Obama's plan to draw down troop presence in Iraq and both redeploy them to Afghanistan while sending even more troops home comes to pass, a sudden redeployment to protect the State of Israel would become both logistically untenable but also popularly insupportable in the U.S.

However, if Israel were determined to force a resolution of the nuclear issue in Iran by military intervention, now would be the time to do it. Obama, like all democrats, is beholden to Jewish-American donors and voters. And Obama, like all democrats, is also easy prey for comments about military weakness and lack of resolve. If Israel creates a sudden military issue between itself and Iran while American troops stand ready to react, Obama would assure his own political suicide in the eyes of American Jews and pro-Zionist foreign policy hardliners by not interceding for Israel.

That's what's most frightening about Goldberg's interview. Not the historical whitewashes, fallacies, unfair comparisons, absurd timetables and the idiotic slant that admits no subtlety emanating from the Israeli establishment. No, not that: the immediacy.

All those other issues are things that can be subject to debate and analysis, which Goldberg doesn't offer. That absence of criticism in his writing would be forgotten in the outbreak of war. Just like everything else. If the issue is forced, once it becomes force, there will be no debate, because we will be committed by ultimata we didn't issue for aims that don't necessarily help us, in defense of attitudes that might undermine us. For what purpose?

By then, there won't be time to ask that last question.