Beware the Bibi gun

When I was young, my mother would always tell me the story of a boy shot in the face with a BB gun to remind me of the danger of guns.

Someone needs to give President Barack Obama the same advice.

Back in 1955, a battle over the soul of Israeli policy was raging within the walls of its government.

At one end stood the activists, led by David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan.

At the core of the activist school of thought was the belief that the world was a dangerous place and that the only language the Arabs would understand was the language of force, of the bayonet.

At the time, the activists believed Israel was facing a deteriorating political situation and the only way to solve this was through a “preventative” military demonstration, specifically against Gamal Nasser of Egypt.

At the other end stood the Sharettists, led by Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett.

Although not opposed to military action on principle, the Sharettists were convinced that negotiations with the Arabs could be fruitful, and peaceful coexistence was possible in the Middle East.

The Sharettists’ conviction that Israel had to play by the rules of international behavior led them to cast a suspicious eye towards Dayan’s increasingly reckless schemes to push Egypt into war.

Of course, we know how this story ends. The Sharettists lost, and in a case of vomit-inducing imperialism, Israel colluded with the colonial-minded Britain and France to launch an attack after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal.

Enraged, the superpowers forced the three countries to withdraw from Egypt soon after.

As an ultimatum, the Eisenhower administration threatened to cut off all public and private American aid to Israel and throw Israel out of the United Nations.

More than a paltry history lesson, this battle has continued to play out over the course of Israeli history and has recently been reignited over the question of whether Israel should attack Iran.

The chief public opponents of a strike have been from the older military generation and are led by former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who said last year that an Israeli air strike on Iran would be “the stupidest thing I have ever heard” and “patently illegal under international law.”

But unlike on the road to Suez, all the modern Sharettists have left
the government.

Left behind are the trigger-happy hawks at the helm, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu — who would make a better GOP candidate than any of the current clowns — and Defense Minister Ehud Barak straight out of the Labor activist tradition.

To these men, Iran is the symbolic existential threat to the Jewish nation, to which the basic solution is the overthrow of the Iranian regime.

Thus, through the lens of this ideology, attacking Iran is a foregone conclusion. The only question is, how soon?

Of course, as those of us beholden to different ideologies realize, Israel’s attack on Iran would be disastrous for the world.

As Admiral Mullen has put it, an attack on Iran would be “a big, big, big problem for all of us, and I worry a great deal about the unintended consequences.”

Because of our yoking to Israel, America would inevitably be drawn in.

Also, because of our interests in Iraq and Afghanistan, there will be unavoidable mission creep.

And let’s just say a joint Israeli-American regime change would not be welcomed with open arms, even if it didn’t start a world war.

Today, there is only one man who can prevent Israel’s attack on Iran.

In 2002, he was an obscure state senator who spoke against a “dumb war” in the Middle East as the drums of war were beating. Today, on the strength of that claim, that man is our president.

In a world where the “Atlanta Jewish Times” is calling for Israel to assassinate Obama over Iran, there can be no prevarication, no hesitation, no options left open to Bibi.

To save the world from the activists, President Obama must gather the strength to deliver a change and publicly declare that the United States will not militarily support Israel in an attack on Iran.

I fear nothing else will save the world from the Bibi gun about to go off in
our face.

­— sidfletc@umail.iu.edu