Israel, Alone (Justin Raimondo)

 The nuclear cat is out of the bag – and Olmert issues a warning…

  by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com

  Dec. 13, 2006 -- Israel's long-standing policy of nuclear ambiguity came to an end the other day when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in answer to a question about his country's rumored WMD arsenal, replied:

  "Iran openly, explicitly, and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they [the Iranians] are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?"

   Ha'aretz avers, "It is not clear whether this was a slip of the tongue on the part of Olmert or an intended statement" –- and his aides and supporters are certainly scrambling to explain his comments away as a linguistic mix-up. Yet, taken in context -– not only the context of the interview, but the context of Israel's present position -– I would argue the Israeli Prime Minister was sending a message not only to Iran, but also to the United States.

  As a rebuke to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rants about wiping Israel off the map, Olmert's is the perfect retort. Everyone knows that Israel has at least 400 nukes, and it isn't hard to guess in which direction they're aimed. Olmert is pointedly reminding the Iranians of what everyone has known for quite some time. All the Israeli prime minister has to do is give the order, and Tehran would be reduced to a pool of molten glass.

  The message sent to Washington –- and, indeed, to the entire world -– is that Israel is making a clean break with the policies of the past, based as they were on a strategy of economic, diplomatic, and military dependence on Western allies. Israel feels it has been abandoned by the West, including not only Britain but also the U.S. – and all bets are off.

  This fear of abandonment, although greatly exaggerated, is not entirely unfounded. It is based on a sensitive reading of the political dynamics in the U.S. and the threatened future of Israel's "special relationship" with the Americans.

  The Israel lobby in the United States has recently taken it on the chin four times in a row, without so much as getting a punch in edgewise: it started with the arrest and indictment of two top AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, for espionage. They are charged with funneling classified information, some of it high-level stuff, to Israeli embassy officials. Then there was the Harvard University research paper authored by professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, documenting and decrying what they called "the Lobby" and its distorting effect on American foreign policy. Now there's the Baker-Hamilton commission linking the Palestinian question to our "grave and deteriorating" prospects in Iraq, and, to top it off, the Jimmy Carter book.

  The Lobby is reeling. For the first time since the Eisenhower era, our Israeli-centric policy in the Middle East is being openly and successfully challenged. In the past, Israel's amen corner in the U.S. has been able to effectively neutralize all critics by smearing them, and the charge of "anti-Semitism" has been applied with an absurdly broad brush to everyone from Gore Vidal to Pat Buchanan and all points in between. However, this case is getting increasingly hard to make. Are we now to believe that the U.S. Department of Justice, Harvard University, Baker and the Bush I crowd, and Jimmy Carter are all part of a vast anti-Semitic conspiracy?\

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