The Yuval Steinitz Master Class

In her September 28 column in the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick set forth the short list of Israel’s “alternative leadership:”  Benjamin Netanyahu, Moshe Ya’alon, Shaul Mofaz, Yuval Steinitz, Natan Sharansky, Uzi Landau.

Yuval Steinitz was in Los Angeles last week, and JCI hosted a breakfast for him.  He is a remarkable man — a former professor at the University of Haifa, former member of Peace Now, author of four books, elected to the Knesset as part of Likud in 1999, former chair of the Knesset Foreign Affairs & Defense Committee, sometimes mentioned as the potential defense minister in a Netanyahu government.

At the breakfast, he gave what amounted to a master class on the war in Lebanon (his lengthy article in Haaretz — “The War That Was Led Astray” — remains one of the best analyses available), the place of Israel in the world, the future of Israeli politics, and the gathering storm of Iran. 

After he laid out a description of Iran’s nuclear project making it clear that, based on the number and scope of the bombs Iran is contemplating, the threat involves much more than Israel, Writer/Director Rick Lieberman responded that he thought it was unlikely the United States would respond:

I don’t think the American people have the will, and we don’t have the will, in history’s greatest time, at this time, whether because of Iraq or just because the American people are so fundamentally divided as to what our goals should be.

And that statement provoked a remarkable, seven-minute answer from Steinitz, which is worth reading in its entirety:

I can see your point, and you might be right.  I am slightly more optimistic.  But maybe I am wrong.   First, I am generally optimistic, you know?  We shouldn’t underestimate the risks, the threats to Israel — now I am speaking from an Israeli point of view, not from the free world point of view — and the risks are very serious.  But looking back, and looking to the last thirty years, I can be optimistic.  We’ve faced terrible animosities, terrible terrorist attacks — terrorist attacks and suicide bombers against us, once and again, and we suffered many casualties and many pressures and many threats, and it is not the case only that we succeed to prevail, to survive and to defend ourselves, which is good.  But more significant is we succeeded to grow, while defending ourselves.   

One would think that under such strong pressures, animosity from all around us, terrorist attacks, the population will be shrinking.  But [it did] not.  In 1976 — 30 years ago — we were three million Jews.  And now we are six million Jews.  So demographically we are in a better situation than in 1976.  In 1976, we were part of the developing world economically, and now we are part of the developed world already.  And we are stronger, much stronger than in 1976.  In 1976, our international posture was very difficult — more than today.  Despite all our complaints about anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere, in 1976 it was much worse, and we didn’t have  diplomatic relations with Russia and most of the Soviet bloc, China, with India, and many other important states.  Today we have diplomatic relations with most of the world — with Russia and China and alliances.  So the fact is, that despite all these animosities, attacks, threats, we succeeded not just to defend ourselves, but to grow in those years.  So despite the general picture with regard to Israel, we are not just surviving, but we are growing, our economy is growing, our Jewish population is growing, and our international status, posture, is better than before.  And this is very encouraging.

With regard to Iran, it is very difficult to say, but I listen to Bush and Blair.  And one thing they say is that they understand how history will judge us if we fail to stop the nuclearization of Iran. . . . [T]hey are so sensitive to this, and rightly so, the analogy to the situation in the 1930s.  It is very different, and yet, too similar.  And this might help them to get to the right decision. 

And by the way, sometimes — and this is the question of true leadership — sometimes you get the support of the people, not before you get the right decisions, but after. 

. . . [A]s I said before, the war on global terrorism is successful — very successful.  After September 11 one could expect — there was such enthusiasm all over the Arab world — I saw it in Israel in the Islamic community.  You know, there was, four days after [September 11] there was a gathering of the Israeli Islamic Movement — which is legal in Israel — 40,000 people gathered, and the head of the movement, Sheik Mohammed Darwish, said — and I’m quoting now, it was on Israeli television — “I want to tell you” — and the crowd was cheering — “I want to tell President Bush and the United States, the truth, and the truth is if you don’t want further attacks, and more serious attacks, like what happened to you in New York and Washington, there is only one solution:  You should convert to Islam.” . . .  and 40,000 Arab Israelis were cheering. 

[But] you put strong pressure on Arab regimes, to stop this public support of Bin Laden.  This was significant.  You pressured Saudi Arabia to stop financing schools worldwide that were supporting worldwide such strong animosity to the Western world and the United States of America.  This was a very successful campaign.  And not less important, you destroyed al Qaeda training bases in Afghanistan which enabled them to bring thousands — and maybe after September 11 hundreds of thousands — to be trained and indoctrinated terrorists.  So although al Qaeda still exists . . . unlike six years ago, al Qaeda has no bases, no country will host their bases. . . . no regime will support them.  And this is significant, because after September 11 experts expected that because it was such a success, from the terrorist point of view, that now many people will join in, and the West, especially the United States, will suffer from many such attacks, much more than before.  It didn’t occur.  This is a very significant success. 

And the people usually don’t appreciate it, don’t understand . . . and I tell you something:  when Churchill wanted to challenge Germany and refused to [seek] any peace agreement or cease-fire with Germany, most people in Britain didn’t understand it.  It was not the fact that most of the people in Britain immediately followed Churchill. . . . 

Sometimes you have to take decisions and people will follow you if it is the right decision. 

In Iraq something very bad happened.  I am not confident any more that it was the right decision.  Of course it was based on wrong intelligence.  I was the head of the Israeli inquiry committee, following the war in Iraq, on intelligence. . . . [But] In Iran, we don’t estimate:  we know.  It is totally different.  In Iraq it was based on estimates, and maybe it was not so wise to have a ground invasion and, all the more so, the ways you handled it thereafter.  But this does not mean that you cannot get the right decision [on Iran] because this is a totally different – a different level of threat than posed by Iraq and Saddam Hussein. 

Almost exactly at the same time that Yuval Steinitz was responding to Rick Lieberman in Los Angeles, President George W. Bush was holding a press conference in Washington, D.C.  In response to one of the questions, Bush said this:

I know it’s incumbent upon our government and others who enjoy the blessings of liberty to help those moderates [in the Middle East] succeed because, otherwise, we’re looking at the potential of this kind of world: a world in which radical forms of Islam compete for power; a world in which moderate governments get toppled by people willing to murder the innocent; a world in which oil reserves are controlled by radicals in order to extract blackmail from the West; a world in which Iran has a nuclear weapon.

And if that were to occur, people would look back at this day and age and say, what happened to those people in 2006? How come they couldn’t see the threat to a future generation of people?

George W. Bush has a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office.  He is undoubtedly aware of the theme that Churchill put on the front page of Volume I (“The Gathering Storm”) of his history of World War II, covering the years leading up to the war:  “How the English-Speaking Peoples, Through Their Unwisdom, Carelessness, and Good Nature, Allowed the Wicked to Rearm.”