Israel should strike Iran

RHONDA SPIVAK

Retired Israeli ambassador to the United States Yoram Ettinger said he favors Israel striking Iran militarily, "not in a matter of months but hopefully in the next few days."

In an interview following his keynote address in Winnipeg at a Passover lunch sponsored by Canadian Friends of Hebrew University, Ettinger said regarding Iran, "preemption is essential. There are no non-military solutions that will stop Iran from going nuclear."

Ettinger, who served from 1989-1992 as minister of congressional affairs at Israel's embassy in Washington, D.C., a position that confers the title of ambassador, added, "Every day Israel waits [to attack Iran] makes it more difficult to do."

According to Ettinger, Israel should not "delude itself" into thinking that the notion of retaliation would persuade a nuclear Iran not to attack Israel militarily. "Israel does not have an option of retaliation ... if Iran goes nuclear, the mere threat of an attack on Israel will be enough to take the state [of Israel] down.... The economy would slow down, foreign investment would slow down, aliyah would slow down, people in Israel would want to leave the country and this would doom the Jewish state into gradual extinction."

Ettinger said the concept that Israel's option of retaliation would deter Iran, "ignores the reality that in 1980 to 1986, Iran proved itself willing to sacrifice two million of its people, including one million children, in its six-year war with Iraq."

He said that, in terms of human life or, political, military and economic consequences, "whatever the costs of an operation [they] would be dwarfed by the costs of Iran dropping a nuclear bomb on Israel."

Ettinger said that Israel has shown before that it will take action notwithstanding world public opinion when it has felt it had to.

"In 1981, [former Israeli prime minister] Menachem Begin took a decision to destroy Iraq's nuclear reactor, in defiance of the U.S.'s threat to excommunicate him, in defiance of what the Europeans and the world wanted, in defiance of what the Mossad and military intelligence advised him.... He did it even though his [then] minister of defence Ezer Weizman was against it, and though Shimon Peres opposed it and leaked it to the press ... he did it for Israel's long-term interests," Ettinger said.

Ettinger, a former director of the government press office in Jerusalem from 1988-1989, also said he believes that the "global atmosphere [against a military strike] is less problematic today than in 1981." As he said, "1981 was before 9/11, before the terror attacks in London and Spain, before the war in Afghanistan."

When asked if he thought Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would decide to strike Israel militarily, he said, "I don't know," but he hoped that Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak would make a decision to do so. He said he hoped that Barak had decided to join Netanyahu's government because the two both understood that there ought to be a military strike on Iran.

"The question is, are we headed by politicians or statesmen? A statesman [such as Begin] is willing to sacrifice short-term inconvenience for long-term interests," he said.

Ettinger said he voted for Likud in this election, not because he liked Netanyahu but to try to help more people at the bottom of Likud get into the Knesset, "because the bottom of Likud has better people than the top."

Since retiring as an ambassador, Ettinger has been a consultant to Israeli cabinet members and legislators and to the Knesset foreign affairs and defence committee on U.S.-Israel bilateral projects, U.S. policy and Mideast politics.

When asked why he didn't vote for Avigdor Lieberman, Ettinger said, "Because he has said he's committed to the Road Map, which will lead to a two-state solution" and Ettinger said he doesn't believe in that. "Lieberman has said he will even leave his home in Nokdim for peace ... and he has also said he thinks it would be OK to have NATO forces instead of the IDF in Judea and Samaria," Ettinger added, noting that he disagreed with both of these ideas.

In the interview, Ettinger, who lives in Jerusalem and is the president of U.S.-Israel Opportunities Ltd., also said that he wasn't always right-wing in his outlook. "In 1974, I was told by Abba Eban [then Israel's foreign minister] that I was too dovish!... But then I got involved in a Middle East research unit for close to 10 years and underwent an educational change."

In regards to Israel's relations with the United States, Ettinger was critical of President Barack Obama's suggestion that the unresolved Palestinian issue is the root cause of turbulence in the Middle East. "This is not true," said Ettinger, "because turbulence in the Middle East has been going on for 1,400 years. How can the Arab-Israeli conflict, which has only been going on for 100 years, be responsible for that? Obama's assumption is out of touch with reality," Ettinger said.

Rhonda Spivak is a freelance writer and the editor of Winnipeg's Jewish Post and News.

^TOP