When Shimon Peres, architect of the disastrous Israel-PLO Agreement of 1993, said one can learn nothing from history, he was recorded in the Guinness Record book as the personification of Chronological Myopia and Arrogance or Smugness.

Chronological myopia: the diagnosis

The Knesset, observing 61 years of existence. Photo: Itzik Edri, CC BY 2.5 Generic License

Smugness permeates Israel’s decrepit government. The smugness of its leaders has produced, in addition to myopia, curvature of the spine or, Scoliosis. These defects are also evident among America’s political elites.

As a dual citizen of these two countries I see a lot of Barack Obama in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu despite their obvious differences. Like BO, Bibi is not a statesman but a party man. I say this because both lack not only the wisdom but also the ambition to promote solid and national pride and purpose.

I find it remarkable that these two men, so different in other respects, have no constructive goal derived from the foundational documents of their respective countries. Their goals are morally uninspiring and intellectually insipid.

What high-toned person would gladly struggle and fight for the mundane goals of such party hacks?

If they were statesmen rather than party men, they would not only articulate, with realism and vivacity, not only the abiding and cherished ideas and ideals of their respective countries. No, they would also elucidate with reason and evidence, the implacable evil of their country’s enemies.

Of course, this is impossible for Obama because he is a post-American President. Moreover, Obama is a self-professed multicultural moral relativist, who also poses as a Muslim without a stitch of moral or logical consistency!

Meanwhile, his American counterpart, PM Netanyahu, has jettisoned Israel’s territorial integrity and national identity by endorsing the creation of a Palestinian or Muslim-Arab state in Israel’s ancestral homeland.

This manifestation of Netanyahu’s scoliosis has encouraged Mahmoud Abbas, the villain who heads the Palestinian Authority, to brazenly declare that Jerusalem must be the capital of Netanyahu’s territorial gift to the local disciples of Muhammad.

Since Netanyahu has bestowed this gift on Abbas, no one should be surprised if Israel’s PM compromises on Jerusalem. In as much as “land for peace” has been his secular religion since he became Israel’s Prime Minister in 1995, it has modulated much his adult life, long enough to have twisted his mind and affected the curvature of his spine.

The remedy: some definite and some tentative considerations

Just as America must jettison Obama, so Israel must rid herself of Netanyahu. Bibi talks right of center, but his acts often expose him to be like the Ariel Sharon that Reuven Rivlin described as a Mapainik, or closet leftist. Only recall his position as a minister in Sharon’s cabinet: he voted for the July 2005 expulsion of the 8,000 Jews from Gaza, contrary to the June 2005 warnings given to the Knesset Security and Defense Committee by generals Moshe Yaalon and Aharon Ze’evi-Farkash, respectively Israel’s Defense and Intelligence Directors.

The present writer maintains that Israel must go on the offensive! Israel will therefore need a Prime Minister whose military echelon is headed by generals comparable in ferocity to the Americans George Patton and Omar Bradley. Needed are concerted shock-and-awe attacks that eliminate the entire terrorist network West of the Jordan River. This would entail destroying the infrastructures of Fatah and Hamas as well as the Hezbollah forces in Lebanon. The latter requires closing the terrorist gate from Syria. This should have been done in 1982, in the first war in Lebanon. Whether this can be done today with Iran in the picture is problematic, although Iran’s nuclear weapons program surely calls for air-and-sea launched attacks against Teheran’s command and control centers.

At stake is Israel’s survival. Hence, miracles aside, preemption is necessary, as others, with empirical-based knowledge of strategic affairs have affirmed.◙