ISRAEL, IRAN AND THE BEGIN DOCTRINE

Special to THE JEWISH PRESS

A Column in Two Parts

14 June 2007

Louis Rene Beres

Professor of International Law

Department of Political Science

Purdue University

West Lafayette IN 47907

USA

TEL     765/494-4189

FAX    765/494-0833

lberes@purdue.edu

-------------------

          After uncovering Nazi Germany's vast kingdom of death at the end of World War II, the victorious allies drafted a special charter for an international military tribunal at Nuremberg. Concluded on August 8, 1945, this document defined "crimes against humanity" as uniquely egregious acts that are designed to eradicate entire groups of people. Today, Iran plans a Nazi-style (and, in part, a Nazi-inspired) fate for the Jewish State, but this time the exterminatory logistics would be less complicated. All that would be needed for another Holocaust are assorted nuclear weapons, either placed strategically on missiles or delivered more unexpectedly by car, truck or ship.

          To a certain extent, this warning message is already perfectly obvious, and – ironically – already a bit tiresome. It is pretty much generally known that Iranian intentions toward Israel are authentically genocidal – after all, the Iranian leadership says so openly on an almost daily basis – but what is not usually acknowledged is the absolute and immutable impotence of the so-called “international community.” Indeed, not only does the “civilized world” stand by ineffectually as Iran proceeds furiously with its enrichment of uranium and associated technological refinements, the United Nations itself insists on impotence. Adding a layer of absurdity to impending tragedy, the world body recently reelected Iran as vice chairman of the U.N. Disarmament Commission. Simultaneously, as reported in the May 2007 issue of Outpost (Americans For A Safe Israel), Alfonso de Alba of Mexico, president of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, announced that his key agency was abandoning any further consideration of human rights violations by Iran.

          Credo quia absurdum. “I believe because it is absurd.” Our international community confirms its bottomless disutility and lack of dignity by periodic celebrations of its own derangement. In the United Nations, both crime and folly remain the official order of the day. Unless we as a species were to enthusiastically welcome intermittent genocides, it is plain that the world of diplomacy and international statecraft is now a relentlessly preposterous world. I mean this in the most literal sense, of course, as everywhere a dizzying unreason triumphs boldly over both rational thought and palpable compassion.

          For the current regime in Tehran, any planned annihilation of "The Jews" is always a pleasing pretext for convulsions. It is true that this intended genocide is now directed against the institutionalized state of the Jews - the codified State of Israel, which nonetheless represents each individual Jew in macrocosm - but Iran’s annihilatory motives are unchanged. Moreover, under binding international law, war and genocide are not mutually exclusive. Any Iranian war to "liquidate the Zionist entity" would be jurisprudentially indistinguishable from what happened to the Jewish People before and during the second world war. This critical point should never be forgotten.

          In the passionately apocalyptic vision of the Iranian regime, Israel is merely the newest face of an old hatred. Whatever assaults were once directed only against flesh-and-blood Jewish individuals are now focused upon those particular Jews who are bound together in an institutionalized "entity."  Allowed to “succeed” by the international community,  Iran’s carefully crafted plan for another Jewish genocide would affect the whole world. As goes Israel, so shall go an entire planet. It should, therefore, now become an overriding imperative of the whole world – not just of the Jews – to safeguard and sustain the imperiled Jewish State.

          Let me invoke here the pertinent thought of  Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, who sought in all inquiries not “concepts of truth,” but truth itself. Influenced even by Buddhism, Kook envisioned a species with a natural evolutionary inclination to perfect itself. The course of this human evolution, he surmised, must always be directed toward a progressively increased spirituality. The Torah, he continued, is a concrete manifestation of the Divine Will on earth; thus, the entire People of Israel must assume a cosmic and redemptive role in saving the whole world. Things simply cannot be otherwise.

          Rabbi Eliezer Waldman has written movingly in The Jewish Press of “the eternal flame of Jewish life in Israel.” By working for the redemption of Israel, Rabbi Waldman instructs, we necessarily work to bring a blessing to all the peoples of the world. It follows that we Jews ought never to imagine a contradiction between our own struggle for Jewish survival in the State of Israel, and our existential concern for the wider world. The mutually reinforcing wisdom of Rabbi Kook and Rabbi Waldman points to a genuinely serious and meaningful understanding of the historically oxymoronic term, “international community.”  And this understanding belies the usually smug and ritualistic affirmations of worldwide justice and solidarity.

          The Jewish People, whether dispersed like an evaporating dew all over the world, or struggling mightily in their own state, can never trust their survival to others. Never. In The Jewish Revolution (1971), Israel Eldad painfully announced that the persisting miscalculations of “Jewish diplomacy” had hastened the Holocaust. Yet, even today, Eldad’s warning and reminder is largely unheeded. Bound first to patently suicidal agreements known cumulatively as “Oslo,” and now to the equally disingenuous documents of a so-called “Road Map,” Israel still considers making further surrenders of Judea, Samaria and Golan to sworn enemies. What strange expectations for diplomacy could possibly justify such a twisted cartography? What curious faith in the international community could conceivably prompt such unilateral concessions? Credo quia absurdum.

          Returning to diplomacy, let us understand that, in substance, the purported promise of  "negotiations" between Iran and Israel is always subterfuge. Should Iran be permitted to acquire nuclear or even certain biological weapons, the probable result to Israel might well be another Jewish genocide. Although history is largely the record of humankind’s most inhumane inclinations, its “lessons” are still worth studying.

          Here, for our purposes, relevant history begins just before the start of World War II. Beginning in 1938, small groups of predominantly Jewish scientists from Central Europe living in the United States began to express informed fears that Nazi Germany could attempt to build nuclear weapons. About two years after Albert Einstein transmitted these critical apprehensions to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his now-famous letter of August 1939, the United States launched the Manhattan Project. In part, this unprecedented effort was the result of a perceived danger by Jewish émigrés of an incontestably existential threat to the then widely dispersed European Jewish communities.

          Today it is the secular and spiritual responsibility of all "civilized nations" (I dare not say “international community”) to recognize another existential danger. This time the greatest genocidal threat is to the ingathered Jewish population of the State of Israel. Should it face the prospect of a nuclear Iran, or even of any Arab state or movement with nuclear or even certain biological weapons, Israel would likely have no rational choice but to act preemptively. This is exactly what Prime Minister Menachem Begin did on June 7, 1981, when Israel's "Operation Opera" successfully destroyed Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor.  This is also exactly what was recommended by “Project Daniel” in our special January 2003 report to then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (the report and numerous commentaries are still readily available online).

          No doubt, my readers in The Jewish Press have already heard a great deal about Project Daniel. Operation Opera, to which I also refer, and best described under international law as "anticipatory self-defense," was a tangible application of the "Begin Doctrine." This doctrine clearly affirmed Israel's policy to deny certain weapons of mass destruction to particular enemy states. It was drawn directly from Prime Minister Begin's correct awareness that the developing nuclear threat then facing Israel (at that time, from Iraq – not Iran) was merely a new form of an old cry to "slaughter the Jews."

          It is essential today that the Begin Doctrine be reinvigorated and declared. Now, just as during the second world war, Jews face the threat of mass murder because of nuclear weapons. Now, however, the danger is not that these weapons will be used by a genocidal state against other states to acquire physical custody over Jewish bodies. Instead, it is directed against that single state which was expressly created for the eternal protection of these Jewish bodies.

          The particular nuclear danger to Jews is today even greater than during World War II; that is, it looms even more menacingly over those Jews who live in Israel.  Logistically, with the concentration of more than five million Jews within a state that is the size of New Jersey, genocide has now become a much simpler operational task. In an unspeakable irony, the Zionist solution to what Herzl called the "Jewish Problem" could soon make much easier what Hitler called the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." This fact is not lost upon elements of the Arab/Islamic world, who cite to it regularly in theological justification for their planned war of Jewish extermination.

          Routinely, we know all too well, Israel comes under international pressure to dismantle and renounce its still undeclared nuclear weapons capacity. In the name of "fairness," dozens of countries, including virtually all Arab/Islamic states and certain others in Europe, insistently demand that Washington push Israel to accept a regional "nuclear weapon free-zone." Significantly, any future Israeli move to comply with such sinister or naive pressure would effectively assure Israel's explosive disappearance. Heeding the international community on such a demand,  Israel would hammer in the last nail on its own coffin.

          International law is not a suicide pact. From the standpoint of criminal intent, Israel cannot possibly be compared to Iran or to various Arab and certain other Islamic states, whose only true rationale for weapons of mass destruction vis-à-vis Israel is manifest aggression and total war. It is plain that Israel's nuclear weapons exist only for national survival and self-protection, and that these weapons - which have never been flaunted, brandished or even acknowledged - would be used only in reprisal and only for survival. Significantly, the use of nuclear weapons for national survival could be entirely permissible in certain circumstances that were identified by the International Court of Justice on July 8, 1996. In that authoritative Advisory Opinion ("The Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons"), the Court ruled as follows: "The threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law. However, in view of the current state of international law, and of the elements of fact at its disposal, the Court cannot conclude definitively whether the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be lawful or unlawful in an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a State would be at stake."

          International law cannot be properly judged and juried by journalists, pundits and television commentators. Rather, it is a complex and detailed jurisprudence that requires real learning. Like medicine, engineering or architecture, it is necessarily constructed upon a highly-generalized system of theory and concepts that mandates careful study, evaluation and interpretation.

          Faced with the newest form of organized Jewish extinction, Israel's leaders should now remind the world with full confidence that the "Begin Doctrine" is still consistent with the established right of anticipatory self-defense under international law. Following such an appropriate legal reminder, they should also make prompt preparations to prevent a looming Jewish disappearance by implementing a number of established military strategies, including comprehensive plans for the preemptive destruction of various Iranian nuclear and/or biological targets and infrastructures. Other coordinated and corollary Israeli efforts must be directed at particular Iranian regime targets, ranging from pertinent national leadership elites to those individual scientists in different parts of the globe who now fashion or prepare to fashion biological and nuclear weapons for exclusively genocidal purposes.

          The defensive killing of enemy scientists making mega-weapons for dangerous regimes to murder noncombatants is assuredly not an unprecedented practice by Israeli or American operatives. Nor, by any means, is it patently a violation of international law. Similar Israeli/American tactics of "targeted killings" must remain firmly in place against certain terrorist leaders, and should also quickly be extended and expanded to any such leaders with documented and identifiable plans to create nuclear or certain biological weapons of mass destruction.

           If European Jewish leaders in the months before September 1, 1939 had known the precise identities of German scientists and industrialists who were then designing and constructing gas chambers for Jews, would it have been wrong for these murderers to be preemptively targeted? Should we assume that the blood of would-be genociders is redder than that of utterly innocent and defenseless civilians? Instructively, for current and future reference, we already know the position of the international community before 1939. Glib archeologists of ruins-in-the-making, this community – whether for reasons of sheer evil or simply on account of docility – can always be counted upon for error. Steadfastly, and gazing indifferently over history’s already-gathered mountains of corpses, it is always poised smugly for surrender.

          During World War II, a number of Arab leaders went directly to Berlin to meet with Hitler. There they enthusiastically offered their own armed forces to extend the European annihilation of Jews to portions of the Islamic Middle East. At that time the Allies did everything possible to prevent the wartime nuclearization of Germany and, very successfully, at least for that moment, to create a nuclear monopoly for the United States. Today, aware that it cannot possibly permit Iran to acquire authentic weapons of mass destruction, Israel must finally acknowledge the infirmities of the international community, and act accordingly.

          At this very moment the terrorists of Hamas are slaughtering the terrorists of Fatah in Gaza. Nonetheless, it is to such unreconstructed devotees of ritual slaughter that the international community demands Israel surrender even more Jewish land. What is perhaps most stunning of all, one Jewish prime minister after another has capitulated to these demands for auto-destruction, the latest example being Prime Minister Olmert’s announced plan to trade the Golan for “peace” with Syria. Credo quia absurdum.

          For Israel, “disengagement” has been an unforgivable crime. Even today, in parts of Samaria, police and IDF units are deployed to keep Jews off  Jewish lands. Harking to the endlessly false promises of an international community, the present prime minister – in the fashion of several of his equally misguided predecessors – confuses surrender with diplomacy.

           There can be no authentic diplomacy with an enemy that seeks only Israel’s annihilation. Reciprocally, there should be no Jewish respect for an international community that cares vastly more for the prospective Iranian murderers than for the prospective Israeli victims. It is certainly true that substantial numbers of innocent Iranians could die in any Israeli preemptive strikes implementing anticipatory self-defense, but these deaths would be the result of Iranian “perfidy” – a codified crime under international law. Pursuant to both customary and conventional norms, all legal responsibility for these noncombatant fatalities occasioned by cynical Iranian use of “human shields” would fall directly upon the shoulders of the perfidious regime in Tehran, not upon Jerusalem.

-----------

LOUIS RENE BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Strategic and Military Affairs columnist for The Jewish Press.