This is the thinking that scares me, and that is prevalent throughout Jewish life: Mark Helprin saying at the Wall Street Journal in a piece called “Why Israel Needs the Bomb,” that he’s sure glad Israel’s got the bomb because of the delegitimization campaign against its policies. The message of the piece seems to be, Israel will nuke people before Jews will share power with Palestinians. (Did the South Africans say that? What about Saddam? Even going down, he didn’t use nerve gas, right?)
Jeffrey Goldberg offered a similar rationale for Israeli attack on Iran a few weeks back: “The only reason Israel would risk rupturing relations with America [by attacking Iran] is if it feels it would have no future in an Iran-dominated Middle East.” No future means just what Helprin means– If Israel couldn’t still be the Jewish state. (How do American Jews feel about this? Is it worth warfare to maintain this ethnocracy?)
Helprin’s lead contains some fancy footwork:
Sixty-five years after Germany’s campaign to exterminate the Jews, of the many countries in the world Israel is the only one repeatedly subjected to calls for its extinction. Though Pakistan and India, like Israel and the Arabs, have suffered population exchange and territorial wars, neither questions the other’s right to exist.
Notice the word “countries” in the first sentence. Pakistan and India are countries; they both became countries 63 years ago. A year later, the Israelis got a country, and the Palestinians got… nothing. But Helprin deals with that by saying that it’s the country of Israel against the country of “the Arabs.” But “the Arabs” have actually accepted Partition, even a Partition on less than half the original Partition!
