Symposium: Israel's Test

What are the dire threats Israel now faces? Will it be able to equip itself to face them? To explore these questions with us today, Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel. Our guests are:

[Caroline] Glick: One of the reasons that Israel finds itself in its present predicament is because its leadership -- both political and cultural -- has failed to understand one central fact and act on it in a constructive fashion. This fact is that Israel is a central front - if not the central front in the global jihad.

The fact that this is the case is made clear from a number of indicators. First, as Ken Levin rightly points out, demonization of Israel; negation of the right of the Jewish people to exist, let alone exert sovereignty over our homeland; and sponsorship through financing, training, arming and marketing of the Palestinian jihad against Israel, crosses all intra-Islamic lines. Saudi Arabia and Iran which daily compete for leadership of the Islamic world; Iran and Egypt which have not have full diplomatic relations since 1979, can all cooperate harmoniously in supporting the Palestinian war against the Jewish state.

Second, the Islamic world, whether organized in the Arab League or in the Organization of the Islamic Conference or in Islamic groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, uses its refusal to accept Israel's right to exist as a rallying cry to enlist Muslims to the ranks of the global jihad whether through groups such as al Qaida or Hizbullah or Islamist cells in places like Britain and Norway.

Israel is perceived in a political sense as an American enclave in the Islamic world which must be destroyed as a first step towards the destruction of Western Civilization.

From a religious perspective, the existence of a Jewish state in what would otherwise be a wholly Islamic-ruled continent that extends from the Mediterranean Sea to Pakistan, is an insult and indeed a repudiation of the jihadist view of Islam as the religion that must dominate the world.

As noted by Ken and Rael and David already, the Israeli political and cultural elites are unwilling for a host of psychological and parochial reasons to acknowledge the war against Israel's central role in the global jihad and as a result the importance of an Israeli victory against our enemies for Western civilization as a whole.

This refusal of Israel to acknowledge the nature of the war being waged against us and the centrality of Israeli national security to the security of the West in general is raft with consequences not only for Israel but for the West in general and for America in particular.

Specifically, by presenting the war against Israel as a unique war not related to the larger jihad, the Israeli leadership obfuscates a global reality that desperately needs clarification if Israel is to survive and if the West is to persevere against the jihadist onslaught.

Israel's refusal to acknowledge the importance of its role in global security has caused successive governments to form policies like the retreats from Gaza, south Lebanon and northern Samaria that led to the creation of safe havens for both local and global jihadists from which they not only attack Israel but train to conduct attacks throughout the region and world.

By refusing to acknowledge its importance in the international fight against the global jihad, Israel's leaders have underplayed Israel's importance for US national security. Generally speaking Israeli leaders act as though the US is doing us a favor by supporting Israel militarily and diplomatically. But the fact of the matter is that Israeli defeats and general weakening are dangerous for America's national security interests both at home and around the world because Israel and the US are perceived by our common foes as two sides of the same coin.

By so obfuscating Israel's central importance to the US, Israeli leaders have played into the hands of powerful actors in the US who are intent on denying the very existence of the global jihad -- to the detriment of US national security. These actors, whose views manifested themselves most forcefully in the Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq -- seize on Israel's unwillingness to explain its importance to the US and use it to advance the false and dangerous view that the global jihad --to the extent that it exists at all -- is the Jews' fault and if Israel is simply squeezed hard enough, the Islamic world will abandon their faith and end their war against the free world.

In light of all of this it is important for Americans to understand that they cannot afford a weak Israel, one that is "tired of fighting" but rather need to support voices in Israel that are capable of making the case for a robust offensive against the forces of global jihad that seek the destruction of the Jewish state as a step towards the defeat of the US and the subjugation of Christianity.

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