Lord God.... How can Jacob stand, He is so small?

Dearest Friends,

This month I offer a blog not of my own making. Instead here is an article that was forwarded to me.

It is copied exactly as written, all emphasis original from the author. I have not altered it in any way.

It is very powerful & ought to be read by every world leader today, for I believe it states plainly the truth.

Ever "politically incorrect"
Rivka


Facing Suicide Bombers and Suicide States: How Shall Israel Stand?
Louis René Beres - Dec 16, 2008

Lord God.... How can Jacob stand, He is so small?
Amos 7:2

In patently ritualized chants from Iran, threats to annihilate Israel are now a commonplace. Were it not for that country's complementary capacity to inflict major harms – a capacity that has now become existential - these genocidal threats might not really be all that worrisome. But Tehran’s ascent to full membership in the Nuclear Club is now less than two years away, and such membership may also coincide with a fixed and firm Iranian leadership belief in the Shi’ite apocalypse. It follows that Jerusalem could soon have to face not only Palestinian suicide-bombers, but also, in Iran, the suicide bomber in macrocosm.It would be a daunting confrontation. The true goal of Israel's myriad Islamist enemies, not only the goal expressed openly by Iran, is extermination. Even in a world that has grown comfortable with every conceivable form of slaughter, Israel remains the object of glaringly new kinds of crimes against humanity. In the bitterest of ironies, an ancient nation that was ingathered to prevent another Holocaust has now become the dominant focus of yet another “final solution.”

For the Jews, it must seem, yet again, that there is nothing new under the sun. Looked at more broadly, the goal of Israel's enemies, especially Iran and the still-impending Palestinian state (Hamas, Fatah, it won’t really make a difference) is to be left standing while Israel is forced to disappear. For these irremediable enemies of a Jewish state, there can be no coexistence of any kind. Never. This is because their own survival presumably requires Israel's extinction.

Soon, the next president of the United States, Barack Obama, will soberly and seriously extol the virtues of the same old twisted cartography – that is, the so-called “Road Map” to peace in the Middle East. Yet, like the Oslo Agreements that preceded it, this plan is premised on Israel’s acceptance of land for nothing.

Asymmetrical international agreements always miss an important point: International law is not a suicide pact. Under the longstanding customary rule of "anticipatory self-defense," Israel still has every right to strike first at developing Iranian nuclear infrastructures. Further, to undertake such a preemption could become more than a legal right. In certain circumstances, it could even become a distinct obligation, not only to the imperiled people of Israel, but also to the most elementary expectations of civilized international relations.

If anticipatory self-defense remains operationally possible (a problematic determination at this point), Jerusalem should not be inhibited by smug assurances of alternative protections from the “international community.” Here, for Israel to decline an operationally plausible preemption could be nothing less than an implicit acknowledgment that international law may expressly defile international justice.

It must be a fatal mistake for Israel to believe that Reason and Justice govern the world. It must be an unforgivable error for Israel to project its own Western, rational and humane sentiments upon its most relentless and barbarous foes. It would be a life risk for Israel to seek to remain standing by stubbornly clinging to false promises and manifestly false hopes.

It is always an error for Israel to fashion policies upon fundamentally incorrect assumptions. Whether in Gaza, West Bank (Judea/Samaria) or Tehran, Israel's Jihadist enemies wish to kill Jews because such murder is felt to be a deeply sacred obligation. For these enemies, killing Jews is plainly an expression of religious sacrifice, and – perhaps most significantly - one that will confer precious immunity from personal death.

Could there be any greater incentive to plan the next genocide of Jews, albeit in this case one in which war and terror have become the prescribed method of extermination? This idea of death as a zero-sum commodity - "I kill you; I therefore remain alive forever" - has been explained in some of the finest psychology literature. For example, it is captured perfectly in Ernest Becker's paraphrase of Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti: "Each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good."

Shouldn't this idea be especially obvious to the Jewish People? Isn't it time that Israel finally start to elect leaders who can understand what Otto Rank had revealed so courageously in Will Therapy and Truth and Reality: "The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the Sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed."

Israel's enemies, in order to remain standing - and to prevent Israel from standing up - seek to sacrifice the Jewish State on a blood-stained altar of war and terrorism. The idea of sacrifice, therefore, is absolutely central to what is now happening in the Middle East. The planned genocidal destruction of Israel is integrally part of a system of religious worship that is oriented toward the conquest of personal death.

Present-day Israel should not simply ignore four thousand years of Jewish history and world politics. The true source of global influence is always power, and the greatest expression of raw power is always the conquest of death. For the president of Iran, and for the proposed government of executioners now battling each other for control in a future Palestinian state, killing Jews - indeed, killing Israel itself - offers an incomparable fusion of private ecstasy and personal survival. These sworn enemies of Israel are much more than dimly aware that in killing Jews and in killing Israel, they will have killed their own death. For the Islamist "martyr," whether as a terrorist individual or as a murderous individual writ large (i.e.,, the state of Iran), killing Jews and the Jewish State is manifestly the optimal way of affirming life.

Only when Israel finally learns to understand and to appreciate this particular enemy perception will the country finally understand the overriding obligation to stay alive. To fulfill this obligation, Israel should combine a determined willingness to preemptively destroy Iran’s now nearly complete engines of atomic annihilation (a willingness spawned in part by the persistent refusal of the United States to itself exercise this expression of anticipatory self-defense) with a clear and parallel determination to resist any further territorial withdrawals from Judea/Samaria. The now-disgraced and outgoing Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, never received any sort of mandate for the further surrender of Jewish land to the Palestinians. Moreover, the People of Israel are entitled to live securely on this land without constant threats of intimidation and dispossession issued by their own foolish and cowardly leaders.

The intolerable security costs to Israel of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Gaza “disengagement” are incontestable. To the extent that Hamas continues to collaborate closely in Gaza with al-Qaeda, these costs will also have to be borne by unwitting citizens of the United States. Although still widely unreported, Hamas has begun to allow al-Qaeda elements to fashion certain WMD terror weapons for strategic use in New York, London, Washington and other selected “crusader” targets in the West.

Israel is so small, but if it can turn quickly to plain truth and serious understanding, it can still stand.

LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) lectures and publishes widely on Israeli security matters. His work is well known in Israel's political, military and intelligence communities, and to these same communities in the United States. Professor Beres was Chair of “Project Daniel.”