Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's actions are shaped by a profound conviction that Israel will be in danger of extermination if Iran has nuclear weapons at its disposal. Removing the Iranian threat to Israel has been Netanyahu's main goal for years, and the Iranians' progress in this realm has only reinforced his awareness that the fateful hour of decision is fast approaching.
Ariel Sharon called Iran a global rather than an Israeli problem. Ehud Olmert used to say no issue preoccupied him more than the nuclear threat posed by Iran. But Netanyahu's predecessors didn't describe this danger with the same gravity as he does. "We will not allow the Holocaust-deniers to perpetrate another Holocaust against the Jewish people," the prime minister warned at the state ceremony on Holocaust and Martyrs' Remembrance Day last week. Senior political figures say Netanyahu has spoken to them about the danger of another Holocaust in private conversations as well. They are convinced that he truly believes it is his historic mission to rescue the Jewish people from a catastrophe.
As far as Netanyahu is concerned, a decisive turning point in world history will occur when Iran completes its nuclear bomb. This will mean that significant control over the world's energy resources will be in the hands of a fanatical sect of ayatollahs, and will turn the Arab countries, against their will, into Tehran's satellites. Netanyahu views Israel's strategic problems as part and parcel of the ongoing struggle with Iran, a country that has built "launching bases" on the other side of the borders, in Lebanon and in Gaza, by supplying rockets to both Hezbollah and Hamas. The prime minister believes that once Iran goes nuclear, thereby turning Syria into its protege, any withdrawal from the Golan Heights will turn that territory into an Iranian front.
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In his speeches in recent years, Netanyahu has compared Iran to Nazi Germany and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to Adolf Hitler, and has spoken of the international community's silence in the face of both threats - in 1938 and at present.
"The second Holocaust" of which Netanyahu warns will not feature ghettos, trains or gas chambers, but will be characterized by an attempt to eradicate the State of Israel. In his opinion, the Jewish people's continued existence depends on the State of Israel's continued existence. Today, a great proportion of the world's Jews live in Israel, the only place where they can truly enjoy the revitalization of Jewish life, while their coreligionists are gradually being lost to assimilation elsewhere. Netanyahu sees Iran as the latest enemy that has surfaced and threatens the survival of the Jewish collective, an enemy that must be repelled, with the help of others or on our own.
A country's leaders are obligated by commitments they make in public, which often compel them to keep their promises. Here are a few examples: The Arab countries invaded Palestine in 1948 after promising to prevent the Jewish state's establishment and to help the Palestinians, but their armies were ill prepared for the mission and lost the war. In 1967, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, swept up by his own rhetoric, pushed Israel into declaring its own "red lines," thereby dragging both sides into a war that probably neither of them wanted.
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HAARETZ:
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1082131.html
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