168. Why I want to draw the red line with Benjamin Netanyahu.

"I don't want to do anything with Benjamin Netanyahu.  He does what his God wants.  That's the worst reason in the world to do something in foreign affairs or politics."

What do you mean 'his God wants'?  He never mentions God.  He never appeals to him. 

"No, but he's the head of the God party, the party that believes that the land in dispute over there is theirs because God gave it to them.  Question any decision, propose any compromise, soften any action, and there they are: God wants it this way.  Can you imagine any party more difficult to deal with at a negotiating table?  I mean outside of the Party of God on the other side — the party of a different God."

No Israeli premier, including members of the opposing party, has cut back settlements.  Can they all have been God-people?

"If they're not how do you explain their actions?  They're either God-people or afraid of God-people.  They serve them.  What's the negotiating-table difference?  If you act as a duck you should be dealt with as a duck."

I agree.  But this is one duck I have to stand alongside of.  If it's a matter of denying Iran nuclear weapons I'm right there.   I can't let a country that says it hates us, calls us "the Great Satan," wants to wipe out our closest ally, and whose culture weakens (by elevating martyrdom) all normal deterrence, I can't let that country have a weapon that can do such substantial damage.

"Yet you have stood by and watched them sponsor or approve of many terrorist acts."

Terrorist acts do not do substantial damage.  They do symbolic damage, image damage.  Add up the number of deaths they cause compared to what World War II caused and you'll see what I mean by "substantial."  5,000 died at Iwo Jima in five days, 19,000 at the Bulge in two weeks.  The Russians in two weeks lost 57,000 at the Battle of Kursk.  An A-bomb raises Iran's capability to that level.

"So to prevent that you will stand by Netanyahu doing just what all the God people in Israel are doing.  You'll be saying, 'God gave them that land.'  Talk about acting like a duck!"

I know all that, and I know worse.  They tricked me into standing beside them.  They arranged it so that I had no alternative.  By settling themselves, little by little, in the Occupied Territories, they were able to reach the point where removing them became a humanitarian outrage.  All of my arguments against those God-sanctioned settlements were negated by what they called "facts on the ground."   They moved so gradually I didn't see it.  Now I stand here a fool, obviously tricked.  Yet I have to stay here.

"I can't believe it.  You, a college-educated man, standing with creationists!  Even more unbelievable is the change in those who tricked you.  Aren't they the same people who scoffed at fundamentalists in the thirties and forties?  In my college days a Jew was somebody who came to your Midwest school from New York and shot down all the fundamentalists' arguments.  I can't believe that these are the people who tricked you into standing with fundamentalists.  I can't believe they're standing there.  How can they be related to the Jews I knew?"

It doesn't matter.  Their identity doesn't matter.  Their trickery doesn't matter.  Their history doesn't matter.  What matters is the prospect of death, in substantial numbers, for my countrymen and their friends when the big bomb, dropped on or smuggled into New York, heart of the Great Satan, by an Allah-serving martyr, goes off.  With that in front of me I've got to draw the red line with Benjamin Netanyahu.

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