George Gilder - The Israel Test

This experience transformed Netanyahu’s life, somewhat in the way that the death of Joseph P. Kennedy in World War II changed the life of his brother John F. Kennedy Jr. In the United States at the time, Benjamin Netanhayu resolved to enter politics, with a focus on combating terrorism.

After founding the Jonathan Institute, Netanyahu called a conference on terrorism in July of 1979 in Jerusalem. He attracted such notables as George H. W. Bush, then a former head of the CIA, as well as future Reagan cabinet leaders George Schultz and Ed Meese, then-FBI Director William Webster, and soon-to-be American ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick. To this group Netanyahu offered shocking details of a Soviet network of training camps for Muslim terrorists.

Out of this conference came Netanyahu’s first book, an edited compilation of the speeches from the event together with two analytical chapters by the editor. It was called International Terrorism: Challenge and Response; Proceedings of the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism . The second conference was held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, DC, in 1984, and attracted another group of luminaries and produced another notable book, Terrorism: How the West Can Win , also edited and with an introduction by Netanyahu. Highly impressed, George Schultz gave the book to Ronald Reagan, and he is said to have read it later on a plane to Asia. Then in 1995, Netanyahu wrote his own book, Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat the International Terrorist Network , which was republished after 9/11 with a foreword consisting of his September 20, 2001, speech to Congress.

Netanyahu singlehandedly shaped the U.S. response to terror of three American administrations. Like Churchill, he took his enemies at their own word and resolved to overcome them, whatever it might take. His own first administration ended in three years with an economic crisis caused by the bursting of the tech bubble, and he was defeated in a sweep by his former special forces commander, Ehud Barak. But both Netanyahu’s economic policies and his view of terrorism were vindicated by subsequent events.

Netanyahu is a flawed politician, but he is flawed like Churchill — stogies and drink (though Bibi is a teetotaler compared to Churchill’s famed capacity) and a succession of three wives. Like Churchill, Netanyahu was more than a decade ahead of his contemporaries in grasping that the enemy is serious and that their stated goals must be weighed seriously. Now he must confront the Iranians at a time when it appears that the only plausible path is the overthrow of their government. Perhaps, though, there is an implausible alternative.

“The first and most crucial thing to understand [about terrorism],” as Netanyahu told the U.S. Congress after 9/11, is that “there is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states…. Terrorists are not suspended in midair. They train, arm, and indoctrinate their killers from within safe havens in the territories provided by terrorist states.” The reality is that Hezbollah and Hamas are creatures of Iran, that al-Qaida is harbored by Pakistan, that the Palestinian Authority depends on Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Nations, and that the Kurdish PKK, the Islamic jihad, and Hamas all subsist on Syrian support. North Korea aids Iran and Pakistan in their nuclear ambitions, which portend the most lethal threat that terrorism poses.

Even suicide bombings, as Netanyahu observes, “are seldom carried out by solitary individuals. A whole array of people inculcate the suicide, provide him with explosives, guide him in their use, select the chosen target, arrange for his undetected arrival there, and promise to take care of his family after the deed is done. In short, suicide attacks require a significant infrastructure, and the people who provide it are anything but suicidal.” These people are all ensconced in nation-states, and by them are taught, sustained, encouraged and their families financially rewarded. In addition, he explains, the “terrorist states and terror organizations together form a terror network, whose constituent parts support each other operationally as well as politically.”

Netanyahu spurns the romantic image of the lone caveman terrorist who poses a mere police problem. As Boston University strategist Angelo Codevilla explains the issue, this concept “substitute[s] in our collective mind the soft myth that terrorism is the work of romantic rogues for the hard reality that it can happen only because certain states want it to happen or let it happen.”

The influence on U.S. policy of Netanyahu’s great insight has been both profound and lamentably limited. When George W. Bush responded to 9/11 by finally dropping the cops-and-robbers model of fighting terrorism, focusing instead on punishing the Taliban, the state sponsors of 9/11, he was following Netanyahu’s prescription. Far more so than the pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the exemplary termination of the Taliban regime was the crucial response to 9/11, defining the risk to any state sponsors contemplating attacks on the United States.

Missing Netanyahu’s message and perpetuating the myth of stateless terrorism is the U.S. practice of declaring war on something called “terror” while continuing to offer foreign aid and prestige to the very governments that enable and sponsor actual terrorist acts. Apart from drug dealing, none of the terrorist organizations have any substantial means of internal support. None of them is capable of running a country that partakes of the productive activities of humankind. Most of them run front organizations as shells for the collection of money from the West in a kind of global shakedown racket. As Michael Yon shows in his devastating portrait of al-Qaida in his book, Moment of Truth in Iraq , the terrorists’ grip on the local population is driven more by fear and dependency than by any heartfelt unity.

Sustaining this terrorist network of states is largely foreign aid to governments, together with environmental bars to energy production in the West that endow despots with economic power. Terrorism will continue as long as these literally suicidal Western policies continue. Without the support of the United Nations and U.S. foreign aid, many of the mendicant oppressor states of the third world would wither away, liberating their people to join the adventure of productive capitalism.

Netanyahu’s message is that terrorist nations are not strong. They are pathetically weak. His counsel is to “oppose the bad things when they are small.” Libya during the Qaddafi era was perhaps the leading perpetrator of terrorism, financing assassinations and bombings around the globe and killing Libyan exiles in the West. An effective program of sanctions against Libya coupled with the exclamation point of a bombing led to a rapid, albeit impermanent, change in Libyan policy by persuading Khaddafi to give up his nuclear weapons.

Terrorists gain all their power and momentum from the compulsive “negotiations,” the multipronged founts of foreign aid, the “peace-keeping” forces, and the legal contortions of the cowering West. As Netanyahu points out, “Terrorism has the unfortunate quality of expanding to fill the vacuum left to it by passivity or weakness.” But this murderous momentum, feeding on the pacifist flailing and self-abuse and outflung alms and oblations of the West, will rapidly reverse when faced with resolute resistance. He writes: “Once the terrorists know that virtually the entire population will stand behind the government’s decision never to negotiate with them, the possibility of actually extracting political concessions [from the West] will begin to look exceedingly remote.” The terrorist afflatus will dissipate and the momentum can be reversed.