I understand the reservations of the Israelis here.
The wheels of this bus have to come off very publicly if the conservative movement can have a “Don’t ever ask us to negotiate with these mutants again” moment. Nothing in the MOU is irrevocable. I worked on MOUs at the State Department often. They have weight around the discussion table and before cameras. That’s it.
I am going out on a limb with my three readers here that we are struggling with William F. Buckley’s “In Search of Antisemitism”. I wish that they’d take a look at who in (and out of) the USG is pushing this abomination. Make no mistake the strategic imperative deserve a serious answer. But we have fundamental questions to answer definitively, and this conflict is a good proxy for doing so.
Are we children of (thus brothers under) the same Lord? As peoples, do we not honor the name El Shaddai?
Answer, yes, we honor the one God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
So why would we entertain these notions that Israeli and American interests as divergent? In some small picayune matters, almost certainly that will happen. These are ripe for diplomatic working-level chats. But the larger questions require us to examine greater questions of common destinies, and thus common causes, and that must be answered and fixed upon our hearts. They must be mutually agreed upon as historically and biblically fully answered questions.
In the course of that, we must dismiss arguments that President Trump faces from members of his own political house. It is painful as it is to watch this “deal” unfold, but there is an element of theater. My prayer is that it is designed to be an exhibition of diplomatic folly. My fervent hope is that the gambit works in order to show the level of compromise within the conservative movement. One will likely find a river of mainly (though not exclusively) Qatari money there.
In so doing, we might be able to clean our own house within the conservative community and finally answer the Israel question for good so as to guard against future accretions. Only then can we clean up with overall American outlook. My hope is that it will offer the Israeli national outlook a similar opportunity because a larger issue looms.
In watching Levin last night, he discussed cold war issues with a level of gravity implying the existential questions involved. The conservative movement has roundly declared victory over the defeat of the Soviet monolith, largely at Reagan’s doing. As men/women of the right we see communism’s discredit as final.
What was deeply troubling of communism is that it was a political philosophy of “man without God”, to quote Whittaker Chambers. It is what gave us all a pit of foreboding in our collective gut during the cold war. That shared tacit understanding by many, gave gravity to the task of confronting it, and thus the purity of our intent was clear. Some of our countrymen opted to sniff the airplane glue of accommodationism.
The red monolith was defeated by ideas of freedom born in Judeo-Christian Biblical principles.
In our sedentary post-cold war world, ‘Man without God’ was quietly and stealthily usurped by a far more insidious threat embodied by the Iranian threat: Man against God.
That is what we are against in this fight against Iran. Yes, Iran is nothing compared to the Soviet Army. But that cold calculus of national power falls away to those on the receiving end of Iranian satanic fury. When brought back to human proportion, the distinction of the scope of the threat is irrelevant when its intentionality is made clear. Imagine the heart stopping urgency of a pair of newly-weds rushing a precious newborn to a shelter in Haifa amid the seemingly endless whales of the klaxon.
My friends, Trump knows what he is doing. he has to clear the division within his own house. Prime Minister Netanyahu must also do like. I argue that by his action Ehud Barak has shown himself to be as hostile to God as anyone. My long years in the wilderness have taught me that Man against God is real. Let’s fortify our President by prayer, that the foregoing is understood.
