Chief Rabbi of South Africa, Rabbi Goldstein, reacts to Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on the Iran threat, covering Israeli military strategy, US Congress reaction, and the Iran-Israel conflict. The Chief Rabbi delves into an analysis of Netanyahu's address discussing its impact on military tactics and the ongoing Iran-Israel conflict.
Rabbi Goldstein opened his comments by saying that, “The unprecedented fourth speech by an Israeli Prime Minister to the United States Congress amidst innumerable standing ovations should not lull Israel into thinking that it can rely on a polarized America to save it from the existential threat that a nuclear Iran poses. If Israel does not destroy Iran's production of nuclear weapons, no one else will. Israel has been here before.”
Rabbi Goldstein explained that, “In 1981 Prime Minister Menachem Begin faced a similar decision. Under Saddam Hussein Iraq had been pressing ahead with its nuclear program, just like Iran. Saddam had issued genocidal threats against Israel. According to many reports the country was less than a month away from full nuclear capability and so Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered a daring Israeli Air Force operation on the eve of Shavuot, 7 June, 1981. Begin's trusted advisor, Yehuda Avner, in his book, The Prime Ministers, describes in dramatic detail how the Israeli pilots flew below Saudi, Jordanian and Iraqi radar to destroy the nuclear facility situated in Osirak, in the heart of Baghdad, and returned home unscathed. In a statement issued, as the jets returned back to base safely, Begin said, ‘the atomic bombs which the reactor was capable of producing would have been of the Hiroshima size, thus a mortal danger to the people of Israel. All our aircraft return safely to base. Let the world know that under no circumstances will Israel ever allow an enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction against our people. If ever such a threat reoccurs, we shall take whatever preemptive measures are necessary to defend the citizens of Israel with all the means at our disposal.”
Rabbi Goldstein tells how, “Afterwards, as expected, Menachem Begin faced a barrage of harsh criticism. The Reagan Administration suspended delivery of F-16 aircraft to Israel and voted in support of a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israel's actions. Reagan wrote in his diary, ‘I swear Armageddon is near.’ The US ambassador to the UN described the raid as shocking and compared it to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. UK prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, accused Israel of a grave breach of international law and the French, who had actually helped Iraq build the nuclear reactor in the first place, insisted that Israel's actions had not, in their words, served the cause of peace in the area. Begin was unphased, saying, ‘whenever I have to choose between saving the lives of our children or getting the approval of the Security Council and all of those other fair weather, friends I much prefer the former.”
Rabbi Goldstein described how, “Begin had this to say about Reagan's Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, who despite his Jewish origins, took a particularly hard line against Israel, ‘by what moral standards does a man like that live? Who is he trying to punish? Israel, which acted in self-defense? Or the tyrannical Iraqi slaughterer, who seeks to wipe us off the map. Hasn't Mr. Weinberger heard of the 1.5 million Jewish children who were thrown into gas chambers and choked to death with Zyklon B Gas? What greater act of self-defense could there be than to destroy Saddam Hussein's nuclear potential, that was intended to bring Israel to its knees, slaughter our people, vaporize our infrastructure, destroy our nation, our country, our very existence. Begin wrote an impassioned letter directly to Weinberger: ‘Dear Mr. Secretary, I feel I have a moral obligation to ask you whether in any of your actions and judgments you consider the following: at a time when your children and grandchildren live and continue to live in the big country of America, my children and grandchildren will keep on living in small Israel, which has many enemies that would like to see her totally destroyed and disappear. Does Israel have to be punished by a weapons embargo because of this? After you read this letter, when looking at the pictures of your children and grandchildren, you might think that a million of them are living in Israel. It is about them that I write.”
Rabbi Goldstein continued, “So we've been through all of this. We've seen it before. None of this is new. Today Israel faces the same situation with Iran. If there's one thing that October 7 has taught us, it is that the implacable hatred of the proponents of violent Jihad know no bounds. For them no evil is too horrific to perpetrate. Anything is possible. Hamas is Iran's proxy army. It operated in that capacity on October 7th and gave an inkling of what Iran would do from the moment it possesses nuclear weapons. Iran has stated clearly on many occasions its determination to wipe Israel off the map. An objective deeply embedded in its Jihadi worldview. The prospect of mutually assured destruction, which deterred the atheistic secular Soviet regime during the Cold War, won't deter Iran.”
“As the great political analyst Charles Krauthammer once observed,” says Rabbi Goldstein, “mutually assured destruction for Jihadists who glorify death and martyrdom is an incentive, not a deterrent. Moreover, as New York Times bestselling author Annie Jacobson emphasizes in her new book Nuclear War, missile defense systems, even extremely advanced and sophisticated ones like Israel's Iron Dome, have limited capabilities to defend against a nuclear attack. So, a nuclear Iran places the seven million Jews of Israel in mortal danger. This is so horrifying. It is almost impossible to say out loud. The US and the West cannot be relied upon to protect Israel from Iran's nuclear weapons. History has shown us that no other nation will come to our rescue. We learned this from bitter experience, when boats of German Jewish refugees were turned back by America and Britain, and when the Allied Forces refused to bomb the railroads to Auschwitz. Should the unthinkable come to pass, God forbid, we can be sure that in the West, just like after World War II, there will be tears, hand ringing, sorrowful memorials, moving addresses about the tragedy, solemn undertakings to ‘never again,’ they will create museums, asking the question with deep angst, ‘how could it be that another Holocaust happened within living memory of the first’?, Rabbi Goldstein explains.
He states that, “The question that Prime Minister Netanyahu should ask himself is the one that, as recorded by Yehuda Avner, moved Prime Minister Menachem Begin to act. He said this, ‘No nation can live on borrowed time for months. I've had sleepless nights. Day after day I asked myself, ‘to do or not to do. What would become of our children if I did nothing,’” and adds that, “For years Netanyahu has given many speeches in the UN and the US Congress warning about this. The time for talk is over. Act now, save Israel and be prepared to be condemned for doing it. In the end history will judge favorably, just as it did with Prime Minister Begin. As President Bill Clinton put it in 2005, ‘everybody talks about what the Israelis did at Osirak in 1981, which I think in retrospect was a really good thing. It kept Saddam from developing nuclear power and in 2006 a joint statement of the United States Congress thanked Israel for taking action in 1981.”
Despite all this, says Rabbi Goldstein, “Far from praising this heroic act that benefited humanity, the world community responded with condemnation, even outrage. Yet in hindsight, is anyone so foolish as to assert that Israel should have waited for the United Nations to confirm that a threat existed, that Israel should not have taken action to destroy the reactor, even in defiance of the international community. Had Israel not acted, the future of the Middle East and the West would likely have unfolded quite differently and far more tragically.”
“But for now,” emphasizes Rabbi Goldstein, “Israel needs to know that it is alone in the world. The next few months leading up to the American elections will be particularly perilous for Israel. With all the political instability and depolarization in America and Iran's nuclear breakout period, according to many experts, measured in weeks and months, not years. It is no coincidence that in the Torah portion read in synagogues throughout the world on the Shabbat before Prime Minister Netanyahu’s address, we heard the prophetic words in the Book of Numbers describing the Jewish people, ‘Behold a nation that dwells alone.’ To dwell alone means to do the right thing even if you are alone against a world of opposition. Abraham, our founding father, was the first person to be called a Hebrew, an Ivri, which the sages of the Talmud would say has a root meaning of ‘standing alone’ and refers to how Abraham stood on one side and the rest of the world stood on the other. Abraham stood alone. With his message of faith in one God, with the Divine values of compassion and kindness against a brutal Pagan world. Now almost 4,000 years later his descendants and spiritual heirs in Israel must do the same thing.”
Rabbi Goldstein warns that, “Israel must stand alone and do the right thing. Nuclear weapons in the hands of a violent oppressive Jihadi regime, like Iran, the greatest state sponsor of global terrorism, is a danger not only to Israel, but to the freedom and dignity of every decent human being, in Iran itself, the Middle East and the world. The nation that dwells alone must act now, alone if necessary, to save itself and the world. We are alone, but not helpless. Three quarters of a century ago God blessed the Jewish People with an independent state and now those who are in charge of its military forces need to act, placing their faith, not in America, but in God and use the full might of the sovereign Jewish state that God has granted our generation, to protect and defend the people of Israel and the cause of freedom and justice for all.”
“At this historic moment,” concludes Rabbi Goldstein, “Let us utter in heartfelt prayer the words of King David, the great psalmist and leader of Israel, ‘May God grant strength to his people. May God bless his people with peace.’”