In the Eye of the Whirlpool

Michael L.

Those of us who care about the well-being of Israel and of the Jewish people are in a very curious moment.

The Speech has come and gone and the resultant anti-Netanyahu hysteria seems to be winding down a tad, but nobody is quite sure what we are facing going forward.

There are three major questions in the air at this moment and we will not know how things are shaping up until the outlines of the answers to those questions become clear.

Those questions are concerned with the upcoming Israeli elections, ISIS, and a potential Iranian nuclear weapon.

Until we begin to see the answer to these questions, we are sort-of bobbing in the eye of a political whirlpool.

First there is the election:

Will Netanyahu be able to hold on?  Maybe.  But, maybe not.  We could very well see an Israeli Prime Minister Herzog in the not too distant future.  If the Israeli Left - via emphases on economic and non-security issues - manages to get those 61 seats then Israel's relations around the world will change, at least in some measure.  The Obama administration could certainly expect a more compliant government in Jerusalem.  And, if this is the case, what will this mean in terms of the hideous final death rattle of the Oslo Accords?

My suspicion is that Barack Obama will give the corpse mouth-to-mouth resuscitation - but there will be no negotiated conclusion of hostilities within a two-state solution.  This is for the exceedingly simple reason that a two-state solution, with a State of Palestine in peace next to Israel, is emphatically not the national aspiration of the Palestinian-Arab leadership, nor the Palestinian-Arab people, who would generally prefer to see the Jews dead or gone.

Failing a negotiated two-state solution, the West - as Barack and Michelle pack their bags - may force a non-negotiated two-state solution down Israel's throat under a weak Herzog government.  This is an eventuality that needs to be taken into consideration.  Certainly the trends out of Europe that we see, lo, these last months and years, point in that direction.

Whatever direction the Israeli government takes, however, we will have a strong inkling shortly.

Then there is the Islamic State:

We may, also, very well see significant movement on the ISIS question within a matter of weeks.

We are in the midst of the battle for Tikrit and if the Iraqi Sunni-Shia coalition holds, and if it beats the Islamic State, it will represent a serious blow to that execrable organization, and, in some measure, to political Islam as a international political movement.  So, keep a close eye on ISIS, because whether in the coming months it fails or it thrives, this will tell us something about the near-term fortunes for political Islam, more generally.

And, finally there is Iran:

Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu just got shamefully gang-raped for daring to suggest that maybe the international community should not allow an Islamist Iran a nuclear bomb until they stop threatening genocide against the Jews of the Middle East.

{What a crime against humanity.}

Netanyahu wants Iran to cease encroachment into surrounding countries, cease promoting terrorism around the world, and cease calling for the destruction of the Jewish State of Israel.  For daring to express this highly commonsensical set of notions the man was lambasted as a war-monger and just the Single Worst Person on the Planet.  The unbelievable vitriol spit at Netanyahu, particularly by the international Left, tells us far more about them than it does about him.

They have turned him into a screen upon which that they project their own vile shadows.

In any case, the question is, will Iran, or will Iran not, do the nuclear break-out dance any time soon?  The truth is, we just do not know the answer to that question and what you think on the matter depends, for many people, on how much faith they have in the Obama administration.  But, faith or no faith, if the deal as described by Netanyahu resembles reality then it is practically an Iranian nuclear yellow brick road.

The maximum length of a hudna is ten years according to traditional Islamic sources and - coincidentally enough - the "sun" in the deal is said to "set" in ten years.

This is not what we were told by the Obama administration initially.  What we were told was that it was US policy to oppose the emergence of an Iranian bomb, not seek to manage it.

So, from my perspective, this is where we are.

We are in the "eye of the whirlpool" and we really won't know what direction we will be tossed until some of these matters begin to resolve themselves.

Israelis go to the polls this coming Tuesday, March 17.

Whoever wins - left, right, or center - let us just hope that they serve the people well.

And, whoever wins, it will undoubtedly alter the nature of the conversation going forward, because a part of the landscape will become more clear.