Israel must go alone

By Bernie Quigley

The Ukraine, troubled again, is being asked by the shadow masters if it prefers to be part of the EU or part of Russia. It is like one of those riddles from "Doctor Who." The answer, of course, is Ukraine, we must want to be Ukraine. And Israel should answer the shadow masters the same.

“Deal leaves Israel very few options,” reads the headline on the Drudge Report. But last weekend's interim deal between six world powers and Iran on its nuclear capabilities leaves Israel with one very good option. It is the option Israel has been moving toward for a decade and the option the rising generation in Israel should embrace. Israel should now turn its back on any aid from Barack Obama’s radicalized, unpredictable, strange and random American State Department. Israel’s greatest enemy today is not Iran. It is America. And Israel must definitively let the world know that it is not the external American colony that most think it is; it is not a secondary, external borough of New York City; and it is not a toy to increasingly dangerous and dystopian American foreign policy.

And Israel should vote Netanyahu out and all the other old guard, dominating, Americanized Israelis with what Knesset Member Moshe Feiglin calls the “exile’s mentality.” The generation has passed. Israel, voting Naftali Bennett, Ayelet Shaked, Feiglin and others into the Knesset the past season already moved on to its rising generation. Only dogged, out-of-touch and ill-informed America opinion today holds it back.

It is time now for Israel to go alone, to let go America’s hand and all others who have subtle agenda for her. That includes the abominable Obama crew, whose most prominent member, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, was diabolically advanced to her position even after she notoriously proposed an American invasion of Israel. And did somebody say Benghazi? Arab Spring? Israel must finally say, “No more.”

Israel should turn away now from all of our American dreams of what she should be. We, the fatally secular, endlessly optimistic Americans can barely understand its depth and promise. Yet it is elementary to the Washington establishment right and left that Israel remain in our minds as it has been these past 30 years. But it is Israel that has been on a rising, creative metamorphosis and the American friend who has grown static, dangerous and dysfunctional. Now it inhibits Israel’s progress and awakening. And in this, Israel leads the world in the century’s rising vision of nation-states and away from the oppressive and inhibiting superstates, at their best, insidious and watchful, and at their worst, plodding, Machiavellian and totalitarian. 

“Israel seems to have its hands tied,” the very popular talk radio commentator Tamar Yonah said recently on Israel National Radio. “Always having to go and ask permission of the international community if it has the green light to defend itself.”

Ask no longer. Do.

“The time has come and we must initiate a serious discussion both in the Economic Committee and here in the plenum on the damages of the procedure called American aid,” Feiglin said recently to the Knesset. “There is no reason to add more words; this issue is simple and clear. Taking this money is in and of itself a moral question. 10 years have already gone by since the PM promised both houses of the Congress that Israel would stop taking US aid.”

(Ed. note: Originally published online at The Hill.)