Bush won’t allow Iran to go nuclear

12 August 2006

The former Israeli prime minister tells Allister Heath why he believes the US President will keep his promise to curb Tehran — even if many Europeans remain blind to the threat

For Netanyahu, Israel is a latter-day Czechoslovakia, which deluded and desperately anti-war European powers, led by Neville Chamberlain, sacrificed to the Nazis in 1938 because of the German-speaking minority in Sudetenland, whom he compares with today’s Palestinians. ‘And, yes, there was apologetics and, yes, there was appeasement and, yes, there was pressure on a small resistant democracy in the face of this German onslaught. It was called Czechoslovakia at the time. And, yes, there were articles in the British press condemning Czechoslovakia for inciting a German response because of the denial of the rights of the Sudeten Germans. Do you want to go on with this?’

Netanyahu rejects the comparison between radical Islamic terrorists and communists. The main difference, he argues, is that the communists were rational when it came to foreign policy, putting their survival first and always backing down at the last moment, as shown in the Cuban missile crisis. This was not true of the Iranian regime, he said, arguing that they were trying to prompt the return of the Hidden Imam, an event which Shiites believe would be accompanied by an apocalypse. ‘Is it possible in the 21st century to have a resurrection of the religious wars that we thought had ended in the 17th century? Yes, it’s possible. This is what is going on.’

With more civilian casualties announced in Lebanon by the day, I asked Netanyahu whether he thought Israel’s military campaign was proportionate. ‘Our response is disproportionately low,’ he replied, comparing Israel’s campaign with Britain’s bombing of Germany during the second world war. ‘We had thousands of rockets on our cities, on Haifa and the northern cities. You had thousands of rockets on your cities. What was the response? How can you measure proportionality without using precedents? In a court of law that’s what people do, they look at precedents.’