The neoconservative commentator, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, recently proposed what he described as a "Holocaust Doctrine," in which an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel would be regarded as an attack on the United States. This is a bizarre and profoundly anti-conservative idea, as it should be readily apparent to every American and Israeli alike that Israel is not the 51st state of the Union. While it is to be regretted that anyone should wish to attack Israel, with nuclear weapons or anything else, this doesn't change the fact that Israel is not America and never will be.
The doctrine is also pure propaganda. What does a non-martial mass murder by National Socialists have to do with a potential military attack by Iran? Jews who revere the memory of their murdered ancestors should be offended by Krauthammer's shameless attempt to make use of them this way.
Krauthammer's proposal is a non-starter because Israel is not even a military ally of the United States. Unlike Slovakia, Estonia and Bulgaria, the United States is under no obligation whatsoever to defend Israel from Iran or anyone else. While this may be upsetting to certain Washington Post columnists, it presumably doesn't bother the Israeli government at all, as they have shown no signs of actively pursuing any such alliance with the United States. And while it is presumably possible for NATO to extend an invitation to Israel as an honorary European country, as UEFA has done, the fact that Israel isn't on the short list of planned NATO expansion tends to indicate that neither NATO nor Israel considers the issue to be a pressing one.
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Delegating the defense of Israel to the United States, even in part, would not only be antithetical to Israel's reason for existing in the first place, it would be a strategic blunder of potentially critical proportions for four reasons. They are as follows:
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1. Moral hazard. As the ongoing mortgage debacle demonstrates, the knowledge that someone else is responsible for one's behavior tends to tempt one into accepting risks that one would not otherwise accept. Thus, a U.S. guarantee might actually increase the risk of an Iranian strike against Israel.
2. The decline of shared values. As Mitchell G. Bard of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise explains: "The Jewish State has emerged in less than half a century as an advanced nation with the characteristics of Western society. This is partially attributable to the fact that a high percentage of the population came from Europe or North America and brought with them Western political and cultural norms. It is also a function of the common Judeo-Christian heritage." These shared values are not held by the millions of members of the third world migration and are outright rejected by the growing secular irreligionist population.
3. The backfire principle. A few decades ago, Jewish Canadians lobbied the Canadian government for human rights restrictions on free speech. Those restrictions and the institutions they spawned are now being used as a weapon by Canadian Muslims against their critics. Given the current rate of Muslim immigration, encouraging America to intervene militarily in the Israeli-Arab conflict would set a very dangerous precedent that could lead to American military force being used against Israel.
4. The next administration. It is possible that if he is elected president, B. Hussein Obama will be inclined to continue the positive relations that Israel has enjoyed with previous presidents of both parties. But given his obvious ties to African supremacists and third-world recrimination ideology, to say nothing of outright anti-Jewish supporters such as the Rev. Eric Lee, this is far from given. His middle name is not "Sadat," after all.
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Israel will do better to depend upon the fierce spirit of Zionist independence that characterized its early beginnings than upon the vagaries of a powerful but decadent ally of dubious loyalty. They would do even better to place their trust in the Lord God of Israel who chose a certain group of people to be His so many years ago. But to paraphrase the wise words of a Christian pastor: if someone's breaking into your house and you don't have enough faith to trust in God, then trust the baseball bat in your hand. Don't trust the police on the other end of the telephone line.
