Last week, Northwestern welcomed the Honorable Michael Oren, Ambassador of Israel to the United States, to McCormick Auditorium in Norris University Center. Unlike many of the Ambassador’s other academic appearances, his talk at Northwestern was not a repeat of the disrespectful treatment he received from fringe elements at the University of California for example. The audience at Northwestern was attentive, respectful, and for the most part open-minded which allowed Dr. Oren to shift from statesman to academic and even to preacher, as he himself admits to blurring the line between lecturer and Rabbi.

Courtesy of JewishBlogging.com

Unknown to many in the audience, Dr. Oren was born and lived in the United States for most of his life only sacrificing his citizenship to serve as Israel’s official representative. He has a very impressive résumé of having attended Columbia, fought in the Israeli Defense Forces as a paratrooper and taught at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown. He has also written the best selling Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, which also won the Los Angeles Times History Book of the Year Award. Not surprisingly Ambassador Oren had a lot to say regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because he not only studied it for most of his life but lived it as well.

At the beginning of his speech Ambassador Oren told the biblical story of the book of Jonah, one of the shortest books the Hebrew bible shares with Christianity and Islam.  Jonah was a Hebrew prophet asked by God to go to the city of Nineveh and tell its citizens to repent their sins or suffer the same fate as the decimated Sodom and Gomorrah. Despite being anointed by God as the destined savior of the populace, Jonah had great fear and self doubt of what might happen to him in Nineveh whether the masses accept his message or not. Concluding the task was a sort of Catch-22, he chooses not to go. Instead, Jonah runs away and faces a number of miracles, among them his famous encounter with the whale, in which he discovers that he cannot escape the responsibilities placed on him.

For those of us who believe in the democratic system of government, there is no escape for our chosen leaders as well. According to Ambassador Oren, world leaders are presented what can only be called lose-lose situations. Winston Churchill, who warned about the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s when Hitler could still have been easily contained or better yet destroyed, would have been branded a warmonger by the appeasementists and likely the British public if he had become prime minister and ordered a preemptive strike on Germany. Harry Truman, who inherited both the presidency and the Manhattan Project from the dead Franklin Roosevelt, faced a similar conundrum when deciding whether or not to drop Atom bombs on Japan.

There is no rest for those who make difficult decisions when there are no good options. At Israel’s inception David Ben-Gurion, the man who would become its first prime minister, made the difficult decision to fulfill a generations old Jewish dream for a state to call their own. He did this knowing full well that the Jewish settlers would have to defend themselves from multiple Arab armies in some cases with only handguns.

The danger for that tiny state, surrounded for most of its history by nations who failed to recognize its fundamental right to exist, has not abated. Ambassador Oren views the terrorist groups Hezbollah and Hamas, who have taken over territories from which Israel unilaterally and magnanimously withdrew, as persistent and growing dangers to Israeli security. In the aftermath of Israili withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah is now better armed than it was at the beginning of the 2006 war, while Hamas, responded to Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza strip by using it as a beachhead for terrorist attacks. In a classic lose-lose decision, the Israeli government decided to blockade Gaza’s military resupply and accept the inevitable backlash from the rest of the world, which resulted in the flotilla incident.

Despite the failure of its withdrawals, Israel, according to the Ambassador, is still committed to a two state solution so long as it produces permanent and legitimate peace. Additionally, the ambassador views Iran as the greatest threat both to Israeli security as well as the security of the West. Its missile program is advancing so quickly that most of Europe is squarely in its crosshairs or will be in a short time. Its nuclear program, which all objective observers acknowledge has been created with malicious intent, threatens the Arab states and will trigger a nuclear arms race which would make the nonproliferation treaty a bad joke.

After President Obama’s election, Prime Minister Netanyahu signed on to his plan of engagement, patience, and sanctions which the Ambassador, and Secretary of State Clinton for that matter, indicated did little more than offer a minor bite of displeasure. Despite this “reset” of Middle East peace, the situation is as bad as it has been in recent history. The Ambassador stated unequivocally that Israel must and will use all necessary options to prevent Iran from going nuclear.

With his objective clearly defined, Prime Minister Netanyahu will need President Obama’s help to prevent a nuclear Iran. One of the Prime Minister’s favorite sayings likens this moment to 1938 and reminds his audience that Iran is Germany. The question is does President Obama have, as the Ambassador put it, the “moral fiber” to make the difficult and unpopular choice to launch Churchill’s preemptive strike or will he be Neville Chamberlain – satisfied with peace in our time.

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