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Editor’s note: The following is Part II in a two-part series on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the U.S. war on terror. Part I can be found HERE.
(LifeSiteNews) — The origins of Israel’s foreign policy doctrine of “preemption,” as laid out by Benjamin Netanyahu to the U.S. Congress in 2002, go back further than one might expect.
The Jerusalem Post explains why “preemptive strikes” have been a “permanent part of Israeli doctrine”:
The Midrash Raba, written over 1,000 years ago, tells us to go ahead, strike first: ‘He who rises to kill you, preempt and kill him.’ This dictum is based on biblical precedents running back about 3,000 years.
If you imagine someone is your enemy, you can kill him. This is part of “Midrash,” a form of “biblical interpretation” according to Sefaria, a repository of 3,000 years of Jewish texts. According to Sefaria, “Sections of Midrash appear frequently throughout the Talmud.”
Netanyahu is following Talmudic guidance, which is the reason this policy of “preemptive strikes” has been pursued since the founding of Israel.
Avram Avi-Hai, who wrote the story for the Jerusalem Post, worked for David Ben-Gurion. Avi-Hai concludes that “the pillar of preemption… certainly has been Israel’s policy almost from day one.”
The Encyclopedia Britannica definition of “pre-emptive force” is “[a] doctrine whereby a state claims the right to launch an offensive on a potential enemy before that enemy has had the chance to carry out an attack.”
It is the justification of attack as defense, which in its attempt at legal justification invokes:
Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, [which] explicitly protects ‘the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.’
It is business as usual, of course, in the rules based order, to hear attack described as defense, just as warmongering as peacemaking.
In this case the aggressor always plays the victim.
Israel brought nuclear weapons to the Middle East
Dr. Charles Tripp, a Middle East specialist, was quoted by the BBC on June 5, 2006. He said the attack on Iraq’s Osirak reactor exemplified Israel’s policy of illegal preemption since its founding, and that it was Israel itself which “introduced nuclear weapons into the Middle East.”
Israel has ignored U.N. demands to open up its own nuclear weapons program to inspection. It was the charge that U.N. inspectors were not allowed sufficient access into Iraq which led to missile strikes, and eventually, a full-scale invasion of Iraq – at Israel’s behest.
Tripp said that while Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had used chemical weapons on his own people, he had no interest in doing so against a state with superior weapons of mass destruction. Israel began to produce nuclear warheads in 1967, having produced nuclear bombs for “last resort” use in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Tripp said accordingly:
Saddam Hussein’s regime was not dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel, it was dedicated to the promotion of Saddam Hussein.
Tripp saw the bombing of Osirak as a variation on an Israeli military doctrine going back to Prime Minister Ben Gurion in the 1950s, who was “advocating devastating preemptive strikes on Arab armies.”
“The Osirak attack is an illegal way to behave – Resolution 487 established that – but it is an understandable way to behave if you are the Israeli military-security establishment,” he added.
David Ben-Gurion was the founding prime minister of Israel. He refused for two years to comply with U.S. President Kennedy’s demand for an inspection of the Dimona nuclear plant in Israel.
When an inspection was conducted, Israeli behavior obstructed it to the point of uselessness.
It was Mordecai Vanunu who revealed that Dimona had been used to produce nuclear fission and fusion bombs – leaving Israel with a larger nuclear arsenal than that of Britain, according to one U.K. Defence Select Committee report.
Vanunu was kidnapped by MOSSAD and spent 18 years in prison, mainly in solitary confinement, for the revelation of Israel’s secret weapons of mass destruction program. Following his release in 2004, he has been rearrested, re-imprisoned, and his freedom is restricted to this day.
Israeli action triggered Iraq’s WMD production
Not only is Israel behind the attacks on Iraq, its actions generated Iraq’s secret WMD program. Following Israel’s lead, the Iraqis refused to comply with inspections – at first.
Yet the Iraqis have never threatened to launch nuclear weapons at their neighbors, or even use them within their own borders.
Israel has done this for over 50 years.
Israel is charged by Seymour Hersh with using “nuclear blackmail” to secure U.S. support in its 1973 war. The country mobilized truck-launched nuclear weapons in response to the ineffectual landing of SCUD missiles on its territory from Iraq, in 1991.
In recent months, members of the Israeli Parliament, including government ministers, have called for the use of nuclear weapons on Gaza.
The U.S. government has known about the Israeli nuclear weapons program since its inception in the 1950s, a few years after Israel was declared a state. As Hersh claimed:
America’s policy toward the Israeli arsenal was not just one of benign neglect; it was a conscious policy of ignoring reality.
The actions of Israel have produced a reality so terrible that no one can ignore it any longer.
Israel is a rogue state
Israel is indeed the country which introduced nuclear weapons of mass destruction into the middle east. It is the country which repeatedly threatens to use them. It is the country which invented the principle of the “preemptive strike” practically upon its founding. It was in fact founded by terrorist violence in part, and its actions have been routinely described as state terrorism ever since.
Now it stands accused, credibly, of genocide. The nuclear threat is real from the Middle East. The weapons of mass destruction are confirmed. No inspections are permitted. And the state that threatens to use them has routinely attacked without warning, to “prevent” a danger which its own violence – and only its own violence – succeeds every time in translating from fantasy to reality.
It is the actions of Israel and its doctrine of preemptive strikes which has become a medicine of death, killing the patience of its former allies as successfully as it does the populations of its neighbors.
This doctrine of war as peace dovetails with the increasing debt slavery of freedom in the West, circumscribed in an ever-decreasing circle of preemptive censorship known as “pre-bunking.”
Netanyahu could never have acted alone to shape the nightmare we inhabit. He was aided by the architects of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), founded in 1997, to realize the domination of the globe by U.S. military force, and justified by the “defense of liberal democracy.”
Its creators were Robert Kagan and William Kristol. Kagan continues to urge forever wars, describing Americans who oppose forever wars in the Middle East as “intolerant.”
Like his wife, former Under-Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, and like Kristol, he is the descendant of Jewish immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early 20th century.
The PNAC was disbanded in 2006, its work to capture U.S. foreign policy complete. Nothing illustrates this fact more plainly than the Kagans themselves.
The Kagan family business is the promotion of and profit from permanent wars. Robert Kagan’s brother is Frederick Kagan, former West Point lecturer and author of the 2000 book While America Sleeps: Self-Delusion, Military Weakness, and the Threat to Peace Today.
This book urged a massive increase in the military budget and repeatedly stressed the danger of emerging threats from weapons of mass destruction – especially in Iraq.
As The Washington Post noted, “Kagan went on and on about potential WMDs in Iraq in his book, though they were never found.”
Frederick Kagan’s wife is Kimberley, who founded the Institute for the Study of War in 2007. Funded by defense contractors, the ISW was set up following Kimberley Kagan’s “frustrations… at the detrimental effect of biased reporting on policymakers”
The ISW has distinguished itself by producing some of the most self-beclowning nonsense on the Ukraine war I have ever read. True to form, it published in April 2024 a paper claiming that defeatist reporting is the reason Ukraine is losing the war:
The notion that the war is unwinnable because of Russia’s dominance is a Russian information operation.
Read that again.
The “neocons” have been consistently wrong militarily, diplomatically, strategically, and morally on every issue. None of them have ever suffered any consequences for their actions. In fact, they continue to do very well out of them, as disaster is their stock in trade.
Why are none of these wars ever won? As Julian Assange presciently said in 2001, “The goal is an endless war, not a successful one.” It is a business.
Kimberley Kagan studied under Donald Kagan, Frederick’s father, at Yale. Her ISW is the source of almost all the ridiculous propaganda you have read as “news” about Ukraine.
The ISW has been selling Ukraine war optimism since Russia launched its military response in 2022. It basically repeats propaganda from Kiev, which itself frames every event as a fundraising pitch to the U.S. and its other subscriber-nations.
According to Responsible Statecraft:
Such reporting is unsurprising when we consider the specific nature of ISW as a think tank. Funded by important military contractors in America’s military industrial complex such as General Dynamics, DynCorps International, and CACI International, ISW is also a creation of the ‘Kagan industrial complex.’
The war business is founded on the lie that war is peace. That attack is defense. What they do with your life and your money, your freedoms and your idea of what is just and wise in war, is none of your business.
It is the business of those who know best how to make and market war. Netanyahu has been a market leader for over thirty years. He is selling you another war right now, and so are all his friends.
Help Christians who escaped Gaza: LifeFunder