You may remember that President Obama had some advice for Israelis last summer. He said they needed to “engage in serious self-reflection.” Well, I had a serious cow when he said that. May I quote from the relevant Impromptus?
Of all the things Obama has said in his half-year in office, I think the most offensive was his assertion that Israel must “engage in serious self-reflection.” The Israelis are experts in “serious self-reflection.” The Jewish people is expert in “serious self-reflection.” They have been seriously self-reflecting for several thousand years — they practically invented the practice. Israelis, since the founding — refounding — of that state, have had to do some urgent self-reflecting, and other reflecting. They live in a tinderbox; their existence and survival are threatened all the time. Barack Obama knows nothing about serious self-reflection compared with the average Israeli — compared even with a relatively unreflective Israeli. It’s their lives that are on the line, not Obama’s. It is they who have gone through war after war, not Obama. And those were wars of attempted annihilation: the annihilation of you-know-who.
People always speak condescendingly, ignorantly, and offensively about and to the Israelis. It’s kind of a world specialty. But I think our new American president may have taken the cake. . . .
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At about the same time, I was reading, and reviewing, The Israel Test, by George Gilder. For my review of that book, in the August 24, 2009, National Review, go here. When I read a particular passage, I thought hard — hard and unhappily — about Obama and “serious self-reflection.” The passage concerns Benjamin Netanyahu:
In May 1969, he nearly lost his life in an action against Egyptian forces that had been laying traps for the Israelis near the Suez Canal. The team succeeded in destroying an Egyptian truck loaded with weapons, but two days later Egyptian troops opened fire on Netanyahu’s inflated rubber boat operating in the canal. Laden with ammunition for his machine gun, Bibi discovered that he could neither swim nor disengage himself from his sling full of ammo. He had virtually drowned by the time he was rescued by a naval commando named Israel Assaf, who happened to notice bubbles of foam on the surface, felt for a head under the water, and extracted Bibi by his hair under intense Egyptian fire.
Think of Obama’s life experiences; think of Netanyahu’s. It is Netanyahu who should undergo serious self-reflection?
In his book, Gilder writes that Netanyahu “is the obverse of Obama in nearly every way.” He elaborates,
In his book, Gilder writes that Netanyahu “is the obverse of Obama in nearly every way.” He elaborates,
While the youthful Obama was a community-action organizer and lawyer, Netanyahu was an anti-terrorist warrior. While Obama imagines that taxes in general are too low and inadequately progressive, Netanyahu is a sophisticated supply-side economist who believes that lower rates bring higher revenues and who opened his administration by advocating tax cuts. While in the past the United States has long offered a haven for frustrated Israeli entrepreneurs and other Jewish capitalists, Israel under Netanyahu will beckon as a land of hope and hospitality to frustrated American venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. While Obama believes that foreign aid is the answer to Palestinian poverty, Netanyahu knows that new opportunities opened up by Israeli enterprise are the only solution to the regional crisis.
While Obama believes that the United States has overreacted to the threat of terrorism, Netanyahu for nearly thirty years has championed and explained the war on terror in both the United States and Israel, in books, international meetings, and through the Jonathan Institute (named for his late older brother who died in the stunning Entebbe hostage rescue in Uganda). Netanyahu sees jihad as the single greatest threat to the West, and no other politician is so learned or so determined in combating it. While Obama thinks Churchill is a man whose time has passed, Netanyahu has read and pondered all of Churchill’s works and admires the British titan “above all other gentiles.” The time for Churchillian leadership, according to Netanyahu, is now.
Given that Obama has decided to declare the Israeli prime minister his bête noire in the world, I thought these words were pertinent.
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