By Jamie Glazov FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is P. David Hornik, a Frontpage columnist, freelance writer and translator living in Tel Aviv. He has also contributed in recent years to American Spectator Online, ynetnews.com, the Jerusalem Post, the Jewish Press, IsraelNationalNews.com, and others. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/ and can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.

FP: David Hornik, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Hornik: Thanks, Jamie, glad to be here.

FP: How grave are the dangers facing Israel?

Hornik: Very grave. Recently Israel’s chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenasi, warned in a speech to army officers that war may be imminent. Israel’s intelligence community relates seriously to the genocidal saber-rattling issuing from Iran and Hezbollah particularly since the Mughniyeh assassination. According to not a few intelligence estimates, Iran will have the bomb sometime in 2008. The fact that, notwithstanding the endless analyses, articles, meetings, Security Council sessions, etc., things have come this far–imminent nuclearization, at most a couple of years away but probably a lot less–is of course appalling.

The freedom, tolerance, creativity, and high living standards of the Western democracies constitute a great blessing, but these countries’ inability to cope with threats realistically, their tendency to let catastrophes happen that could have been avoided with just a little resolve and common sense, may be a fatal flaw. So far the Western democracies are failing the test of the Iranian threat and allowing the world to move toward another cataclysm.

In addition to the overarching Iranian threat, Israel is now surrounded by terror-havens in Gaza, the West Bank, and southern Lebanon with belligerent Syria and malign Egypt thrown into the bargain. The terror havens pose tactical and strategic threats in themselves while also being intimately related, of course, to the larger Iranian and other state threats. By “tactical” I mean relatively crude rockets, suicide bombings, and the like; by strategic I mean larger rockets and missiles, and the possibility of WMD infiltration.

Both the Iranian nuclear buildup in itself and the related buildup of Iranian-allied forces on Israel’s doorstep pose ultimate dangers.

FP: How is Israel coping with these dangers, and how capable is it of coping with them? Is it still the tough, hardy country of the past?

Hornik: Israel–having called off its recent brief foray into Gaza under U.S. pressure–is essentially doing nothing about the Gaza threat; it’s still letting the citizens of southwestern Israel be terrorized by daily rocket and mortar attacks while fighting back in ways that are clearly inadequate. It’s also doing nothing about the always-growing Hezbollah threat in Lebanon apart from Olmert’s occasional fatuous self-congratulatory pronouncements about what a great success the 2006 Second Lebanon War was. Israel is mostly containing the West Bank threat with constant military and intelligence activity but still tolerating a situation that in the pre-Oslo era would have been considered unthinkable–a West Bank infested with terrorists from various organizations, sometimes in conflict with each other but all sharing the goal of Israel’s annihilation.

The recent massacre in a Jerusalem yeshiva by an Arab resident of Jerusalem also underlines the growing threat from radicalized Arabs who are citizens or residents of Israel. Israel has not begun to deal with this threat realistically and coherently and is not capable of doing so under the current government.

Israel’s strike against the Syrian installation in September, however, reminds us of the fact that notwithstanding the Olmert government’s irresponsibility in the face of the immediate terror threats, there is still seriousness about state-generated strategic threats in Israel’s highest military, intelligence, and even political echelons. If Israel was responsible for the Mughniyeh assassination, it further reinforces that fact. The highly capable Ido Nehushtan is replacing the highly capable Eliezer Shkedi as Israel’s air force chief. Israel also has a highly accomplished Mossad chief in Meir Dagan. Olmert’s cabinet includes people who are capable of seriousness about security like Shaul Mofaz, Avi Dichter, and others. Even the defense minister, Ehud Barak, is capable of seriousness about security though he’s basically an unprincipled political operator. I have even less good to say about Olmert, but at least we know from the Lebanon War and the strike on the Syrian facility that he hasn’t become a pacifist — despite some notorious words before he became prime minister that seemed to indicate that.

That the Israeli population, despite its higher standard of living and the corrosive effects of a Left-dominated media, academia, and Supreme Court, is overall as tough and hardy as ever was clearly evident during the Lebanon War–both in the military sphere, where the army showed high motivation despite poor management, and in the civilian sphere, where the population showed great resilience. The Israeli people just need better leadership.

FP: Your own personal story is very much interwoven in these themes. Where are you from originally and why did you move to such a dangerous place?

Hornik: It all began in the fall of 1938, a few months after the Nazi invasion of Austria and resulting Anschluss or unification of those two countries. My parents, both of them then teenagers, were able, with their respective families, to flee Vienna for the U.S. That eventually resulted, among other things, in my birth in New York City, but I grew up some distance from Albany, NY, in relatively rustic surroundings. Though my parents were secular and I grew up with not too much Jewish culture, I was enchanted by the idea of Israel from a very young age. In long retrospect, it in fact had partly to do with how Israel afforded the possibility of a rich secular Jewishness without necessarily being religiously observant. I was charmed by the idea that everyone spoke Hebrew, the Jewish holidays were the national holidays, the basic national reality was Jewish with or without religion.

These feelings only intensified in my young adulthood as I became more politically aware. In addition, I was still young and naive enough to be shocked at how badly the Jewish state was treated so soon after the Holocaust–and I’m not referring, of course, to the Arabs but to Israel’s treatment by Europe, the Western media generally, and to aspects of its treatment by U.S. governments. Eventually I did not feel that, in terms of loyalty, I had any choice but to live in Israel; I didn’t feel I could be loyal to Israel while living somewhere else. The moral reality was too stark. The dangerousness, then, of Israel’s environment wasn’t relevant to the fundamental moral choice I faced, which ultimately was an issue of identity. At the same time, the Israel I moved to, in 1984, was pre-Oslo and still tending to function rationally in the security sphere; things weren’t as dangerous as they are now.

Apart from that starkness, the same, ecstatic “pull” factors were there–the Land of Israel, Hebrew culture, the adventure of building a new-old Jewish society in the ancient setting. I still feel all that very keenly; I love being here despite the worries.

FP: How did you arrive at your views?

Hornik: My father, Alfred Hornik, was a deep, well-read thinker and a conservative intellectual who introduced me to conservatism when I was about 17. He had made a journey from the Left and by that time was regularly reading Commentary, National Review, and others. He opened to me the world of those magazines. For reasons of greater ethnocultural affinity, I particularly liked Commentary; its writers were to me the voice of reason and sophistication, without trendiness or axes to grind. I was also aware that the conservative intellectuals were the true rebels, then perhaps even more than now, and this had an appeal to me.

In my twenties I was a conservative with a strong Israel-compartment that eventually, of course, became dominant and determinative. Events that deepened my conservative-hawkish orientation in the foreign policy/defense sphere were the horrors in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos after the U.S. retreat (the liberals had said things would be fine there once the U.S. got out, the conservatives said there would be a bloodbath–a debate I was exposed to while still very young), and the horrors and debacles in Israel resulting from Oslo, the Lebanon withdrawal, and the Gaza withdrawal, events that were similarly surrounded by debates that pitted left-wing delusionals against right-wing realists. In the background of all this, of course, is Munich and what happened to the Jewish people including relatives of mine, and the world, in the wake of that particular exercise in delusion and appeasement. Clearly there are other examples but these are the ones, as an American and Jew, that have registered most strongly with me.

FP: What is it like living in an endangered, front-line state with daily news reports of rocket attacks, other terror, and growing threats? How does an individual cope and how does the society cope?

Hornik: It’s made bearable by the very strong societal solidarity that still exists in Israel despite intense Right-Left and religious-secular divisions, and it’s also bearable in proportion to how much a person feels it’s special and a privilege to live in the Jewish state. Most Israelis feel that to a considerable degree; it may be “ideological,” involving religion and/or nationalism, or simply a realization that this is the only place one can truly feel at home. Apart from the threats you mentioned Israel has serious economic defects that probably cause more people to leave than the security problems. Israel was set up with a socialist system and sixty years later, despite considerable reforms and privatization, people still suffer from the tax burden and from bureaucratic and other irrationalities.

It’s hard to make a distinction between individual and societal coping because they’re intertwined; the Israeli individual copes with the situation largely by feeling the mutuality and support of the surrounding society. It’s a very special experience in many ways.

FP: What are Israel’s prospects?

Hornik: It depends primarily on what, if anything, will be done about Iranian nuclearization. Even if that threat is eliminated, there is still a worldwide jihadist movement possessing or seeking WMD capabilities that is capable of posing existential threats to Israel and others, with Pakistan a particularly perilous arena. But Iran is currently the primary, overarching threat to Israel, America, and the West. From Israel’s geographic standpoint, take Iran out of the picture and Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, Syria, and so on are orphaned children and seriously weakened. Clearly, the U.S. and Israel are the only two parties that might do something about Iranian nuclearization, probably Israel. The election of a pacifistic Democratic dove as U.S. president would not be an encouraging development.

FP: If you could advise the U.S. and Israeli leaderships on how Israel could best cope with the threats it now faces, and how the U.S. could help best, what would you recommend?

Hornik: America wants stability in the Israeli sphere; it doesn’t want relatively small-scale clashes between Israel and Arab forces–let alone the larger wars into which such clashes could escalate–that are beamed all over the Middle East and aggravate anti-Israeli, anti-American, and anti-Western sentiments. America’s obsession with pressuring Israel into territorial concessions, while strengthening the Fatah terror movement as a supposedly constructive force, directly contradicts the American goal of stability and reflects blindness at best and a cynical, acknowledged or unackowledged agenda of sacrificing Israel at worst. I won’t go into the issue of America’s oil dependency on Arab regimes and what to do about it, but so long as America pursues a relationship with these regimes, it’s worth realizing that they’re not motivated by idealism but by economic and possibly strategic considerations and are not in need of constant spectacles of American leaders, diplomats, and functionaries supplicating Fatah leaders, paying protection money to the PA, training PA terrorist forces, and so on. If America feels it has to show its concern for the “Palestinian cause” it can do so by supporting fair and empirically based proposals for a solution like MK Benny Elon’s plan instead of in effect embracing the Islamist and Arab-nationalist program of whittling Israel down to indefensibility and destruction.

American can best promote stability in the Israeli sphere, while reaping the strategic, intelligence, and other benefits of having Israel as a strong ally, by helping Israel be militarily and territorially strong and helping it exercise deterrence. This includes, of course, Israel operating according to normal international principles such as exercising the obligation to protect its citizens and treating attacks on them as intolerable rather than as realities to be indefinitely endured.

As for Israel, it desperately needs leaders who are not marionettes of a U.S. policy of appeasing the Arab world at Israel’s expense. Israel needs to emphasize the fact that it has already given up all of Sinai and, for the time being, Gaza, while giving up a substantial amount of control over the West Bank, and all it has received in return is intensified terrorism, weapons smuggling/buildups, peril, and hatred–the last not only in the Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim spheres but throughout the world. Having already more than fulfilled its obligations under UN Security Council Resolution 242 of “withdrawing from territories,” Israel should make no further territorial withdrawals from the post-1967 lands it still has in the West Bank and the Golan Heights, and should work to destroy both the Hamas and the Fatah menace and reassert military control of both Gaza and the West Bank, while being ready to restore partial civilian control to Palestinian parties absolutely conditional on the security situation.

Apart from this Israel should continue the endeavor of revamping its armed forces and strategic approach that it began in the wake of the Second Lebanon War–a restoration of capability and deterrence that apparently already succeeded in 2007 to dissuade Syria from initiating hostilities with Israel on the Golan Heights.

On the Iranian front, it’s clear by now that sanctions, while they could possibly have worked with enough international cooperation, will not work because sufficient international cooperation does not exist. America needs to pursue a military or regime-change solution to the Iranian threat, not mainly to protect Israel but to protect the West in general and itself. If America does not do so, Israel, which presumably does not have the capacity to effectuate an Iranian regime change, has to neutralize the Iranian nuclear threat militarily so as to ensure its own survival.

FP: David Hornik, thank you for joining us.

Hornik: Thanks, Jamie, my pleasure. Frontpage is a major pro-Israeli force and a site notable for rare moral insight and courage.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 and is filed under opinion. You can leave a response.