Lebensraum

by Benjamin Netanyahu

Israel and I have never yearned for anything but peace and safety for our people. I did not seize power but acquired it democratically and lost it and reacquired it and lost it again before once more earning the ultimate confidence of my people for what now totals a wondrous eighteen of the last thirty years. This could only have happened because my fellow citizens understand that I am the most skillful and dedicated politician in our country today and indeed in the history of our sacred land.

We are a very small nation, more diminutive indeed than all but three states of our steadfast ally, the United States of America. We had to defend ourselves against Arab aggression in 1948 and remove several hundred thousand nomads from land that by right had been ours for two thousand years. We successfully defended ourselves in 1956 and in 1967 launched the most devastating preemptive strike in military history, seizing in only six days the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, the West Bank of Jordan, and the Golan Heights from Syria.

In little more than a decade, we returned the Sinai even though Egypt and Syria had attacked us in 1973 and for a brief time battered us into mortal danger and forced us to consider using nuclear weapons. We don’t publicly acknowledge having them but in this private communique I concede what you already know: Israel has scores of nukes and, frankly, could one expect less from a nation of brilliant Jews? Be honest. People everywhere are bright but we’re more luminous just as athletes from around the world are excellent but generally not quite so transcendent as those of African heritage.

I’m proud to report that our administrations have gotten along fine with Egyptians who appreciated that in transferring the Sinai Peninsula back to them we relinquished an area almost three times larger than Israel. We could not be so generous with the West Bank which at some points lurks a mere nine miles from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean and encouraged generations of Palestinian terrorists to chant and believe their battle cry “From the River to the Sea.” Rather than depend solely on the Israel Defense Force, derived from our limited population of several million, we quite correctly and with existential legality began building settlements that systematically increased our West Bank population from effectively none in 1967 to almost seven hundred thousand today. We will never leave. We will continue to seize more Palestinian land. We will chop down their sacred olive trees. We will continue to make them third-class people who cannot drive on many of our roads or exercise political and economic rights. They should leave. We will help them find new homes in faraway lands. If they don’t get out soon, they may end up like, dare I say it: European Jews or contemporary Gazans.

I’m confident we won’t have to be so forceful in fortifying the Golan Heights, which overlooks the failed Syrian state that we bomb as we sometimes must, and that Turkey hammers Kurdish regions from the north. Our strategic Heights contains less than five hundred square miles but we already have thirty thousand settlers living there near twenty thousand Syrians. How do you think those numbers will compare in the future?

And what about Gaza, where bulldozers are going to shove scores of thousands of corpses, the majority women and children, under millions of pounds of rubble prior to building a paradise for billionaires?

Gaza will always be ours, protecting our southern flank along the Mediterranean athwart Egypt. The Golan Heights will forever be ours. The West Bank and Jerusalem are intrinsically ours. We also occupy five Lebanese hilltops that help us peer down on Hezbollah and remain ever alert to attack their rocket sites arrayed against us. We pounded them last year and we’ll blast them any time we must. Our message to Arabs is honorable and clear. We want peace, and we demand it. Tell that to your Iranian allies. Make them understand. They’re weakening Arabs by continually arming you to attack us. Tell Iran to keep its weapons. Tell Iran to demand better leadership. Tell them the United States and Israel are not going to much longer tolerate hidebound leaders from the Islamic Republic that just slaughtered thousands of freedom-seekers in the streets of a potentially great country.

Trust me, I don’t know exactly what President Trump is going to do with his aircraft carrier strike force churning toward Iran. I wish he’d tell me. Our enemies keep charging that the United States has become Israel’s lapdog and will do whatever the Israel Lobby and I tell them. That’s absurd. President Trump is a wise and compassionate man. He doesn’t want to hit Iran hard. But even if Trump only hits the Islamic Republic in a moderate way, to ensure it doesn’t acquire nuclear weapons and continue fomenting terrorism, the ayatollahs and their greedy military henchmen will strike Israel. They will probably hit us hard. No matter how they attack, we will counterstrike with great force. Perhaps we, the United States and Israel, can help the eternally-suffering people of Iran to rid themselves of anachronistic and incompetent leaders who’re making their lives miserable and aren’t helping us be happy either

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