|
AIPAC Conference 2002 Remarks As Delivered by Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday, April 22, 2002 Thank you. Well, I was told there were -- there were hundreds of students here, but it sounds like thousands, So to all of you young in age and young in spirit -- everyone here is young -- I want to congratulate your for standing up for Israel and for working as hard as you do to cement the unbreachable bonds between Israel and the United States of America, the greatest democracies on earth. There was, by all accounts, the greatest observer of the United States and of America, in the 19th Century, and he was not an American, he was a Frenchman. Now, I don't intend to compete with de Tocqueville, but I will make an observation about America and Americans at the beginning of the 21st century. You know, I've had the opportunity to visit many lands, talk to many leaders, talk to many parliamentarians, and I have never, ever encountered such a degree of openness in the United States as I have encountered here, that is. There is never such a willingness to shed received opinion, never such a willingness to examine an issuance on merit, to examine the factual veracity of statements, to look at stated ideals based under intrinsic moral worth as you find in America. And that is why when people ask how is it that Israel receives such a fair hearing in America and not elsewhere in other parts of the world, the answer is very simple: fairness, decency, the fact that people are willing not only to hear but to listen. And if I had to distill it, I would say that Americans are typified by a moral sense and a common sense. This is a very moral country, a very decent country, and a country with a great common sense. It is this moral sense and common sense that the representatives of America, the members of Congress and Senators who are here in this city, exemplify so often. And it is, I believe, exemplified above all else by the president of the United States, President George Bush. He has moral sense and common sense. When you look at the power of a president, and this has been stated by many historians, the real power of the presidency is the power to persuade. But how do you persuade? You persuade, at the end of the day, with an appeal to a sense of morality and a sense of what is practical. I think that, in many ways, President Bush is endowed with both. I said not very far from here on the steps of the Capital last week in this extraordinary rally for Israel... ... I said that there has never been a greater friend of Israel in the White House. And I was asked by people after the speech, did you really mean it? And I said, yes, I meant every word, and I repeat it here. There has never been a greater friend of Israel in the White House than President George W. Bush. At the end of the day and, very often, at the beginning of the day, President Bush will do the right thing. He will do the right thing. And I came here today to talk about doing the right thing, as well. But a few hours ago a friend of mine, an American friend of mine, said to me, "You know, we already agree with you. We agree with you. We agree with you about the definition of terrorism. That is, that it is the systematic targeting of the innocent. We agree with you that there is a world of difference between that and the undeliberate, unintentional, tragic civilian casualties of war. We understand that. We understand that, by the way, whether it's in Jenin or in Kandahar, it's the same thing. There is a big difference between those who deliberately target civilians and hide behind civilians and those who take legitimate military action that sometimes results in unintentional civilian casualties. We understand that. "And we also understand that terrorism is evil, it is always evil, and nothing ever justifies it. We agree with that too. "And we agree, too, that if you want to fight terrorism you have to fight the regimes that stand behind terrorism, that you have to either deter or dismantle these regimes. And we agree that you have to prosecute this war to victory, a full victory, and not be deterred in the middle. Let one victory breeds another victory. Just as one defeat breeds another defeat for the other side. Prosecute it to its war -- the war's end. Have the imperative of victory before your eyes. We agree with all that." But then he asked, "What happens after that? What about peace? What about peace and stability in the Middle East? Is it ever going to happen? Is it possible? Why don't you talk about that?" And I thought, that's a good idea. So I had a lot of typed notes, you know, a speech, a ready speech. And I put it -- I hope you don't mind -- I put it aside. And I said, I'd like to talk about peace. And I'd like to talk about, not a photo-op, handshake peace that crumbles before the negatives are even developed. And I don't want to talk about peace in a facile way. I want to talk about peace going to the foundations of that idea, the very foundations. Not the way that the polemicists talk about it or the soundbite artists talk about it, but how real thinkers think about peace. There's never been a greater thinker about the question of peace than the philosopher Immanuel Kant. And in the late 18th Century, over 200 years ago, he wrote a book, short book, for all of you students out there. I know you don't like classroom assignments. This is out of class. It's only 50 pages long. It's worth reading. It is the single most important political tract on international relations and on peace ever written. And it is called, not surprisingly, "Perpetual Peace." And Immanuel Kant asked exactly the question that this friend asked me tonight and that we are all asking today: How do you get a perpetual peace, an enduring peace, a peace that stands? Well, he said something very startling in this book. He said there are two kinds of peace in the world, not one, two kinds. He said there's peace with democracies, which is automatic and self-sustaining. You don't have to do anything to keep it because it keeps itself. And the reason for that is that democracies represent the will of the majority, and most people don't want to go to war. They don't want their children to go to war and die on strange battlefields. And therefore, in a democracy, the electorate will punish any government that unnecessarily goes to war, that provokes unnecessary military ventures. Democracies might respond to provocation, but it takes -- it's almost impossible to get them to initiate wars. Democracies, Immanuel Kant said, tend toward peace. But then he said, what about dictatorships? How do you get peace with dictatorships? Because a dictator practices aggression on his own people, so what's going to prevent him from practicing aggression against his neighbors? There's no electorate. I mean, Saddam Hussein didn't take a poll in downtown Baghdad before he decided to invade Kuwait, right? So what's going to stop war from a dictatorship? And Kant said, nothing, absolutely nothing inside the dictatorship. He said the only way you can stop aggressive war from a dictatorship is by having an outside force that constrains such aggression, and he called that the League of Free Nations. He meant by that that the democracies would combine to form a deterrent force to prevent aggression or, if deterrents failed, to roll it back with force. The League of Free Nations. Mind you, he didn't say United Nations. He didn't say United Nations because he wasn't dumb enough to think that democracies and dictatorships together would prevent dictatorships from practicing aggression. And you know, when you look at what we're seeing today, when the U.N. sends this investigatory committee to investigate the so-called fictitious massacres of Israel, when we've had dozens and dozens of proven massacres by Arafat and they didn't lift a finger, how can we even accept... ... the legitimacy of such a commission? How can we accept its findings? They're irrelevant, they're unjust, they're unfair. We should discard them, Israel and the United States together. No, I have a better idea, I have a better idea. You know, I spent some time in the U.N. as Israel's ambassador. They love initials there. So I suggest that Israel and the United States form an investigatory committee of its own -- of their own. We call it the FFCC, the Fact-Finding Committee on Chutzpah. Where do they get the chutzpah to do this? Back to Immanuel Kant. You got me going on the U.N., I'm not going to stop. So Immanuel Kant said that the only way to stop aggression, to have peace opposite a dictatorship, is to have enough deterrent power by the League of Free Nations to prevent this aggression. Now, was anyone listening to Kant, well, in the first half of the 20th century? And the answer is practically no one. And faced with the dictatorship of Nazi Germany, the democracies practiced the wrong kind of peace. Instead of strengthening themselves and building that deterrence force, they did the exact opposite, they weakened themselves and weakened themselves and still weakened themselves. And of course what they got was not peace, but the most catastrophic war in history and, of course, the greatest catastrophe that befell any people, our own people, in the form of the Holocaust. But equally, it can be said that in the second half of the 20th century, the democracies learned their lesson, and faced with a much more powerful dictatorship than Nazi Germany. How can one compare the might of the Soviet Union -- its ballistic missiles, its nuclear warheads -- to that of Germany? Faced with this awesome dictatorship, this time the democracies practice the right kind of peace. And they formed, exactly as Kant had said 150 years before, they formed the League of Free Nations. Of course we call it NATO. And they got a cold peace. We don't call it the cold peace, call it the Cold War. But there wasn't a war. There was half a century of peace. The armed peace of deterrence opposite dictatorships. Now, a few years ago, in the beginning of the '90s, I was sitting, reading the magazine of opinion that I value very much. No, it's not U.S. News and World Report. I value that, too, Mort. Happened to be a monthly familiar to you all, and I read the following. It said, (inaudible) Nazism was defeated. Now Soviet communism was defeated. So democratic capitalism has triumphed. It's over. Sounds (inaudible), doesn't it? So I called my friend, the publisher, and I said, "Norman" -- ah! OK. I said, "Norman, what a brilliantly written piece of garbage. "How did you publish this?" He said, "I've retired." I said, "No, seriously, how did you publish this?" And he said, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, yes, the Soviet Union has fallen, that's true." And you all know I'm not a communist, so it wasn't that I grieved over the fall of the Soviet Union. But I said, "The Soviet Union was the principle stopgap in the growth of militant Islamic terrorism, or rather militant Islam, the new force that is challenging the West. And once removed, those regimes that border the Soviet Union, militant Islamic regimes and the terror organizations that they harbor, will grow and grow and grow. And they will suck in Soviet nuclear and ballistic technology that is no longer controlled by a rigorous arms control regime that the Soviets applied." He said, "Do you really think that?" I said, "Yes. I think militant Islam is a tremendous threat to the West." Now, here's what I didn't say. I think it's a greater threat than the Soviet Union. The roots of militant Islam's antipathy to the West go back 1,000 years, a lot longer than the Soviet Union's did. And what they seek to do is merely to reverse 1,000 years of history, the rise of the West and the decline of Islam in their eyes. They seek to bring back the world into a rigid pre-medieval conception of humanity, very rigid with none of the freedoms that we in the West hold dear. And they seek to do this not by advancing their own societies, not by healthy competition, say, in the economic or cultural or technological sphere. They seek to do it by one way: They seek to do it by destroying the West. And to destroy the West you have to destroy the main engine of the West. And the main engine of the West is, of course, the United States. I was recently in the House of Commons speaking to some British parliamentarians, and I think I offended them because I said, "You know, you're a middle-sized Satan. There is the great Satan. "That's the United States, a position of honor. And there's a little Satan, also a distinct position. But you are in the indistinct model middle." And it is a fact that this deep antagonism to the West explains the antipathies in the Middle East. It is not, as I've often said, it is not that they hate the West because of Israel. It is that they hate Israel because of the West, because they see us... ... as an extension, as a frontal position of these Western civilization and Western values that they so abhor. Now, that still doesn't make them stand out compared to Soviet communism, except for the longevity of their hatred, because the Soviet communists wanted to dominate the world just as the militant Islamists do. And they, too, had millions of adherents around the world, just as the militant Islamists do. This is a similarity, but there is one huge difference: Every time the Soviets had to choose between their ideology and survival, they always chose survival. They always backed off, in Cuba, in Berlin. Every time America was resolved and determined, they backed off. It can not be said, however, that that is the case of militant Islam, because, very often, they reverse the order. And faced with a choice of their zealotry or their survival, they will often choose zealotry. They cultivate a bloodlust, a cult of death that was not present in communism. They have mothers offering joyously their children -- did you hear Arafat's wife? They have soldiers in the Iran-Iraq war drinking from fountains of real blood -- I'm not talking about colored water, real blood. They have this particular -- I won't repeat it here -- this view of heaven that they have, you know what it is. It's a culture of death. One of the Hamas leaders said a few months ago, he said, "We will defeat the Jews because they are a part of the West, they value life, and we love death." When you have such a suicidal penchant, that is different, different from communism. Have you ever heard of communist suicide bombers? No. But militant Islam produces battalions of them, hordes of them, just beginning to produce them. And we cannot rule out that if such a militancy acquires weapons of mass destruction, they will use them. Without a doubt, they will use them. They will use them against this country first, or maybe my country first. But they will use them, unless they are stopped. I say this because we now see, in the last few years, the manifestation of this cult of death in the form of the suicidal terrorism that we're experiencing. And we have to ask whether Kant's categorization of the kinds of peace -- the two kinds of peace, the peace opposite democracies and the peace opposite dictatorships, the peace of democracies and the peace of deterrence, whether it is possible to secure either kind of peace against this force. Certainly I want to say tonight that I believe that, against this militant Islamic terrorism, deterrence will not work. It simply will not work. So what do you do? In the short run, it's very clear what you have to do. What you have to do is, first of all, dismantle the means that militant Islam, this global movement, is using against us... ... and the means -- there are half a dozen regimes with two dozen terror organizations. We have to defeat them. Pure and simple. It's not that complicated, and it's going to be done. And by defeating, you deter. Some regimes, those that do not have yet the penchant for suicide, you deter, you punish them, you deter them. But the others that have shown this penchant, or show signs of having it, you destroy them. This is why the United States destroyed the Taliban regime... ... and this is why we must destroy Arafat's regime in Arafatistan. We have to do it. I'll say to you what I said to the prime minister a few days ago in a private conversation. I said, "Arik, get rid of Arafat. Get rid of him. Get rid of that regime. And America will understand, and many in America will support you. Get rid of that regime. Get rid of Arafat. Because as long as that man is there, representing what he represents, terrorism and violence will not stop and no kind of peace will begin." But I think equally we must understand that there are regimes that support suicide bombings from a greater distance and, indeed, are showing that they're rapidly trying to develop nuclear weapons. It is the marriage of this tendency, this fanaticism, and nuclear weapons that most threatens our world. So we must also make sure that those regimes are dismantled, and that's why we must support President Bush's goal of getting rid of Saddam Hussein as rapidly as possible. There is no time to waste. As soon as possible. It is not either Arafat or Saddam Hussein, it is both. They both have to go, and as soon as possible. Now, that is clear, that's the short run. By the way, it'll be done. I guarantee you, it'll be done. And you'll see terrorism subside and disappear as a serious force in our world, for five years, 10 years, 15 years, maybe 20 years. But then what? How do we prevent it from coming back? How do we prevent the next Arafat, the next Saddam Hussein, the next Osama bin Laden from coming up? There are kids right now who are absorbing the glorification of these killers. And how do we prevent, in a decade or two, the reappearance of another regime that harbors other terrorist organizations that could form and reform? There are a billion Muslims in the world. Say only 5 percent are infected, say 10 percent are infected with the disease. That's 100 million people. That's an enormous pool for recruitment and for support. How do we prevent it from coming back? We have to recognize that unless we do something, it will come back. And we have to recognize that we can't put the technological genie back into the bottle. It doesn't take much to create a nuclear device, certainly a primitive nuclear device. It's very easy to do, not very difficult. Just get your hands on a critical mass of plutonium and you will do it. It'll happen. This is the world we're entering. So the real question is, what do you do to cure the disease? Are there any doctors here? OK. What do doctors do? They look at what has already worked -- what has already worked. The closest analogy that we can see for these diseased militants is Nazism and its allies. What did we do with Nazism? First we defeated it, there is no substitute for that. Just as there's no substitute for defeating these terror regimes, there's no substitute for that. But we didn't end it there, we didn't end it there. We proceeded to plant the seeds of freedom. We defeated Nazism and planted democracy instead. And if we look at what has happened in the last 60 years, 50 years, there is no danger from Germany because there's democracy. Just imagine that this was not the case. Imagine that a neo-Nazi regime took power in Germany again, and you can understand the danger, not to the peace of Europe, but to the peace of the world. We defeated Nazism and planted democracy. What did we do with imperial Japan -- imperial Japan, by the way, that had some serious suicidal tendencies? They had kamikaze bombers, admittedly against military targets. But what did we do with that? We defeated -- the United States and its allies, the democracies, defeated imperial Japan and, in its place, planted the seeds of freedom, democratic institutions. It's not perfectly Western society or Western democracy, but it's a democracy. And that is the guarantor that Japan remains peaceful and that those tendencies that might have developed in Japanese societies are pushed back. This is the guarantor. Now, I think that we must approach the same problem of the militant Islamic realm because the root cause of terrorism must be dealt with. I know that many people will tell you that the root cause of terrorism, they will tell you that the way to stop is not -- stop terrorism is not what I've been suggesting. They will tell you that the root cause of terrorism is totalitarianism -- or rather, I'm sorry, the root cause of terrorism, they will tell you, is the grievances of terrorists because of the deprivation of national rights, national rights and civic rights that are being deprived. And I think that many have bought this line. It's sounds plausible if your knowledge of history extends to breakfast. This is the -- this is the contrary line to what I'm proposing. They say, "Look, the way you stop terrorism is by addressing the grievances, giving in to some of the terrorist demands, maybe to all of the purported terrorist demands, and that's how you stop terrorism. Because people are acting out of desperation because of the lack of freedom, because of oppression." Now, if that were true, then in the thousands of such struggles for freedom, for national freedom, for civic rights, for civic equality, in the 19th and 20th century, we'd expect to see a lot of terrorism. But we don't. We don't find it in the 19th century when the Greeks fought for their liberation, their national liberation from the Turks. We don't find it from the Pols who fought for their national liberation from Russia. We don't find it from the Czechs -- I know there's a Czech ambassador here, is that right? The Czech's, the Italians, the Hungarians, they fought for their liberation from Austria. You don't find it. And you hardly find it in the 20th century either. You don't find it with Mahatma Gandhi fighting for the liberation of India from British rule. You don't find it in the people of Eastern Europe struggling to throw down the Berlin Wall. You didn't find it, as I said, on the steps of the capital with Martin Luther King fighting here for civic equalities. What violence? No violence. No terrorism. You don't find it in our own people, the Jewish people, when we fought for our independence from Britain. And boy, did we have a grievance. We weren't fighting merely for an independent state, we were fighting for life. They were turning back the ships right into the ovens. If any people had a grievance that supposedly should justify terrorism, it is us. We never did. I know they say we did, because the Arabs say, "Well, the Jews are terrorists." But today they call the United States terrorists, the British are terrorists, and so on. Doesn't make a difference what they call you. Terrorism isn't defined by the names they call you, by the identity of its perpetrator. Terrorism is defined by one thing and one thing alone: by the deliberate targeting of civilians, by the nature of the act. And the Jewish underground forces had thousands of acts of taking up of arms. But you might find one case, maybe one case, two cases, which arguably fall into the area of terrorism. In fact, Zeb Jebotinsky (ph), the ideological father of Legun (ph)... ... and the Legun (ph) and Lethe (ph), heard about a case in which two women and two boys were killed. So he issued this order. He said, "Find out first if it's true, if it really happened. If it happened, find out if it was deliberate. If it was deliberate, put the people on trial immediately." Menachem Begin used to give orders to notify British military trains that they would be attacked, so that women and children and civilians would get off. He would, in attacking compounds like the military headquarters of the British in the Middle East, they phoned 45 minutes in advance to say, "Please vacate the building, a bomb will be coming off." Can you imagine Yasser Arafat calling the Israeli government and say, "Please vacate a building"? Well, they don't attack our headquarters. They attack cafes and restaurants and shops, and they certainly don't give any warning. And that's the whole difference, you see. In the thousands of cases, you might find one or two exceptions. But in the thousands of attacks of Arab terrorists, they deliberately target civilians. You may find, on occasion, that they hit soldiers by accident... ... or even by design. Now, how is it that some attack -- or rather, fight for their rights or their struggles and do not use terrorism, as I've shown you? In fact, most do not. At least for genuine struggles of liberation, I think it's very hard to find any example of use of terrorism. Whereas others do use terrorism. And the answer is that the people that I've enumerated were democrats -- with a small "d," by the way, for you Republicans out there. They're democrats, they believe in human rights, they believe in the sanctity of individual life. They believe that you can't blow up people. They believe that there are other ways of resolving conflicts. Whereas the terrorists don't believe in these things. To get somebody to blow up a bus full of babies, you have to do something to that person's mind and heart. And what you do is you put a goal in front of their heads -- a total goal. And you say, "This is the God to which you worship, and that God allows you to break any moral rule. You can trample all human rights into the dust. You can blow away all the rules. You can blow away children. You can do anything. In fact, you are required to do that," because that makes the goal even more elevated, in their eyes. There is a name for what I've just described, and the name for that is totalitarianism. The root cause of terrorism is totalitarianism. And the root cause... ... the root cause of suicidal terrorism is militant Islam totalitarianism. There is only one antidote, if we apply it in time. It is democracy. There is none else. Any way you cut it, from the historical examples that I could educe, and have educed, to the simple fact that we are running out of time. We must decide to do something that has never been done and that the U.S. has never done. We must recognize that, as democracy's sweeping the four corners of the world, we must end the exemption given to the Arab and Islamic world and promote actively and demand actively the democratization of those societies. I know this will not happen overnight. I know it won't happen and produce Western-style democracies. It doesn't, it won't. But it can happen in a way that would make things a lot better than they are otherwise. There are those who will tell you, well, the Islamic world is incapable of democratization. Really? What about Turkey? And that, too, is not a perfect Western democracy. But I'll tell you something, I'd rather have Turkish-style freedom any day than Iranian-style tyranny. There's no question about what we prefer. Now, there are intelligent people in this town whom I respect, who will tell you, and they tell me, if we press for democracy in the Arab world, we'll destabilize the entire Middle East. And I say, if we don't press for democracy in the Arab world, we'll endanger our entire civilization. This is what is at stake now. And I have a suggestion where to start. Saddam Hussein will soon be toppled. Send Americans there to build the institutions of democracy, of free debate, of free press, of free expression. And another suggestion, Arafat will soon be toppled. Send American monitors, not to monitor Israel's right of self-defense -- that doesn't need to be monitored -- to monitor free, genuine elections so that the Palestinians can finally, once and for all, choose their representatives democratically, their partners that we can make peace with. Start democracy, push for democracy, bring democracy to the Arab world, bring democracy to the Islamic world. Aerate and ventilate these societies. Make it work. Well, Kant, Immanuel Kant -- and I have a hard time saying this, because I devoted a chapter of a book of it I wrote to this great thinker -- Immanuel Kant was wrong. In the 21st century, with the advent of the possible marriage of suicidal regimes and nuclear weapons, there is only one kind of peace. That is the peace of democracies. We have ignored this truth for the last decade to our great peril, and we cannot afford to ignore it any longer. So we have to act. It's a question of whether we're capable of acting. Some of you know my father. He's an historian, so I read history. And the great recurring debate in history is, what shapes what? Do events shape people, or do people shape events? Are there forces, inevitable historic forces that flood us and we can not do anything about it but simply go with the flow, wherever it takes us? Or can we shape the currents, can we redirect them? I have come to assure you -- all of you, friends of Israel, representatives of the greatest democracy on earth, guardians of liberty -- I've come to assure you that never in history, certainly not in the last 60 years, and I think beyond that, never has there been such an opportunity for us to shape events, to shape our destiny. There has never been that opportunity, as much as it is today. Because everything that I have said here today is within our power. And I'm confident that, armed with moral sense and common sense and an understanding of history and led by President Bush, the United States, Israel and the champions of liberty elsewhere in the world will uproot terrorism, will plant the seeds of freedom, will secure our tomorrow, and will thus save our world. We can do it, we must do it, we will do it. Thank you very much. |
