In good measure, A'man's (IDF Intelligence Branch) record of intermittent failure is noteworthy. While it is obviously too late to rectify prior mistakes, lessons can be learned for the future. The most important of all such lessons is this: Do not trust altogether to the politicians, to the generals, to the IDF Intelligence Branch, least of all to the academic strategists. Before you take comfort from what the "experts" have to say about Oslo I and II, allegations about Israel's continuing strength and your enemies' continuing weaknesses, recall that their record has been decidedly unimpressive and that Israel exists today because, in the past, enemy weapons technologies were relatively primitive.

Let us be candid! Israel's endurance has too little to do with being smart. It has, on several significant occasions, only been lucky.

At this ominous time in its history, Israel is confronted especially by Iranian nuclearization, a developing menace of potentially unprecedented import. Although Israel's leaders maintain that this menace is unrelated to the Oslo Accords, exactly the opposite is true. While Iran will soon have the capacity to launch missiles against Israel from its own territory - and will not need the strategic advantages of a cooperative state of Palestine (the state now being created by Israel) - its willingness to launch will surely be enhanced by Oslo's dismemberment of Israel. This is the case because the overall effect of such dismemberment will be to weaken the country generally, including its basic will to resist, and because Oslo will preclude any essential Israeli preemptions.

Israel, in the fashion of an individual organism, is a system. Here, the weakening of constituent "organs" may not be life-threatening by itself, yet - taken together - such weakening might portend "death." While particular territorial surrenders might not, in and of themselves, produce national annihilation, they will, over time, drain the lifeblood from the country. In response, enemy states, sensing the progressive deterioration a still-hated Jewish State, will poise for the kill. Only fools do not understand that this is precisely what is being calculated at this very moment in Damascus, Teheran, Baghdad, Cairo, and, of course, in Gaza.

Israel, in the past, has resorted with astounding success to preemptive destruction of enemy military assets, to what we international lawyers call "anticipatory self-defense." Within the next year or two, Israel may have to undertake similar actions against Iranian unconventional assets and infrastructure (although it may already be too late) or forever risk chemical/biological/nuclear aggressions from Teheran. Naturally, the Government, its generals and its professors will tell you not to worry. There is no need for preemption. Israel has, in its "basement," a "nuclear deterrent." Israel is working diligently on the Arrow, the Hetz, and on associated forms of anti tactical ballistic missile defense. Even the Americans are helping. (Who could possibly not have faith in The Americans?) Stop worrying!

Friends, the requirements of nuclear deterrence are extraordinarily complex. As best I can tell from my own lectures and conversations with pertinent Israeli officials and scholars, this fact is not understood in your country. Rather, I hear, again and again, that Israel will be protected by something called "multilayered active defenses," an integrated network of warning/interception systems to augment retaliatory threats. Nonsense! Unless Iran were to believe that Israel could and would retaliate with "unacceptably destructive" reprisals, it might not be dissuaded from striking first. Moreover, if Iran were willing to absorb an Israeli reprisal in order to fulfil Islamic expectations of jihad, it might strike regardless of anticipated destructiveness. As for the Arrow and similarly integrated systems, deployment is still years away. Under the most optimal conditions, deployment will be inadequate. In the interim, Iran will have a heightened incentive to strike first. And this says nothing about the policy consequences of Israel's persistent preference for "deliberate ambiguity" over nuclear disclosure (a preference that should at least be periodically reexamined).

Preemption may be essential to Israel's very survival, and Oslo prevents Israel from striking preemptively. The political leadership, the generals, the professors know this. In the Middle East shaped by Oslo - a Middle East embraced foolishly by the current Prime Minister - such a strike (should it still be tactically feasible) would be incontestably belligerent, upsetting all of the delicate "peacemaking" now underway. The world would never tolerate such Israeli "aggressions." No, there can be no essential preemptions after Oslo.

Friends, what if Menachem Begin had thought this way back in June 1981? If he had chosen to forego the preemption option at that time, what sorts of warheads would have been fitted on Iraqi Scuds ten years later? While Begin's actions at Osiraq did indeed save the country from "another Holocaust" (Begin's own words after the successful raid), the present prime minister prefers to place his bets on eventual reconcilation with the Islamic world. It is a noble wager; but it is altogether wrong.

Friends, the generals and the professors who counsel the political leadership on strategic matters in Israel are occasionally (let me be generous) not all that smart. They work hard, to be sure, and they are certainly all honorable men and women but they are generally (like their American counterparts) all too ordinary, and they are sometimes very confused. In their assessments of the probable security effects of Oslo, they are now very, very confused. If you prefer life to death, both individually and collectively, it is time to demand of your government officials and their advisors some serious scholarship, some sustained analytic arguments that support their reassurances not by dogmatic assertion, but by sound, compelling internal logic. To date, these figures have offered absolutely nothing in the way of adequate intellectual demonstrations. Their ongoing "peace process" is still built upon sand.

General Yitzhak Rabin, on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, assured his countrymen that the Arabs would not attack. This view, derivative from the similarly misconceived assessment of then Minister of Defense Moshe Dayan, has come to be known in your country as the mechdal, the "concept," the idea that the enemy is not preparing for war. Recall, if you still prefer to have blind faith in your "experts," that a scant twenty-four hours before the attack A'man's official estimate on the probability of war, according to Chaim Herzog, was "the lowest of the low." Today, Israel faces another mechdal, an omission, an instance of nonperformance, an expression of neglect with vastly more catastrophic potential. This time the "concept" could produce an end to the Third Temple Commonwealth. The problem stems from an erroneous understanding of what the Oslo Accords do to weaken Israel and to strengthen Israel's enemies, especially Iran.

If you liked the mechdal, you'll love Oslo!
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