Jewish state has right to attack nuclear site

By HENRY MARK HOLZER
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
NEW YORK -- My position on this issue rests on indisputable premises.
First, Israel is a democratic sovereign state. It is heir to centuries of rabid anti-Semitism, and in the 60-plus years of its existence has suffered countless acts of state and state-sponsored aggression ranging from border incursions to homicide bombings to full-scale military assaults.
Second, the rogue regime in Iran, controlled by anti-Semitic madmen, has publicly and repeatedly waved a potential nuclear sword, promising to annihilate the state of Israel. To that end, it has loosed its terrorist puppet, Hezbollah, to attack Israel militarily on the ground. To achieve its final solution for Israel, Iran has pressed forward with its nuclear weapons program.
Two options for Israel
Facing this threat, Israel has two choices.
It can wait until Iran escalates its attack on the Jewish state, at the low end of the spectrum through use of surrogates like Hezbollah operating from Lebanon, or at the high end, until Iran obtains and uses a nuclear weapon. And pray for the best.
Or Israel can reprise its 1981 pre-emptive strike on Iraq's Osirak nuclear facility, which indisputably set Saddam Hussein's weapons program back decades and may have eliminated it for all time.
Which choice is best for preservation of the Jewish state? History provides some guidance.
For example, tens of millions of lives would have been saved from the carnage of World War II and the Holocaust had the Western democracies destroyed Hitler's war-making machine in the 1930s.
More recently, the United States rousted the communist Cubans from Grenada and the narco-Noriega regime from Panama. We attacked Iraq on behalf of Kuwait and our own interests in the early '90s, and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Hussein regime in Iraq on our own behalf a decade later.
Anti-bombing rhetoric
We are told, however, that the "international community" is opposed to Israeli retaliation against Hezbollah and unilateral military action against Iran. We are told that such conduct is not moral, that retaliation is wrong, that self-defense has limits. We are told that "international law" would not support Israeli action.
Nonsense!
As to the moral question, it is not immoral to kill in self defense -- indeed, it is a moral imperative to do so.
As to retaliation against Hezbollah, every civilized legal system in history recognizes the right of a state wrongfully attacked to strike back at least in kind -- as Israel is doing now in Lebanon.
As to international law, to the extent it has any meaning at all in the context of war, it is impotent to deal with today's terrorism waged by states and their surrogates who have not the slightest concern for law of any kind -- except the kind that comes from the barrel of an RPG or the warhead of a missile.
Travesty of international law
In the context of aggressive state-sponsored war, the idea of international law should not deter Israel because those rules are a travesty.
In the 20th century alone, German Nazis, Japanese Imperialists, Italian Fascists, Soviet communists -- and let's not forget the North Koreans and the North Vietnamese -- unhesitatingly initiated attacks against their neighbors.
"International law," and its impotent intellectuals in academe and The Hague, could not stop, let alone prevent, the extermination of Jews, the Rape of Nanking, the bombing of Ethiopia, the starvation of Ukraine, the sacking of Seoul, and the savage slaughter of innocent civilians at Tet.
As the state of Israel, by pre-emptive strike against Iran and retaliation against Hezbollah, defends itself in an increasingly hostile and dangerous world, it keeps faith with its people, the posterity of Jewish survivors of centuries of hatred, oppression, murder and genocide.
Not a mere slogan, "Never Again!" is a promise that must be kept.
Henry Mark Holzer, professor emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, is editor of www.supremecourtwatch.info. He was named a First Amendment Fellow of the National Press Club in 2000. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.