Will Israel strike by August?

Joel Rosenberg's latest commentary is interesting and consistent with what many other observers in the region have been saying:

"Will Israel Strike by Summer?"

Russia has just announced that it intends to allow the Iranian nuclear reactor facility located in Bushehr (near the Persian Gulf) to go live in August. This is an ominous development. Now Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has a fateful decision to make. Will he order a preemptive military strike against all of Iran’s nuclear sites before August when the Bushehr site becomes “hot”? His mentor, Menachem Begin, ordered an Israeli air strike against Saddam Hussein’s Osirik nuclear reactor in Iraq before it went hot in 1981. Netanyahu wants the world to act with decisive unity to stop Iran from getting the Bomb. But that is increasingly unlikely. The Obama administration is no longer calling for “crippling sanctions,” and even if they were, it appears to be too late for sanctions to be effective. U.S. officials — including Defense Secretary Robert Gates — says Iran could have the Bomb by next year. German intelligence thinks it could be sooner. We need to pray for peace, but prepare for war

Of all places, the LA Times has a very well-written commentary on the same situation:


"When Armageddon lives next door"


Obama is denying Israel the right to self-defense when it is not his, or America's, life that is on the line.

I take it personally: Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wants to murder me, my family and my people. Day in, day out, he announces the imminent demise of the "Zionist regime," by which he means Israel. And day in, day out, his scientists and technicians are advancing toward the atomic weaponry that will enable him to bring this about.

The Jews of Europe (and Poles, Russians, Czechs, the French, etc.) should likewise have taken personally Adolf Hitler's threats and his serial defiance of the international community from 1933 to 1939. But he was allowed, by the major powers and the League of Nations, to flex his muscles, rearm, remilitarize the Rhineland and then gobble up neighboring countries. Had he been stopped before the invasion of Poland and the start of World War II, the lives of many millions, Jews and Gentiles, would have been saved. But he wasn't.

Obama has indeed tried to mobilize the international community for sanctions. But it has been a hopeless task, given the selfishness and shortsightedness of governments and peoples. Sanctions were supposed to kick in in autumn 2009; then it was December; now it is sometime late this year. Obama is still pushing the rock up the hill -- and Ahmadinejad, understandably, has taken to publicly scoffing at the West and its "sanctions."

Obama insists that Israel may not launch a preemptive military strike of its own. Give sanctions a chance, he says. (Last year he argued that diplomacy and "engagement" with Tehran should be given a chance. Tehran wasn't impressed then and isn't impressed now.) The problem is that even if severe sanctions are imposed, they likely won't have time to have serious effect before Iran succeeds at making a bomb.

Which makes his prohibition against an Israeli preemptive strike all the more immoral. He knows that any sanctions he manages to orchestrate will not stop the Iranians.


Obama is effectively denying Israel the right to self-defense when it is not his, or America's, life that is on the line.


The American veto may ultimately consign millions of Israelis, including me and my family, to a premature death and Israel to politicide. It would then be comparable to Britain and France's veto in the fall of 1938 of the Czechs defending their territorial integrity against their rapacious Nazi neighbors. Within six months, Czechoslovakia was gobbled up by Germany.


An Israeli attack might harm U.S. interests and disrupt international oil supplies (though I doubt it would cause direct attacks on U.S. installations, troops or vessels). But, from the Israeli perspective, these are necessarily marginal considerations when compared with the mortal hurt Israel and Israelis would suffer from an Iranian nuclear attack. Netanyahu's calculations will, in the end, be governed by his perception of Israel's existential imperatives. And the clock is ticking.

We are now approaching the end of April. Summer will be here soon, and war is on the horizon. I do not believe it possible, this time around, that we can have any war - any "conflict" - without things progressing rapidly towards the final fulfillment of biblical prophecy, including Isaiah 17 and Ezekiel 38-39, both of which will serve as entry points into the "confirming" of the peace covenant from Daniel 9:27 and the beginning of the Tribulation.

As the article stated "The clock is ticking".