Louis Rene Beres

Certain Arab/Islamic critics of Israel often speak of some deeply sinister Jewish migrations to "Palestine" after World War I, neglecting to mention that (1) there has been a large and continuous Jewish presence in the land for over 3,000 years; and (2) there has been a continuing Jewish majority in Jerusalem.

Again and again, we hear the nearly visceral incantations from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah: "We love death."

Jorge Luis Borges, the very special Argentine writer and philosopher, sometimes identified himself as a Jew. Although lacking any apparent basis in halacha, he clearly felt himself to be a kindred spirit: “Many a time I think of myself as a Jew,” he is quoted in Willis Barnstone’s, Borges at Eighty: Conversations (1982), “but I wonder whether I have the right to think so. It may be wishful thinking.”

“Everything in this world exudes crime,” says Baudelaire, “the newspapers, the walls, and the face of man.” But this “face” does not belong solely to what classic seventeenth-century international law scholar Hugo Grotius called “men of deplorable wickedness.”

The explicit application of codified restrictions of the laws of war to noninternational-armed conflicts dates back only as far as the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. Recalling, however, that more than treaties and conventions comprise the laws of war, it is also clear that the obligations of jus in bello (justice in war) comprise part of "the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations," and bind all categories of belligerents. Indeed, the Hague Convention IV of 1907 declares, in broad terms, that in the absence of a precisely published set of guidelines in humanitarian international law concerning "unforeseen cases," the preconventional sources of international law govern all belligerency.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Soon, even the more "moderate" Palestinian forces will re-start their carefully choreographed terror attacks against Israel. Simultaneously, more or less, Hamas- even as it proceeds to a presumably formal rapprochement with Fatah - will do the same. In Lebanon, Shiite Hizbullah, steadily mentored and lavishly re-supplied by Iran, and operationally allied with Sunni Hamas, has already initiated massive preparations for the next war.

Any chaotic disintegration of the world system wouldfundamentally transform the Israeli system. Again, recalling the remarkable Swiss playwright, such a transformation could ultimately involve total or near-total destruction. In anticipation, Israel will have to orient its strategic planning to an assortment of worst-case prospects, thus focusing much more deliberately on a wide range of primarily self-help security options. This point simply cannot be overstated.

The following Keynote Address was delivered by Professor Beres to the Intelligence Summit in St. Petersburg on March 5, 2007. It is published here for the very first time in its original form. These formal remarks presented by our own Strategic and Military Affairs analyst to very senior members of the military and intelligence communities (U.S., Israeli and certain others) remain starkly relevant and timely.

William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet, wrote prophetically of a time in which "the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned." Here he revealed what still seems to elude historians, diplomats and scholars: In the not-too-distant future, there will come a moment in which there will be no safety in treaties or in armaments, no help from "civilization," no counsel from public authority, and no rescue from science.

Back in October 2006, then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had urged Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to free imprisoned terrorist Marwan Barghouti. Her obviously naïve argument was that the Tanzim leader remained very popular among Palestinians, and that he was likely the only Fatah representative who could successfully advance the U.S.-led "Middle East Peace Process." Today, not without irony, similar arguments are being raised in Israel itself, even in the Knesset. Following the election of Barghouti to Fatah's powerful Central Committee on August 11, Minority Affairs Minister Avishay Braverman (Labor) said: "In light of the election results, we must consider releasing him in order to create a moderate and strong political leadership among the Palestinians."

We have seen that Israel could conceivably need nuclear weapons, among several other essential purposes, for nuclear war fighting. Should nuclear deterrence options and/or preemption options fail altogether, Israel's "hard target" capabilities could be critical to national survival. These capabilities could depend, in part, upon nuclear weapons.

In many ways, Iran is now the Islamic terrorist writ large, the individual murderer in macrocosm. Although military analysts are certainly correct in pointing out that Iran is the major sponsor of Hamas and related Islamic terrorist groups (e.g., Hezbollah), it is as a direct threat to Israel that its terrors are most ominous.

Regarding the Oslo accords and Israel's vulnerability to war, Israeli security has become increasingly dependent upon nuclear weapons and strategy.

For many years, any talk of preemption against a nuclearizing Iran was certain to elicit primarily harsh and uniform condemnation.

Ten years ago, Professor Beres - following publication of his memoir in The New York Times − was invited by Swiss Ambassador Thomas Borer to present personal testimony before the specially constituted Swiss Commission on World War II.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. For anyone who can still think clearly, the Annapolis "Peace Conference" in November was merely the latest hallucinatory rendition of a very troubled sleep. It's not that this carefully scripted assembly actually confirmed a catastrophic outcome for Israel. Rather, it underscored America's perilous and persistent preoccupation with a determinably wrongheaded foreign policy.

Even now - even after thousands of Israeli men, women and children have been systematically dismembered and murdered by the most barbarous terrorist movement in recent memory - much of the world remains willfully impervious to what is true in the Middle East.

One must wonder: Is current U.S. policy on the "Road Map" merely the result of a foolish consistency, or is something much more sinister going on? After all, President Bush and Secretary of State Rice remain determined to birth a viable Palestinian state, one that would be part of an altogether mythical "two-state solution."

My readers in The Jewish Press will already know that I write a great deal about Israeli nuclear issues. One of these inherently existential issues is the need for a coherent and codified Israeli nuclear doctrine. Moreover, this need was an integral part of Project Daniel - a private effort that reported to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ("Israel's Strategic Future," January 2003) and was most immediately concerned with Iranian nuclear weapons and the associated prospect of nuclear war in the Middle East.

"The more things change," goes the well-worn maxim, "the more they remain the same." Readers of The Jewish Press are already well acquainted with now incessant Iranian calls for the annihilation of Israel. What might not be so apparent, however, is that such calls to "wipe Israel off the map" constitute a serious crime under international law.

Israel's policy of opacity or deliberate ambiguity on nuclear weapons had already been breached long before Prime Minister Olmert's public statement on December 11th. And it was also breached at the prime-ministerial level, no less. More than 10 years ago, Shimon Peres explicitly undermined Israel's longstanding commitment to keep the bomb in the "basement."

Technically, the Lebanon war against Hizbullah is over. In fact, however, Israel remains starkly vulnerable to further rocket attacks, and - even more ominously - to a still-nuclearizing Iran. Making matters worse, Prime Minister Olmert has yet to openly change course from his indisputably catastrophic plan for "realignment" and "convergence."

Science begins with the discovery of regularities. A regular feature of all Islamic "suicide" terrorists is a declared love of death. For us in the West, such declared affections must seem intuitively suspect. After all, they are contrary to everything we normally believe about self-preservation, reason and human behavior.

We who care desperately for Israel and for the Jewish People don't need a propaganda film to make our case. A completely truthful account - as Spielberg has given us - will always be in our interest.

For the moment, fears of a nuclear war in the Middle East remain focused narrowly and correctly on Iran. In the coming months, before that country is able to deploy a fully operational nuclear capability, Israel will have to preemptively destroy essential parts of the Iranian nuclear infrastructure.

Since the latest Arab attacks on the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, the fashionably operative counter terrorism strategy in Israel has focused on "smashing the infrastructure of Hamas." With this in mind, the United States will now send at least $100 million of equipment to Israel for advanced bomb detection devices, X-ray systems and robotics devices, as well as for advanced thermal and radar sensors.

The April 17 suicide bombing in Tel Aviv included the usual breakdown of casualties - the steadily rising number of dead and of those casually described as "merely wounded." But what, exactly, does it mean to be in the second category? Consider just a few of the carefully documented medical answers.

How shall we truly understand what happened on the last day of March one year ago, when an Iraqi mob burned, desecrated and hanged four American contractors from a bridge in Fallujah?

A Speech Presented to Purdue University's Homeland Security Institute Published Exclusively In The Jewish Press (Part One)

With Pertinent Policy Recommendations For The President of the United States