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News & Events

2009-10-30

Nuclear Iran Threat to Free World, Israeli Official Tells Students

A retired Israeli general who helped lead the heroic 1976 mission to liberate hostages in Entebbe, Uganda told Maimonides Upper School students Oct. 29 that if diplomacy and economic sanctions fail, Israel should launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The alternative, said Effi Eitam, could be “the ultimate surrender of the free world to evil.”

Gen. Eitam, a member of the Knesset from the National Union Party and a ba’al teshuva, visited Maimonides as an emissary of the prime minister of Israel, through a Jewish National Fund speaking tour.

Purveyors of radical Islam “are not just people who don’t behave in a nice way,” he told the students. They represent “an effort to undermine the foundation of the world moral order.” If such an ideology possesses weapons of mass destruction, the results could be horrifying for the entire world, he said.

Should Iran develop nuclear weapons, one result will be their “rapid proliferation” among terror groups in the region, including Al Qaeda, the speaker continued. Suitcase-size weapons could bring the world to its knees. Israel, he added, cannot live under such a threat, because the country is too small to absorb even a limited nuclear attack.

The mutual deterrence that marked the Cold War succeeded because, in the end, the U.S. and the Soviet Union “share the same moral principles,” Gen. Eitam told the students. The government of Iran does not subscribe to that system of morality. A suicide bomber, he said, is a concept that is “against the moral order of nature.”

Should Israel attack, “You will have to prepare yourselves to defend the State of Israel,” the speaker told the students. And what that really means is “to maintain and protect the morality, security and freedom of the whole world.”

After the presentation, Gen. Eitam continued the conversation with several students. In answer to a question, he said the reported dispersal of Iran’s nuclear facilities is not a deterrent to a pre-emptive strike. Top Israeli military officials know their location, he said.

During his remarks, the general also commented on the recent United Nations report accusing the IDF of war crimes in Gaza. Eitam was indignant over the allegations, declaring, “I served for 30 years in the IDF. Not an airplane, not a cannon, not a rifle ever shot at civilian targets deliberately.” He acknowledged that the IDF, like any armed force, can err. But in many of those cases victims or their families were compensated. And there are “endless examples” of how combat operations were aborted because “we heard the cry of a baby in a house where the ground floor was filled with weapons.”

“We can fight a war and yet remain within the boundaries of Jewish morality, of Jewish justice,” he stated.

He also related details of the planning and execution of the hostage rescue at the Entebbe airport, a mission that has been immortalized in books and films. At the time, military planners knew little about Africa. “I went down to a store and bought a globe,” said Eitam, who headed a commando unit. “We found Africa and then we found Uganda, and at the bottom of Lake Victoria we found Entebbe.”

The task was made easier when they discovered that an Israeli company had built the airport there, he said.


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