I spoke with Danon last week, and even with John Kerry scrambling to clinch a deal by throwing in the sweetener of a Jonathan Pollard release, Danon was not budging.
“I have been fighting for Pollard for the last twenty years,” he said, “and I continue to fight for him to come back to Israel. But I don’t think we should make a linkage. Even if Pollard will be released I will still resign as deputy minister of defense. This is a moral decision. We should not allow murderers to walk freely.”
Danon condemned Kerry’s shuttle diplomacy as “unacceptable” and lamented how “in the past Netanyahu said there will be no preconditions and then we saw that a settlement freeze and releasing murderers became preconditions. Even now we are negotiating about the price to continue to talk. We need tell our friends in the U.S. that there are red lines that we are not willing to cross.”
Is it mere coincidence that these negotiations, which serve only as a vehicle for Jewish self-immolation, are unraveling at a fast and furious pace as the holiday of our redemption approaches?
The lessons of Hashem’s deliverance of the Jewish people became all the more crystallized when I heard Danon admit he was “very concerned” about Kerry. “He is adopting the Palestinian ideology and talking about two states and two capitals in Jerusalem, meaning that we have to go back to the 1967 lines.”
Danon’s solution? “We should count only on ourselves, despite our friends in the Jewish community and in both houses of Congress. Israel is preparing itself for all options, even the option of dealing with the threat of Iran by ourselves.”
Welcome words from a politician whose ascent in Israeli politics is not accompanied by selling out the citizens he represents. Coupled with reliance on Hashem, this should be a wake-up call to other policy makers who suffer from an affliction of Jewish insecurity that threatens the security of us all.