Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should win the Nobel Peace Prize.
For the nattering nabobs who have spent 30 years saying that Netanyahu is a dangerous warmonger, such a recognition might sound unthinkable. But the nabobs have always been wrong. Like Ronald Reagan in the United States in the 1980s, Netanyahu has shown that strength and prosperity lead to peace. This has always been what he said would happen, and this year his long career of pursuing his stratagems has finally borne impressive fruit.
The peace deal between Israel and Morocco that is expected to be signed this week is the fourth in a recent series of astonishing breakthroughs for Middle Eastern comity. It follows similar agreements for formal ties between Israel and three other Arab or Islamic nations: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Sudan. A fifth such nation, Oman, has not agreed to formal ties yet, but it is serving as a de facto facilitator of regional peace.
All of these announcements have come since the beginning of August. They follow decades of (sometimes uneasy) peace between Israel and two of its immediate neighbors, Egypt and Jordan. The informal ties between Israel and these five other nations, along with plenty of informal cooperation with Saudi Arabia, have been growing throughout Netanyahu’s 11 years of uninterrupted service as prime minister. (He previously served in the same job from 1996-99, and did great work on the prosperity front as minister of finance from 2003-05.) Still, for four of them to be formalized within five months is a stunning achievement.
The naysayers all insisted for decades that Israel would never achieve peaceful relations with the Arab-Islamic world unless it kowtowed to the ever-increasing demands from Palestinian terrorist leaders. Former Secretary of State John Kerry, for example, insisted just four years ago that “there will be no advanced and separate peace with the Arab world without the Palestinian process and Palestinian peace. Everybody needs to understand that.”
No, what everybody really needs to understand is that Kerry and his haughty, left-wing cognoscenti have always been wrong about the Middle East, just as they were always wrong about how to counteract Communist hegemony in the 1970s and 1980s. Strength, prosperity, and mutual interests, not guilt trips or weakly bowing to threats, are the ingredients necessary for peace.
Netanyahu understood realities far better than Kerry and his ilk did. Netanyahu realized that a mutual interest in deterring Iranian hegemony unites Israel with its Sunni neighbors. So, too, do mutual interests against terrorism and the dangerous instabilities it brings. So, too, are mutual interests in prosperity. With Israel the absolute engine of almost all non-oil-related prosperity in the region, it behooves Arab-Islamic nations to do business with the Jewish state.
Beyond that, Bibi’s critics always had him wrong. They called him a warmonger, ignoring all the times he showed restraint and carefully calibrated responses, even earning criticism from other hard-liners in Israel. Netanyahu preached strength but not unbridled aggression.
If the Nobel Peace Prize is to be more than a left-wing popularity contest, it should recognize actual achievements, not mere platitudes. To an extent never before thought possible, Netanyahu is bringing stability to the entire troubled region. The Israeli leader merits the prize and the gratitude of the entire globe.
