Epicenter 2.0

by Joel C. Rosenberg

  CHAPTER THREE

  CONNECTING THE DOTS

  About a week after Sharansky returned to Israel, I received a phone call from a top strategist for Benjamin Netanyahu. Could I meet the former Israeli prime minister the following week when he came to the U.S.?

  With Barak’s government on the verge of collapse, the strategist explained, Netanyahu was being urged to run for prime minister again when new elections were called, perhaps as early as the spring of 2001. He was, therefore, quietly forming a new inner circle of Americans to complement his Israeli team. Netanyahu wanted to map out a possible comeback, and he wanted to talk to me about serving as one of his communications advisors.

  If the interview went well, I would be invited to join the half dozen or so other advisors already on board and stay for the six-hour strategy meeting to follow. I accepted without hesitation.

  Just before 8:00 a.m. on Monday, September 25, 2000, I entered the lobby of Netanyahu’s hotel in Manhattan and was taken by a security guard directly to the former prime minister’s suite, where I was greeted by the strategist who had talked to me over the phone. We chatted about the latest developments in the Bush-Cheney campaign against Vice President Gore and Senator Joe Lieberman and about the morning’s headlines from Israel.

  A few minutes later, Netanyahu entered the room. He looked tanned, fit, and very relaxed, sporting a black polo shirt and dress slacks. His hair was a bit grayer than when he had been in office, but he seemed rejuvenated and ready to get back into the arena. He gave me a firm handshake and asked me to sit.

  “So, Joel, tell me a little about yourself,” Netanyahu began.

  I tried to compose my thoughts. There was something remarkable about meeting the ninth prime minister of the modern State of Israel, a man who’d literally had his finger on the button while facing down enemies like Saddam Hussein and the ayatollahs of Iran.

  “Well, sir, my first job was at the Heritage Foundation. . . .”

  I had barely gotten the words out of my mouth when Netanyahu broke out in a smile and told me how much he loved the work Heritage did for the cause of freedom and how long he had been friends with the organization’s founder, Ed Feulner.

  “What did you do after Heritage?” he asked.

  I explained that my next job had been working for Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp. This, too, elicited a strong reaction. Netanyahu was friends with both men. As I recall, he referred to Jack as “Yitzhak Kemp,” a nickname the famed quarterback turned congressman turned secretary of housing and urban development had earned through years of supporting Israel through thick and thin.

  Netanyahu also turned out to be a big fan of Rush Limbaugh, for whom I’d worked as director of research from 1994 until I joined Steve Forbes’s presidential campaign in 1996. And when I mentioned working for Steve as his communications director and later as deputy campaign manager during the 2000 primaries, that was apparently all Netanyahu had to hear. He couldn’t say enough good about the flat tax, Steve’s passion for free-market reform, and the Jubilee Business Summit they had cochaired together in October 1998. The interview had been under way for barely five minutes, and already it was over.

  “Why exactly are we having this meeting?” Netanyahu asked, standing. “If you were good enough for them, you’re good enough for me. Let’s get started.”

  Startled, I stood as well and shook his hand. I was in.

  “ALL HELL IS BREAKING LOOSE”

  By the end of November, less than three months after that initial strategy meeting in New York, Netanyahu led Barak by a stunning seventeen points, forty-six to twenty-nine. We had run no ads. There was no official political campaign in operation, yet the numbers were exploding, and Barak’s camp was in full panic mode. So what had happened?

  Yasser Arafat had happened.

  Rather than pocket the most generous deal ever offered by any Israeli prime minister in history (too generous, in our judgment) and declare victory, Arafat chose instead to launch a bloody campaign against Israel, hoping to force Israel to make even more concessions. Using the pretext that Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount on September 28 (a visit I have made several times and which is and should be perfectly legal) had somehow violated a Muslim holy site (though Sharon never entered the Dome of the Rock or the Al-Aksa Mosque), Palestinians began rioting on the Temple Mount, throughout East Jerusalem, and all over the West Bank and Gaza.55

  Day after day they torched cars, threw firebombs, and fired automatic weapons at Israeli soldiers and civilians alike. Then, on October 6, Arafat’s Fatah Party, along with the Islamic resistance movement known as Hamas, ratcheted up the crisis even further, calling for a Palestinian “day of rage,” thus intensifying the clashes.

  Six days later, on the morning of October 12, 2000, I woke up to an urgent call from one of Netanyahu’s advisors. “Turn on your television,” he told me. “All hell is breaking loose.” He was actually understating it.

  In Ramallah, Arafat’s capital on the West Bank, Palestinian mobs had lynched and butchered two Israeli reserve soldiers—a thirty-eight-year-old father of three and a thirty-three-year-old newlywed—on worldwide television. One of the teenage murderers had actually slathered his own hands in the men’s still-warm blood and held them out a window for the media and a cheering Palestinian crowd to see.

  In Lebanon, meanwhile, Hezbollah guerrillas had seized three Israeli hostages and declared their own day of rage, vowing to set the border with Israel on fire. In Yemen, Al-Qaeda terrorists operating at the direction of Osama bin Laden had just launched a suicide-bombing mission against the USS Cole, an American warship in port for refueling. The attack killed seventeen American sailors and wounded thirty-nine others. And in Iraq, Saddam Hussein not only issued a chilling new threat to destroy Israel if he was given access through Jordan; he also began moving an armored division of 15,000 Republican Guard troops westward out of Baghdad toward the border of Jordan and Israel, a highly provocative move in such a volatile climate.56

  Once again, the Middle East was the epicenter of a massive political earthquake. Saddam, Arafat, and bin Laden were all moving on the same day, and the world was looking on in horror. My phones were soon ringing off the hook as American journalists, radio talk-show hosts, and network news producers sought Netanyahu’s reaction.

  On November 2, a car bombing in Jerusalem killed two Israelis and wounded ten more. On November 20, an Israeli school bus filled with children was ripped to shreds by a roadside bomb, leaving two dead and nine seriously injured. Two days later, Palestinian terrorists blew up a bus in Hadera, killing two Israelis and injuring sixty more. On and on the violence went, and Barak appeared powerless to stop it.57

  During the Camp David summit, Netanyahu had warned that Barak’s concessions were putting Israel’s security at risk because the Palestinian leadership would view them as being offered not out of strength but out of weakness.58 Now such warnings were playing out before the eyes of the world.

  Netanyahu was no prophet. Rather, he was a man who understood the nature of evil. He had coldly and correctly assessed the character and intentions of Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein and the leaders of jihadist movements such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and Al-Qaeda. He knew how they thought, how they operated, how they collaborated, what they wanted, and how far they were willing to go to get it. And the Israeli people began to see that he was right.

  Netanyahu now had a commanding fifteen- to twenty-point lead over Barak in nearly every public poll. He certainly seemed poised to become Israel’s next prime minister. The strategist who had introduced me to Netanyahu now asked me to consider working full-time as his English-language press secretary when the campaign officially launched early in 2001. It would mean moving my family to Jerusalem for several months, but it was the chance of a lifetime.

  Still, I had one question: “You know that I’m an evangelical Christian, right?”

  It was a sensitive subject in Israel, especially coming from an Orthodox Jewish heritage as
I did. But it would be better to deal with the issue up front, I thought, than risk causing Netanyahu or his team problems later on, particularly in the white-hot battle of a political campaign.

  The strategist looked at me for a moment as if to say, Do you think you would have gotten within a hundred miles of the former prime minister of Israel if we didn’t already know everything about you? But what he actually said was, “It’s not an issue for us if you don’t make it one.”

  I appreciated the confidence of Netanyahu and his team and their willingness to build strategic ties with evangelical Christians, who are among Israel’s most loyal and steadfast friends. In the end, however, neither my family nor I moved to Jerusalem to serve on the campaign. There was no campaign. For as quickly as Netanyahu’s political fortunes had soared, they just as suddenly came to an abrupt end.

  CHECKMATE

  On Saturday, December 9, I received an unexpected call at home from Jerusalem. “Barak’s resigning,” said one of Netanyahu’s top aides. “He’s expected to hold a press conference in the next few hours.”

  That was good news, wasn’t it?

  Not exactly, the aide explained.

  Rumor had it Barak was going to call for special elections under the pretext of a national-security emergency. That meant voters would go to the polls to choose the nation’s prime minister in just sixty days. But such a move would also trigger a provision within Israeli law that allowed only a sitting member of Israel’s parliament to run.

  Barak’s gambit suddenly became clear. Netanyahu was no longer a Knesset member. After his defeat to Barak in 1999, he had stepped down to spend more time with his family, travel a bit, write a book, give some speeches, and get some rest. If Barak had waited for the normal election cycle to roll around or for his government to officially collapse via a parliamentary vote of no confidence, Netanyahu could have legally reentered the political arena and soundly defeated him. By resigning the way he did, however, Barak had put his strongest opponent in checkmate and positioned himself for a run against Ariel Sharon, who appeared far easier to beat.

  In the end, however, Barak’s gambit failed disastrously. Arafat’s war on Israel grew bloodier. One Palestinian suicide bomber after another wreaked havoc on the psyche of the Israeli people. Netanyahu threw all his political support behind Sharon. And lo and behold, Israel’s “most notorious hawk” wound up beating Barak in the biggest landslide in modern Israeli history, sixty-two to thirty-seven.59

  From Beirut to Baghdad and from Moscow to Washington, Sharon’s almost-overnight rise to power shook long-held assumptions about the future of the Middle East to their core. No one knew what to expect. Not Arafat. Not Saddam. Not the newly elected President Bush, who had actually toured Israel with Sharon back in 1999 when neither man could have known they would soon simultaneously lead their respective nations.

  On a more personal level, I had to accept the fact that a new political era was being born in the Holy Land, and I was not going to be a part of it. Thus, as December unfolded and I recovered from the initial shock of Netanyahu not running, I began to assess my options. I was still running November Communications, the consulting company I had formed after the Forbes campaign to help business and political leaders “discover, develop, and drive their message.” But the more my wife, Lynn, and I thought and prayed about our next move, the more I thought about putting myself through political detox.

  Maybe it’s time to get out of politics altogether, I told myself. The last ten years have been an exciting ride, but you’re exhausted. You’re hardly ever home. You barely see your kids. Maybe it’s time to stop being so dependent on the ups and downs of political polls and personalities. Maybe it’s time to stop ghostwriting for others and start writing your own novels.

  That, of course, was easier said than done. I had never written a novel in my life (no surprise to my critics). I had not taken a single fiction-writing class in college (though when I was writing for Rush Limbaugh’s political newsletter back in the early 1990s, my liberal friends insisted I was writing fiction). I had barely even had time to read any fiction over the previous decade, except for an occasional Clancy or Grisham thriller my sister-in-law might give me for Christmas. What’s more, I had no story, no characters, and little idea of how to construct a Clancy-like thriller, no matter how much I wanted to.

  Yet sometime around New Year’s, as life slowed down and the phones stopped ringing and the snow fell gently over the Virginia countryside, I found myself thinking back over all that had happened in the past few months: The Camp David summit and Arafat’s new war for Jerusalem. Sharansky’s meetings with Putin and the emerging alliance between Russia and Iran. Saddam’s threat to wipe out Israel and his recent troop movements toward Jordan. Ezekiel’s prophecies and The Coming Peace in the Middle East. Was there a novel in any of that? Would anyone publish it if there was? And even if someone did, would anyone buy it?

  A PLAUSIBLE SCENARIO

  Most Americans at the time were not paying attention to the Middle East, as tumultuous as events there were. They were still reeling from the photo-finish presidential election between George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore, and understandably so. The air was filled with talk of hanging chads, voter intent, and the Supreme Court, not the future of Russia, radical Islam, or weapons of mass destruction. If I was going to write a novel that had any hope of seeing the light of day—much less breaking out and truly capturing people’s imagination—it would have to be unique, to say the least.

  I decided that any political-thriller writer worth his or her salt had to begin with a what-if scenario that was as plausible as it was provocative, and it struck me that the scenario arising out of Ezekiel 38 and 39 actually wasn’t bad: What if a dictator rose to power in Russia, formed a military alliance—a nuclear alliance—with Iran, and tried to attack Israel and seize control of the oil-rich Middle East? How might such a crisis play out if it were to happen in my lifetime? How would NATO respond? How might Bush respond? How might an Israeli prime minister like Netanyahu or Sharon respond?

  A reader of such a novel would not necessarily need to buy into Bible prophecy to accept both the plausibility and the chilling implications of such a high-stakes plot and the vexing moral questions it would trigger for any world leader. After all, from the days of Peter the Great, Russian leaders had been scheming of ways to gain control of central and near-east Asia. It was why the Soviets had armed the Arab world to the teeth during the Cold War and backed them in the 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars against Israel. It was why Moscow had invaded Afghanistan in 1979, amid the chaos engulfing revolutionary Iran at the time. It certainly was not out of the realm of possibility that a future leader of Russia might recklessly play the same game again.

  Pentagon planners have been preparing for the possibility of a Moscow-led invasion of the Middle East for years. In their 1996 book The Next War, former Reagan defense secretary Caspar Weinberger and coauthor Peter Schweizer, a scholar at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, laid out five scenarios for current and future war planners and policy makers to consider in the post-Soviet world. Among them: an ultranationalist radical seizes control of Russia to reconquer the former Soviet empire, and a nuclear-armed Iran launches a new war in the Persian Gulf and initiates a wave of radical Islamic terrorism across Europe and the U.S.60

  By the time Lynn and I returned home from one of the Bush inaugural balls a few weeks later, I had made my decision. I was going to take a shot at turning this Ezekiel-driven, what-if scenario into a full-blown political thriller. I had no guarantee of success, of course, but I had a little time, a little money in the bank, and a dream long unfulfilled. If I didn’t try my hand now, I knew I might never try at all.

  But no sooner had I begun than I ran into a problem. On the one hand, I wanted this novel to be both as riveting and as plausible as I could possibly make it, and I hoped to draw upon my time in Washington and my experiences with Netanyahu and Sharansky and their advisors in the process. On the other
hand, as a Christian I also wanted to be as true to the scenario presented by the prophet Ezekiel as I possibly could. I could not be certain exactly when or precisely how the prophesies would come to complete fulfillment, but I had no doubt they would someday and thus felt compelled to handle the biblical text with care. This immediately created a tension I was not sure how to overcome.

  Let me give you an example to illustrate my dilemma. In the first few verses of Ezekiel 38, the prophet lays out a list of countries that will join Russia and Iran in a coalition against Israel in the last days. It is a list I will describe in more detail in later chapters, but suffice it to say here that two countries struck me as conspicuously absent.

  The first was Egypt. Nowhere in Ezekiel 38 or 39 is Egypt mentioned directly. Yet Egypt has been a leading enemy of the children of Israel going back to the times of the pharaohs and the slavery of the Jews, which lasted four hundred years. More recently, Egypt was a driving force in all of the major wars against Israel, including 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. Was it really possible, then, that Egypt would not participate in what could be the next great war against Israel?

  As I pondered that question, however, I immediately thought of the 1979 Camp David Accords and the peace treaty that had been historically signed by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. It has been a cold peace, to be sure, but it has held for nearly three decades. As I realized that, it suddenly struck me that for the first time since Ezekiel had written this prophecy 2,500 years earlier, it actually was plausible that Egypt could sit out the next war. In my novel, therefore, I could credibly exclude Egypt from the Russian-Iranian coalition against Israel in a way that would never have seemed realistic prior to 1979.