Yesterday, One Jerusalem sponsored a blogger telephone conference with Ambassador Uri Lubrani. His name may not be in the headlines these days, but you can bet that it's somewhere behind them.
Ambassador Lubrani has served as adviser to the Israeli minister of defense, government coordinator for Lebanese affairs and chief Israeli negotiator for the release of Israeli hostages and prisoners of war and Israeli ambassador to Iran, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. He was an advisor to Israeli Prime Ministers Levi Eshkol and David Ben-Gurion. And he was the man in charge of Operation Solomon -- the incredible rescue of 14,500 Eithiopian Jews back in 1991, airlifting all of them to Israel in just over a single day.
Lubrani's knowledge of and familiarity with Iran are extensive. According to Ralph Peters,
Uri Lubrani is the grand old man among Israel's Iran experts. As his country's last ambassador to Tehran before the shah's fall, he was the single senior figure anywhere who called Khomeini's revolution right.
So it was a timely opportunity, and many thanks to Allen and David for arranging the call and to the ambassador for sharing his thoughts with us.
I'm not going to try to summarize too much of the discussion here. In some respects, I'm still digesting it. Lubrani has very definite ideas about how the crisis with Iran must be handled and it boils down to: the current regime must not be permitted to obtain the bomb, the US must do whatever it takes to facilitate regime change, the Iranian people will welcome it with open arms given the chance, and resort to force must be avoided if at all possible. Finally, Iran's real target is the US first and Western civilization as a whole next. The destruction of Israel is only the first step toward that goal.
Lubrani has a great deal of faith in the Iranians and in US ingenuity. I hope it's justified.
One Jerusalem has posted an audio file of the conference, so you can hear the whole thing here.
And that's the week.
Shabbat Shalom.
