A local activist friend has created a new petition campaign against an Israeli attack on Iran. He asks signers to commit to divesting from Israel in their personal and political lives if it launches a pre-emptive assault on Iran.
In all honesty, there is one element of the text with which I have difficulty, which calls for ending U.S. military and diplomatic support for Israel in light of such an assault. My problem is with calling for an end to diplomatic support of Israel, which essentially demands that the U.S. government to put Israel into diplomatic isolation. It’s not that different from a law passed by Congress which criminalizes any contact by any American official with any Iranian official. It also would do roughly to Israel what the west is now doing to Iran. If it won’t work, and isn’t right for Iran, I don’t think it’s right for Israel. So this is a tough one for me.
UPDATE: The petition organizer tells me that the term “diplomatic support” wasn’t mean to imply the U.S. should shun Israel diplomatically or refuse to deal with it. Rather, that the U.S. should cease providing diplomatic “cover” or support for Israel’s most provocative behavior (such as war against Iran).
But I believe in letting 1000 flowers bloom when it comes to finding ways to oppose war. Some will find the Israel Loves Iran campaign perfect for them. Others will want more political substance to express their sentiments. There are many readers of this blog who will agree with this petition and the organizer has done an excellent job offering a new tool for activists to express their opposition to an Iran war. I urge you to sign if it accords with your beliefs.
It’s not every day you read an article like this (Hebrew) in the Israeli press. Leading settler Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, one of the most senior of the religious Zionist rabbis, attacks the idea of an Israeli assault on Iran and rejects the notion that a nuclear Iran is an existential threat to Israel. In fact, he says, it is only one of many threats Israel faces and not necessarily the most dangerous. Because of that, the rabbi rejects the notion that a military attack on that nation is warranted.
He calls Ehud Barak and Bibi Netanyahu leaders with “inflated egos” and says ego and other personal motivations are propelling an attack. Melamed recommends that all other ministers voting on this issue should act in a calm, deliberate manner and not get carried away by the defense and prime minister’s fervor for war. He argues that Netanyahu suffers from a “trust gap,” and that the latter believes a successful attack against Iran will transform him into one of the great leaders of Israel on a par with Ben Gurion or Begin. For that reason, Bibi’s desire for personal glory and his motives must be distrusted.
Barak’s career, Melamed argues, is in free fall in contrast to his dreams of being a great leader, security expert, and figure capable of resolving international crises. The defense minister’s only opportunity to return to political leadership and become a winner in the eyes of the populace is through a successful assault on Iran.
Rabbi Melamed argues that while the impulse by nations to gain nuclear capability is undesirable, it appears impossible to prevent. He writes that even if Israel succeeded in destroying Iran’s nuclear program it would only delay that country gaining a weapon. In the rabbi’s view, Israel’s efforts should be directed not at attacking Iran, but at creating anti-missile defenses that could stop any Iranian attack on Israel. He favors deterrence over attack.
What’s especially important here is that Melamed is a settler rabbi, beloved of the nationalist camp. He favors all the things that my readers and I oppose in the Territories. But he carries great sway with those MKs and ministers who share his views. Therefore, he may carry weight in the debate over attacking Iran. As I’ve written before, I don’t care about the motivation for opposing an Iran strike. Taking the right position is more important than ideological purity. We can always oppose Rabbi Melamed on those issues that divide us at a later time.
War, like politics, has a habit of making strange bedfellows. Just when we’d heard that Bibi Netanyahu had a clear 8-6 majority in the cabinet favoring a war against Iran, we hear a new report that Avigdor Lieberman and his two Yisrael Beitenu ministers may join other opponents of an attack and throw a major wrench into the proceedings. That means that Dan Meridor, Eli Yishai, Bogie Yaalon, and Benny Begin will join Lieberman and his two colleagues, making the vote 7-7, by my count. If you speak Hebrew, you can watch this segment in which the correspondent covers this story. It begins around the 16:00 mark.
For the life of me I don’t understand why Lieberman and Yaalon oppose the war. They’re among the most rapid Arab-haters and as far-right and hawkish as any Israeli leader can be. There may be an explanation for Lieberman’s opposition, though. He, as I’ve written here before, is a close ally of the Kremlin. In fact, Israelis who accuse him of corruption and other sins claim he is an agent, bought and paid for, of the Russians. The truth? Who can say? But I definitely would not dismiss this rumor out of hand. Lieberman is about as dirty as they come.
Yaalon, according to the Israeli media, opposes an attack on Iran because he hates Ehud Barak’s guts (both were former IDF chiefs of staff with very different politics). Talk about pettiness. But hey, I don’t care what their reason is. I don’t look gift horses in the mouth.
At any rate, Lieberman on an international tour told Yediot that an Israeli strike against Iran would be a “nightmare.” He deferred to his Chinese hosts saying they had enormous leverage with Iran, which he asked them to utilize on Israel’s behalf.
The NY Times reports that a U.S. military war game simulation found that an Israeli attack on Iran drew a massive U.S. response after a U.S. warship was attacked and sunk by Iranian forces:
The two-week war game, called Internal Look, played out a narrative in which the United States found it was pulled into the conflict after Iranian missiles struck a Navy warship in the Persian Gulf, killing about 200 Americans, according to officials with knowledge of the exercise. The United States then retaliated by carrying out its own strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
The initial Israeli attack was assessed to have set back the Iranian nuclear program by roughly a year, and the subsequent American strikes did not slow the Iranian nuclear program by more than an additional two years.
…Officials said that, under the chain of events in the war game, Iran believed that Israel and the United States were partners in any strike against Iranian nuclear sites and therefore considered American military forces in the Persian Gulf as complicit in the attack. Iranian jets chased Israeli warplanes after the attack, and Iranians launched missiles at an American warship in the Persian Gulf, viewed as an act of war that allowed an American retaliation.
These results are in fundamental accord with a 2010 Israeli war game simulation I reported here and also agree with a report on this subject authored by Anthony Cordesmann. But they fundamentally disagree with the standard narischkeit Jeffrey Goldberg is penning. In a Bloomberg column, he predicts an Israeli war against Iran soon. He quotes this bit of Israeli wishful thinking:
One conclusion key [Israeli] officials have reached is that a strike on six or eight Iranian facilities will not lead, as is generally assumed, to all-out war. This argument holds that the Iranians might choose to cover up an attack, in the manner of the Syrian government when its nuclear facility was destroyed by the Israeli air force in 2007. An Israeli strike wouldn’t focus on densely populated cities, so the Iranian government might be able to control, to some degree, the flow of information about it.
Some Israeli officials believe that Iran’s leaders might choose to play down the insult of a raid and launch a handful of rockets at Tel Aviv as an angry gesture, rather than declare all-out war. I’m not endorsing this view, but I was struck by its optimism.
…Some Israeli security officials also believe that Iran won’t target American ships or installations in the Middle East in retaliation for a strike, as many American officials fear, because the leadership in Tehran understands that American retaliation for an Iranian attack could be so severe as to threaten the regime itself.
It never ceases to amaze me that the putative intelligence mavens of a nation contemplating a war against another country would predicate their plans on the fact that the victim will simply roll over and play dead. On what planet does that happen? Certainly not this one. And don’t anyone dare compare this to Syria because Iran is not Syria. If anyone is foolish enough to believe the Syrian scenario will play out regarding Iran, then they almost deserve the black eye they’ll get after the real response happens.
I’ll be speaking later today to the Fellowship of Reconciliation on the threat of an Israeli attack against Iran. The event will be at Seattle ‘s Woodland Park Presbyterian Church, 225 North 70th Street at 6:30PM. If you’re in town, please join us. I’ll be joined by longtime peace activist Dick Blakney, former chair of the local United Nations Association and currently involved with the Network Promoting Peace with Iran. Over the past few months, we’ve spoken to a number of local church groups on the subject in an effort to promote awareness of the dangers and offer ways to address them.
Probably an inapt title, as a war against Iran will not be a comedy. But I love Marx Brothers films and gag lines and couldn’t help myself. Personally, I also believe that such a war is so ill-advised that I can’t see it as anything but as hapless as Fredonia’s war against its neighbor. Not to mention that Israel has only slightly more reason to attack Iran than Fredonia had.
Haaretz’s managing editor, Aluf Benn, has penned one of the strongest columns in recent memory in the Israeli media making the case that Bibi Netanyahu plans to attack Iran:
Since his return from Washington, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has mainly been preoccupied with one thing: Preparing public opinion for war against Iran.
Netanyahu is attempting to convince the Israeli public that the Iranian threat is a tangible and existential one, and that there is only one effective way to stop it…an Israeli military attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure…
Netanyahu is hinting that in his Washington visit, he received Obama’s tacit approval for an Israeli attack against Iran – under the guise of opposition. Obama will speak out against it but act for it, just as the past U.S. administrations speak against the settlements in the territories but allow their expansion. And in this manner Netanyahu summarized the visit: “…I believe that the first objective that I presented [to Obama]– to fortify the recognition of Israel’s right to defend itself – I think that objective has been achieved.”
…To use Netanyahu’s “duck allegory”, what looks like a preparation for war, acts like a preparation for war, and quacks like a preparation for war, is a preparation for war, and not just a “bluff” or a diversion tactic. Until his trip to Washington, Netanyahu and his supporters in the media refrained from such explicit wording and made do with hints. But since he’s been back, Netanyahu has issued an emergency call-up for himself and the Israeli public.
Anyone reading this blog over the past few months has been regaled with scores Israeli journalists writing in the same vein. But what is different here is that Benn is the editor of Israel’s leading liberal daily. He’s not a beat reporter or a columnist. He’s the top journalist at the paper thus making him one of Israel’s most important media figures. He does not issue such warnings, nor make such claims lightly.
I spoke today with a peace activist who is putting together an international petition campaign against war with Iran. He’s not quite ready to launch, but should be in the next day or so. I will let you know when that happens. It would be nice if we can gather several hundred thousand signatures in a short period of time.
In an interview in The Nation, David Grossman, Israel’s leading novelist and moral conscience, expresses the conviction that Bibi Netanyahu and Ehud Barak want a war against Iran:
…He said he had “a very bad feeling” that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were going to order an attack, even against America’s wishes. “There is a dynamic to all these warlike declarations,” he said.
I’ve written often in the past about David Grossman as an admirable, but attenuated figure. As a liberal Zionist who is a moral bellwether for Israeli centrist and leftists, but one who is constrained by many of the limitations inherent in those defending major elements of the Israeli status quo. With Grossman, the glass is always both half empty and half-full. He is someone always willing to sound the alarm about the worst depredations of the rightist governments who have afflicted Israel for the past decade or more. But he is also someone who never wants to be too far ahead of his countrymen. He is one of them, and feels their moral confusion and remains constrained, as they are, about Israel’s predicament and how to get out of it.
The good news is that Grossman has launched an assault on Bibi and Barak’s plan to assault Iran. He’s gone so far as to accept that an Iran with a nuclear weapon would be far less bad than an Israeli attack on Iran in order to prevent this outcome.
In both Larry Derfner’s Nation interview and Grossman’s own Haaretz op-ed (Hebrew), he’s offered cogent analysis of the thinking of the Israeli leadership. He’s especially good at placing their mindset in the context of Jewish history:
He [Netanyahu] has this idea that we are the people of eternity, am ha’netzach from the Bible, and our negotiations, as he sees it, are with eternity, with the primal currents of history and mankind, while the United States, with all due respect, is just another superpower like Rome or Athens or Babylon, and we’ve survived them all,” said Grossman. “I’m afraid that this way of thinking might encourage Netanyahu to take the step” of attacking Iran.
In the Haaretz interview (translation mine) he amplifies on this subject:
The prime minister makes many speeches these days. Before our eyes, he fires up his listeners and himself with frequent references to the Holocaust, the Jewish fate and the fate of the generations to come. Opposing this rhetoric of apocalypse and catastrophe, there are moments when one asks whether Netanyahu distinguishes between the very real dangers Israel faces and the echoes and shadows of these past traumas [i.e. the Holocaust]. This is an important, indeed fateful concern because the confusion between the one and the other could sentence Israel to relive those echoes and shadows.
This world view also characterized several periods of Jewish history in which leaders arose who asserted that violent resistance against tyrants was preferable to continuing to live under their yoke. Revolts like the two against the Romans (the first in 66 and the second in 132 CE) featured Jews like Bar Kochba and Elazar ben Yair, whose nationalist zeal led them into adventures that cost the Jewish people of the day dearly in lives and suffering. While such resistance is certainly admirable and heroic, it threatens the sense of self-preservation of a relatively small, vulnerable people historically surrounded by nations far stronger and more powerful. I say beware those leaders who see visions and hear voices of Jewish destiny. They can, in many cases, lead us down the path to national self-destruction.
One of Grossman’s great strengths in the face of ultranationalist grandiosity is his pragmatic way of looking at the threats facing Israel. In fact, he’s willing to live with a nuclear Iran if necessary and advocates a policy Barack Obama just forcefully renounced–containment:
“I don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons, but I think that if the sanctions do not work, Israel and the whole world, painfully, will have to live with it,” Grossman said, warning that bombing Iran would set in motion “a nightmare that’s hard to describe.”
…Grossman said that if sanctions and diplomacy could not stop the Iranian nuclear program, trusting to deterrence was less dangerous than starting an open-ended war.
But amidst all of Grossman’s admirable qualities as a moral and political seer, he also has serious limitations. Here he explains why he has held back in denouncing the government’s plans to attack Iran. Note how many factual errors about Iran beset him here:
Asked why he hasn’t, until now, spoken out on this matter when he’s been so vocal in his dissent against past Israeli wars and the occupation of Palestinian territories, Grossman said he is beset by the same doubts and hesitations that have quieted the public at large, including the peace camp.
“We are dealing here with the most crucial existential problem that the State of Israel may ever have faced in all its history,” he said, “and most people are reluctant to express their opinions because they feel they just don’t have all the necessary information.
“Remember,” he said, “we are talking about fanatic, fundamentalist leaders in Iran who have declared openly that they want to eradicate Israel. And they may come into possession of nuclear bombs. It’s important to face the complexity of this dilemma—it’s not an abstract moral debate, but something very, very concrete.”
Is Iran the “most crucial existential problem” Israel has faced in all its history? No, that’s buying into the Bibist narrative. Iran is a problem no greater than the prospect of China getting a nuclear weapon in the 1960s or Stalin getting a hydrogen bomb in 1949. Looking back, were these the most crucial existential moments in American history? They would have been only if one or the other leader had made a critical miscalculation that led to nuclear war. Luckily that didn’t happen and I hope it will not happen today.
Note, that Grossman repeats the erroneous claim that Iran’s leaders have “declared openly they want to eradicate Israel.” They of course have done no such thing. You would think that Grossman, with all the linguistic and literary resources at his disposal, would be able to discover the truth by consulting Persian speakers who could set him straight.
Grossman also claimed that Iran has “chemical and biological weapons,” a point which I’ve never heard any analyst say. It is possible that Iran does have such weapons, but I’ve never read of any proof of this in any credible publication or from any credible source.
In everything he writes about Iran, there isn’t any recognition of the fact that Israel has played any role in drawing Iran’s hostility. There is only the perception that Iran’s leaders are near psychopaths with whom a supposed moderate, secular middle class is saddled and even imprisoned. This is the typical myopia that afflicts liberal Israelis who appear to want to understand the motivations of their Arab neighbors, but who are ultimately stymied by their myopia in not recognizing the impact Israel has on them for better and mostly for worse.
The Israeli author closes his interview by offering powerful advice against a war:
The author said that while it may be possible to destroy Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, it was impossible to destroy the knowledge of how to recreate it. “And the people who have that knowledge will rise from the rubble after we attack,” he said, “and they will start to create a new nuclear infrastructure, only this time they will be heavily loaded with humiliation, hatred and desire for revenge, and this time they will have the support of the entire Iranian people.”
Citing the large presence of “more secular, educated, realistic” people in Iran, masses of whom protested bravely in 2009 against the regime, Grossman said this face of Iran held out the hope of a future leadership that might be less hostile to Israel. But he warned that this hope would be destroyed, too, in an Israeli attack.
“If Israel bombs Iran,” he said, “I think it will be seen as an arrogant, megalomaniacal, violent nation even by the most sober, moderate Iranians.” Israel’s hope for peace, or even just quiet, with a future, better Iranian government “would be eradicated for generations.”
In Haaretz, Grossman asks another important (rhetorical) question. In reading it, keep in mind that his beloved son was killed only hours before a ceasefire was declared in the 2006 Lebanon war:
Can there be any real purpose to this war? Such that it would guarantee life and tranquility to Israel for many years? And create the will to accept it sometime in the future as a legitimate partner and neighbor? One which can transform in the long run, this chapter regarding the nuclear weapons of Israel and others into something redundant?
He closes his op-ed with this moving statement in which he implores Israel not to attack Iran, even if it means it will attain nuclear weapons:
An Israeli attack on Iran would be based on a wild, rash bet, one which will change our future irreparably. I daren’t even imagine it. Yes, I can imagine it, but my hand hesitates to write the words.
Tonight, 60 Minutes will feature Meir Dagan’s first foreign interview since he left the Mossad. He speaks with Lesley Stahl about Iran (of course). Here is a small taste of what you’ll hear tomorrow night:
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