by Mitchell Plitnick
April 28 is the day on which Jews all around the world commemorate the Holocaust. It’s an important day, a somber time for obvious reasons. One would think it would be treated with respect, especially by self-defined “Jewish leaders.” And yet, it comes as no surprise [...]]]>
by Mitchell Plitnick
April 28 is the day on which Jews all around the world commemorate the Holocaust. It’s an important day, a somber time for obvious reasons. One would think it would be treated with respect, especially by self-defined “Jewish leaders.” And yet, it comes as no surprise that at least one such leader, the Prime Minister of Israel, would cynically use the memory of the Holocaust to further a political agenda that presses for confrontation and uses the Holocaust memory to further the goal of ongoing occupation.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made what was probably the clearest statement of sympathy for the history of Jewish suffering in World War II ever by a Palestinian leader. He called it “…the most heinous crime against humanity in modern history.” Abbas continued by offering his sympathy to the “families of the victims and the innocent people who were killed by the Nazis including the Jews and others.” That is a decidedly clear statement, acknowledging the Jews specifically, but also not forgetting that nearly an equal number of non-Jews were killed in the Nazi camps.
Many Jews around the world welcomed Abbas’ statement, as well we should. But Netanyahu used the opportunity to declare once again that “rather than releasing declarations aimed at soothing international public opinion, he must choose between Hamas and true peace.” Bibi dismissed Abbas’ statement as a public relations move.
Well, yes, it was a public relations move, just like similar declarations by various heads of state and other leaders on this day. Just to hammer the irony home, Netanyahu issued his own public relations statement to Israel’s Druze citizens on the occasion of Nebi Shueib holiday. “Nebi Shueib is known in Jewish tradition as Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, one of the founding fathers of the Jewish People,” Netanyahu said, both co-opting the holiday and, incredibly, misrepresenting Moses’ role in Jewish memory. “This is yet another link between the Jewish People and the Druze community…In recent years I have devoted special attention to continuing the development of Druze villages and to improving their economic and infrastructure situations. It is clear to me that there is more work to be done but the changes may already be felt.”
The brazen hypocrisy of accusing Abbas of acknowledging the Holocaust as a PR stunt and then doing the very same thing with Israel’s Druze community is mind-boggling, but it doesn’t end there. Netanyahu also used the memory of the Holocaust to further his agenda on Iran.
Speaking at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Netanyahu told the crowd, “In this place I have said many times that we must identify an existential threat in time and act against it in time and tonight I ask ‘why in the years before the Holocaust did most of the world’s leaders not see the danger ahead of time?’ In hindsight, all the signs were there. Has the world learned a lesson from the mistakes of the past? Today we are again faced with clear facts and before a real danger. Iran calls for our destruction, it develops nuclear weapons.”
Has the world learned? If too many listen to Netanyahu, the answer is surely “no.” Ha’aretz reporter Chemi Shalev sums up Netanyahu’s abuse of Holocaust memory quite well. “While Israel complains (not altogether accurately) that Abbas is violating the holy of holies by daring to compare Jewish trials with Palestinian tribulations, it’s apparently quite all right for Netanyahu to equate Hamas with the Third Reich and to accuse it of seeking another Holocaust,” Shalev wrote. “And to counter comments in the U.S. media that Abbas’ acknowledgement of the Holocaust is groundbreaking and significant, Israel pits an anonymous “senior official” who tells the New York Times that the new statement is worthless because if fails to condemn the Nazi-collaborating World War II Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini. Seriously.”
Yes, this seems to be desperation on Netanyahu’s part. He seems to have realized that none but Israel’s most myopic and radical backers believe his nonsense about why the peace process has failed. He seems to understand that most of the world, including many supporters of Israel, are fully aware that he has done everything he can to destroy the possibility of a viable Palestinian state ever coming into existence. And so he presses harder to demonize Abbas, who is without a doubt the most cooperative leader the Palestinians are ever likely to have. What else can Netanyahu do? He has no other tools in his kit.
But as a Jewish man, one who takes pride in his Jewish heritage, I must call foul on this heinous and, frankly, disgusting abuse of my people’s long history of suffering. That persecution has, thankfully, diminished enormously in recent decades, to the point that this is unquestionably the freest era for Jews in two thousand years. The threat remains, however, and it could very well grow again. Indeed, Netanyahu, and far too many of his supporters inside and outside of Israel, seems to be doing everything he can to fan the flames of anti-Jewish hatred. But at this moment this is as good as Jews have ever had it.
That’s why Netanyahu’s actions should be condemned by every Jew around the world. It may be that too much of our cultural character is based on the memory of our suffering, but that suffering is very real and has a long and frightening history. It is a history from which we, and the entire world, must learn.
The lesson is not, however, increased militancy, nor is it that Israel has some special right to hold millions of Palestinians without basic human, civil and national rights. It is not that Israel has some special right to defy international law and treaties or that it is somehow uniquely entitled to a clandestine nuclear weapons program that it maintains as a threat to its adversaries while evading all regulation of it.
No, the lesson is that bigotry, privileging one group of people above another, and reliance on military might do not bring peace or security. The lesson, ultimately, is that the Jews, the Roma, the LGBT folks, the physically challenged, the leftist activists and all the others who the Nazis tried to exterminate are still here, and those communities are growing while the Third Reich has been relegated to history. That is the lesson of the Holocaust.
The ultimate phrase of the Holocaust is “Never Again.” It means we must not allow what happened in Nazi Europe to happen again, to anyone. We must not allow it in Rwanda, in East Timor, in Cambodia, in Sri Lanka, in Bosnia or, today, in Syria. It means not just zero tolerance for genocide, which is axiomatic, but also zero tolerance for human rights violations, for massive dispossession, for reliance on war over diplomacy — yet Netanyahu is using the memory of the Holocaust and the longer history of Jewish suffering to defend and support these policies. That’s not just wrong. It’s obscene.
]]>By Gary Sick
Every few months there is a concocted “crisis” involving suggestions that Israel is just on the verge of attacking Iran. This cycle started almost a decade ago, and it has repeated itself roughly annually, though sometimes more frequently.
In the early days, these alarms typically began with [...]]]>
By Gary Sick
Every few months there is a concocted “crisis” involving suggestions that Israel is just on the verge of attacking Iran. This cycle started almost a decade ago, and it has repeated itself roughly annually, though sometimes more frequently.
In the early days, these alarms typically began with a series of “leaks” by anonymous sources, usually to well connected Israeli or pro-Israeli reporters. For years it appeared that the US and world media would bite every time, with no apparent recollection that they had heard that tune before.
But when you have cried wolf so many times, even the main stream media, which loves an exciting story, begins to wonder if it is not being led by the nose. More important, over the past two years, as the veiled threats of an attack became ever more shrill, virtually the entire Israeli security establishment came out in opposition to such an operation. For a good summary, click here. Their reasoning was simple:
- Israel could not finish the job by itself; it could launch an attack by aircraft and cruise missile, which might do damage to the Iranian nuclear infrastructure, but Israel could not finish the job. For that, they needed the United States.
- A unilateral Israel strike would very likely speed up Iran’s nuclear weapon development; Iran might well withdraw from the Non-Proliferation Treaty, kick out the IAEA inspectors who are our eyes and ears on the ground, and announce that, since they had been attacked by a nuclear weapons state, they were no longer bound by their pledge not to produce a weapon.
- The entire Persian Gulf region would be thrown into chaos and the price of oil would probably go sky high for some time. The costs to delicate world economies, still struggling to recover from the Great Recession, would be severe.
- The Iranian people, at least initially, would probably rally around their hard line leadership, as they have in the past when their national sovereignty was challenged. The Green reform movement would be undercut, since they would not dare associate themselves with external invaders.
- The United States would be blamed (and not only by Iran) for complicity in the attack, regardless of whether it was true. Iran and its allies might well retaliate against US military and civilian targets, in addition to Israel, thus sparking a much wider regional conflict.
- If an air strike did not work, the logical next step would be to go after the leadership. And, as we learned in Iraq, that means boots on the ground.
In short, an Israeli (or American) attack would very likely leave the situation much worse than it was before taking military action. Israel’s security would not be improved; in fact, it might be imperiled by the negative response of even Israel’s closest allies. And Iran’s creeping approach to nuclear capability might turn into a sprint.
This awareness of the “day after” effect has persuaded many security specialists that an Israeli attack would be the very definition of a Pyrrhic victory.
It is worth remembering that Israel acquires significant leverage from this constant perception of imminent war. By keeping the Iranian nuclear case at the forefront of the world’s media, political leaders everywhere are more likely to pay a price in the form of lost revenues and political sparring with Iran, rather than facing the calamity of an outright war.
The problem is that economic sanctions and covert interference with Iran’s nuclear program have been pushed to such a level that they are morphing into outright economic and political warfare. Iran has lost roughly fifty percent of its national income in the past six months, in addition to a series of assassinations and cyber attacks on its infrastructure. Inflation and unemployment are soaring — affecting all levels of society, especially the poor. There is no longer even the pretense that these are “smart” sanctions directed only at Iran’s political and military leadership.
Iran has responded to this onslaught by entering into negotiations and offering some compromise positions, such as potentially terminating its uranium enrichment to the 20 percent level and eliminating its stockpile of such uranium. But the US and its allies have taken a hard line position that Iran must cease ALL enrichment if they want to see any relief from the sanctions.
It is doubtful that the US can make any significant concessions during an election year, and Iran has shown little willingness to yield to the pressure by terminating all uranium enrichment.
That is the context for the latest crisis about a possible Israeli attack.
Based on the experience of a decade of such crises, all of which faded away with no military action, I can only be skeptical. I am aware that “This is the Middle East…” i.e. that nations are capable of acting against their own interests in the hysteria of the moment.
My only concern is that Prime Minister Netanyahu, having made the case so often and so publicly for Israel’s right and even duty to attack, will have painted himself into a corner where there is no escape without actually risking national catastrophe.
Yes, that is a possibility. But I have sufficient confidence in the operation of Israeli democracy and the instinct for self preservation of its leaders to regard that possibility as vanishingly small.
In response to a recent flurry of media reports suggesting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is gearing up to strike Iran (some of which have been rounded up here by Laura Rozen), Harvard University’s Stephen Walt explains why he remains skeptical that the attack will happen:
Although [...]]]>
In response to a recent flurry of media reports suggesting that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is gearing up to strike Iran (some of which have been rounded up here by Laura Rozen), Harvard University’s Stephen Walt explains why he remains skeptical that the attack will happen:
]]>Although I believe war with Iran would be folly, one cannot rule it out. All countries commit blunders, and neither the United States nor Israel is immune to this sort of miscalculation (see under: Iraq, Lebanon, etc.). But I am remain skeptical that Israel will attack, for the simple reason that it does not have the military capability to inflict strategically significant damage on Iran’s nuclear facilities. As the Congressional Research Service reported earlier this year, “Israeli officials and analysts generally agree that a strike would not completely destroy the [Iranian nuclear] program.” The CRS report also suggested that an Israeli strike could not delay the program for long, and that long-term success would depend either on repeated follow-up strikes or on subsequent diplomatic activity (e.g., more sanctions).
All of which suggests that all this talk of Israeli “red lines” and some sort of imminent attack (including the possibility of an “October surprise”) is just talk. Indeed, those prophesying war are starting to sound like those wacky cult leaders who keep predicting the End of the World, and then keep moving the date when the world doesn’t end on schedule. At what point are we going to stop paying attention?
Like I said, I can’t be completely sure that reason will prevail and that a war won’t happen, although there do seem to be a lot of sensible voices inside the Israeli security establishment who are counseling against it. What worries me most is that the people who have been sounding all these alarmist warnings will start to worry that their credibility is evaporating, and they will feel compelled to go to war because they’ve talked about it for so long. That’s just about the dumbest reason I can think of, but sometimes even pretty smart people do dumb things.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) told reporters that he “would not at all be surprised that there may be a pre-emptive attack” by Israel against Iran — and he doesn’t think the U.S. could do anything about it. Savannah Now reports Chambliss said that, though he has [...]]]>
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) told reporters that he “would not at all be surprised that there may be a pre-emptive attack” by Israel against Iran — and he doesn’t think the U.S. could do anything about it. Savannah Now reports Chambliss said that, though he has “no indication of anything right now,” he could foresee a strike:
If Iran keeps moving down the road they’re moving on now, Israel has every reason in the world to [be] concerned about the future of its country and people. … I’m not sure there is anything the United States could do to stop Israel.
When news of an alleged plot by Iran to assassinate a foreign diplomat in the U.S. broke, right wingers pushed for war. At the time, Chambliss, who has a poor (at best) understanding of Iran, “urge(d) the administration to hold the Iranian regime accountable in a direct and meaningful way.”
But much of the U.S. security establishment — as represented in the periodic National Journal “National Security Insiders” poll — doesn’t agree with either a U.S. or Israeli strike. A slim majority of respondents said that “no military strike should be carried out,” no matter the circumstances. And none of those polled thought the U.S. should undertake the mission alone. Ninety-five percent of respondents also thought it was a bad idea for Israel to strike Iran. Here’re the results:
Respondents, who come from among the well-connected National Journal’s sources, said that an attack on Iran “would set in motion a conflagration, set back the Arab Spring, and destroy what little is left of U.S. credibility as an arbitrator of the Middle East peace process,” among other given reasons to not attack. Another respondent said: “It’s a dream for us to think that a strike will solve this problem.”
]]>