In just these last few weeks, the
amount of material published in print and online regarding the JCPOA—the
so-called “Iran Deal” signed in Vienna on July 14 between the Iran, the
European Union, Germany, and the five members of the United Nations Security Council—has
become so voluminous that no one could possibly read all of it, let alone
digest it all thoughtfully or thoroughly. Nor has anyone’s approach emerged as
“the” interpretation of the deal’s implications with which all others must either
agree or take issue; even a basic consensus about what the details of the deal
actually mean has yet to emerge in the kind of unassailable way that would make
it easy to agree, at least, about what it is we are so passionately disagreeing
about. As things stand, listening to politicians and talk-show pundits (not to
mention rabbis) untrained in science, let alone in the intricacies of nuclear
physics, give forth passionately about “break-out times” and centrifuge types
is, to say the very least, unedifying and nothing like the kind of thoughtful,
fact-based analysis for which the moment calls. It feels a bit as though we’re
trying to focus on a moving target while we ourselves are also in motion. I’ve
hardly read anything at all that isn’t directly contradicted by something else
I’ve read.
The President, clearly, has his own
interpretation of the deal, one he has put forward forcefully now on many
different occasions. The political leaders of all countries who negotiated and
signed the agreement have also come out strongly in favor of its
implementation. What else did anyone expect David Cameron or Angela Merkel to
say? Nor did it come as a real surprise that the Iranian political leadership
has mostly spoken out favorably about the deal their own representatives
negotiated with the West or even that the Ayatollah Khamenei did. To my way of
thinking, all those naysayers who have made the basis of their opposition to
the deal the fact that the very people who negotiated it, or whose
representatives did, are spreading out over the globe to sell their own
product—all those naysayers whose basis for saying nay is the fact that the
deal is supported by its own authors sound just a bit naïve: speaking honestly, who didn’t expect the deal to be
enthusiastically touted as a magnificent achievement by those people who spent
years negotiating its terms? To me personally, none of their comments matter
much: when I walk into a Ford dealership, I expect the salesperson to
try to sell me a Ford and certainly don’t take offense when that is precisely
what happens. That does not mean, however, that I feel morally bound to buy
one.
The response from Israel’s political
leaders has also been entirely along predicted lines. Prime Minister Netanyahu
denounced the deal as “capitulation.” Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi
Hotovely used the expression “historic surrender” in her analysis of the deal.
Naftali Bennett, head of the Bayit Yehudi party, described the situation as
“grave and dangerous.” Others had even harsher things to say, but even
those Israeli politicians that did voice some sort of cautious support for the
deal did so out of the conviction that something was better than nothing…and
that facing the prospect of a nuclear Iran in ten or fifteen years is better
than facing one now. With that, surely no one could rationally disagree. But is
that a good enough reason to encourage Congress to lend its support to a deal
that is merely better than nothing? That is the question facing our nation as I
understand it this third week in August as Congress approaches the midway point
in its self-mandated sixty-day review period.
I’ve just returned from five weeks in
Jerusalem, and I did not hear one single Israel speak enthusiastically and
unreservedly about the JCPOA as a great achievement that no thinking person
should reject. But neither did I encounter a populace preparing for its own
nuclear annihilation. Instead I heard people speaking with a strange mixture of
resignation to reality and confidence in the future…and it is that specific
man-in-the-street Israeli response that, fresh from five and a half weeks in Jerusalem, I wish to write about today.
From the Israeli point of view, there
was, to be sure, something of the theater of the absurd in the whole
negotiation process, but this was mostly a direct outgrowth of the fact that
Israel was excluded from the negotiations somewhat in the way that
Czechoslovakia was not invited to the table in 1938 as countries—as countries not
one of which at the time had any idea how much was really at stake—sat
down to negotiate its dismemberment. (When the doctors finally convinced my
father a few years before he died to agree to the amputation of his left leg,
the discussion was a bit surreal…but at least he was being asked to agree to
the amputation of his own leg, not someone else’s!) And so there Israel was,
firmly on the sidelines, its presence neither wished for nor required…while the
world thoughtfully discussed how much time would be reasonable for Iran—a
nation that has openly, shamelessly, and repeatedly declared its wish to
annihilate the State of Israel and to murder all of its Jewish citizens—how
much time Iran should reasonably have to wait before acquiring weaponry
so powerful that even the successful deployment of a single bomb would be
sufficient to wreak almost unimaginable damage to Israel’s cities, its
farmland, and its people. In the end, the fact that the people to whom the
specifics of the deal will almost inevitably matter the most were personae
non gratiae at the table at which it was being worked out simply led most
Israelis to consider the whole enterprise more akin to some sort of dark, post-modern
tragedy in which the people whom the play is about never actually appear on
stage…and the people who do appear on stage only think that they play is
about themselves.
When I put my ear to the ground, I
heard two themes occurring and recurring all summer when the table talk turned
to Iran and “the deal.”
The first had to do with the fantasy
that this whole prolonged negotiation was about the security of the West as
much as it was about Israel. The President has made that point repeatedly. But
does anyone really think that the chances that the Iranians might one
day launch a premeditated nuclear strike against France are even remotely
similar to the chances that the Iranian leadership might one day strike out
mindlessly, violently and (if they are a nuclear power) unimaginably
murderously against Israel? When our nation and Israel are vilified in the
Iranian media as the greater and lesser Satan, does anyone truly conclude
from that parallel usage that it is just as likely that Iran might declare
launch a nuclear missile strike against Cincinnati as against Tel Aviv? Surely
no thoughtful observer thinks either of those things. But, if that is the case
(which is surely is), then why vilify the Israeli leadership for being
unwilling to embrace a deal that basically puts on hold for a decade or fifteen
years a potentially devastating threat to its security that is highly unlikely
ever truly to matter to any of the countries who negotiated the accord? Even
just lately, I continue to hear people talk about a nuclear Iran as a threat to
our country. I suppose that a nuclear Iran would, by its very existence,
destabilize the Middle East and thus by extension also bring untoward, unwanted
consequences to our country as well. But to compare the threat a nuclear Iran
would constitute, say, for the U.K. with the threat it would constitute for
Israel just makes Israelis laugh. It makes me laugh as well…but not quite as
heartily as I wish it did. I mentioned my father before, so I’ll mention him
again: his expression for that kind of laughter would have been bitter gelechter, bitter laughter, the kind that leaves
a sour taste in your mouth…and that only exists to hold back tears of frustration
and tension.
The second has to do with the childish,
naïve willingness of the world to assume that a maniacal dictator who openly
speaks of his wish to murder the six million Jews of Israel couldn’t possibly
mean it, that only crazy people take that kind of political rhetoric
seriously. This too I’ve been hearing constantly, the mostly recently
from someone who called into a radio show I was listening to in the car the
other day. “Didn’t the naysayers,” the young man asked, “realize that the
Iranians would be risking everything by launching such an attack against
Israel, that the consequences for their own country would be devastating and
impossible to calculate in advance? They’d be crazy even to consider doing such
a thing…so why are we so worried about it?” I’ve reconstructed his remarks here
from memory, so I can’t vouch for the exactitude of the quote…but that was the
general gist. And it is precisely that kind of naiveté, that kind of good-natured
ignorance of the fact that the history of the world is peppered with examples
of nations so fully in the thrall of their own anti-Semitism that they behaved precisely
in the way the caller found so unlikely, risking everything to go war with
its own Jewish citizens—it’s that kind of utopian worldview that no student of
Jewish history can find at all rational and which Israelis, almost all of whom
study Jewish history in high school and all of whom are fully schooled in the
history of their own country, find so childish and so unwise. Why, after all,
would the Iranians cheat? They’d only get in trouble! But what if giving vent
to their violent anti-Semitism—and to judge from the rhetoric of their leaders,
we are speaking about people whose loathing for Israel knows no bottom line—what
if their unyielding desire to destroy were to be more important than avoiding
whatever consequences their actions might conceivably trigger? What then? That
was the question I heard asked over and over during my weeks in Israel this
summer.
And so we now enter the second thirty
days of the Congressional review period, the crucial half. My representatives
in Congress are split on the issue: two against, one for. I feel that myself. I
admire Senator Schumer for his principled stand in the fact of what must have
been overwhelming pressure from the White House to toe the party line. I admire
Congressman Steve Israel for doing the same thing and for the same
reason. I don’t see any reason to argue this ad hominem, but I also
don’t see any way in which the deal as negotiated comes even close to fulfilling
President Obama’s pledge to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power in the sort
of absolute way that everybody, myself included, understood it to mean at the
time. And that being the case, I can’t quite imagine
how Senator Gillibrand, whom I heard with my own ears last winter repeat and personally
endorse the president’s pledge that our country would prevent Iran from becoming
a nuclear power, can feel honorable supporting the bill. On the other hand, I can’t quite turn away from the hope that buying a
decade’s time at least creates the possibility for the kind of
meaningful regime change that could at least possibly put an end to Iran’s
support for world-wide terror and its endlessly bellicose hostility toward Israel.
I find that a very improbable prospect, one no one as familiar with Jewish
history as myself could reasonably be expected to embrace as likely. But it
does constitute a noble hope…and hope itself is never something reasonably
dismissed as pointless or foolish. And Jewish history teaches us that as well.
