A youth praying in front of the Wailing Wall, Jersualem, 20 December 2013. Andre Pain/Corbis.
June 30, 2015
Some say
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is obsessed with the Iranian nuclear
issue. Some say he just cares deeply about it. Whatever the case, the feeling draws
on the historical passions of many others, including Netanyahu's own father.
Benzion
Netanyahu, a history professor, tutored his son on his own life's work, an
encyclopedic history of the Spanish Inquisition. In 1492, with the Reconquista
of Spain from Muslim rulers, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella embarked on a
campaign to expel Jews from the country. For centuries, Spain had been the world's
leading center of Jewish life and host to a celebrated coexistence among Jews,
Christians, and Muslims. But Ferdinand and Isabella unraveled that coexistence.
Spain's Jews were banished, penniless, to Amsterdam or Salonika, or else faced
the torture chambers of the vicious Tomas de Torquemada.
Benzion
Netanyahu wrote a nearly 1,400-page book on the Spanish Inquisition and its
narrative of deceit and hostility toward the Jews. The choice of research topic
was no coincidence. The elder Netanyahu was a disciple of Vladimir Jabotinsky,
founder of the school of Zionism that birthed, eventually, Israel's Likud
party.
Jabotinsky
advocated a Jewish polity that would seek, unapologetically, maximalist territorial
goals and stand proudly in the face of the inevitable international opposition
and local resistance. For Zionists from the Left, anti-Semitism was a curse of being stateless, to be cured once
Jews were sovereign in their own land and normalized among the peoples of the
earth. For Jabotinsky and the elder Netanyahu, nothing would cure Jew-hatred.
The only option was for Jews to stand steadfast against it. The goyim hated the Jews, and they always
would. What mattered was the resilience of Jewish fortitude.
In 1937,
Jabotinsky visited Warsaw to speak to the city's Jews. "Liquidate the diaspora,"
he told them, "or the diaspora will liquidate you." The message: Jews should leave at once for
the Land of Israel, or else lie exposed to a hostility that could one day boil
over. Jabotinsky's words were not met with great enthusiasm. Yet, by
1945, most of those in the room likely were dead. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews,
90 percent were massacred in the Holocaust. Again, history had confirmed the
dark prophecies of Jabotinsky's—and Benzion Netanyahu's—worldview.
This
outlook is hardly one held by only Jabotinsky, Benzion, or Benjamin Netanyahu.
It resonates throughout much of Israeli society and the Jewish diaspora. Nearly
every Jew—whatever his or her roots—bears personal stories of persecution in their
own family tree. Beyond the Holocaust, these stories may draw from as far back
as the Spanish Inquisition or as recent as the mid-century pogroms of the Arab
world, or the anti-Semitism of the Soviet Union that continued well into the
1980s. This history of persecution continues to animate Israeli politics.
Benjamin
Netanyahu has found a ready audience for his worldview—and has been elected
three times by Israeli voters. Netanyahu is not Barack Obama. He believes that
human nature is rotten: the Palestinians will not make peace with a Jewish
state; the Arab Spring will be won by the extremists; and the Iranian regime
will build a nuclear bomb and leverage it to try to destroy the Jewish
commonwealth.
That
latter threat has consumed Netanyahu. On almost all issues—economic reform,
religion and state, even the West Bank—Netanyahu has shown flexibility for a
paramount goal of personal political survival. But the question of Iran's
nuclear program is an issue above political considerations. For that, it seems,
Netanyahu would even give up the acclaim of the prime ministership. This, he
believes, is the issue of our time. Other foes, whether Arab nationalism or
jihadism, may menace Israel. Yet today, none has similar momentum or
capabilities to the Iranian regime. The specter of a Palestinian demographic
majority between the river and the sea preoccupies much of Israel's
establishment, given the potential
consequences for the state's character. But Netanyahu believes, rightly or
wrongly, that the status quo can be managed. The march of the Iranian
regime, on the other hand, must be broken.
The
complexity, in history and today, is that the Iranian people are not the enemy.
Jewish tradition views the ancient Persians—in contrast to the Egyptians,
Babylonians, Greeks, or Romans—as relatively benign. The Persian ruler, Cyrus,
permitted Jewish exiles to return from Babylon to rebuild the Temple in
Jerusalem. In the Book of Esther, a tale of Jewish salvation from annihilation
by a Persian monarch, the story's chief villain, Haman, is, according to Jewish
tradition, not even Persian but Amalekite, part of a mythical nation that will
pursue the Jews until the end of days. In the ancient text, the Persians may be
decadent and gullible, but unlike the Amalekite Haman they are not hostile, and
even show tolerance in running their multinational empire.
In
modern times, too, Israel and Iran enjoyed warm diplomatic and people-to-people
relations before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. An older generation of
Israelis, particularly those with Iranian family roots, remembers the country
fondly. Relations between Jews and Palestinians have been toxic for nearly a
century. In contrast, some Israelis’
attitude toward Iran are more like those of Americans toward Cuba: nostalgia
for a long-lost past and regret about the politics that cut short the cultural
connections.
Still, there
are points where Jabotinsky and Netanyahu’s reading of history meets
reality—and confirms Jews’ worst fears. For more than three decades, the
Islamic Republic's leaders have paraded their followers through the streets with
shouts of “Death to Israel!” They have stomped Israeli flags and rolled
missiles through streets as part of demonstrations against Israel. Motivations
for this anti-Israel speech are both ideological and cynical. Ideologically,
the revolution's leaders viewed Israel as an illegitimate affront to the Muslim
collective. Cynically, hostility towards Israel serves the geopolitical needs
of the Iranian regime, which seeks a position of power in the Arab world. It helps
the regime form a bond with an Arab public hostile to the Jewish state.
The
regime’s hostility is not just limited to words; it’s propped up non-state
proxy groups like Hezbollah and Hamas along Israel’s borders. The umbrella of a
nuclear-armed Iran might allow these groups to make further gains and cause greater
suffering to Israelis and many others in the Levant. Of course, Israelis also
face the risk that the Iranian regime would actually attack Israeli cities with
nuclear bombs. This is what social scientists call a “low-probability,
high-impact event.” In all likelihood, Israel could deter or destroy an
incoming nuclear missile. But, if not, the impact would be cataclysmic. For
this reason, whatever the likelihood of an apocalyptic scenario, Israeli
policymakers like Netanyahu treat it seriously. To date, that thinking has not
led Netanyahu, ever risk-averse about military engagement, to pursue a strike
on Iran. But Israel has not been shy in the past: In 1981, the government led a
strike on an Iraqi nuclear reactor, and is allegedly responsible for a 2007
strike on a reactor in Syria.
An
agreement between the United States and Iran that leaves the status of Iran's
nuclear program ambiguous will be greeted in Israel, at best, with grudging
resignation. The nature of the agreement requires trust: trust in the Iranian
regime to comply, and trust in the international community to enforce.
Netanyahu, along with many Israelis, trusts neither.
Both the
Hebrew Bible and Jewish tradition teach that the Jews are “a people that dwells
alone.” Zionism originated, in part, to temper this sense of powerlessness. Sovereignty
has supplied a sense of efficacy lost for centuries. Still, the sense of
isolation persists, as Zionism runs up against its geopolitical limits. Israel
is a small country, and the Jews a small people. Unlike Americans, Europeans,
or Arabs, Israelis cannot count on civilizational allies on a Huntingtonian
map.
It is
simplistic to embrace the Benzion Netanyahu narrative in its entirety, and
dangerous to apply it crudely to the Iranian nuclear issue. But the opposite is
no wiser. Israel must survive in a world where hostile parties—that will always
be present in some measure—have greater access to catastrophic means, including
nuclear weapons. However obsessive Netanyahu’s views on Iran, the realities of
Jewish history and Israeli geopolitics cannot be dismissed.
Owen Alterman is a research fellow at the
Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.