Why Israel is obsessed with Iran

Israelis are right to worry about an existential threat to their country. They are right to worry that their youth will gradually emigrate. They are right to worry, as Mr Netanyahu says he does, that Israel may lose its raison d’etre as a refuge for embattled Jewry, that Jews may be less safe in Israel than they are in the diaspora. But the source of the existential threat to Israel is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It is Palestinian terrorists who put Jews in Israel at risk; the grinding, never-ending low-level war in the West Bank and Gaza that drives Israel’s youth to emigrate; and the demographic problem of Palestinian population growth that threatens to destroy Israel’s character either as a democracy, or as a Jewish state.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been impossible to resolve both because of its viciously tangled concerns of security, religion and historical justice, and because of political defects on both sides. But on the Israeli side, the essential defect has been a lack of both the political conditions and the psychic equipment to address the nature of the conflict. Right-wing Israelis, who now constitute a majority of the electorate, have proven incapable of understanding themselves as occupiers, incapable of acknowledging the Palestinian claim to nationhood in Palestinian territory, and incapable of accepting that a Palestinian state must be created even if some level of terrorism continues. Many Israelis are unable to see themselves except as victims, threatened now, as throughout Jewish history, with annihilation by fanatical anti-Semites. 

Mr Goldberg’s article rightly focuses on the centrality of the Holocaust to the way Israeli leaders think about Iran. (Former Israeli Air Force general Ephraim Sneh points Mr Goldberg to a poster on his wall showing three Israeli F-15s flying over Auschwitz in 2003. "We were too late," Mr Sneh says.) He fails to follow the insight through: to what extent does the Holocaust obsession irrationally distort the Israeli perspective on Iran? At some point, one has to wonder whether the Israeli conception of the Iranian nuclear threat as a second Holocaust represents a psychological projection of existential fears rooted in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Palestinian conflict cannot be resolved without tremendous political sacrifice, and perhaps not at all. Israelis don’t even know what tools they would need to resolve it. It’s understandable if Israelis and their leaders react by displacing their anxieties onto an enemy they can put in the familiar role of a Hitler or a Haman, one they can engage with a tool that gives them a familiar feeling of control and power: their air force.

I remember the first time I heard an Israeli friend raise anxieties about the Iranian threat. It was during a discussion of the collapse of the Palestinian peace process in the aftermath of the second intifadah. I couldn’t figure out what the Iranian nuclear programme had to do with Israel’s engagement with the Palestinians. But the gist of my friend’s point was, look, why should we be expected to make sacrifices in this infuriating process with the corrupt Palestinian Authority and the Hamas crazies, when even if we could somehow reach a deal, the Iranians are building a bomb to try and kill us all? I may not be presenting my friend’s point fairly, but it tipped me off to the temptation, for Israelis, of invoking of the Iranian threat as a way to retreat from the exhausting, painful, perhaps impossible task of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of Mr Goldberg’s interviewees pulls the same self-serving psychological trick when he worries that Barack Obama is a "J Street Jew": “We’re worried that he thinks like the liberal American Jews who say, ‘If we remove some settlements, then the extremist problem and the Iran problem go away.’” Liberal American Jews do not think the Iran problem will "go away" if Israel "removes some settlements." Rather, they think that Israel is doomed if it fails to remove most or all of the settlements and cooperate in the creation of a Palestinian state, and that Israelis, incapable of confronting this fact, are pretending to themselves that the real problem lies elsewhere.

On the Iranian side, it would be hard for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to do anything more perfectly calibrated to provoke an Israeli attack than pursuing nuclear weapons while denying that the Holocaust took place. Mr Ahmadinejad, a first-caliber incendiary nationalist politician, may well understand this perfectly, and his gratuitous finger-in-the-eye Holocaust denials may be intended to bring on an airstrike that would benefit him politically. But this only highlights how Israel is rendered vulnerable by its tendency to view the world through the distorting prism of the Holocaust. The Holocaust prism leads Israelis and their leaders to adopt inappropriate, self-defeating, violent policies, in much the way that the American tendency to view the world through the distorting prism of the Cold War led us to adopt inappropriate, self-defeating, violent policies in response to the September 11th attacks. The Israeli assessment of the Iranian nuclear threat should be viewed sceptically especially because of the ways it is bound up with Holocaust thinking. If the Israeli desire to bomb Iran is unreasonable and rooted in historical trauma, then the challenge facing American leaders is different from the one Mr Goldberg describes. The challenge is not solely to ensure at a great level of certainty that Iran does not obtain a nuclear device. The challenge is also to dissuade Israel from launching a catastrophic attack on Iran.

ONE interesting thing about Jeffrey Goldberg’s much-discussed articleon Israel’s approach to the Iranian nuclear threat is that it is not all that clear what the Iranian nuclear threat actually is. Mr Golberg establishes beyond any doubt that Israelis and their leaders believe that an Iran possessing nuclear weapons would be an existential threat to their country. But most of the Israeli officials he cites don’t seem to believe that Iran would use, or deliver to proxies, nuclear weapons to attack Israel. Binyamin Netanyahu tells Mr Goldberg that the threat is not so much a direct attack as a shift in the balance of power in the Middle East, the prospect that Iran’s proxies will enjoy a "nuclear umbrella" and other Islamic militants will be "emboldened". (It’s not quite clear what a "nuclear umbrella" might mean. Does Mr Netanyahu think Iran would threaten to use nuclear weapons if Israel attacks Hizbollah or Hamas?) Ehud Barak is concerned that the anxiety of a nuclear-armed Iran will drive Israel’s youth to gradually emigrate. Do these represent existential worries? Moreover, do they justify the bombing of Iran, with all the catastrophic political and economic consequences that Mr Goldberg lays out in his piece?

Israelis are right to worry about an existential threat to their country. They are right to worry that their youth will gradually emigrate. They are right to worry, as Mr Netanyahu says he does, that Israel may lose its raison d’etre as a refuge for embattled Jewry, that Jews may be less safe in Israel than they are in the diaspora. But the source of the existential threat to Israel is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It is Palestinian terrorists who put Jews in Israel at risk; the grinding, never-ending low-level war in the West Bank and Gaza that drives Israel’s youth to emigrate; and the demographic problem of Palestinian population growth that threatens to destroy Israel’s character either as a democracy, or as a Jewish state.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict has been impossible to resolve both because of its viciously tangled concerns of security, religion and historical justice, and because of political defects on both sides. But on the Israeli side, the essential defect has been a lack of both the political conditions and the psychic equipment to address the nature of the conflict. Right-wing Israelis, who now constitute a majority of the electorate, have proven incapable of understanding themselves as occupiers, incapable of acknowledging the Palestinian claim to nationhood in Palestinian territory, and incapable of accepting that a Palestinian state must be created even if some level of terrorism continues. Many Israelis are unable to see themselves except as victims, threatened now, as throughout Jewish history, with annihilation by fanatical anti-Semites. 

Mr Goldberg’s article rightly focuses on the centrality of the Holocaust to the way Israeli leaders think about Iran. (Former Israeli Air Force general Ephraim Sneh points Mr Goldberg to a poster on his wall showing three Israeli F-15s flying over Auschwitz in 2003. "We were too late," Mr Sneh says.) He fails to follow the insight through: to what extent does the Holocaust obsession irrationally distort the Israeli perspective on Iran? At some point, one has to wonder whether the Israeli conception of the Iranian nuclear threat as a second Holocaust represents a psychological projection of existential fears rooted in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Palestinian conflict cannot be resolved without tremendous political sacrifice, and perhaps not at all. Israelis don’t even know what tools they would need to resolve it. It’s understandable if Israelis and their leaders react by displacing their anxieties onto an enemy they can put in the familiar role of a Hitler or a Haman, one they can engage with a tool that gives them a familiar feeling of control and power: their air force.

I remember the first time I heard an Israeli friend raise anxieties about the Iranian threat. It was during a discussion of the collapse of the Palestinian peace process in the aftermath of the second intifadah. I couldn’t figure out what the Iranian nuclear programme had to do with Israel’s engagement with the Palestinians. But the gist of my friend’s point was, look, why should we be expected to make sacrifices in this infuriating process with the corrupt Palestinian Authority and the Hamas crazies, when even if we could somehow reach a deal, the Iranians are building a bomb to try and kill us all? I may not be presenting my friend’s point fairly, but it tipped me off to the temptation, for Israelis, of invoking of the Iranian threat as a way to retreat from the exhausting, painful, perhaps impossible task of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of Mr Goldberg’s interviewees pulls the same self-serving psychological trick when he worries that Barack Obama is a "J Street Jew": “We’re worried that he thinks like the liberal American Jews who say, ‘If we remove some settlements, then the extremist problem and the Iran problem go away.’” Liberal American Jews do not think the Iran problem will "go away" if Israel "removes some settlements." Rather, they think that Israel is doomed if it fails to remove most or all of the settlements and cooperate in the creation of a Palestinian state, and that Israelis, incapable of confronting this fact, are pretending to themselves that the real problem lies elsewhere.

On the Iranian side, it would be hard for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to do anything more perfectly calibrated to provoke an Israeli attack than pursuing nuclear weapons while denying that the Holocaust took place. Mr Ahmadinejad, a first-caliber incendiary nationalist politician, may well understand this perfectly, and his gratuitous finger-in-the-eye Holocaust denials may be intended to bring on an airstrike that would benefit him politically. But this only highlights how Israel is rendered vulnerable by its tendency to view the world through the distorting prism of the Holocaust. The Holocaust prism leads Israelis and their leaders to adopt inappropriate, self-defeating, violent policies, in much the way that the American tendency to view the world through the distorting prism of the Cold War led us to adopt inappropriate, self-defeating, violent policies in response to the September 11th attacks. The Israeli assessment of the Iranian nuclear threat should be viewed sceptically especially because of the ways it is bound up with Holocaust thinking. If the Israeli desire to bomb Iran is unreasonable and rooted in historical trauma, then the challenge facing American leaders is different from the one Mr Goldberg describes. The challenge is not solely to ensure at a great level of certainty that Iran does not obtain a nuclear device. The challenge is also to dissuade Israel from launching a catastrophic attack on Iran.

Aug 16th 2010, 20:55 by M.S
The Economist