Iran and Israel’s National/Spiritual Mandate
I was listening to an interview with Professor Paul Bracken, author of “The Second Nuclear Age.” Professor Bracken was describing a war game involving Iranian nuclear weapons and Israel. In this war game, Iran started an evacuation of their cities. And, at that point, Israel lost the game. Why? As the Ayatollahs are fond of reminding us, Iran can destroy Israel with a few nukes, but the destruction of Iran would take many more than we have. We can destroy their cities – but if those cities are empty, we lose our leverage. And so, as soon Iran evacuates those cities, the die is cast and Israel is doomed.
Professor Bracken suggested a solution – namely that the U.S. would declare that they would launch a nuclear assault on Iran if they initiated an evacuation (or carried out a number of game-ending moves). But the Jewish people should not rely on the acts of others to preserve our lives. The current American administration has done an impressive job of stranding many allies, Israel among them. I don’t believe we can expect the U.S. to make such a threat and I don’t believe our enemies would count on them to carry it out even if they did.
Israel needs a solution to this problem. Professor Bracken’s suggestion was accurate in one key way – we can’t solve the game as it unfolds. We must, get ahead of the plot. This is what our missile interception program is about. But military means are not enough.
My family and I made aliyah six months ago. Among the many differences between the U.S. and Israel is a fundamental difference in foreign policy. The United States talks about isolationism. It talks about withdrawing to its own borders and defining those things it gets involved with very narrowly. Israel, on the other hand, is isolationist. When it is threatened, it strikes. But, otherwise, we are like a closed religious community – trying our hardest never to get involved in other people’s business. When others face natural catastrophe, we help. But when they face human catastrophe, we stand at a distance and watch. We don’t want to make anybody angry and so we don’t get involved. We want others to stay out of our business and so we stay out of theirs. We have allies and friends we sell arms to and trade with – but we avoid moral pronouncements. It is almost like Zionism’s political reality has become a dream of separation; a dream whose goal is to enable us to become another anonymous nation among anonymous nations.
Obviously, it hasn’t worked.
We are not allowed to be anonymous. Beyond this, our strategy has holes. As the U.S. is discovering with the Syrian civil war, problems abroad can fester and morph and grow and metastasize and lead to terrible threats at home. Israel, as least publicly, doesn’t get involved. The theory might be that we don’t want to make new enemies, but we have no shortage of enemies. If we never take a stand beyond our own narrow self-interest, then we never stand for principles greater than the survival of our own people. If we never stand for greater principles, then our only friends will be those who believe our self-interest is itself a core principle. Those peoples are few indeed.
Current U.S. policy is creating a void. Not just a void of power, but a void of morality. It is a tremendous time of pain, but also of opportunity. We are a people who originated the idea of a relationship with G-d. We can harken back to the very beginnings of Torah to understand the building blocks of such a relationship. We were created in His image. He created for six days and rested (connecting to the unchanging) on the seventh. We work in His image, creating and resting, and we can connect to Him. Fundamentally, the building blocks of a relationship with G-d are productive and not destructive. While there is a place for blood and violence – but it is not the core of the G-dly path.
It is our national legacy to adopt a foreign policy that spreads these values. How?
We can:
· Establish cities of refuge where our values can flourish.
· Spread our values through educational campaigns. There are many possibilities here. Among them are campaigns that mock evil systems, that invite others (like those visiting teenage orphans stopped by Hamas) to see the reality of our values, and that rank the moral performance of foreign governments (as the State Department does now).
· Defend, as we do, our friends. The reliability of human relationships is a pre-cursor to relationships with the divine.
· Help those societies that have internalized something resembling a productive and holy and protective set of values, to throw off evil or even foreign domination. If these ingredients are in place, such a revolution will be successful – as it was in the United States and Poland.
· Limit our own drive for pleasure, greed or glory. This will prevent us from taking what is not ours. When others choose to attack us, it will be because they are either seeking to curse us or are seeking their own pleasure, greed and glory. In either case, we have a license to arur them and make them a lesson for mankind.
The world weighs in on our morality. It is time for us to embrace our divine mission and turn the focus to them. The urgency for this is great. Among our neighbors, moral choices seem to be vanishing. They can choose destructive forms of Islam- either Sunni or Shi’ism- or totalitarianism. All three pose a dire threat to mankind and our relationship to the positive and creative values of G-d.
Israel is not like other nations. We do not have our land simply to live in it; we have our land to fulfill our national purpose. If we fail in this, we risk destruction.
Israel is probably unable to change Iran’s nuclear development – but their society might respond to our values. We might undermine the hatred and destruction that rules those people. But for this path to succeed, we must act quickly. If we fail in our national purpose, then Iran will empty its cities and Israel will disappear – a flash like the Crusader kingdoms of yore. In later years, Israel will be established again – but our opportunity will have been lost.
The world hates us for the same reason Joseph was hated. We have a dream and the world interprets it as a dream of domination; as a dream of their undoing. Like Yosef, we can teach them that ours is a positive dream. Like Joseph’s dream, our dream is one in which we enable physical survival and spiritual growth of our brothers.
It is time we, as a nation, helped make it a reality.
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