U.S. Jews Should Heed Top Israeli Soldiers Who Oppose Bombing Iran
By Peter Beinart
Some of Israels leading soldiers and spies are warning against bombing Iran. American Jews should listen to them rather than accept Netanyahus apocalyptic claim that Tehrans nuclear program is an existential threat to the state. Plus, Niall Ferguson rejects the arguments against attacking Iran.
Theres nothing American Jews love more than Israeli soldiers, except perhaps, Israeli spies. Go to American synagoguesespecially Orthodox synagoguesand youll find boys wearing green-and-yellow skullcaps bearing the Israel Defense Forces Hebrew acronym. A central element of the Birthright Israel program, which aims to instill a love of Israel and Judaism in young American Jews, is their mifgash, or encounteroften R-ratedwith Israeli soldiers. For my Bar Mitzvah, I was given a tome celebrating the exploits of Israels external and internal spy agencies, the Mossad and Shin Bet. My 6-year-old son recently came back from the library of his Jewish school carrying a volume entitled Keeping Israel Safe: Serving the Israel Defense Forces.
So perhaps American Jews should start noticing that an astonishing number of Israels top soldiers and spies are warning against bombing Iran. It began last summer, when Meir Dagan, fresh from a highly successful, eight-year stint as head of the Mossad, called attacking Iran the stupidest thing I have ever heard. He noted that while in office, he had joined with Yuval Diskin, director of the Shin Bet, and Gabi Ashkenazi, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Fund, to block this dangerous adventure.
Since then, a throng of current and former security officials have issued similar warnings. In December, Dagans successor at Mossad, Tamir Pardo, suggested that an Iranian nuclear weapon was not an existential threat. This month, another former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, declared that it is not in the power of Iran to destroy the state of Israel. Former IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz added that Iran poses a serious threat but not an existential threat and that bombing would mean taking upon ourselves a task that is bigger than us. Its remarkable, when you think about it. Almost every week, Israeli security officials say things about Irans nuclear program that, if Barack Obama said them, would get him labeled anti-Israel by American Jewish activists and the GOP.
The struggle between Israels civilian and military leaders eerily evokes the struggle inside the Bush administration over war with Iraq. Like Dick Cheney, Benjamin Netanyahu has only one mode: apocalyptic. His idols are Winston Churchill and Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, both men famed for having foreseen the Nazi menace when others looked away. And throughout his career, Netanyahu has plugged virtually every adversary Israel faces into the Hitler role. In 1993, when thenForeign Minister Shimon Peres brokered the Oslo Accords, Netanyahu compared him with Neville Chamberlain. In his 1993book, A Place Among the Nations, reissued in 2000 as A Durable Peace, Netanyahu compared the Palestinian effort to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of Israel to the Nazi effort to force Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudeten district. In a CNN interview with Piers Morgan in 2011, Netanyahu analogized negotiating with Hamas to negotiating with Hitler. And in 2006 he told an American Jewish audience that its 1938 and Iran is Germany.
