There are four main players in the ongoing, and possibly accelerating, crisis, over Iran and its nuclear programme. There is, of course, the unelected yet ‘supreme’ leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has definitive say over the direction of Iran’s nuclear programme (Iran’s elected — in a fashion — president, the ludicrous Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has never had dispositive sway over it, and appears to be fading as a political power in any case).
Then there is the American President, Barack Obama, who has so far done an incomplete job of convincing Iran’s leader that he means what he says when he says he will not allow Iran to possess nuclear weapons. Obama has also done an incomplete job (though not for lack of trying) of convincing the third player, the Israeli prime minister, that, as he told me in an interview last week, his administration ‘has Israel’s back’. Benjamin Netanyahu, of course, has driven the debate over Iran’s nuclear programme, and it is, in large measure, fear that he will strike out against Iran on his own that has concentrated the world’s attention on the matter of Iran’s nuclear plans.
There is little hope that Obama will convince Khamenei to shelve Iran’s nuclear ambitions. His predecessor, George W. Bush, convinced Muammar Gaddafi to give up Libya’s nuclear programme, and Iranians saw how that story ended. (The Iranians have also made a study of the demise of their nemesis, Saddam Hussein, who did not have nuclear weapons, either.) There is also not much hope that Obama will convince Netanyahu to subcontract out his country’s security to the United States, as robust an ally and benefactor as it is. If the Israeli prime minister accepted Obama’s recommendation to rest easy that America would protect it from all manner of Iranian-generated harm, this would obviate the need for Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities on its own — precipitously, unilaterally and possibly ineffectively. But Netanyahu, who sees Khamenei as a turbaned Hitler, is predisposed to disbelieve such an assertion by any outside power, no matter how friendly, because of the education in Jewish history he received from the fourth key player in this drama, his father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu.
I suspect the prime minister would object to the inclusion of his father on this list of main players. After all, Netanyahu is a man already in his early sixties. He has lived a full and interesting and challenging life, and it stands to reason that he would reject the notion that he is a prisoner of his father’s worldview. But it is an objective truth that Ben-Zion, who is 102 years old and, until proven otherwise, immortal, has had a profound impact on the thinking of his middle son.
And how does Ben-Zion (the name means ‘son of Zion’; the family’s last name means ‘gift of God’) understand the world? He sees great swaths of mankind infected by the ineradicable virus of anti-Semitism. Deadly outbreaks of anti-Semitism occurred in the distant past, and they occur today. This is the virus that took his son, Benjamin’s older brother, Jonathan, a commando officer killed while freeing Jews from Arab and German hijackers on a Ugandan airport tarmac in the now-legendary raid on Entebbe in 1976.
Ben-Zion had an early career as a functionary in the ‘revisionist’ wing of the Zionist movement, which espoused a more militant, right-wing version of Jewish nationalism than the one advocated by the Labour Zionists who led Israel in its early years. But he is mainly known as a scholar of the Spanish Inquisition. His masterwork, The Origins of the Inquisition in 15th-Century Spain, overturned the academic consensus on the roots of this notorious episode. Ben-Zion argued that Spanish hatred of Jews was spurred by the principle of limpieza de sangre, purity of blood; in other words, it was racial hatred in the manner of the Nazis, not mere theology, that animated the Inquisition. Ben-Zion also argued that the Inquisition followed a traditional pattern of anti-Semitism: systematic persecution, he has argued throughout his career, is always preceded by campaigns of vilification and dehumanisation meant to ensure the eventual elimination of Jews.
For those seeking clues about the Israeli prime minister’s intentions — will he trust the Americans to take the lead against Iran, or act on his own? — I would point to the comments of Ben-Zion Netanyahu at a party two years ago marking his 100th birthday.
The party was held at the Menachem Begin Heritage Centre in Jerusalem. The guests included the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, as well as Ben-Zion’s son, the prime minister. In a toast, Benjamin credited his father with forecasting the Holocaust and, in the early 1990s, predicting that ‘Muslim extremists would try to bring down the Twin Towers in New York’. Then it was Ben-Zion’s turn to speak. His talk was short, direct and stark. ‘Our party this evening compels me to speak of recent comments made about the continued existence of the nation of Israel and the new threats by its enemies depicting its upcoming destruction,’ he began. ‘From the Iranian side, we hear pledges that soon — in a matter of days, even — the Zionist movement will be put to an end and there will be no more Zionists in the world. One is supposed to conclude from this that the Jews of the Land of Israel will be annihilated, while the Jews of America, whose leaders refuse to pressure Iran, are being told in a hinted fashion that the annihilation of the Jews will not include them.’
He continued, ‘The Jewish people are making their position clear and putting faith in their military power. The nation of Israel is showing the world today how a state should behave when it stands before an existential threat: by looking danger in the eye and calmly considering what should be done and what can be done. And to be ready to enter the fray at the moment there is a reasonable chance of success.’ One of the guests at the party told me, ‘This was the father giving his son history’s marching orders.’
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I thought about this sombre birthday party the other night, while listening to the Israeli prime minister address a gathering in Washington of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac. Three years ago, shortly before returning to office (he was prime minister for a short, unhappy period in the late 1990s), he argued to me in an interview that Iran was ruled by a ‘messianic, apocalyptic cult’, and sketched a direct line for me from the ideology of the Nazis to the rhetoric of the mullahs.
But once he took power (shortly after President Obama entered the White House), Netanyahu stopped analogising Iran to Nazi Germany, in part, I believe, because he was frightening Israelis (many of whom are Holocaust survivors, or the descendants of Holocaust survivors). But in Washington, Netanyahu returned to the theme with enthusiasm. He brandished before the supportive crowd of 13,000 a 1944 letter from the World Jewish Congress to the US War Department that begged the Roosevelt administration to target-bomb the gas chambers and rail lines at Auschwitz. The letter’s message was rejected, to the everlasting discredit of Roosevelt’s advisers, and the official response read in part: ‘Such an effort might provoke even more vindictive action by the Germans.’
Netanyahu then said, ‘My friends, this is not 1944. The American government today is different. The Jewish people are also different. Today we have a state of our own. The purpose of the Jewish state is to secure the Jewish future. That is why Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat.’ He added, ominously: ‘We must always remain the masters of our fate.’
This was, I thought, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, speaking through his son. Benjamin Netanyahu gave this speech a few hours after meeting with President Obama. The meeting, their ninth, apparently went swimmingly, at least when compared with their previous encounters. But it seemed remarkable that Netanyahu, only a few hours after listening to President Obama make an earnest plea for restraint, reintroduced the spectre of the Holocaust to the conversation.
He is not wrong to hear in Iran’s rhetoric an echo of the most extreme manifestations of anti-Semitic thought. But is he entirely a prisoner of Jewish history? Last week, before Netanyahu arrived in Washington, I asked President Obama if he thought it possible that the Israeli prime minister had overlearned the lessons of the Holocaust. The President gave me a balanced and judicious answer. On the one hand, he said, ‘The prime minister has a profound responsibility to protect the Israeli people in a hostile neighbourhood, and I am certain that the history of the Holocaust and of anti-Semitism and brutality directed against the Jewish people for more than a millennium weighs on him when he thinks about these questions.’ But he went on to say, ‘I think it’s important to recognise, though, that the prime minister is also head of a modern state that is mindful of the profound costs of any military action, and in our consultations with the Israeli government, I think they take those costs, and potential unintended consequences, very seriously.’
There is no doubt that Netanyahu takes these costs, and ‘potential unintended consequences’, very seriously. There is also no doubt that he takes his father’s admonitions even more seriously.
The question of the moment is not whether Netanyahu believes, as he suggested in Washington, that this American administration is different in its approach to the issue of Jewish survival than was Roosevelt’s. The question is, does the prime minister believe that this is even a relevant issue? As he said to the president, and as he has said in public, the Jewish state is the master of its fate. What matters is not Obama’s steadfastness on the question of Iran. What matters is that the Jews have the power to stop an anti-Semitic regime from getting hold of a weapon that it might use to wipe out a nation of six million Jews.
I thought, before the Netanyahu-Obama summit, that the meeting would delay premature action by Israel against Iran. I believe now that I was mistaken. My sense is that Netanyahu feels the press of history and may well strike at Iran in the coming months. The clues are increasingly obvious. The most obvious, to my mind: the gift Netanyahu brought to Obama at the outset of their meeting. It was a copy of the ancient Scroll of Esther, which tells the story, now commemorated during the holiday of Purim, of how the Jewish people narrowly escaped annihilation at the hands of a perfidious Persian ruler. Netanyahu is many things. Subtle is not one of them.
Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent of the Atlantic magazine and a columnist for Bloomberg View.
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