Israel vs. Iran: the kook's on the other foot

Soaked up any sage talk lately about whether the Iranian leadership is "rational"?  Two high-level  voices from Israel's military and security services have weighed in recently on questions of rationality and religious fervor, and their comments mesh interestingly.

First, Benny Gantz, head of the Israeli Defense Force, told Haaretz, in an interview published on April 25, that he did not think Iran would build a nuclear bomb -- not now, anyway. He scoped out Khamenei's thinking in some detail:

As long as its facilities are not bomb-proof, "the program is too vulnerable, in Iran's view. If the supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wants, he will advance it to the acquisition of a nuclear bomb, but the decision must first be taken. It will happen if Khamenei judges that he is invulnerable to a response. I believe he would be making an enormous mistake, and I don't think he will want to go the extra mile. I think the Iranian leadership is composed of very rational people. But I agree that such a capability, in the hands of Islamic fundamentalists who at particular moments could make different calculations, is dangerous."

And now, Yuval Diskin, former head of Israel's internal security service, casts a cold eye on current Israeli leadership. The Times' Jodi Rudoren reports:

The Amalek connection: Goldberg protests too much

Jeffrey Goldberg has responded to those who have seized on his report that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu views Iran as a modern incarnation of Israel's Biblical enemy Amalek by pointing out that Netanayahu never made the equation himself -- an aide told Goldberg that Amalek is the frame in which Netanyahu views Iran. Part of Goldberg's response is directed at Andrew Sullivan, who protested that the Amalek meme indicates little about Israeli intent but is harmful to its public diplomacy. Both Goldberg and Sullivan downplay the significance of God's command to Saul in 1 Samuel 15 to massacre the Amelekites down to the last head of cattle.

Three points in response:

1) Netanyahu may not himself have mentioned Amalek to Goldberg, but Goldberg quoted an aide assuring readers that Netanyahu views Iran as Amalek. He then tied this historically Jewish reflex -- viewing all subsequent enemies as reincarnations of the Biblical bogeys -- to Netanyahu's father's scholarship, the central theme of which he portrayed as the irreducible racial hatred borne against the Jewish people by the perpetrators of the Spanish Inquisition. If readers concluded that Netanyahu views Iran as Amalek, Goldberg bears some responsibility (and credit!) for that.

2) Andrew Sullivan, by emphasizing the damage that the Amalek-Iran equation does to Israel's diplomatic stance rather than what it says about Israeli leadership's unspoken worldview, got the problem backwards (and gave Goldberg the opportunity to focus much of his defense on a red herring - Israel's diplomatic acumen). The whole point of Goldberg's unveiling of the Amalek metaphor is that it gets at the Israeli unconscious.

That's what's so disturbing -- we have the leadership of a powerful modern nation state viewing its enemies in terms of the stylized, moralized victors' history codified in a 2000+ year-old chronicle. Of course Israel is not planning to massacre tens of millions. But atavistic fears underpin Israel's response to current dangers that are alarming enough. And however softened and spiritualized by the rabbis over 2000 years, the Biblical demonization of Israel's enemies remains an important element in Jewish consciousness -- and Israeli action.

3) Goldberg protests:

In any case, this whole debate is a perversion, and not only because genocide is the specialty of other religions, and not Judaism. Iran has called for the elimination of the Jewish state, and seems to be building nuclear weapons that could make that a reality; Israel simply seeks to protect itself from a country that wants to exterminate it. If Israel does strike Iran, it would bomb military targets while trying to minimize civilian casualties. Iran, through its proxies Hezbollah and Hamas, already has a long and distinguished record of murdering Jewish children. There's simply no equivalence here. Yes, Israel does various idiotic and immoral things. But it isn't, even on its worst day, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

All true, to a point. Iran has called for the elimination of the Jewish state, though its leaders always carefully avoid suggesting that Iran itself plans to effect that elimination by military means. But Goldberg here reproduces the endless disconnect -- which I think Ezra Klein pointed out -- between Israel's focus on intent and its Muslim neighbors' focus on action. Yes, Israeli action against Iran would focus on military targets. But it's likelier that Israel will make that attack, and kill hundreds or thousands of Iranians in its targeted strike, than that Iran will deploy nuclear weapons or otherwise directly attack Israel. Israel may indeed try to minimize civilian casualties, while Hezbollah and Hamas directly attack civilians. But Israel has killed a lot more civilians in its struggles with Hezbollah and Hamas than those enemies have Israelis. That's a difference in power, not intent. But Israel's neighbors focus on the body count.

One could counter that the number of Iranian civilians killed by the Iranian revolutionary regime probably outstrips the number of civilians that Israeli armed forces have killed in the country's entire history. I agree with Goldberg that there's "no moral equivalence" between Israel and Iran. But an Israeli preemptive attack on Iran would bring equivalence a lot nearer. And the Amalek mindset makes such an attack a lot more likely.

Goldberg: Will Netanyahu smite the "Amalekites"?

Jeffrey Goldberg has done us a service by opening a terrifying window into the mind of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Rejecting the hypothesis that Netanyahu's saber-rattling over Iran is a negotiating ploy, Goldberg explains:

...the prime minister’s preoccupation with the Iranian nuclear program seems sincere and deeply felt. I recently asked one of his advisers to gauge for me the depth of Mr. Netanyahu’s anxiety about Iran. His answer: “Think Amalek.”

“Amalek,” in essence, is Hebrew for “existential threat.” Tradition holds that the Amalekites are the undying enemy of the Jews. They appear in Deuteronomy, attacking the rear columns of the Israelites on their escape from Egypt. The rabbis teach that successive generations of Jews have been forced to confront the Amalekites: Nebuchadnezzar, the Crusaders, Torquemada, Hitler and Stalin are all manifestations of Amalek’s malevolent spirit.

How do you deal with an "undying enemy"? Here's the divine answer in 1 Samuel 15:3:

Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.

God meant business. He rejected King Saul, who led the Israelite assault, because while wiping out the Amalekites he spared their king and some of their livestock.

Netanyahu is not a religious fundamentalist per se, but he too means business. Goldberg usefully recounts that his personal ideology was shaped by his father's scholarship, which

suggests a belief that anti-Semitism is a sui generis hatred, one that is shape-shifting, impervious to logic and eternal. The only rational response to such sentiment, in the Netanyahu view, is militant Jewish self-defense.

That militancy is now focused relentlessly on Iran. Drawing on his March 31 interview published some weeks ago by the Atlantic, Goldberg reports that Netanyahu

said that Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons represented a “hinge of history.” “Iran has threatened to annihilate a state,” he said. “In historical terms, this is an astounding thing. It’s a monumental outrage that goes effectively unchallenged in the court of public opinion. Sure, there are perfunctory condemnations, but there’s no j’accuse — there’s no shock.” He argued that one lesson of history is that “bad things tend to get worse if they’re not challenged early.” He went on, “Iranian leaders talk about Israel’s destruction or disappearance while simultaneously creating weapons to ensure its disappearance.”

It is not strictly true that Iran has "threatened to annihilate a state." Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, quoting and channeling Khomeini, has expressed the wish and forecast that Israel "vanish from the page of time," that the "Zionist regime" will collapse, and that Muslims should unite to make this happen. He and other Iranian leaders have been careful, however, to avoid saying that Iran will bring about these results by military means. Ahmadinejad has disingenuously called for a single referendum of all the people in "Palestine" -- which would indeed make the Jewish state "vanish from the page of time." His long string of forecasts, disgusting vitriolic insults, and incitements are threatening enough, expressing a hatred, like that of Benzion Netanyahu's Spaniards, "impervious to logic and eternal."

But for the leader of a Jewish state to cast a current adversary as "Amalek" presents almost a mirror image to this deadly, irrational hatred. It suggests a leader haunted by ancient commands to wipe out the accursed of God. It stands off Isaac versus Ishmael, each with rival claims to being chosen of God, each viewing the other as the accursed.

To my mind, it's dead dreams of divine command that are the existential threat. The world is held at the point of the terrible swift sword of scriptural monotheism.

Related post: The Amalek connection: Goldberg protests too much