In striking Iran Israel would be off target

Palm Beach Gardens, Florida

With three questionable assumptions Israel drifts toward war.

The first is about privilege. Israel may be going to war with Iran to preserve the monopoly of nuclear deterrence in a region in which it feels alienated. The second is about overtaxing US-Israeli relations. Israel expects Washington to join its defense forces in a risky war, imposing the reversal of US policy of troop withdrawal from the region. The third is about Palestine. If Israel provokes Iran on the battlefield, it would be ignoring, and possibly augmenting, its real existential threat, an occupation of a people who are destined to achieve equality, if not statehood.

Israel’s monopoly of nuclear deterrence is taken for granted. The West assumes that Israel is the only rational state which can handle the atomic weapon. Iran is considered “too irrational” to be trusted with nuclear deterrence. The nuclear status quo in the region does not make sense: If unleashed, the atomic arsenal of Tel Aviv is capable of destroying the entire region.  

Linking “deterrence” to “rationality of governance” is too simplistic. Like beauty, reason is in the eye of the beholder. Balancing deterrence is an impossible task. A country’s level of insecurity, the homogeneity of its population, its partnerships with other states, its military record and its integration in the region are among many factors which complicate the authorization of deterrence. It is certainly not clear if Israel should be more trusted than Iran with the possession of an atomic bomb.

To resolve the issue of membership in the deterrence club, a Mideast nuclear-free zone policy is sensible. Israel claims that it would be willing to support a free-zone policy only after the Arab Israeli conflict is resolved. It is as if the Arabs do not want peace and Israel is rushing to the peace table.

The second Israeli assumption of going to war is anticipation of unconditional support from Washington. Israel would not confront Iran without counting on Washington to help on the battle field. Mindful of Jewish support, the US president assured Israel’s Prime Minister on March 5 that he is “serious” in stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Should Iran develop the nuclear bomb, US policy is not “containment”, he asserted; it is military intervention.

Obama’s willingness to be drawn into a new war in the Middle East is hard to fathom. He is fully aware that many Americans, particularly his own (Democrat) constituency, is sick and tired of war.

In a recent exercise of war- simulation, top US planners foresaw Washington to be drawn into a regional theater of hostility. The planners forecast “peril” in a preemptive war and predicted to “delay” Iran’s nuclear agenda for three years. ( N Y Times, “US Simulation Forecasts Perils of Strike on Iran”, By Mark Mazzetti and Thom Shanker, March 19, 2012).

By committing to stop Iran from developing the atomic bomb, Obama may have assumed that there is no longer a need to go to war. He seems confident that sanctions are “crippling”; he figures that economic unraveling is bound to tame Tehran.

A war- obsessed Israeli cabinet looks to Europe for additional help on humbling Iran. The EU recently ordered its Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, SWIFT, to forbid the banks of Iran from transferring money electronically. A European ban on transfer of money on March 17 followed an earlier ban on exporting oil. In retaliation, Iran has stopped oil export to some European countries last month.

Insecure Gulf rulers are following Washington’s plan. The Arab Gulf states are no longer conducting transactions in the Iranian currency, an important development.

How long can Iran sustain severe economic sanctions, not to mention Israeli cyber attacks on its nuclear facilities and assassination of its nuclear scientists?

Iran may be softening. A new round of talks between the Islamic Republic and the six international mediators - US, Russia, China, UK, France and Germany – is expected to take place in April.  The US has already sent a stern diplomatic message to Iran through the Russian foreign minister: Washington views April meeting as the “last chance” to settle the crisis peacefully. Obama warns: “the window of diplomacy is shrinking.”

Echoing Obama, Netanyahu repeated his threat: the strike on Iran” is not a matter of days or weeks, and not a matter of years.”

So far Iran has not blinked; its rhetoric gets more defiant. Nonetheless, assuming that Iran would soon abandon its search for the atomic weapon, would Israel achieve the security its people deserve?

The people of Israel deserve concrete and lasting national security.

And here comes the third shaky motive for Israel’s rush to war: focusing on Iran and ignoring Palestine. Israel’s prime security is in its backyard, not in a humiliated Iran.

With a no-to-Palestine policy, Zionism remains off-task in its current search for real stability.  By fragmenting one section of the West Bank, annexing the other and isolating 1.5milllion Palestinians in Gaza, Israel has lost its capacity of becoming a Jewish state and a live democracy.

To establish lasting security, Israel has two choices: either to establish defined borders to enable the formation of a viable Palestinian state or to share power with Palestinians in a new democratic, secular state.

A war on Iran may be worse than the war on Iraq. And the reasoning for this new war is as shaky as the rationale of “elimination of weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq.