1.
In case you had forgotten, I’ll remind you. Israel and Iran are at war. Any doubts about this should have been put to bed by the reports of a series of airstrikes by Israel on Iranian arms convoys bound for Hamas as they passed through Sudan.
2.
Iran wants to squeeze Israel from the north through Hezbollah and from the south through Hamas. Hezbollah has already achieved a certain degree of deterrence against Israel on the northern front - and if enough missiles with enough range to hit Tel Aviv reach Hamas, then the same situation may arise in the south.
3.
Why Iran is doing this is not hard to divine. The mullahs want to put an end to Jewish self-government in the Middle East. They know that repeated attempts to defeat Israel on the battlefield have failed and have wisely decided to bypass its armed forces and instead focus on chipping away at its sovereignty by arming its proxies with weapons designed to terrorize its civilian population. If Iran gets its way, Israel will soon be expected to accept as normal a situation whereby every square meter of its national territory will be within range of either Hamas or Hezbollah rockets. Even if they are never fired, the normalization of the presence of rockets on Israel’s borders already represents a victory for Iran; no other state, regardless of its current or past crimes or errors, is expected to live with the muzzle of cocked pistol held against the side its head.
4.
Israel has no territorial claims against Iran and does not believe that ethnic Persians have no right to their own state, or that Iran really belongs to one of the Islamic Republic’s oppressed minorities. Israel does not believe that ethnic Persians have falsified major events in their own history in order to garner sympathy from the world or that ethnic Persians are manipulating the policies of governments throughout the world.
5.
Israel is 20,770 square kilometers in size and has a population of a bit more than seven million people. Iran is 1.648 million square kilometers in size and a population of more than 66 million people.
6.
In this war, victory for Iran would mean the destruction of a lawfully constituted state that came into being at the hand of the United Nations. As the Jews are unlikely to surrender their state without a fight, such a victory would certainly entail massive loss of human life. A victory for Israel would not have to involve the loss of a single life, it would be fully achieved if the Islamic Republic of Iran abandoned its ambitions to destroy Israel and decided to focus its energy and ingenuity on other projects.
7.
Netanyahu was right. Abandoning the Gaza Strip without making sure that it wouldn’t be governed by a regime willing to turn the territory into Iran’s most forward outpost in the struggle against it was a huge error on Israel’s part. Continuing the occupation of the territories captured from Jordan, Syria and Egypt in 1967 is wrong and has costs, but the wrong can’t be undone at the price of gifting a strategic advance to Iran while the costs of the occupation pale beside those of dealing with the ever greater rocket threat.
7.
What of the Palestinians? They must have their state. How soon that happens depends to a considerable degree on the progress of the war between Iran and Israel. As long as Iran remains set on its present course with regard to the world’s only state for Jews then it’s hard to see a Palestinian state becoming a reality.
8.
Iran grows ever closer to acquiring nuclear weapons.
9.
Distinguished newspaper columnists assure us that there is nothing to worry about, that the mullahs are really a pragmatic bunch of chaps and that the real problem is Israel’s bellicosity.
Eamonn,
Great analysis. I hear so many Iranians, of various political stripes, ask me: “Why are we risking our security and wasting our money on the Palestinians? What do they have to do with us?”
But I also know there is a good chunk of my compatriots who’ve been fooled by the regime’s propaganda into hating Israel, or else they go along with the IRI party line because the regime subsidizes their daily life in one way or another.
That said, it isn’t the case that the average Iranian wakes up every morning saying to herself, “Hopefully today will bring another victory for us against the Zionists!” So the best chance of Israel “winning” the war would be for the Iranian people to make it clear to their regime that enmity towards the Jewish state does not put food on the table, does not allow their recent graduate to find a job, does not make them more free, etc.
Well, the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is certainly costly, but it is not wrong given the manifest realities. Likewise, the vision of a two state regimen is reasonable and even propitious, but that is a medium to long term vision that needs to take present and continuing realities into account, that requires a qualitative backbone married to that vision on the part of Israeli politicians and social/political commentators and leaders in general.
“Clarifying the debate about Roger Cohen”
By Uriel Heilman · March 30, 2009
piece in Sunday’s U.K. Guardian takes a belated look at the controversy surrounding New York Times columnist Roger Cohen and his columns about Iran, Jews in Iran and Israel. The piece reports:
‘A row has broken out over allegations of antisemitism at the New York Times, America’s most vaunted name in journalism and a newspaper with a large Jewish readership.
The storm centres on a column about Jews in Iran written by New York Times journalist Roger Cohen and a cartoon attacking the recent war in Gaza.
The newspaper, and Cohen in particular, has been accused of being too critical of Israel and an apologist for Iran and its leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.’
In typical British fashion, the Guardian gets the point about criticism of Israel wrong.
Contrary to what some Britons may think, there is no invisible, forbidden line in America when it comes to criticism of Israel that, when crossed, becomes certifiable anti-Semitism. Reasonable people can argue about what constitutes anti-Semitism, and whether certain criticisms of Israel fit the bill.
I’m not sure what other critics of Cohen have been saying to the New York Times, but my problem with his columns isn’t his criticism of Israel (or anti-Semitism) but his bad journalism. Cohen has the right to criticize Israel — as do I, you or anybody else. The problem isn’t that Cohen has criticized Israel too much, crossing some unspoken line, but that he’s simply been wrong or duplicitous in what he has written about Israel, Iran and Iranian Jews….”
read the rest here:
http://blogs.jta.org/telegraph/article/2009/03/30/1004093/clarifying-the-debate-about-roger-cohen
“A row has broken out over allegations of antisemitism at the New York Times, America’s most vaunted name in journalism and a newspaper with a large Jewish readership.”
I am not surprised to see antisemitism portrayed by the Guardian as
- an issue of concern to Jews but not troubling in itself;
- a danger to the reputation of a paper, the danger occurring because there is the potential to offend a large volume of its readers.
Incidentally, how does the Guardian know what religion the readers of the NYT profess, if any?
Off-topic - Eamonn, CAMERA’s dossier on ‘The Irish Times’ is a must-read:
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=203&x_article=1651
you have forgoten the power of iranian politician is growing rapidly in all the world . first to unified major arab country againest israel, two let intire world view the killing of people in the gaza ,three creat a fieles againest israel in un and internatiional court ,then is final have strick in all line to israel from air and in side by full force ,that i am believe has prepered for long time ago.