Even after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933 there were people all over the world, including Jews, who didn’t believe that he would put into practice his anti-Semitic threats. History proved otherwise and the Holocaust was the result.
Jews should, therefore, be understood when taking literally similar threats against them today. For the last three dozen years the Iranian regime has proclaimed its determination to wipe Israel off the map. Six million Jews now living in Israel to be annihilated like the six million murdered by the Nazis.
Ehud Yaari, one of Israel’s acknowledged experts on Islam and the Arab word, wrote about it last month in The American Interest: “All rival factions within the regime, and many outside too, agree that the destruction of the Jewish state constitutes an important tenet of their devotion to Islam,” He cited the daily newspaper Kayhan, the mouthpiece of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that “the belief that Israel must be eliminated is a condition of our adherence to Islam.”
Columnist Jeffrey Goldberg, quotes Khamenei in the Aug. 11 issue of The Atlantic that “this barbaric, wolf-like and infanticidal regime of Israel which spares no crime has no cure but to be annihilated.”
President Barack Obama told Goldberg that he agrees that Khamenei and his gang are steeped in anti-Semitism and would want to inflict great harm on Israel if they could. But the president believes that the leaders of Iran are rational and, therefore, the deal over Iran’s nuclear capabilities will inhibit them and thus also protect Israel.
Goldberg responded that Hitler may have made rational decisions in general “except if you understood his desire to wipe out the Jews of Europe as an actual overriding policy goal.” Similarly, “bringing about the end of the sovereign Jewish state in the Middle East is a paramount political and theological mission of the Iranian regime.”
Though the Holocaust was unique and shouldn’t be compared to the Iranian threat, awareness of what happened then, in living memory of some of us, is an inescapable factor in the way Jews respond to Iran now.
Nor should Jewish reactions mean that all Jews believe that the deal with Iran is necessarily bad. There’s much to suggest that the increased American deterrence will make the world, including Israel, more secure.
The question is, of course, whether it will make Israel secure enough. Goldberg writes: “If, in the post-Holocaust world, a group of people express a desire to hurt Jews, it is, for safety’s sake, best to believe them.” The desire of the Iranian regime is unmistakable, which is one of the reasons why, in addition to its nuclear ambitions, its now greatly improved finances, as a result of the removal of sanctions, will encourage its proxies on Israel’s borders to carry out the murderous biddings of their paymasters.
Nothing in the deal addresses this issue. Even those of us who believe that the government of Israel should do more to seek peace with the Palestinians fear that the so-called two-state solution could bring Iran and its rockets even closer to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
If the United States and the rest of the free world are serious about peace they must, therefore, make sure that Israel is protected not only from nuclear bombs but also from the potentially relentless onslaught of conventional weapons.
As long as that isn’t clear, what looks like Israeli intransigence is a reflection of its determination to secure the future of the Jewish people. Therefore, it behooves the powers that say they abhor the Iranian anti-Israel rhetoric to demonstrate persuasively that Israel is safe enough to seek peace.
