I was listening to an interview with Professor Paul Bracken, author of “The Second Nuclear Age.” Professor Bracken was describing a war game involving Iranian nuclear weapons and Israel. In this war game, Iran started an evacuation of their cities. And, at that point, Israel lost the game. Why? As the Ayatollahs are fond of reminding us, Iran can destroy Israel with a few nukes, but the destruction of Iran would take many more than we have. We can destroy their cities – but if those cities are empty, we lose our leverage. And so, as soon Iran evacuates those cities, the die is cast and Israel is doomed.
Professor Bracken suggested a solution – namely that the U.S. would declare that they would launch a nuclear assault on Iran if they initiated an evacuation (or carried out a number of game-ending moves). But the Jewish people should not rely on the acts of others to preserve our lives. The current American administration has done an impressive job of stranding many allies, Israel among them. I don’t believe we can expect the U.S. to make such a threat and I don’t believe our enemies would count on them to carry it out even if they did.
Israel needs a solution to this problem. Professor Bracken’s suggestion was accurate in one key way – we can’t solve the game as it unfolds. We must, get ahead of the plot. This is what our missile interception program is about. But military means are not enough.
My family and I made aliyah six months ago. Among the many differences between the U.S. and Israel is a fundamental difference in foreign policy. The United States talks about isolationism. It talks about withdrawing to its own borders and defining those things it gets involved with very narrowly. Israel, on the other hand, is isolationist. When it is threatened, it strikes. But, otherwise, we are like a closed religious community – trying our hardest never to get involved in other people’s business. When others face natural catastrophe, we help. But when they face human catastrophe, we stand at a distance and watch. We don’t want to make anybody angry and so we don’t get involved. We want others to stay out of our business and so we stay out of theirs. We have allies and friends we sell arms to and trade with – but we avoid moral pronouncements. It is almost like Zionism’s political reality has become a dream of separation; a dream whose goal is to enable us to become another anonymous nation among anonymous nations.
Obviously, it hasn’t worked.
We are not allowed to be anonymous. Beyond this, our strategy has holes. As the U.S. is discovering with the Syrian civil war, problems abroad can fester and morph and grow and metastasize and lead to terrible threats at home. Israel, as least publicly, doesn’t get involved. The theory might be that we don’t want to make new enemies, but we have no shortage of enemies. If we never take a stand beyond our own narrow self-interest, then we never stand for principles greater than the survival of our own people. If we never stand for greater principles, then our only friends will be those who believe our self-interest is itself a core principle. Those peoples are few indeed.
Current U.S. policy is creating a void. Not just a void of power, but a void of morality. It is a tremendous time of pain, but also of opportunity. We are a people who originated the idea of a relationship with G-d. We can harken back to the very beginnings of Torah to understand the building blocks of such a relationship. We were created in His image. He created for six days and rested (connecting to the unchanging) on the seventh. We work in His image, creating and resting, and we can connect to Him. Fundamentally, the building blocks of a relationship with G-d are productive and not destructive. While there is a place for blood and violence – but it is not the core of the G-dly path.