Thank you to the surprisingly large audience who joined live for our conversation with Rabbi Joseph about the U.S. joining Israel’s war against Tehran.
Here is the article from the Times of Israel:
Power is not the answer to all problems. But neither is restraint. If you have the power to prevent the world’s biggest exporter of terrorism from developing nuclear immunity yet fail to use it, then disarm, embrace pacifism, and prepare to suffer the consequences.
To those who blame President Trump for abandoning the JCPOA, Barrack Obama’s deal with Iran, consider this: Had the JCPOA still been in effect, its“sunset clause,” allowing Iran to produce advanced centrifuges capable of enriching uranium to weapons grade level in a matter of weeks, would be coming into effect around now. At the same time, the JCPOA would have permitted Iran to continue developing nuclear warheads and delivery systems.
And had the economic sanctions ended, Iran would have benefited from a massive infusion of funds, immensely strengthening the regime and its terror proxies. Iran would have become the regional power in the Arab world; a nuclear Iran would have been virtually unstoppable.
For the last 40 years, the Iranian regime has consistently expressed, in rhetoric and policy, its intention to destroy the Jewish state. Yet the international community took those threats and actions in stride. There has been little or no outrage from governments, human rights organizations, or religious leaders at the genocidal threat aimed at Israel. Most of all, the UN accepted as a given the violation of its own charter, which states that a member state may not threaten the existence of another. The moral burden for the current crisis is not on Israel but the world.
There will almost certainly be painful repercussions to America’s attack. We shouldn’t minimize the Iranian potential for retribution, especially through global terrorism. Israelis are paying a painful price for this war. And Jews around the world are now even more vulnerable. Israel – and “the Jews” – will be widely blamed, by both right and left, for “dragging America into war.”
But there are moments when leaders need to decisively deal with an existential threat and not allow fear of the consequences to paralyze them.
We will deal with the consequences as they unfold.
For those spreading dire predictions of a “forever war,” the precedent of America’s failed wars in the Middle East is sobering. But it is not the knock- out argument its proponents believe it to be. Had Israel listened to the warnings of some of its well-intentioned friends not to go to war on October8, we would still be surrounded on most of our borders by terror entities committed to our destruction. Israel’s stunning achievement in breaking that vise refutes the pessimists.
Israel’s strike on Iran is the culmination of the war that began on October 7. Hamas’s massacre of Israelis was not an expression of an oppressed people revolting against occupation, as much of the world believes; it was the latest phase of the radical Islamist war against Israel’s existence. What began on October 7 was the Israeli-Iranian war. For the last 18 months, we have been fighting Iran’s proxies. Now, finally and inevitably, we have taken the war to its source.
In the past, in warning against a nuclear Iran, Israel and its supporters invoked the Holocaust: A Holocaust-denying regime obsessed with the destruction of Israel could not be permitted to go nuclear. Since October 7, though, our frame of reference has shifted to the Middle East, where it always belonged. What we learned that day was never to minimize the intentions of genocidally-minded enemies. When they promise to slaughter you, don’t dismiss them.
The banners hung along Tel Aviv’s highway – “Thank you, President Trump” – speak for most Israelis. As for Prime Minister Netanyahu, he deserves our gratitude for his decades-long courageous campaign against a nuclear Iran, withstanding ridicule and accusations of “warmongering” and now bringing that effort to fruition.
That historic achievement doesn’t absolve him of his responsibility for corrupting the soul of Israeli politics. Appallingly, he has failed to accept any responsibility for October 7, refused to establish a commission of inquiry into the events leading up to the disaster, or to curtail the endless incitement among his most fervent supporters against political opponents even during war. History will judge him as both savior and destroyer.
Another word of gratitude belongs to the two spiritual fathers of Israel’s Irandoctrine. The first is Menachem Begin. His attack against Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor established the doctrine that Israel’s enemies cannot be allowed to attain nuclear capability.
The second is Yitzhak Rabin. In September 1993, just after signing the Oslo Accords with Yasser Arafat, Rabin explained in an interview his rationale for seeking an agreement with the Palestinians. Israel was surrounded by two rings of threat, he said. The “inner ring” – the enemies along our borders – didn’t pose an existential threat to Israel. The real threat, he said, would come from the “outer ring” – Iran. Israel needed to try to make peace with the Palestinians, the Jordanians and the Syrians to neutralize the threats along its borders and instead concentrate on preventing a nuclear Iran. Rabin predicted that a showdown with Iran was inevitable. Israel’s Iran policy, then, was jointly established by leaders of the right and of the left. That bipartisan legacy is playing out today in the virtual consensus among Israelis for the attack on Iran.
A word, as well, about the American organizations – AIPAC and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, among others: They led the domestic fight against a nuclear Iran, braving accusations of dual loyalty and even treason.
For the Jewish people, this is a time for courage and resolve. Whatever one’s opinion on the Gaza war, there should be no disagreement among us about the imperative of preventing the nuclear capability of a regime obsessed with the destruction of Israel. We know that an obsession with the Jews usually ends in mass murder. That possibility has now been thwarted.
In 2007, Michael Oren and I wrote an essay in The New Republic warning against a nuclear Iran. We ended with these words: “A Jewish state that allows itself to be threatened with nuclear weapons – by a country that denies the genocide against Europe’s six million Jews while threatening Israel’s six million Jews – will forfeit its right to speak in the name of Jewish history.”
Today, I am as proud as I’ve ever been of the Jewish state and grateful to our truest ally, America.
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