World War II ended seventy-five years ago, or so we think. The truth is, we are still feeling its aftershocks in the Middle East—right up to and including Donald Trump’s literal shot in the dark to take out Iran’s nuclear ambitions, whatever they may be or wherever they may go.
It makes me think of the line from one of Bob Dylan’s most praised songs, “Tangled Up in Blue”: “I don’t know how it all got started.” Well, it got started in the Second World War. The United States has now been dragged by Israel into another of its no-holds-barred, often quixotic wars. I count six. First it was Suez, when Dwight Eisenhower cut off aid (done once and never again) for an act of aggression, joined by France and England, to capture Egypt’s Suez Canal. Then there was the lightning June War of 1967, which tripled for a time Israel’s size and prompted Lyndon Johnson’s first-ever shipment of American F-4 fighter jets. What did we get? A fight over Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza that violated international law and has persisted for nearly sixty years.
Then there’s the October War of 1973, which Egypt and Syria launched to regain their lost territories. Israel, running out of conventional weaponry, appears to have delivered the United States an ultimatum: Resupply us or we will use the nuclear bomb. Resupply we did, even as the Soviet Union was shipping Egypt or Syria nuclear weapons, just in case. (See The Samson Option: Israel, America, and the Bomb by Seymour M. Hersh, 1991.)
In 1982, there comes the war in Lebanon, which was supposed to destroy the Palestinian resistance movement. It killed about seventeen thousand people, most of whom were civilians. (Bin Laden once referred to the “towers of Beirut” falling in the Israeli siege that year inspiring his attack on the “towers” of New York City.) Two truck-bombs at the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983 killed 307 people, the great majority of whom were U.S. Marines and French forces who were there as multinational peacekeepers. It was the largest death toll for Marines in one day since Iwo Jima in World War II. It doesn’t happen without Israel’s invasion, prompted by the wounding of one of its diplomats; the diplomat himself castigated Menachem Begin for the invasion from his own hospital bed.
A period of relative peace ensued during the negotiations under George H. W. Bush and then Bill Clinton, cemented with the famous Yassir Arafat–Yitzhak Rabin handshake at the White House. But then Rabin is assassinated by an Israeli extremist settler from the West Bank. The settler—who also kills the peace process—comes from a territory occupied during the highly lauded 1967 War.
It’s not long until the ascent of Ariel Sharon and the extremist Likud Party in Israel. One year after Sharon’s visit in 2000 to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem—which is supposed to be off-limits to him and on sacred Muslim ground—al-Qaeda launches its 9/11 attacks against the United States. Egged on by American neoconservatives, the United States invades Iraq, but there are neither al-Qaeda terrorists nor weapons of mass destruction there. The United States remains stuck in Iraq for almost a decade; roughly one hundred thousand Iraqi civilians die in the invasion, civil war, and subsequent mass health crisis. A 2007 study finds that one third of the one hundred thousand American troops who served in Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from PTSD or other mental illnesses, and many face poverty and homelessness.
Those who got us into Iraq, or their buddies, are going down the same path in Iran. And the man who decried our involvement in Iraq and got elected president dances the United States into this impossible conundrum, mistaking power itself for precision and destruction for the will to peace.
There is a dangerous codicil to all this. Antisemitism in America is on the rise. Bigots and neo-Nazis come out of the woodwork at such a fraught time. But we may ask ourselves: What part does the extraordinarily sadistic violence of the Gaza War play? (I have not counted it here, as Israel began it in response to a very real massacre of 1,200 of its own innocent civilians.) According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, over fifty-seven thousand people, mostly civilians, have been killed in what some have called a genocidal onslaught. As difficult as our shores have become for some of our Jewish citizens, America is still a far safer place than Israel for Jews. Doesn’t that tell unyielding leaders something?
Take a look at the map. There are now six destroyed countries around Israel or not far off: Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, and Libya. Iran is close behind. I don’t for a second blame Israel for all of this; many of these societies have been rent by civil war for a long time. But has it helped? Ashes don’t make good neighbors.
What has helped is the flashing of Israel’s conscience. Recently, three hundred thousand people marched in Tel Aviv to protest the Gaza War and demand the return of the hostages. This is a huge protest—proportionate to about ten million people if held in the United States. I also had the privilege last weekend of meeting an Israeli poetry translator and peace activist named Joanna Chen, who has been ferrying wounded Palestinians from the West Bank to Israeli hospitals; people like this give me hope.
There are three important things to say in conclusion. First, the United States is not Israel. This would seem to be obvious. However, years ago, William Bennett, a neighbor of mine once and Secretary of Education under Ronald Reagan, wrote in an op-ed that we were in fact one nation, or at least identical in our makeup, goals, and ideals. I responded in disagreement. The United States does not give favor or automatic citizenship to any one religion or ethnicity. It does not refuse any group by ethnicity from traveling or walking on its roads. It does not hold any population under military occupation for one year, not to mention fifty-eight years. It does not have a nuclear capability that it does not admit to. It subscribes to—it created—the Nonproliferation Treaty, which Israel has not signed. Israel’s paranoia and aggression are not ours, and its laws favoring one religion are certainly nothing like what we believe.
Second, Israel was created in worldwide sympathy for Jews who suffered the Holocaust of the Second World War, and this was good—a great good—but the disinheritance of seven hundred thousand Palestinians was the cost. For some years, Arabs thought they could rectify this situation by force or appeal to the United Nations. In both cases, they were wrong. Ultimately, in 2002, all twenty-two Arab nations signed an “end of conflict” accord to accept Israel and live in peace with it if the Palestinians got some form of self-determination. There is plenty of evidence Iran would, too, despite one leader’s vitriol. But Israel under the Likud Party of Begin, Sharon, and Netanyahu resists any real justice for Palestinians, and so the conflict continues in one form or the other.
Fear never elicits love or even real acceptance. Military force repeatedly shows it cannot work in this area without fundamental moves towards political rectification and justice. Force only shifts the problem elsewhere. Israel does not want to risk vulnerability, but it may have to if it wants true peace. In any case, a ceasefire and negotiations over Iran and Gaza are desperately needed. (David Ignatius has suggested in The Washington Post that on the table with the Netanyahu-Trump meetings at the White House this week are “big picture” moves towards real peace, including a six-week ceasefire in Gaza, Israel’s withdrawal, the evacuation of Hamas to a Muslim country à la the PLO to Tunisia in 1982, a Saudi-Israel rapprochement, and a serious addressing of Palestinians’ hunger for their own nation.)
Third, there is no way to keep Iran or other Middle Eastern countries from trying to get the bomb while Israel harbors up to two hundred nuclear bombs of its own in a Negev desert enrichment site called Dimona. Perhaps Iran is squelched today; it won’t be squelched in a year or two, even if we occupy the entire country. How can Israel be afraid of another country’s potential for the bomb and be blind to that country’s fear of Israel’s very real monopoly of nuclear weapons? The best thing Israel might do with these weapons is offer them up in return for a complete disarming of nuclear ambitions by Iran and everyone else in the Middle East, preferably with Pakistan involved, too. Ironclad inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency would have to be agreed to. Power generation by nuclear reactor might have to be foreclosed, or energy generated some other way, with our help. In short, what Dimona could lead to is a Nuclear-Free Zone in the Middle East. It would be a great irony. It would also be a great step for peace that would bring Israel more fully into the family of nations.
World War II might finally be over.
