Decades of Burden Obliterated in an Instant
One American-Israeli's long journey to the Israel-Iran War
The State of Israel was born two decades before I was. Just one decade before that, most of my father’s extended family fell victim to either Hitler or Stalin, as my wife’s grandmother hid in a narrow crevice under a Polish barn for two years.
In stark contrast, I grew up in the serenity and security of an affluent New York City suburb, wanting for absolutely nothing. When I was ten years old, Islamic fundamentalists seized power in Iran and, shortly after, stormed the American embassy, taking 52 Americans hostage. I became obsessed with the hostages, memorizing their names, tying a yellow ribbon to my school notebook, and posting the number of days they had been held in the window of my bedroom.
Slightly over a decade later, I spent the year after college in Jerusalem, aiming to augment my education in Jewish text study, theology, and history. Thursdays began with a class about the weekly Torah portion. Our teacher, an American immigrant named Rabbi Schweiger, was deeply committed, as a theological matter, to the notion that Jews should live in the Holy Land. He had enough good humor to be aware of a perpetual bingo game among his students, who counted how many subtle ways he might, in any given class, imply that they should stay in Israel.
During a discussion about Abraham entering the land of Israel in the book of Genesis, he made every effort to extrapolate lessons for modern Zionism.
Andrea, a tall, striking brunette and former alternate cheerleader for the Dallas Cowboys, had a concern about the notion of the world’s Jews being so concentrated, but she had a hard time expressing it. Rabbi Schweiger, understanding where she was going, clasped his hands together, “shuckled” to and fro, and articulated her concern explicitly.
“So Andrea,” he said, “what you’re really asking is, if all of the Jews came to live in Israel… and if – let’s just say, Iran – got a nuclear weapon and dropped it on Israel, then, if they all gathered here, they would all die. Is that what you’re asking?”
“Uh…yea…yes,” Andrea tepidly replied.
“Well,” intoned the Rabbi in an upbeat manner, “if that happened, I would have a major theological problem!”
That exchange took place 34 years ago. And it was not the first time such a notion entered my consciousness. That nightmare scenario long lurked in the recesses of my mind, and no doubt in those of millions of Jews and non-Jews, inside Israel and abroad.
Later in the 1990s, I would attend AIPAC events where politicians emphasized that there was no more important issue facing the world than preventing Weapons of Mass Destruction from falling into the hands of terrorists or the regimes that supported them. Some of the officials I recall discussing this were the late Senator John McCain, Lindsey Graham (still a stalwart in the Senate on the issue), Congressman Chuck Schumer (now the Democratic Leader in the Senate), and a young Israeli diplomat named Benjamin Netanyahu.
During the Oslo Peace Process, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin repeatedly told people that Israel had to try to find an accommodation with the Palestinians, specifically so it could focus on the existential threat from Iran.
Another decade hence, writing in Commentary Magazine in 2007, Norman Podhoretz argued that the Bush Administration should bomb Iran or risk a nuclear attack even before Iran could develop long-range missile capabilities. “Even if [then-Iranian President] Ahmadinejad did not yet have missiles with a long enough range to hit the United States, he would certainly be able to unleash a wave of nuclear terror against us. If he did, he would in all likelihood act through proxies, for whom he would with characteristic brazenness disclaim any responsibility even if the weapons used by the terrorists were to bear telltale markings identifying them as of Iranian origin.”
And then came the 2010s. Almost exactly 10 years ago, President Obama made it clear that the centerpiece of his second-term foreign policy agenda would be a deal with Iran – seemingly any deal. And the Iranian negotiating team was shrewd enough to understand that. Obama speciously argued that anyone who opposed an agreement wanted war. Later, his deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, publicly boasted that the administration had deliberately “created an echo chamber” by deputizing what the New York Times called “an onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal.” Boasted Rhodes, “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
Ultimately, Obama succeeded in sealing what President Trump, among many others, would call the worst deal ever made. Iran got hundreds of billions of dollars—including literal pallets of cash delivered in the dead of night on American military planes—eventually used to build up terror proxies surrounding Israel: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Shi’ite militias in Iraq, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen. Meanwhile, their nuclear facilities remained intact, with limited enrichment, but with a sunset (which would already be kicking in now if President Trump had not withdrawn from the agreement in 2018), giving the Mullahs a path to internationally legitimized weapons-grade enriched uranium.
The summer of 2015 was painful for those of us who supported Israel and who understood that the Iranian regime’s very internal legitimacy depended on Israel’s eventual destruction, regardless of papers signed at Lausanne. I lost friends that summer—politicians and others—who followed Obama’s rhetoric and who expressed that the real outrage was the audacity of Prime Minister Netanyahu to argue the threat he believed the deal represented to the survival of his country. While vacationing with my family in Alaska, I spoke by phone with Senator Cory Booker, of whom I had been an early supporter. He expressed agony over the decision, but it was clear to me that he would support it. I made clear that I was aware he did not himself believe his arguments, and that it would be the end of our relationship. But he plainly said that he could not withstand the pressure to fall in line behind the Obama White House.
It was right around that time that my family, then having lived in Israel for two years, decided to make our move permanent, relocating from the “Big Satan” to the “Little Satan,” as the Ayatollah would put it. I was no more existentially concerned about Iranian nukes than I had previously been, but the move made me appreciate the incredible and underreported efforts Israel had undertaken to delay the ultimate reckoning. In 2010, the Mossad began the assassinations of key nuclear scientists. Israel and the United States then launched Stuxnet, perhaps the most advanced cyberattack of its time, employing software to destroy 1,000 centrifuges. Israel repeatedly penetrated supply chains and sabotaged equipment. And the list goes on. Without a decade of aggressive subterfuge, Iran would certainly have arrived at the nuclear threshold many years earlier.
But in this decade, in this very month, Iran DID arrive at the threshold. There has always been controversy around the precision of intelligence on nuclear capacity, but keep three things in mind: First, the IAEA found Iran in non-compliance with its non-proliferation obligations literally on the morning of June 12, hours before the attack began, and has long made clear that there is no valid civilian use for the type of enrichment activity underway by Iran. Second, given the achievements of the early days of the war, one would be hard pressed to argue that Israeli intelligence in Iran was anything but best-in-class. Finally, what level of certainty would Israel have needed to order the attack? Given literal billboards in Tehran counting down to the precise date of Israel’s destruction, certainly not anything approaching 100%. As an Israeli, even 1% would seem to me to be high.
As is now common in any type of crisis, this past week has transformed every keyboard warrior into a dual PhD in international relations and nuclear fission. Academic debates aside, the Islamic Republic of Iran has for decades established the motive and was nearing the means. Allowing Iran to determine the point of opportunity is beyond tolerable.
Westerners have difficulty comprehending deep theological motivation, so foreign to their consciousness. Such fanaticism is not borne of desperate circumstances. Osama bin Laden came from an upper-class family, and the 9/11 hijackers were highly educated and financially secure. The Islamic Republic of Iran’s fundamental objective was the defeat of Western Civilization, beginning with Israel. The slogan, “Death to Israel, Death to America,” is omnipresent. The regime allowed per capita income to fall roughly 75%, enduring international sanctions and diverting massive public expenditures to exporting the revolution and exploiting failed states across the Middle East. They helped Bashar Assad gas his own people. They created a “ring of fire” around Israel with their backing of Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis. And they murdered hundreds of US Marines in Beirut, more than a thousand Americans in Iraq, and dozens in terror bombings of Jewish and Israeli targets in Argentina.
If Israelis doubted that fact, or deluded themselves into pretending that the danger was less than it seemed, or that it could be deterred, those illusions were shattered on October 7. Hamas knew what retaliation Israel was capable of and what the massacre would unleash. And they did it anyway.
And so Israelis learned one key lesson: Unlike the US and Soviet Union in the Cold War, Israel could not rely on deterrence. And if Israel couldn’t rely on deterrence, there was no way we could leave 200,000 rockets facing us down from Lebanon. And there was no way we could allow Iran to approach the threshold of possessing a weapon capable of destroying us.
Last Friday morning, at three o’clock, my family awoke to a siren, just as on the morning of October 7, and many mornings since. But this time, our phones did not display information on an imminent attack. Instead, they spoke of a national emergency and preparations for expected attacks. And so we put on the news and understood. Moments later, one of our sons called from his base. He usually slept at home, but he had called the previous afternoon to say he was going out with friends, so we should not wait up. In this early morning call he told us that he was fine, he was safe, and that we would not hear from him for several more days.
And so, Israel was in fact attacking Iran.
What was my visceral reaction as I emerged, somewhat disoriented, from bed? It was not shock. It was not fear.
It was absolute elation.
Despite having four kids of military age, two in regular service and one in reserves, despite the certainty of ballistic missiles keeping us in and near our bomb shelter for an indeterminate amount of time, despite knowing—having already well understood—the costs of war from being in one for the better part of two years, I was simply elated. More than once that morning, with no one around, I pumped my fist and jumped for joy.
Only in the days that followed did I fully process that reaction: a decades-old burden had lifted from my shoulders. And, of course, not just from my shoulders, but from the shoulders of the State of Israel—from the shoulders of the Jewish people—indeed, from the shoulders of the civilized world. What happens next is unknown; indeed, there may yet be very hard days ahead, and success is not a certainty. But the echoes of recent history resound. My father’s defenseless family fell to tyrants fueled by an irrational hatred of Jews, tolerated and excused by polite society worldwide. Israel exists to ensure that my people never again serve as sacrificial whipping boys in other societies’ national dramas. In this century, Jews do not walk passively into gas chambers.
I could not be more proud that my kids—the great-grandchildren of Holocaust victims from Poland and Ukraine - stand at the vanguard of that mission, literally fighting for their futures.
And then I flashed back to the classroom in Jerusalem, and to my teacher and friend, Rabbi Schweiger, with this realization: He does not have a theological problem at all.