Our Zoom call this week will be at a special time: Friday at 11 AM EDT.
Our guest will be Vali Nasr, Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies, author of The Shia Revival, former official in the Obama administration and one of America’s leading experts on Iranian foreign policy. We’ll talk about the dangers of a full-scale war between Israel and Iran and what the Biden administration can do to avoid it.
Paid subscribers will get the link this Tuesday and the video the following week. They’ll also gain access to our library of past Zoom interviews with guests like Rashid Khalidi, Thomas Friedman, Ilhan Omar, Benny Morris, Noam Chomsky, and Bret Stephens.
Sources Cited in this Video
Mouin Rabbani: “We are where we are because it never occurred to Biden to say ‘don't’ to Israel.”
How Israel grew more reckless in its attacks on Iran after October 7.
The UN Secretary General condemns Israel’s April 1 strike on Iran’s embassy complex in Damascus as a violation of international law.
The US, Britain, and France prevent a UN Security Council condemnation of Israel’s April 1 attack.
Israel’s April 1 attack employed US-made F-35s.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin complained that Israel had not warned the US of its April 1 attack, which put US troops at greater risk.
The Director of National Intelligence warns that Israel’s response to October 7 increases the risk of terrorism against the US.
Iran’s cautious behavior after October 7.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
For the Jewish Currents (subscribe!) Podcast, I spoke with Arielle Angel, Mari Cohen, and Daniel May about antisemitism on campus.
Every few days, I get a Go Fund Me request from a relative of someone trapped in Gaza. Although the analogy is inexact, I always think the same thing: What if this was my family in Europe in the 1930s or 1940s? So I give, although I know it’s never enough. Here are several requests I hope you’ll consider. Abir Elzowidi is trying to evacuate the family of her brother, Tamer, whose entire building and neighborhood were destroyed by Israeli bombs. (Here’s a video she made describing his plight.) Khalil Sayegh is trying to evacuate his family, including his brother Fadi, “who has chronic kidney failure, has been struggling for his life since the war started due to his need for weekly dialysis at the local hospital.” Inessa Elaydi is trying to evacuate her family from an overcrowded refugee camp in Khan Younis. Dima (she doesn’t include her last name) is trying to leave Gaza with her family for Canada. Asem Jerjawi is a promising young writer, currently living in a tent after Israeli forces shelled his family’s home. He’s also hoping to leave Gaza. Please help if you can.
Israel’s artificial intelligence war on Gaza.
Sigal Samuel on solidarity between Palestinians and Mizrachi Jews.
Goran Rosenberg on Israel at Road’s End.
Joe Scarborough versus Israel’s Minister of Economy and Industry.
A small act of kindness amidst the horror in Israel-Palestine.
I spoke last week about liberalism and Zionism at Washington DC’s Sixth and I Synagogue with Rabbi Jill Jacobs and Michael Koplow.
I’ll be speaking on April 16 at Sarah Lawrence, April 17 at Brown, April 18 at MIT, April 19 at Tufts, and April 26 at Georgetown.
See you on Friday at 11 AM,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Hi. I’m recording this on middle of the day Sunday in the US after Iran launched a large number of drones and rockets against Israel, which seemed to have been almost entirely shot down. And I think when one looks at this situation we’re in—the possibility of an Iran-Israel war, not a proxy war, but actually a real direct war—we can see the Biden administration having done some really valuable things in the last 24-48 hours. But I think we can also see that the decisions they made over the past six months actually put them in this very difficult situation that they’re now trying to get out of.
So, I give the Biden administration credit for helping to shoot down this large-scale Iranian attack. Thank goodness very, very few Israelis were killed. No one would want that, least of all me. And also, in addition to the importance of just saving Israeli life by shooting down these rockets, it also makes it easier for Israel not to respond. And the reports that the Biden administration has been pushing Israel not to respond, to say basically you got away with this very audacious attack in Damascus on the Iranian embassy. Now you’ve basically gotten away fairly unscathed because you shot down these Iranian rockets. Let’s leave it there. You’re lucky the way it’s turned out. So, I give the administration credit for that. There are lunatics like John Bolton, and even—I’ll say it—lunatics like Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman who’ve basically been going around saying that the United States should support some Israeli response now in retaliation to the Iranian one. The Biden administration deserves credit for not taking that view.
But if you want to understand how we got to this very dangerous place in the first place, then I think the Biden administration deserves some real criticism. Mouin Rabbani wrote yesterday, ‘we are where we are because it never occurred to Biden to say ‘don’t’ to Israel.’ And that’s exactly right. That’s true for Iran as it’s true for Gaza. And to understand why it’s important to kind of rehearse the history of events here. Israel has been for quite a long time attacking military supplies that come from Iran through Syria into Lebanon to Hezbollah because they don’t want Hezbollah to have a more potent military arsenal that could threaten Israel.
But since October 7th, Israel has become much more reckless. You know, Benjamin Netanyahu actually has the reputation for not being militarily reckless, but what Israel has done vis-à-vis Iran since October 7th has indeed been reckless and gone far beyond what they did before. Israel, in December, assassinated a high-ranking Iranian general in Damascus. And then on April 1st, it attacked a building, which was part of the Iranian embassy consulate in Damascus, killing several high-ranking Iranian military officials. Now, this is a very serious escalation of what Israel had done in the past. And it’s really reckless. The Iranian embassy in Damascus is Iranian soil. And there’s a strong notion in international law that you don’t attack other people’s embassies. Indeed, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, said in response to Israel’s attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus that ‘it’s a violation of the inviolability of diplomatic and consular premises.’ And they did that with US F-35s and, according to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, without telling the Biden administration ahead of time.
Now that’s very, very reckless behavior. I think it reminds me of the recklessness of the ways the US responded after September 11th: the sense that the things that we had been doing before weren’t good enough; we needed to take it up several notches but without really thinking about what the consequences were. This act of attacking the Iranian embassy in Damascus puts American forces at risk. We already saw in January that three US soldiers were killed in Jordan because of Iraqi proxies of Iran that were responding to the Gaza attack. And then when you have US planes bombing what is under international legal terms Iranian soil, this also puts the Americans at risk. The US intelligence services have been saying—Avril Haines, the Director of National Intelligence, testified to Congress that ‘it is likely that the Gaza conflict will have a generational impact on terrorism.’ So, already US unconditional support for Israel and Gaza is increasing the risk of terrorism.
And now, we saw that Israel’s attack on April 1st increases the risk of terrorism even further. They’re making the US complicit in an attack on what is Iranian soil. And this is in a context in which Iran has actually been acting in a pretty restrained way since October 7th. Remember: Hamas was reportedly hoping that Hezbollah with Iranian support would go into the war after its massacre on October 7th. Iran has not done that. The Washington Post reported in February that Iran had actually been cautioning its proxies against sparking a wider award. This is not because the Iranian regime is benign. It’s a horrifying regime. I would love nothing more than to see it overthrown in a democratic revolution and to see those Iranian leaders who have brutalized their own people go on trial in front of the Hague.
But because Iran is relatively weak compared to the United States and Israel, it doesn’t want a direct conflict. And yet, Israel’s actions have brought us to the brink of that direct conflict. And it has happened because the US has not been willing to tell Israel ‘no’; not been willing to condition American military support in a way that would prevent Israel from taking the reckless actions that it’s been taking vis-à-vis Iran, just as we have not been willing to do vis-a-vis the reckless and just massively catastrophic actions that Israel’s been taking in Gaza.
Again, I support US military aid to Israel that allows it to shoot down rockets that would kill Israelis with Iron Dome or the Arrow System, as happened just in the last 24 hours, but not unconditional US support for reckless offensive Israeli military actions that lead to the potential for regional war. What I hope is that the Biden administration is now learning its lesson just as it seems to be opening the door to conditioning US military aid on Israel’s reckless behavior in Gaza, that it will do the same vis-à-vis Israel’s behavior vis-à-vis Iran.
