This Purim, consider donating to the Gaza Soup Kitchen.
This week’s Zoom call will be at a SPECIAL TIME: WEDNESDAY AT 2 PM EASTERN. Our guest will be Aslı Ü. Bâli, the Howard M. Holtzmann Professor of Law at Yale. Given the magnitude of what the US (with Israel’s help) has now done, I want to talk about more than just Iran. I want to talk about the kind of global power the United States has become, and what it means not just for the safety of people in the Middle East, but for people across the world. Aslı is the most brilliant thinker about international law, American foreign policy and the Middle East that I know. I’m grateful she’s making time for this conversation.
Cited in Today’s Video
What the Nuremberg Tribunal said about the crime of aggression
The USS Gerald Ford as a metaphor for America today
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).
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Devin Naar explores the history of Sephardic socialists in the early twentieth century United States.
Nader Hashemi and Trita Parsi on the US attack on Iran
Last week I spoke to the Britain Palestine Project.
Appearances
On March 9, I’ll be speaking to Carolina Jews for Justice in Asheville, North Carolina. On March 10, I’ll be attending a fundraiser for Gaza in Asheville.
On March 11, I’ll be speaking at Hofstra University.
On March 30, I’ll be speaking at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
See you on WEDNESDAY,
Peter
Transcript
I want to say three things about the attack that the United States and Israel have just launched on Iran.
The first is that the United States, my country, and Israel, the country that speaks for Jews around the world, have committed the supreme international crime.
The supreme international crime, the crime of aggression.
That phrase, “supreme international crime,” those aren’t my words.
Those are the words of the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunal. We think now of Nuremberg as having put Nazi leaders on trial for genocide and crimes against humanity and those evils. But, in fact, what the tribunal said was that the crime of aggression was, quote, “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
There was a time when leading Americans saw attacks on countries that did not threaten them as the core evil in the world, because it unleashed so many other evils. It was what they associated with the evil of the Nazis — the Nazis’ unprovoked attacks in Poland, in France, in the Low Countries. They associated it with the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. It was considered fundamentally immoral, and fundamentally un-American.
And now, this is the world that Israel and the United States are bringing us towards. Israel has attacked numerous of its neighbors — Syria, Lebanon, and now Iran. The United States attacking Venezuela, threatening to attack Greenland, now attacking Iran.
Of course the Iranian regime is a terrible, terrible regime. Of course the supreme leader has blood on his hands. But what American jurists at Nuremberg understood was that aggression was a crime because it was a crime to attack countries that don’t threaten you, irrespective of their regime.
Because if that is allowed, if that is possible, we live in an entirely lawless world.
And they understood that there is no nation, no group of people who have the right to give themselves the power to commit those acts of aggression against countries that don’t threaten them.
The claim that Iran threatens the United States, or even Israel, is completely laughable. Anybody who says that should be laughed out of the room. Just to state the obvious, Iran has no nuclear weapons. Israel has hundreds, America has thousands.
Iran complied with the Nuclear Treaty with the Obama administration in 2015.
Iran has been desperately, over the recent years, trying to avoid military conflict with Israel and the United States.
Oftentimes barely even responding to these unprovoked attacks by Israel and the United States, desperately trying to find a way to appease America and Israel enough that Israel and America would stop attacking them, but in fact, it didn’t work.
It’s such an irony in the fact that American hawks always say that appeasement doesn’t work. Well, you know what? In this instance, they were right. Iran tried appeasement, and it failed because it just made America and Israel even more emboldened.
This was a kind of behavior by states that American jurists once understood, once associated with America’s enemies in World War II, and it is now the way that the United States, with assistance from Israel, is behaving in the world. God, help us.
The second point has to do with the nature of the United States, my country, in this moment. I don’t know if any folks noticed this, but there were these reports that the USS Gerald Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, which had been involved in the attacks in Venezuela, and now was involved in these attacks on Iran, that on that $13 billion aircraft carrier, the toilets were not working. In fact, some commentators suggested the U.S. might have to go ahead and attack Iran quickly, because it couldn’t leave the USS Gerald Ford there, milling around, because the toilets weren’t working for its sailors.
Could there be a better metaphor for America in this moment? An America that can spend ungodly amounts of money to deploy massive violence on people all around the world, and indeed, often against even people in the United States, but can’t provide for the basic dignity of its own people. Every day, I, like other New Yorkers, get on the subway, and I see people in my city, in the richest city in the richest country of the world, who desperately, desperately need the government to help them — people who are living in completely inhumane ways.
But the U.S. government, my country, has no money to help these people, to allow people in the richest city, in the richest country of the world, to live a dignified life. But we have an unlimited amount of money to go and bomb countries that don’t threaten us. And so the United States becomes not just morally degraded by these actions, but the quality of life in this country — this swaggering country with extraordinary power — can’t even do the basic, decent things of taking care of its people, like those sailors on the Gerald Ford who President Trump told to attack Iran, an essentially defenseless country.
The third point has to do with what this means for Jews.
Benjamin Netanyahu has, in addition to killing many, many Iranians, also put Israeli Jews in danger. Israeli Jews were not threatened by Iran, and now they’re in shelters, seeing Iranian missiles fall on them, and the people who are likely to die in greatest numbers are Palestinians, because Israel’s missile defense systems and our air defense systems don’t protect them nearly as much. But this action also puts Jews in the United States in danger.
Any sane American Jewish leader looking at the debate about Israel and American Jews today would understand that Americans desperately do not want another war in the Middle East.
And that many Americans will look at this action in Iran, and will see this as having to do with Israel’s influence over their government. Now, I’m not saying that Israeli influence is the only reason that Donald Trump did this. I also think Donald Trump was kind of punch-drunk on what he did in Venezuela, and so he wanted to double down and see if he could do the same thing in Iran. But we also have to acknowledge that Israel has been trying to get the United States to bomb Iran in this fashion for years and years and years. Previous American presidents have resisted because it wasn’t in the American national interest, and the American people didn’t want it. And now we have a completely dysfunctional, corrupt government that has no real coherent policy process, and has a leader who thinks only in purely egotistical terms.
And so yes, Benjamin Netanyahu did play a significant role in the United States doing this. I’ve never believed that Israel played a primary role in America attacking Iraq in 2003. I don’t think it did. But even going back then, Israel has never had an American attack on Iraq as a central goal of Israeli policy. But particularly for Benjamin Netanyahu, getting America to attack Iran has been.
And so we have this rising hostility to Israel in the United States, especially on the right, which despises Israel because they see Israel as drawing America into wars that don’t serve the American people. And we have many, many now more and more powerful figures who, as part of this discourse, question the loyalty of American Jews and essentially argue that there is some natural conflict between Jews and their connection to Israel, and being a loyal American. This is in various different ways what we see Nick Fuentes saying, and Candace Owens saying, and Tucker Carlson saying.
And their lives have just been made so much easier. Of course, it should go without saying, the people who peddle antisemitism are responsible for that antisemitism. But a sane and responsible American Jewish leadership would want to do everything possible to make their lives harder — not to do things that play right into these conspiracy theories about Israel pushing America into war, and American Jewish political organizations like AIPAC and others pushing the United States into a war that most Americans don’t want because they’re fundamentally working in support of the Israeli government.
This is an enormously, enormously dangerous thing to do. It’s not just a terrible thing for America to do, and I believe a terrible thing for Israel to do. It’s a very, very dangerous thing to happen to American Jews in this moment. If you wanted to supercharge Fuentes and Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson in this moment — and their popularity and their strength is already growing, and it’s entirely possible that MAGA 2.0 or 3.0 will be openly antisemitic — if you wanted to supercharge that, you would do exactly what Israel has helped to push the United States into doing now.
And the American Jewish leadership, which is supposed to be focusing on our welfare, our safety in the United States, is going to applaud, because we don’t have an American Jewish leadership that actually thinks in any kind of wise and rational way about the interests of American Jews. We have an establishment American Jewish leadership that unconditionally supports Israel, virtually no matter what it does, no matter how immoral, no matter how brutal, no matter how bad for Israel’s own people, and no matter how bad for American Jews as well.
