Hossam and Mariam Alzweidi were severely injured along with their four children by Israeli bombs and have been displaced ten times since October 7th. They’re trying to raise the money to seek medical care in Egypt. Their GoFundMe page is here.
Friday Zoom Call
This Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers, will be at our regular time, 1 PM Eastern. Our guest will be Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, who along with Republican Thomas Massie has introduced legislation invoking the War Powers Act to bar the US from attacking Iran absent congressional approval. We’ll talk about the failure of Democratic leaders to forcefully oppose this war, and the possibility of a left-right coalition against it.
Cited in Today’s Video
Iraqi nuclear scientist Khidir Hamza on why Israel’s attack on Iraq’s nuclear program backfired.
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!), Daniel May explores anti-Zionist violence in America.
Zohran Mamdani on being called an antisemite
Why Harvard’s assumption that all Jews support Israel discriminates against Jews
What it’s like to be a Palestinian citizen of Israel
What it’s like to be a Palestinian in Gaza
For the Foundation for Middle East Peace’s Occupied Thoughts podcast, I talked to American doctor Feroze Sidwha about what he saw in Gaza.
In The New York Times, I wrote about the failure of Democratic leaders to forcefully oppose this war.
Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza was reviewed in Haaretz, Australia’s Jewish Independent and by Eric Alterman and Linda Kinstler in The Ideas Letter.
See you on Friday,
Peter
Transcript
So if you follow the mainstream American media response to the Us's attack on Iran, a lot of it is framed in what you might call consequentialist terms. The big focus is, how much did the US destroy these Iranian nuclear facilities? And then, what are the Iranians going to do in response? So the implication is if the US destroyed a lot of these, and Iran doesn't do too much in response, then this was good, but maybe it won't be good if they didn't destroy so much of the nuclear facilities, and Iran kills a bunch of US soldiers. And I just want to suggest that I think that's fundamentally the wrong way to think about something like this, that it's really, really myopic. And I actually think it's also just immoral to think only in these terms.
I mean, I could make an argument that on consequentialist terms, that this is a really big mistake, right? Because I could say the US had a nuclear deal that would have prevented Iran from getting a nuclear weapon for quite a long time, so you didn't need to do this. And beyond that, that US troops are very vulnerable, particularly in Iraq, where the Iranian pro-iranian militias are very, very tied into the Iraqi military. So I could make a consequentialist argument. But in some ways I just think, actually, even that concedes too much. That's actually, just fundamentally, the wrong discourse to be involved in. And the reason is, first of all, because I think that this consequentialist discourse just has way too limited a framework in terms of time horizon. Right?
Let's say the US does set back the Iranian nuclear program by a long way, and Iran is just too afraid or too weak to really do much in response. So it's a success, right? But over what time frame? I mean you could have said that the US had a big success when it overthrew Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in the fifties, because he was going to nationalize oil industry and do things that America didn't like, and it might have been for years after that it looked like a good idea. But you were laying the groundwork for a politics in Iran that was ultimately going to lead decades later to the overthrow of a pro-American leader, and the emergence of a militant anti-American leadership. The point, is, when you do things, you produce political consequences that play out over long, long periods of time and you don't know what the long term consequences are going to be. Israel thought it had a huge success when it attacked the Osarak nuclear reactor in Iraq. People still cite that as this great precedent of Israel bombing Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor, but in fact, if you look at what Iraqi nuclear scientists and Bob Woodward and others have said in response, actually, what happened? If you look over a longer time horizon, Saddam Hussein redoubled his nuclear efforts. He put much, much more money into it. He did it in a much more clandestine way, and he had gotten very close to a nuclear weapon on the eve of the Gulf War. So the first point is that this consequentialism, I think, really just doesn't think enough about the long-term consequences of how people in a society in a country react when you have attacked them, and generally their responses are not going to make them more sympathetic to your country. They're probably going to lead them to look for for responses that over the longer term are basically going to be ones that are going to cause you greater problems. In particular, the lesson is going to be, and you don't have to be a rocket scientist—pardon the pun—to see this, that the lesson is going to be you have to have a nuclear weapon if you're going to be safe from the United States. That's the lesson of Iraq. It's the lesson of Libya. It's a lesson of Iran. It's the counter-lesson of North Korea, which hasn't been attacked, as a nuclear country. And that's not just a lesson that's going to be learned by Iranians. It's going to be learned by lots and lots and lots of people, because the United States, it turns out, is not willing to negotiate diplomatically in good faith, to try to come to terms with countries that it thinks might have nuclear weapons. It just attacks them until they do. So therefore you need one.
The second reason, I think this consequentialism is really wrongheaded is not just in terms of timeline, but it doesn't think about cost/benefit analysis. I'm going to say something. It is not the thing that hard-headed realist, foreign policy observers tend to say when they go on the news, or they write in the New York Times, and that's that when I was on the subway this morning I saw, as I almost always do when I'm the subway, a homeless guy sprawled out on the subway lines. And I saw other people who were clearly in distress. I also picked up saw the New York Times today say that New York City's food pantries are basically in desperate straits because they don't have enough money. I will never forget being in a Deli in New York a year or so ago and overhearing people who worked at that Deli, basically one telling them that they were very sick. They didn't have any health care. And literally this other person in the Deli praying with this other Deli worker and trying to offer some homemade medicinal suggestions about what they do. This is in the United States of America. This is the country in which you live. I was just in Ireland, a country that was historically much, much poorer. I didn't see any homeless people on the street. If you want to think about consequences, you have to think, not just in terms of broader consequences of time, but in terms of opportunity costs. As America has become a more and more powerful empire, it has in so many ways hollowed itself out at home. And you can see the profound suffering of people in the United States, and so how much is this costing the United States? How much is it costing? This is not a subject that gets discussed almost ever when these actions take place. And what could the US be doing with that money that might actually make lives better for Americans? Given that Iran poses no threat to the United States and America has thousands of nuclear weapons. Iran has not one, and our own Director of National Intelligence doesn't even say that they have a desire at this point to get one, or that they did have one. So when you think about cost benefit analysis, can you actually say that ordinary Americans are better off spending the hundreds of millions of dollars, even billions of dollars, that ultimately this might cost, not to mention the increased cost, because oil prices will go up, as opposed to basically just spending that money again. I'm sorry this doesn't sound very sophisticated, but just spending that money so that homeless guy on the subway in New York basically has a place to sleep tonight, right?
And the third point about this consequentialism is it assumes that if it works for America, that's okay, but it doesn't think about the norms that you are destroying, which allow other countries to think in the same consequentialist way. So are we going to be comfortable if the Chinese say, well, if we can get away with invading Taiwan at reasonable cost to us, which means that the Taiwanese won't be able to kill too many of our soldiers, and we can take the island, then that's a win. We should go for it. Are we comfortable with Russia making that consequentialist argument that if we can basically destroy Ukraine at reasonable cost, that's okay. No, because when it comes to other countries. We actually imagine that there are certain norms, right? And those norms are, for instance, that you don't attack other countries if they don't pose, a threat to you. And and it's just a complete illusion to think that America can destroy these norms again and again and again without having an impact on other countries’ behavior. We know that the Iraq War and Libya attack was cited by Vladimir Putin again and again in his attacks on Georgia in his attacks on Ukraine.
This is the very point of international norms, the norms that were created in large measure after what the Nazis did in World War II, to say that it's immoral to simply think about whether you can get away with it, and whether it works for you in the short-term? Because you are doing damage to humanity as a whole, to the entire international system, when you think in those terms.
So you need to think beyond just, “Can I get away with it?” And about what world you're creating for everybody, not just for your country, but for everybody. And part of the problem is that America is so powerful, and I think to some degree this is the case in Israel as well, because it's so relatively powerful that when we think about bombing places far away... And again, you notice also, the media never talks about how many people were killed in these bombing attacks, as if these were just buildings that didn't have any people around them. Right? We cannot imagine the consequences of destroying these international norms, such that our cities, our nuclear installations, our military facilities, are also being attacked. We don't think about the consequences of being on the other side of that because we've gotten so used to this impunity, right?
But I think Jewish tradition, like most other moral traditions, has some version of the idea of “what goes around comes around.” In Hebrew, it’s, “midah k'neged midah.” And you are creating a world in which these things will be more normalized, and sooner or later they're not just done to nameless, faceless Iranians who you don't know anything about and don't care about, but they get done to you, and that's the world that you're creating. That's the world that Donald Trump has moved us towards, with this illegal, unconstitutional attack on Iran.
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