I have been thinking a lot about this war as we enter its third week. Below are some of the questions and issues on my mind.\n<\/p>\n
The current USA-Israel war against Iran will most likely not achieve its over-ambitious goals of \u201cregime change\u201d or \u201cdestruction (\u201cobliteration\u201d) of Iran\u2018s nuclear capability or\u201d eliminating\u201d all their ballistic missiles. It will diminish these threats but will probably not eliminate them. Therefore, none of the so-called \u201cgoals\u201d of this war are likely to be achieved. This will leave Israelis and Americans disillusioned with their leaders once again!
\nIsrael\u2019s citizens cannot live with continual war and no diplomacy. 220,000 Israelis have left the country during the last 3 years! The best and the brightest! More will leave if these wars never end. They will not want to bring up their children under conditions of forever war! Diplomacy is what is need right now, especially between Israel and Lebanon, to prevent a useless escalation of the war there.
\nIs Iran really an \u201cexistential threat\u201d to Israel? Or was Hamas? Or is Hezbollah? What does \u201cexistential threat\u201d mean? Is North Korea an existential threat to Europe and America? Maybe they should do a preemptive strike against them? Same with India and Pakistan! Etc., etc. If Israel is always under this kind of threat, should we be attacking all our enemies until we have wiped them all out?!? This is a tall order!
\nWars contain many risks. For example, Hezbollah has already been drawn into this war, and the IDF is already talking about wildly unrealistic ideas for \u201ctotal victory\u201d there, the establishment of another \u201csecurity zone\u201d and the \u201cGazafication\u201d (total destruction) of Lebanon! Are we going to reduce Lebanon to rubble too? Are we going to create millions more refugees there? (We have already created more than a million refugees there in the last 2 weeks!) Are we going to do \u201cregime change\u201d there too? After all, our Offense Minister Yisrael Katz (the guy with the smirk even worse than Bibi\u2019s) has already expressed his dissatisfaction with the Lebanese government since they didn\u2019t disarm Hezbollah enough and therefore, we can do it for them as well as attacking infrastructure of the government of Lebanon! In addition to all this, Hezbollah appears to be surprising us with many drone attacks in the north which our air defenses are not catching in time! Hezbollah appears to be much stronger than we imagined and the war against them will take a very long time, we are told! And the Iranians are not giving in so quickly either!<\/p>\n
Most important,\u00a0the home front has not been adequately prepared. Millions of Israelis (especially Arab citizens of Israel) don\u2019t have safe rooms or adequate shelters at their disposal. The home front is living in fear and trauma once again. This is not a normal way to live, over and over again.\n<\/p>\n
Can we really trust Bibi and his buddies regarding their motives for launching this war? And for their guiding the war towards reasonable outcomes? Do they have a plan for the \u201cday after\u201d? (like they didn\u2019t in Gaza!). We know that in the past, Bibi has wanted to attack Iran (for decades) but the IDF rejected his wild ideas over and over again. Why did they give in now? Because he has Trump and the American military to help out? Because he has appointed his own people to run the IDF? Or because Bibi has become an autocratic leader, who faces almost no opposition about anything (like his friend in Washington)!?
\nCan we really trust Trump in handling this war (or anything else)?? What are his motivations? Money? Power? Glory? America\u2019s best interests (unlikely!)? Israel\u2018s best interests? Only if you think that the interests of the Bibi\/Ben Gvir\/Smotrich government are in Israel\u2019s best interests( which they certainly are not!)
\nWill this war help resolve the core issues facing Israel? The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, the decline of democracy, the rise in ultra-religious and ultra-nationalist fascism, the unfettered and blasphemous rise in settler violence in the West Bank? Unlikely. Rather, it will probably fan the flames if fascism and militarism exponentially!
\nBy the way, Bibi and Trumpy have been lying to us! I know that you are shocked to hear this. They told us last June that they had \u201cobliterated\u201d the nuclear capability of Iran and that Hezbollah has been so totally destroyed that they were no longer a serious factor. Do they really think that they will achieve \u201ctotal victory\u201d on both fronts?? Or might they be lying and spinning again??
\nWhat about the rest of the world? The cost of oil, which is perhaps the major factor that might catalyze the American president to end this war!? The world economy? The international order? Apparently, any country should now feel free to pre-emptively attack their enemies, and let world order be damned! Does Israel (and America) care at all about the rest of the world?
\nAre we killing too many people? Creating too many refugees? Destroying too many homes?? Is there any moral reckoning? Or is this war above such minor considerations? Perhaps only self-interest matters or perceived \u201cexistential threats\u201d (do you feel threatened in California, New York, Massachusetts, California?) by the Iranians? Or by the American president and the forces of ICE?<\/p>\n
These are just some of the questions in my mind as we are in the middle of the second or third war of a renewed war\u00a0on two fronts. It seems that this may go on for a long time!! The cost to the physical and mental well being and to the economy of the citizens of Israel is growing from day to day, as is the disillusionment with our government. But does the government even care? I doubt it.\n<\/p>\n
OK, I have to get ready for another siren and another visit to my safe room in my home.\n<\/p>\n
\u00a0\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\tRabbi Dr Ron Kronish is the Founding Director the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI), which he directed for 25 years. Now retired, he is an independent educator, author, lecturer, writer, speaker, blogger and consultant. He is the editor of 5 books, including Coexistence and Reconciliation in Israel–Voices for Interreligious Dialogue (Paulist Press, 2015). His new book, The Other Peace Process: Interreligious Dialogue, a View from Jerusalem, was published by Hamilton Books, an imprint of Rowman and LIttelfield, in September 2017. He recently (September 2022) published a new book about peacebuilders in Israel and Palestine entitled Profiles in Peace: Voices of Peacebuilders in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which is available on Amazon Books, Barnes and Noble and the Book Depository websites,\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have been thinking a lot about this war as we enter its third week. Below are some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[41,10679,38,37,1421],"class_list":{"0":"post-21577","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-israel","8":"tag-benjamin-netanyahu","9":"tag-democracy-in-israel","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-israel-at-war"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@iran\/116238621404868724","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/iran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}