The President’s Revealing Comments on Iran’s Anti-Semitism

In a lengthy interview last week with the columnist Jeffrey Goldberg, Barack Obama spoke about the Iran deal—and the Iranian regime’s official anti-Semitism. The president’s comments, Armin Rosen notes, reveal a fundamental defect in his thinking about the Islamic Republic’s motives:

A nuclear deal [would] be signed with an Iranian regime that promotes an intensely anti-Western and, as President Obama readily admits, anti-Semitic state ideology. Goldberg wondered how the president could believe that anti-Semitism was inherently irrational, while also believing that the Tehran regime was itself rational.

President Obama’s answer offered unintentional insight into how he views his Iranian counterparts. “Well, the fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival,” he said. . . .

This may be true enough, but it discounts how anti-Semitism could inform the regime’s strategic and economic considerations. After all, in spreading anti-Semitism and supporting terrorism against Jewish and Israeli targets, the regime invited sanctions and a general isolation that’s all but locked the country out of valuable consumer markets. . . .

[Nevertheless, the president] believes that the Iranian government’s anti-Semitism is subject to the same rational cost-benefit calculus as any other aspects of a nation’s behavior, even if anti-Semitism is itself irrational.

Whether this is true gets to the heart of the U.S.’s nuclear diplomacy. . . . Barack Obama’s years of Iran nuclear diplomacy will be a waste . . . if Iran’s top leadership can’t leave ideology aside [in favor of] a rational and unselfish decision about what the country’s future should look like.

Read more at Business Insider

More about: Anti-Semitism, Barack Obama, Iran, Iran nuclear program, Politics & Current Affairs

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF