Upon returning from a visit to Israel, Joshua Karlip reflects on the country’s successes in light of the October 7 massacres:

The founders of Zionist ideology, from Leon Pinsker and Theodor Herzl onward, understood the creation of a Jewish state as the antidote to anti-Semitism. Even as a Jewish state would provide a safe haven for the Jewish people, statehood would allow the Jews finally to take their place amongst the family of nations. Tragically, these aspects of the Zionist dream have not yet come to fruition. Rather than taking its place amongst the nations, Israel has become the Jew amongst nations. Likewise, Israeli military strength failed to protect the victims of October 7th from the genocidal violence directed against them.

Still, in an even more fundamental way, the state of Israel has proven a great Jewish success. A century ago, the majority of the world’s Jews lived in deeply Jewish spaces. The shtetls and cities of Eastern Europe, as the cities and villages of North Africa and the Middle East, functioned as the spatial context within which Jews lived a thick Jewish identity, manifesting itself through practices, languages (Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic), folkways, and values that deeply reflected the millennia-old Jewish textual tradition.

If the Torah, the text, stood at the heart of the Jewish experience, it only could survive within the context of Jewish space. The Communist destruction of Judaism, the Holocaust’s destruction of Europe’s Jews, and the Arab lands’ expulsion of its Jews forever ended these centuries-old Jewish spaces. It was Israel that provided a home not just to Jews from all of these lands; even more fundamentally, it restored to them a Jewish space in which they could live, speak, and study in the language of the texts and traditions that always had sustained them.

If Iran succeeds in obtaining nuclear weapons, the war in Gaza, let alone the protests on college campuses, will seem like a minor complication. Jonathan Schachter fears that this danger could be much more imminent than decisionmakers in Jerusalem and Washington believe. In his view, Israel seems to be repeating the mistake that allowed it to be taken by surprise on Simchat Torah of 2023 and Yom Kippur of 1973: putting too much faith in an intelligence concept that could be wrong.

Israel and the United States apparently believe that despite Iran’s well-documented progress in developing capabilities necessary for producing and delivering nuclear weapons, as well as its extensive and ongoing record of violating its international nuclear obligations, there is no acute crisis because building a bomb would take time, would be observable, and could be stopped by force. Taken together, these assumptions and their moderating impact on Israeli and American policy form a new Iran concept reminiscent of its 1973 namesake and of the systemic failures that preceded the October 7 massacre.

Meanwhile, most of the restrictions put in place by the 2015 nuclear deal will expire by the end of next year, rendering the question of Iran’s adherence moot. And the forces that could be taking action aren’t:

The European Union regularly issues boilerplate press releases asserting its members’ “grave concern.” American decisionmakers and spokespeople have created the unmistakable impression that their reservations about the use of force are stronger than their commitment to use force to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb. At the same time, the U.S. refuses to enforce its own sanctions comprehensively: Iranian oil exports (especially to China) and foreign-currency reserves have ballooned since January 2021, when the Biden administration took office.

Israel’s response has also been sluggish and ambiguous. Despite its oft-stated policy of never allowing a nuclear Iran, Israel’s words and deeds have sent mixed messages to allies and adversaries—perhaps inadvertently reinforcing the prevailing sense in Washington and elsewhere that Iran’s nuclear efforts do not present an exigent crisis.