Dear Prime Minister: Americans don’t want this

Dear Prime Minister Netanyahu:

I’m writing today as a concerned Jewish American with a major piece of advice.

Americans didn’t and don’t want this war. That includes American Jews.

It’s no accident that seven Jewish members of the U.S. Senate were among the 40 who voted recently to no longer sell you bulldozers that have been used to knock down Palestinian homes in the West Bank or the similar number who opposed you getting more 1,000-pound bombs.

The war of choice against Iran that you and President Trump started at the end of February is extremely unpopular here, and some 60 percent of American Jews also oppose it, according to a GBOA Strategies survey commissioned by J Street (55 percent in another poll). Even though the overwhelming majority of us Jews strongly disapprove of the clerical regime in Iran, according to the same polling, we’re no fans of reckless wars devoid of any strategy and have no confidence that anything good will come of it.

Despite what you may have heard, most of us Jewish Americans still relate to Israel as a democratic homeland for the world’s Jews, and we care about its future. So we really are pained by the loose talk in various quarters about the war that you helped Donald Trump launch as our country’s “war for Israel.”

Only a minority of us have any illusions about your friend Donald Trump. He has proven himself quite ready to support the racist Jew-haters responsible for the deadly violence at Charlottesville, many of whom were prominent in the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol that he incited. His outlandish self-enrichment schemes are unprecedented among those holding high office in our country. He is all too fond of blowing up things most people in our country care about, like available and affordable healthcare, a Department of Justice that fights actual crime and not his political enemies, a national policy that’s climate-friendly, and a system of legal immigration that does not criminalize the law-abiding or allow masked thugs to grab people off our streets. Not to forget an economy that actually works, governed in part by a central bank that is independent of cronies.

Blowing things up and trying to profit off the chaos seems to be exactly what Trump is focusing on during his second term in his foreign policy. The most obvious things before the attack on Iran were his threats against NATO allies and his completely random tariffs on them, and his rapid military takeover of Venezuela.

I would say the war against Iran has kind of been the last straw here. That is where you come in.

According to New York Times journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman, who conducted extensive interviews with administration insiders, you “made a hard sell [to the president], suggesting that Iran was ripe for regime change and expressing the belief that a joint U.S.-Israeli mission could bring down the Islamic Republic,” in your February 11 White House meeting. Now, late into the second month of the war, we know that actual facts available to both the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies would have led to the utmost skepticism that the war would be “quick and decisive,” as you represented. The unwarranted optimism, if not outright falsehoods, that you put forth that day included “the likelihood that the [Iranian] regime would be so weakened that it could not choke off the Strait of Hormuz, and the likelihood that Iran would land blows against U.S. interests in neighboring countries was assessed as minimal.”

You certainly must have known then, as another Times investigative piece reported, that “Israeli intelligence agencies have long examined the possibility of instigating revolt inside Iran … but until very recently dismissed the prospects.” Yossi Cohen, the immediate predecessor of your current Mossad chief, concluded that thinking outside powers could galvanize a successful popular uprising inside Iran was “a waste of time,” and that analysts at the IDF’s own intelligence organization viewed the notion of a mass uprising “with skepticism.”

We are more than a bit scared, as well as outraged, that President Trump has gone as far as threatening that a “whole civilization will die” in Iran if that country’s leaders don’t bow to his war demands. The Bar Association of the City of New York, notably, found it necessary to denounce such talk (which is unfortunately back now) in the strongest of terms, saying that such a thing “would constitute genocide” by definition.

It’s notable that Trump’s specific senseless threats against Iran went at least as far back as 1987, long before he met you. In that year, he told TV journalist Barbara Walters, “Why couldn’t we go in and take over some of their oil…?” His more fixed path to war was probably set in May 2018. Against the specific advice of his secretaries of state and defense, the then first-term president ripped up the successful agreement that President Barack Obama’s team, led by Secretary of State John Kerry, had negotiated over 20 months. That pact, as you know, set the strict limit of 3.67 percent enrichment to govern Iran’s nuclear research for many years into the future, far beneath the level that could facilitate an atomic weapon, and it required the most rigorous inspections of the country’s nuclear facilities that had ever taken place anywhere. Is any agreement nearly as favorable to the international community remotely likely to come from Mr. Trump’s current negotiations with the now increasingly hardline successors to the assassinated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?

Since we have been very focused this year on the problem of affordability, we Americans don’t like the prospect of higher gas for the foreseeable future. We also don’t like friends or family members in our military risking their lives in a conflict without an exit plan. We don’t like the billion-dollar-a-day price tag. Many of us also are horrified at the large-scale loss of civilian life caused by your intense bombing campaign in Lebanon, just as we worry over the fate of Israeli friends and relatives having to take cover in bomb shelters to be safe from the still potent Iranian missiles and Hezbollah rockets. Now that he has night after night dragged our country into this disastrous conflict, our president clearly doesn’t know the first thing about getting out of it, and he has no competent John Kerry-like advisor to negotiate effectively with the other side.

American Jews, and most of our countrymen here, want to see peace, not just in the distant future but right away. We know that the autocratic power of our president, your friend, and his erratic moves, are the biggest obstacles we are facing. But we can’t make excuses for your criminal role in helping Trump start this war and egging him on. Believing strongly in the Israel that is a national democratic home for the world’s Jews, we reject the notion that this is a war “for Israel.” And it certainly isn’t a “war for the Jews” as the antisemites here continue to suggest. But your close association with Trump is causing us problems in getting this message across.

Trump’s own bad instincts brought him to push our country into this really bad war. He really didn’t need your help so much. And we certainly didn’t.

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.

Opinion

comments