One of the many, many knock-down drag-out tragicomic Israel fights in my family was over the JCPOA: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or in plain English: the Iran Deal.
I will never forget my father going to New York ten years ago to protest the Iran Deal. I told him "Don't do it Dad, these protestors are barn animals." He went, he came back: "Oh my god these people are absolutely insane! Caroline Glick shouted like she was (Godwin redaction) and everybody was cheering for her like she was Moshiach!" "It's a shame nobody told you that Dad before you left." "Alright smart guy... what are you going to get on me next about?"
On the one hand, I found liberal cheering for the Iran Deal to be incredibly disingenuous. Nothing in the Obama years was more effective to isolate me from other liberals, and if I felt alienated, can you imagine how other Jews felt? So many Obama supporters acted as though it was an end to the issue and like it was proof that the proper results always happen when you talk to your enemies. The Iran Deal was not an end, it was a beginning: just one small step on a long road to diffusing a threat that would remain no matter who is the Iranian head of state (take note Netanyahu's camp).
What the Iran Deal bought was time. The Soviet Union was contained, and it was the same Republicans so eager to take credit for the USSR's fall who proved that when a country overfocuses on military and weaponry, they collapse, not from war, but from fear of war that causes them to neglect of everything else. The point was that the more time you buy, the more Iran comes undone by its own idiocy, its own corruption, its own decadence. Once they have their full measure of that, military action is that much more effective.
Deal or no deal, there may have come a time when Israel had to act. The very controversy of the deal is enough reason for Jews to hold a grudge against Obama forever, regardless of the deal's efficacy. The Iran Deal may be the seminal event in the historical chapter that ends the Jewish golden age.
On the other... oy... here we go... on the other,...
The people who opposed it did not simply make a mistake: they WERE the mistake. We gave borderline neoconservatives like Howard Kohr and Abe Foxman the keys to the Jewish community, and forty years ago when they divided the community into 'us' and 'them', we did not take the keys away from these blind dinosaurs immediately. We had a chance for a left-wing pro-peace Israel lobby with J-Street, now that lane is closed and JVP has their long-term parking spot. We let Foxman turn the Anti-Defamation League from a small arm of B'nai Brith to a battleship ready to pick race grievances for Jews on any flimsy excuse like a Jewish Al Sharpton. When the Iran issue came up, AIPAC and the ADL chose a side, and we will be paying for their faux impartiality for generations.
Inevitably, you bring this up to other Jews and they say 'this issue is too important to be on the wrong side of.' OK: what side is the wrong side?
As we see now, even if you defeat Iran, the Iran problem doesn't go away. Even if you get rid of the mullahcracy, the Iran problem doesn't go away. Even if you get rid of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the Iran problem doesn't go away. Even if you occupy Iran through a puppet government in perpetuity, Iran becomes yet another holy cause the world of radical Islam holds against the Jews, the Iran problem becomes the everywhere problem.
When you bring this up to other Jews, the response is always a mix of disingenuous pragmatism and disingenuous nihilism:
The pragmatism:
Iran is the immediate threat, other countries that want to kill us too but they're not trying to get the bomb imminently." How the **** long is imminent? Iran has been six months away from the bomb for more than twenty years! Not even Israel can set the Iranian nuclear program back every six months another six months, and if they can, why the **** is it such a priority to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities?
And let's face it. Iran is far from the only nuclear threat. Pakistan is forever one coup d'etat away from a mullahcracy of its own; its population vastly more antisemitic than Iran's (Pakistan: 78%, Iran: 56%--that will change now...). Pakistan is already the origin of the 'loose nuke network.' How many places does the Jewish community think we can invade at one time?
The nihilism:
I'm hardly the only person to make this point, but there is a large 'woke' segment of the Jewish world. It is not the wokers you think: it's the Jewish right, not left. Every point the left makes with regard to race and gender, this right makes with regard to Jews. If you believed both sides then if you scratch the surface of anyone in the world you find 8.3 billion racist, sexist, transphobic antisemites who simultaneously hate the rich and the poor, hate both their own country and immigrants and simultaneously believe in complete segregation and complete integration.
It isn't just madness from the left, it's madness from the right. It's a lazy, deceitful excuse to justify any outrageous behavior or demand they want to make. The lack of self-awareness, the lack of pragmatism, the utter lack of sympathy for anyone on the other side is simultaneously lethally dangerous, and pretty goddamn funny. Both sides are ripe for a 21st century Monty Python sketch, and it would be just another line on the eternally long list of things to which they take exception.
Follow this nihilism to its logical conclusion: how many wars does Israel declare before they piss off the wrong enemy? If the world is really that bristling with contempt for Jews, all it takes is one war you can't win, and yet again, the entire world won't bat an eye as our temples are burned to ash and our menorahs plundered.
On the other hand, leftists, Jewish and/or gentile, follow your optimism and solidarity to its logical conclusion. If the world is full of brotherhood (siblinghood...), if imperialism and capitalism and racism and sexism and etc. are the true impediments, if the world stands at an intersection of oppression that we have to remove all at once like a pair of pants, why do you hate anyone at all? Why can't you be more understanding of the rest of us ignoramuses, why does the rage well up whenever you encounter someone who doesn't buy what you're selling (er... redistributing)? Is it at all possible that maybe, just maybe, the problem isn't the systems but people like me who create the systems and perpetuate them? And if it is? How are you going to get rid of us? You're clearly not going to convince us, are you willing to go to war over it? Are you willing to die and kill over it? Because if you're not, Hamas is, the Iranian government is, the Communists who once claimed to speak for you certainly were, and they're even less likely to be convinced by your vision than we are.
We can't go back to the world before the Iran Deal, we can't go back to the world before October 7th, we can't go back to the world before Zohran and Hasan Piker and Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro (that ballistic chipmunk). This is our world now. None of us knows the rules of the new world. Don't trust anyone who says they do. All we can do yet is offer an autopsy for the old one and wait until someone a lot smarter than me explains it.
