• A new report from the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran’s nuclear program will likely be harsher than the previous one, after inspectors were denied access to an area suspected to be a main weapons site. [Haaretz]

• What an Israeli strike on Iran could look like. [Free Beacon]

• One of the senior columnists for Sheldon Adelson’s newspaper, Yisrael Hayom, has a contract with Netanyahu’s office to write speeches and lectures. [Haaretz]

• A harrowing look at the frontlines in Syria. [CBS News]

• Jason Diamond on life as a former barista. [NYT]

Happy bagel and lox day!

In December 2010, together with some 30 Israeli defense and political journalists, I boarded a bus that took us to a building on the top of a hill overlooking Glilot junction, five miles north of Tel Aviv. We had come to Mossad headquarters for a meeting with Dagan, who was then the head of the agency. It was supposed to be an off-the-record briefing. But this being Israel, within hours after the meeting ended, most of what Dagan told us was on the Web and in the papers.

What he said was shocking. The Mossad chief told us that Iran would obtain nuclear warheads by 2014 at the earliest, and thus, he argued, there was no need for an Israeli military strike for the time being. Dagan’s claim ran directly counter to the public line of Israel’s defense establishment: that Iran would obtain the bomb much sooner.

Since that meeting more than a year ago, Dagan has been on a crusade to stop Israel from launching an imminent military strike against Iran. He has reiterated the argument that he laid out to us in Mossad headquarters—against a strike and in favor of sanctions and covert operations—at various public events and private conversations over the past year. And though Dagan is no longer head of Mossad, his view carries tremendous weight: His perspective on a possible Israeli strike is shared by many of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet ministers and Israel’s security establishment.

Dagan’s campaign has enraged Barak and Netanyahu, who accuse him of undermining Israeli deterrence. Barak and Netanyahu support an Israeli military strike in the near future, and for the past few months, with increasing intensity, they have tried to create the impression that they are considering such an attack this year.

Which view will prevail? At stake is the future of Israel, the lives of Iranians and Israelis, the supply of oil to the United States and the West, and the stability of the whole Middle East.

***

The roots of the tension within the highest level of Israel’s political-military leadership go back nearly five years, when Barak, Dagan, and the rest of the Cabinet were faced with the delicate question of whether to bomb Syria’s nuclear reactor in the Dir al-Zur region. In summer 2007, the Cabinet, led by then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, deliberated behind closed doors to discuss the assessments of Mossad and Israeli military intelligence of a big structure that Syria was secretly building near the Euphrates River. The undisputed conclusion was that Syria was constructing a reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs and that the plans for the reactor had been provided by North Korea.

The Cabinet’s overwhelming decision was to order the Israeli air force to launch a military strike before radioactive materials would be introduced and it would be too late. Barak was the most senior Cabinet member to oppose the idea, and he argued that Israel could wait a few more months. Olmert, then-Chief of Staff General Gabi Ashkenazi, Dagan, and other Cabinet ministers were astonished to hear it. They suspected that Barak had a hidden agenda motivated by his own ambition to be prime minister. That summer, Barak and the Cabinet knew that within three or four months the findings of an inquiry commission investigating the 2006 Lebanon war would be released. They expected the commission would blame Olmert for major failures of the war, and thus he would be forced to resign. Barak hoped to replace him.

Over the course of a few weeks, Barak realized that he was in unsplendid isolation. Ultimately, he decided to join his Cabinet colleagues in approving the attack. (The Cabinet voted 13 to 1 to approve the attack. Avi Dichter, then minister of homeland security, opposed it.) In September 2007, eight U.S.-made Israeli F-16 fighter planes destroyed Syria’s nuclear ambitions when they bombed the reactor.

Barak’s behavior during that process caused Dagan and other military leaders to lose their faith in him. As one senior official put it, “If he zigzagged then, what assures us that his motives this time are pure?” Indeed, three years ago in private conversation, Barak opposed a military strike by Israel against Iran. So, what made him change his mind? It’s not clear. One possibility is that he wants to please Netanyahu in the hopes that the prime minister will take him aboard Likud and reinstate him in the Defense Ministry after the next elections, which are set for November 2013 but most likely will be sooner.

Continue reading: ‘When the sword is on our neck’

In November, Pejman Yousefzadeh, an Iranian-American Jew, articulated a similar sense of widespread concern in Tablet Magazine:

And, finally, there is Iran’s conflict with Israel. It’s an issue that torments Iranian Jews, who care deeply about what happens to Iran but are not willing to see the Islamic regime harm Israel’s security interests or the lives of innocent Israelis—many of whom are émigrés from Iran. Were it a conflict with any other country antagonistic toward Israel, Iranian Jews would have significantly less hesitation—if any—in endorsing a military response to any threat to Israel. But in this case, the country antagonistic toward Israel is Iran, to which Iranian Jews naturally and obviously continue to feel a deep tie. As such, Iranian Jews are faced with a revolting choice: endorse military strikes against Iran that may—or may not—set back the nuclear program but may also kill scores of Iranians, or do nothing and gamble that Israel will not be consumed by a nuclear conflagration.

Jews With Ties To Iran And Israel Feel Conflicted [NPR]
Related: Personal Revolution [Tablet Magazine]

10. Principal Skinner. Fought bravely for the Great Satan in Vietnam.

9. Lunchlady Doris. Married a guy named Freedman. Look it up.

8. Apu Nahasapeemapetilon. Scurrilous polytheist!

7. Waylon Smithers. “As you can see, the real deal with Waylon Smithers is that he’s Mr. Burns’ assistant. He’s in his early 40s, is unmarried, and currently resides in Springfield.”

6. Kent Brockman. “Brockman,” eh?

5. Artie Ziff. Jewish millionaire voiced by Jon Lovitz.

4. Bart. For much the same reason the Czech Communists feared the Plastic People of the Universe: Bart is rock ‘n’ roll, and rock ‘n’ roll is subversive.

3. Krusty the Clown. Son of Rabbi Hyman Krustofsky. And they dare deny Jews control the entertainment industry!

2. Lisa. Lisa wouldn’t hurt a fly. Instead, she is an extremely bright, curious, inquisitive young woman who is never afraid to say exactly what’s on her mind. It’s difficult to think what could be more threatening to the mullahs. Except …

1. Maggie. Silent. Ever-watching. Omnipresent. Handy with a pistol. Could Maggie be Mossad? Iran can’t take that chance.

Aw, Man! Bart Simpson Joins Barbie in Iran Ban [Reuters]

The vetoes brought the 15-member Security Council’s votes to 13 for, two against. Russia’s foreign minister insisted his country was motivated not to protect Assad but to uphold the essence of the Security Council, which “by definition does not engage in domestic affairs of member states.” Thomas Friedman reports that Russia comes by that motive honestly, but out of selfishness: “There is a strong domestic dimension to Russian policy toward Syria,” he quotes a Russian expert. “If we allow the U.N. and the U.S. to put pressure on a regime—that is somewhat like ours—to cede power to the opposition, what kind of precedent could that create?”

The administration was firm in its condemnation of the regime—“Thirty years after his father massacred tens of thousands of innocent Syrian men, women, and children in Hama, Bashar al-Assad has demonstrated a similar disdain for human life and dignity,” said Obama—and of Russia and China: “A couple of members of this council remain steadfast in their willingness to sell out the Syrian people and shield a craven tyrant,” noted U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice. But that is, for now, all talk. What’s next?

Not direct outside intervention. This is not another Libya. More likely, the situation will turn into something more closely resembling civil war, with several outside groups—including Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who would love to pull Syria, currently ruled by Shiite Alawaites, into the Sunni camp, and also Turkey, which fears for regional stability and would like to project power more—funding and arming the opposition. Crucially, the United States will be implicitly approving of this. After all, from a geopolitical perspective this concerns Iran and its ability to go through Damascus to threaten U.S. allies Israel, Egypt, and Turkey; the tinderbox known as Lebanon; and even the precarious, U.S.-backed government of Iraq. The United States won’t be arming the Syrian rebels, much less providing them air cover, but it will be looking the other way or winking while other parties do so.

It would be something if the Syria situation brought countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey closer to the United States and even Israel. As I noted last week, realpolitik considerations led Israel to be among the first to openly hope for Assad’s downfall; the Jewish state has as much if not more interest in seeing Damascus pried away from Tehran’s grip as the other countries. Israeli Vice President Moshe Ya’alon observed that the fall of the Assad regime would lead to “developments … some of which could be positive as far as Israel is concerned, like a fissure in the Tehran-Damascus-Beirut-Hamas axis of evil.” (Indeed, accounts are that Hamas has already pulled away.) But don’t bet on the Syrian campfire leading to a Kumbaya moment.

And most of all, don’t expect Kumbaya in Syria. Assad is, as they say, not going down without a fight. On the contrary: As dissidence spreads even to regime strongholds like Aleppo and Damascus, and as the opposition begins to get better arms and more experience, signs are that the regime’s crackdown will likewise grow in intensity. It has Russia’s and China’s protection—why shouldn’t it feel like it can do what it wants?

At Least 200 Reported Killed in Syrian City of Homs [WP]
Russia, China Veto U.N. Action on Syria … and the Blame Game Begins [FP Turtle Bay]
Russia: Sort of, but Not Really [NYT]
Solution on Syria Remains Elusive for White House [NYT]
Syrian Unrest After a Failure of Diplomacy [NYT]

• Roseanne Barr announced her candidacy for the Green Party ticket. The Green Party cautioned that she’d still have to be nominated at the July convention like anyone else. [Page Six]

• Ayatollah Khamanei, Iran’s supreme leader, made an unusually blunt threat of retaliation on Israel and the United States in the event of an attack. [NYT]

• Tel Aviv: Silicon Valley of Europe. [WSJ]

• And Canada wants to make itself the Israel of North America, high tech-wise. [Reuters]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Tevi Troy’s epic paean to Ed Koch. [City Journal]

• And catch Koch talking about Israel’s future (along with senior writer Liel Leibovitz and other luminaries) on Super Bowl Sunday in New York. [92Y Tribeca]

• Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center gets an Oscar vote. No, but you should totally continue to get angry when the wrong movies win Oscars. [NYT]

• Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is mulling a run for Congress in his Republican New Jersey district. Says Shmarya Rosenberg: “Now you can hate him for another reason.” [Failed Messiah]

• Benny Morris looks at Greece and Cyprus and why they are newly friendly to Israel. [The National Interest]

• Living up to the name, Diasporist columnist Irin Carmon snapped this shot in Guatemala City’s Plaza Israel. [@irincarmon]

• Marina Weisband: she’s hot, she’s German, she’s Jewish. [Heeb]

• Three Jewish Super Bowl snack recipes. [Kveller]

• Jews of Super Bowls past. [Joint Media Service/Jewish Journal]

Where were you four years ago?

• In a remarkable report, Robert Worth finds an official Iranian attempt to co-opt the Arab Spring failing in light of the leadership’s continued support for the Assad regime. [NYT]

• At Herzliya, former Congressman and Obama ally Robert Wexler questioned whether Israel should be building on West Bank land such that the amount of land swapped in a final deal is diminished. He is doing the Lord’s work, pun intended. [JPost]

• A French Jewish woman is embroiled in a custody battle with a Saudi prince. Wait, what? [JTA]

• Coffee with Shalom Auslander. [Capital]

• The Anti-Defamation League lambasted a local Italian politician for calling Roberto Benigni a “communist billionaire Jew,” which we back the group on. It added, “He is a man to be celebrated, not insulted.”… Yeah? [Ynet]

“I am what they call a Jew,” says The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz, “which means that I am neurotic and have a habit of falling into tailspins of anxiety.” It’s not just Jewish bloggers? Also, remember how this is the best plotline in television history?

• International nuclear inspectors, just returned, will visit Iran again in three weeks. If nothing else, it’s a sign that both sides want to be seen as cooperating. [NYT]

• With the last round not yet implemented, the Senate is already working on new financial sanctions against Iran that would target individual leaders, including President Ahmadinejad. [FP The Cable]

• Eight rockets were fired from Gaza into Israel; they hurt no one. They may have been timed to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s visit to the region, including Gaza. [Israel HaYom]

• At the Herzliya Conference, Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer did not go easy on Israel. Among other things, he said the Haredim, many of whom deliberately subsist on generous government subsidies, have to start working. [Haaretz]

• “In the world of mohels … Mr. Sherman has become a kind of bold-faced name.” [NYT City Room]

• The emergent opposition claims President Assad no longer controls half of Syria. [Haaretz]

• Guess who the Syria issue’s really also about? Iran. [NYT]

• Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, of Gaza and Hamas, is visiting Tehran. Hamas and Iran have been on the outs recently due to Hamas’ abandonment of the Assad regime. [JTA]

• As predicted, Prime Minister Netanyhau cleaned up in the Likud primaries. [Ynet]

• The Orthodox Jewish Press responds to threats it has received over an op-ed it recently published by someone who identified as Orthodox and homosexual. [Jewish Press/Failed Messiah]

• A State Department spokesperson criticized an Israeli announcement of new West Bank settlement-building. [Haaretz]

• The Mossad head has recently had secret meetings with top U.S. officials on Iran. It’s not clear if we are supposed to know this (though it’s not exactly shocking, either). [Haaretz]

• The story of Bernie Fine, the former Syracuse assistant basketball coach, takes a turn for the even-more-tawdry. [ESPN]

• Israel sent the Muslim Brotherhood a note of cautious congratulations on its success in Egypt’s parliamentary elections. [Arutz Sheva]

• Jewcy’s Jason Diamond reviews Ben Marcus’s new, super-Jewy novel, The Flame Alphabet. [NPR]

Ra’anan Alexandrowicz, whose The Law in These Parts, a documentary about the West Bank legal system, just won the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Grand Jury Prize in Documentary, made a short “Op-Doc” for the Times.

It’s important to understand that the enticing prospect of anointing an outsider surely played some roll in Sheldon and Miriam Adelson’s decision to very publicly donate $10 million to a pro-Newt Gingrich Super PAC this month, thereby almost single-handedly materially and politically keeping Gingrich in the race for the Republican nomination. Frontrunner Mitt Romney’s campaign and his Super PACs have outspent Gingrich’s in Florida, whose primary is tomorrow, four to one. So it’s just like your bracket. If you give money to Romney, you’ve probably picked the winner, but you’re just another drop in the bucket—he doesn’t owe you particularly much. Give to Gingrich, you’ve probably picked the loser; but if he wins, he owes you. In this case: what?

“People who know him,” the New York Times reported yesterday of Adelson, the multibillionare casino magnate, “say his affinity for Mr. Gingrich stems from a devotion to Israel as well as loyalty to a friend. A fervent Zionist who opposes any territorial compromise to make way for a Palestinian state, Mr. Adelson has long been enamored of Mr. Gingrich’s full-throated defense of Israel.” (The definitive take on Adelson remains Connie Bruck’s 2008 profile. Incidentally, the definitive take on Gingrich is probably her 1996 profile.) It is true that as early as 1995 Gingrich was pushing for things like the law (now waived by three successive presidents) that would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. But it’s not like Romney is a dove on Israel (“Governor Romney is exactly right,” Gingrich said at Thursday night’s debate after the frontrunner spoke about Israel). And Wayne Barrett has argued, persuasively, that Gingrich was actually well to Adelson’s left on Israel at various points over the last decade—among other things, he went from acknowledging that Palestinian nationhood does indeed exist to, notoriously, denying its existence last month, a line quickly echoed by Adelson himself. (Never mind that AIPAC and, at least, publicly, the Netanyahu government are to Adelson’s left in their willingness to entertain the notion of negotiating with Palestinian leadership.) It seems that Gingrich has campaigned, and promised to govern, in ways designed to land him Adelson’s money. In the post-Citizens United world of unchecked giving to ostensibly unaffiliated but strikingly on-message Super PACs, this is incredibly important.

Frequently, this blog takes stories that are seemingly not Jewish, grabs the tiny strand that is Jewish, pulls real hard, and tries to argue that the whole story is, in fact, in some suggestive or implicit or even metaphorical way, Jewish. The Adelson-Gingrich story is the opposite: it seems very Jewish (or at least Israel-related), but it really isn’t. Gingrich is almost certainly not going to be the nominee; Romney is likely to crush Gingrich by double digits tomorrow in Florida, the first state in the Republican primaries with a voting population remotely resembling the country’s (and the first, it should be said, with lots of Jews), and go on to win the nomination. The chief danger heralded by the Adelson-Gingrich relationship aren’t the particulars of Adelson’s politics. It is the prospect of an individual being willing, able, and legally permitted to fund an entire campaign and essentially to purchase an elected office. Adelson isn’t breaking any laws; you can even argue that in disclosing these donations—the disclosures are part of the point, they served a political purpose for Gingrich, but still—he is being more honest than many of Romney’s big donors. I’ll even grant that this sort of power can be used for good: Adelson apparently exerted his influence to ensure that observant Jews can vote in the Nevada caucuses Saturday. Doesn’t matter. The system stinks.

Adelson failed, this time. Will he next time? Will someone else? It isn’t a question of being good or bad for the Jews. It’s bad for practically everybody.

The Man Behind Gingrich’s Money [NYT]
Is Gingrich’s Hard Line on Palestine Paid For By Sheldon Adelson? [The Daily Beast]
Related: The Brass Ring [The New Yorker]
Earlier: Backed By ‘Shelly,’ Newt Takes S.C.

• At a debate last night in Florida, the Republican frontrunners laid into President Obama’s dealings with Israel. Mitt Romney reiterated the “threw Israel under the bus” line from the 1967 borders speech last May. [JPost]

• Sheldon Adelson, who along with his wife has now given $10 million to a pro-Newt Gingrich Super PAC, denies (through an aide) that he is trying to buy off the presidency. [NBC]

• Even as he sounded more bellicose notes, in a speech President Ahmadinejad also acknowledged the havoc that sanctions and the looming oil embargo are wreaking on Iran’s economy and currency. [NYT]

• Though he resigned as top Middle East adviser, Dennis Ross—long seen as the most pro-Israel voice in the White House—retained his security clearance and still advises the president from time to time. [Haaretz]

• The West’s favorites from both sides, President Peres and Prime Minister Fayyad, met at Davos. [IMEMC News]

• The guy who wrote that dumb op-ed resigned. [JTA]

• Tablet Magazine contributor Sohrab Ahmari reviews the new book by Trita Parsi, a Lee Smith profile subject. [WSJ]

• Wayne Barrett reports that Newt Gingrich has grown more hawkish on Israel ever since Sheldon Adelson started giving him lots of money. [The Daily Beast]

• The Judah L. Magnes Museum becomes the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library. Still in the Bay Area, though! [NYT]

• Jewish Milwaukee Brewers slugger Ryan Braun classily accepted his Most Valuable Player honor in person despite recent allegations that he used illicit performance-enhancing substances. [NYT]

Word is that esteemed Israeli central banker Stanley Fischer wants to succeed Shimon Peres. “Mother, should I run for president?”

• The Arab League proposed an ambitious plan for Syria that would involve President Assad stepping down in a matter of weeks, to be replaced by a national unity government. [NYT]

• The U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier, made a routine trip into the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz without incident—the first to do so since Iran’s threats. [DPA/Haaretz]

• Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, (Jewish) Democrat from Arizona, will resign to focus on her recovery from being shot in the head a year ago. [NYT The Caucus]

• Jackson Diehl argues that Turkey’s Islamist, anti-Israel government has also been an important U.S. ally and represents “the new normal” for the region that can’t be wished or denounced away. [WP]

• Reports have it that the United States is considering shutting down its embassy in Damascus, in part out of security concerns. Marc Lynch hopes it can be kept open and Ambassador Robert Ford on the job. [FP The Middle East Channel]

Goodbye to All That

For generations, the Jews of Caracas had idyllic weather, prosperity, and vibrant communal organizations. Things have changed under Hugo Chávez.

By Vox Tablet

During a recent trip to Bogotá, Colombia, where I’d lived for years, I discovered that the wealthier parts of the city were filling up with an odd sort of super-refugee. The new arrivals were mainly rich Venezuelans fleeing an increasingly chaotic situation in their home country: oil execs booted out by nationalization, industrialists frustrated by the corrupt and now hostile business environment, successful entrepreneurs and others displaced by a newly minted Russian-style oligarchy loyal to Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez. These transplants, many of them Jews, were arriving in the Colombian capital and prospering because they had tremendous skills and valuable international connections—and because they were coming with their social and business ties intact. Their first complaint was invariably about what they called “the security situation” in Caracas. That they found Bogotá to be an island of safety and peace by comparison was alarming.

Through some of these new Colombians, I was introduced to a man named Alan Vainrub. In 2005, Vainrub’s parents sat him down in their spacious apartment in Caracas, on the lush lower slopes of Ávila mountain, to talk about his future. Vainrub, then 23, held an engineering degree from the local Universidad Metropolitana and was happily employed at Procter & Gamble. He had designs on an overseas MBA, after he’d gained more work experience. But Vainrub’s father, a doctor, told him that the domestic political situation was getting worse under Chávez; by the following year, Vainrub’s father said, there might be hundreds of upper-class Venezuelans applying for business degrees, all looking for a way out.

Vainrub was in no hurry to leave. After all, he was the comfortable heir to one of the great flowerings of the Jewish postwar diaspora, third- and fourth-generation Venezuelans with education, social clout, and roots. Jews had first arrived in Venezuela from Curaçao, a haven from the Inquisition, in the 19th century. “Turcos”—the catch-all term for anyone of roughly Middle-Eastern coloring or north African descent, regardless of their religion—had been arriving in the country since the 1900s. And a long tradition of lenient immigration policies—especially after World War II, based in part on the need for expertise and manpower to exploit the country’s single most important resource, oil—meant that Europeans, Iberians, Chinese, Russians, and other Latin Americans were all welcome there. Venezuelans came in all colors and had intermarried for centuries, fashioning a fully mestizo culture brewed from the descendants of indigenous people, Spanish colonials, African slaves, and 20th-century immigrants. Jews were a tiny, accepted minority. People called each other affectionately demeaning nicknames, instead of epithets: mi vieja, mi gorda, mi negra.

But by the time Vainrub’s father sat him down, the Jewish community of Caracas, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, was in precipitous decline. The major cause of this decline was the 1998 election of Chávez—now the longest-serving head of state in the Western hemisphere. After surviving an ouster by coup in 2002, and pushing through constitutional reform to end presidential term limits, Chávez, who declared his recent battle against cancer won, now openly projects his rule into the middle of the 21st century. He has proclaimed the next 10 years to be the Bronze Age of the Bolivarian Revolution, a hybrid of populism and socialism soldered onto a Napoleonic personality cult. The Bronze Age is to be followed by an intermediary Silver Age, and then concluded, beginning in 2031, with the Golden Age of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Over the years, as Chávez’s brash populism has been buoyed by income from Venezuela’s vast, nationalized oil reserves, an object of his political manipulation has become the Caracas elite—“estos ricachones,” roughly translated: those fat cats, as he has dismissively referred to the upper class. In 2004, Chávez made his first official visit to Tehran and struck up a personal friendship and diplomatic alliance with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, whom he welcomed to Venezuela this month. This came after decades of political tutelage from another Holocaust denier, the Argentine ultra-nationalist Norberto Ceresole, who died in 2003 but who managed to instill a conspiratorial, amalgamated view of Jews in his pupil. Chávez has seemed to find in anti-Zionism, and later anti-Semitism, a valuable political tool, one that enhances, or makes more precise, his love of straw-man rhetoric and open hostility toward the United States, first against the bellicosity of George W. Bush and then against President Barack Obama, who remains an avatar of “imperialismo yanqui,” which has abetted “las oligarquias” in Latin America.

And so in 2006, Alan Vainrub entered Harvard Business School, hoping to return to Venezuela after graduation and rejoin the Jewish community of Caracas. But the intervening five years have made that dream seem foolish, if not suicidal. As the reality of Chávez’s durability has set in, nearly half of Venezuela’s Jewish community has fled from the social and economic chaos that the president has unleashed and from the uncomfortable feeling that they were being specifically targeted by the regime.

In this significant migration I saw the seeds of a story of dispossession and loss unlike any other in the hemisphere, a tale spanning five generations—from Europe to Israel to the Americas and back. What I found was at stake for people like Vainrub, his sister, his parents, his Caracas-born grandmother, and her German-born Jewish parents, was the very idea of a “Venezuelan Jew”—a patriotic, Latin-inflected, Holocaust-surviving, entrepreneurial, cosmopolitan, privileged, devout, convivial, passionate, Merengue-dancing, carefree, and idiosyncratic species. How dangerous must a situation get for a Jew to cast off the identity he had constructed for himself and his family as a person rooted in a particular place? I asked this question of everyone I met: What is your limit? When do you leave? On the one hand, there was the Jewish leader who made religion his measure. “I won’t stop being Jewish,” he told me. “If by staying I can’t be Jewish, then I’m not staying.” But many more seemed to have the tolerance of community association President Salomón Cohen Botbol. Just three weeks before I met him, Botbol’s oldest son, who had graduated from high school, had been kidnapped—allegedly by ransom-seeking delinquents. Understanding the situation of what they call “secuestro express,” Botbol said, meant he knew that the assault would be no more than a few unpleasant and costly hours—“the scariest of my life,” he said, but nothing out of the ordinary. An arrangement was made—Botbol declined to offer the details—and the family resumed its life. “In this case it wasn’t traumatic,” he said. “But there are traumatic cases.”

Wasn’t finding your son in mortal danger reason enough to abandon a sinking ship? “I’m not thinking of leaving,” he answered.

***

On Dec. 2, 2007, the day a constitutional referendum was held to abolish term limits, the Chávez government raided the undisputed hub of Jewish life in Caracas, the Colegio y Centro Social, Cultural y Deportivo Hebraica, the site of the main Jewish school and club. It was the second such invasion. This time, masked and armed police piled over the walls as elementary-school children arrived for class. The government claimed it was acting on a vague, anonymous tip that the club was harboring weapons, or was a front for Mossad. In both cases, the raids were officially declared “unfruitful.”

Continue reading: Inside the Jewish islands

• Iran is quietly facilitating Syria’s continued sail of oil in contravention of an embargo by importing it, selling it on the world market, and remitting the revenue back to the Assad regime. [WSJ]

• Russia’s foreign minister forcefully pledged to block any U.N. Security Council authorization for military intervention in Syria. [NYT]

• The annual Security Council report on the Gaza blockade was released yesterday. It calls the blockade “collective punishment.” [Ynet]

• Israel’s submission, Footnote, qualified for the nine-film Best Foreign Movie Oscar shortlist. The five nominees will be announced next week. [JTA]

• Anne Sinclair, Dominique-Strauss Kahn’s wife, will run the French edition of The Huffington Post. [NYT]

• Israel will tell U.S. officials later this week that, according to its intelligence, Iran has not yet decided to build a nuclear bomb but it greatly fears for its regime’s stability; a genuine opposition could win March’s parliamentary elections. [Haaretz]

• President Ahmadinejad has ordered extra security for scientists, five of whom have been assassinated in recent years. [NYT]

• Oil, oil, oil, and nary a drop to sell (if you’re Iran). [WP]

• After initially promising to extend the Tal Law, which allows yeshiva students to more easily avoid army service, by five years, some members of the Cabinet objected and now Prime Minister Netanyahu is postponing discussion. [Ynet]

• A hearing into Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s alleged financial misdeeds that could result in his indictment began yesterday. [NYT]

Of all the arguments that have ever been made about why the Iranian regime is uniquely uninterested in its own survival, the one my colleague Lee Smith offered up last week is one of the more preposterous. “It’s pretty easy to make a strong case that the Iranian regime really is suicidal,” he wrote, presenting three pieces of evidence. First, he mentioned Iranian support for Hezbollah. Then he discussed Iran’s willingness to sacrifice young men in the war with Iraq. (A war, incidentally, that Iraq started.) “Perhaps most tellingly,” Smith concluded, “the plummeting Iranian birthrate—from 6.5 children per woman a generation ago to 1.7 today— suggests that it is not just the regime, but an entire nation, that no longer wishes to live.”

One doesn’t have to be sanguine about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran to understand what a thin argument this is. For years now, conservatives have decried plummeting birthrates in Europe as evidence of the corrosive nature of secularism. “Europe is facing a demographic disaster,” Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2008. “That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life, and eroded morality.” That argument is wrong, but at least recognizes the connection between increased autonomy for women and decreased fertility.

I wrote a book about the politics of rising and falling fertility, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World. While researching it, I read a lot of right-wing articles about how decreasing birthrates in Europe would clear the way for a Muslim invasion. But no one besides Smith, to my knowledge, has ever described fertility decline as a symptom of jihadism.

After all, unstable societies shot through with violent religious fundamentalism tend to have extremely high fertility: Afghanistan’s birthrate is 5.39, Gaza’s is 4.74. Pakistan’s is 3.17. (All these numbers come from the CIA World Factbook, which lists Iran’s fertility as 1.88.) Developed, modernized countries, by contrast, have much lower fertility: 1.67 children per woman in Sweden, 1.47 children per woman in Spain, 1.41 children per woman in Germany. The fertility rate among American Jews is around 1.9, a number that would be much lower without the particularly fecund Hasidim.

As education and opportunities increase for women, fertility rates go down. That’s as true of Iran—where women now outnumber men by two to one in universities—as it is anywhere.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not happy about this development. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini adopted strongly pronatalist policies, but when rapid population growth started straining the economy, the regime reversed itself and began encouraging family planning. Ahmadinejad believes this has gone too far, and in 2006, as The Guardian reported, he “called for a baby boom to almost double the country’s population to 120 million and enable it to threaten the west.” Iranian women didn’t listen to him. It’s hard to see this as evidence of their willingness to sacrifice themselves in a mad religious war.

There is one oblique connection between religiosity and declining birthrates. Fertility tends to go down when economic opportunities for women increase. But in societies that don’t support women’s ambition to combine work and family, it can fall to levels that threaten a nation’s economic future. If having children forces women out of the workplace, some will forgo motherhood, or have fewer children than they might have wished. Thus, developed countries with strongly patriarchal attitudes are shrinking fast: The birthrate in Japan is 1.21, while Italy’s is 1.39.

In a 2003 report on population growth and pensions, Tory MP David Willetts wrote, “The evidence from Italy, and indeed Spain, is that a traditional family structure now leads to very low birth rates.” Countries like France and Sweden, by contrast, are shrinking much more slowly, because the generous benefits accorded to working women allow them to have more kids. “Feminism is the new natalism,” Willetts concluded. In this sense, Iranian women might have more babies if their society was more liberal. But the fact that Iran now has the same fertility rate as Chile and Iceland is still evidence of fitful modernization, not a national death wish.

Lee Smith responds:

Last week I wrote a column about the debate over the rationality of the Iranian regime. On one side of this policy debate are those who believe the regime is rational and therefore will pose little strategic threat to the United States and Israel should it acquire a nuclear weapon. On the other side are those who believe that the regime is irrational, and thus cannot be allowed to have the bomb since it cannot be deterred from using it. My conclusion was that the entire debate should be irrelevant to U.S. policy toward Iran, a country whose conduct—rational or not—already threatens our strategic interests and would surely become more threatening if bolstered by the bomb.

In order to illustrate both sides of the debate, I showed how one could argue—and some have argued—that the Iranian regime really is suicidal and even that the Iranian people as a whole had largely lost confidence and interest in the future that they are being offered by the mullahs. To that end, I suggested that rapidly declining birthrates in Iran could be taken as evidence that the Iranian people as a whole were choosing not to reproduce themselves, which in turn might suggest that, as a people, they preferred not to live.

Continue reading: ‘The small family is divine’

Rational, of course, is not the same thing as reasonable. A regime that shoots its own people in the streets, as the Iranian government did in June 2009, is not reasonable. In the policy debate, rationality refers to a regime’s interest in preserving itself. A regime is rational, therefore, if it understands that using a nuclear weapon would elicit a response that might spell its doom. An irrational regime is one that can’t be deterred because it may use a nuclear weapon regardless of the consequences.

Thus, the Islamic Republic’s threat last week to close the Strait of Hormuz—a move that would send oil prices skyrocketing—struck many as strong evidence of the regime’s irrationality. Interrupting the world’s oil supply would compel the United States, the guarantor of Persian Gulf security, to take military actions that might mean toppling Iran’s ruling establishment. On Sunday, U.S. Joint Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said in no uncertain terms that if Iran tries to close the Strait of Hormuz, the United States “can defeat that.”

Others look at Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz as having little bearing on the country’s rationality. Since the Iranians know the Americans would have no trouble breaking through a blockade, their argument goes, Iran doesn’t actually have any intention of trying to close down one of the world’s most strategically vital waterways. This regime understands, as Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Sunday, that closing down the Strait of Hormuz is an American red line. If Iran crosses it, it jeopardizes its own existence—and so it won’t.

Those that argue the regime is irrational point to the fact that the Iranian regime regularly threatens to destroy Israel, which would retaliate by obliterating Iran. Those that claim Iran is rational write off such threats as mere rhetoric. A nuclear Iran, they say, poses little threat to a much more powerful Israel, never mind the United States. Membership in the club of countries with nuclear weapons might even make Tehran more responsible.

The reality is that it doesn’t matter whether the regime is rational or not. The issue is not whether the Iranians would use the bomb, but how Tehran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon would enhance the regime’s already reckless behavior. Moreover, it would severely limit the ability of the United States to respond to the provocations of this dangerous regime. For instance, if a nuclear-armed Iran actually closed the Strait of Hormuz, U.S. officials would be much less confident in their ability to re-open shipping lanes. American policy-makers already worried about high oil prices are not likely to risk the chances of a nuclear incident and even higher oil prices.

It’s pretty easy to make a strong case that the Iranian regime really is suicidal. This is the same ruling clique, after all, that pioneered the use of the suicide car-bombing during the course of the Lebanese civil wars from 1975 to 1990. The Iranians tapped their local allies, namely Hezbollah, for martyrdom operations against Israel, the United States, and other Western powers. The Iranians spent their own blood even more recklessly in the war with Iraq when they dispatched wave after human wave of teenage boys to march through minefields, clearing a path with their bodies. Perhaps most tellingly, the plummeting Iranian birthrate—from 6.5 children per woman a generation ago to 1.7 today—suggests that it is not just the regime, but an entire nation, that no longer wishes to live.

No country sets out purposefully to bring about its destruction. And yet history is nothing but the record of nations that have misunderstood the limits of their own power and the resources of their adversaries. Nazi Germany may have been suicidal, but the British Empire was not, and yet at the end of World War II both were finished. No one thinks that the rulers of Athens were irrational, but by the conclusion of the Peloponnesian War, their actions had effectively cashiered Athenian democracy.

Jewish leaders between 66 C.E. and 135 C.E. were not irrational, but their revolts against Rome put an end to Jewish sovereignty for two millennia. Furthermore, who is to say that renewing Jewish sovereignty in a sea of Muslim hostility is an entirely rational act? But the rationality of any given government is irrelevant. The question of rationality moves the debate from the real to the speculative—i.e., might a given nation use the bomb at some point? The fact is no one knows beforehand whether any regime is likely to use a nuclear weapon.

The only question American policy-makers should concern themselves with is whether or not a given regime seeking nuclear weapons is already hostile to U.S. interests. If it is, U.S. policy-makers should do everything in their power to prevent that regime from acquiring a bomb. The apparent injustice that Israel has the bomb while the world rues the prospect of a nuclear Iran is a quandary for academics and ethicists—and an entirely inappropriate concern for U.S. officials, whose concerns are much more specific: protecting U.S. citizens, allies, and interests. There is little debate in Washington over Israel’s nuclear-weapons program because Jerusalem has never posed a threat to American strategic interests. Iran, however, has threatened U.S. interests for 30 years.

If or when Iran gets a nuclear weapon, it might drop the bomb on Tel Aviv—or Riyadh, for that matter. But that’s not the main problem. The issue is that Tehran will act in precisely the same fashion as it has since 1979—hostile to the United States and its allies—only now on a much more ambitious scale. And the range of responses available to the United States and its allies will be seriously limited.

Imagine Iran with a nuclear weapon: Tehran will continue to support terror, except that Iranian assets like Hezbollah and Hamas would now be operating under a nuclear umbrella, which will shape Israeli responses. In planning its military strategy, Israel already has to take into consideration world opinion and the strain warfare puts on Israeli society and the economy. Now Jerusalem will have to wonder if crossing the border into Lebanon or Gaza will elicit nuclear threats from Iran.

The Iranians will further extend their reach into Africa and Latin America, where Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in the midst of a regional tour. Allies like Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez will be emboldened to take otherwise unimaginable risks in Washington’s direct sphere of influence in the Americas. The recently unveiled Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington would be only a taste of things to come.

In other words: If Tehran gets a nuclear weapon, will U.S. policy-makers be prepared to ensure that the Islamic Republic doesn’t make good on a threat to close the Strait of Hormuz?

• There are conflicting reports over whether Iran responded favorably to the Turkish foreign miniser’s overture for more nuclear talks. In the past, Iran has proposed fuel swaps with Turkey where the West has demanded swaps with Russia. [Yahoo! The Envoy]

• Despite statements to the contrary apparently made for domestic consumption, the Muslim Brotherhood reassured the United States that it intends to uphold the Egypt-Israel peace treaty. [Ynet]

• The second Amman meeting between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators will be on Monday. [Haaretz]

• Israel and the U.S. are about to commence a major joint missile defense exercise. [DPA/Haaretz]

• Many warn that the one quarter of Israeli children who attend Haredi schools are not getting the education in math and science they will need if Israel is to keep up its pace of innovation and robust economy. [AP/WP]

A bit of news from the Washington Times‘ Ben Birnbaum confirms the Assad regime’s importance to Iran and as a corollary the blow that the fall of Assad would represent to the Islamic Republic. He reports that Iran tried to bribe Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood into backing Assad by offering it four posts in the Syrian government. Which reveals not only Iran’s interest in maintaining Assad’s power and other actors’ support for it, but also its influence in Syria, as captured by its ability to guarantee government posts in what is, after all, ostensibly another sovereign country.

Iran Sought to Broker Syrian Deal Between Assad, Muslim Brotherhood [Washington Times]
Earlier: For Hezbollah, Keys Open Doors
Hamas Smartly Departing Damascus

• Does Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan have cancer? The rumors are swirling. [JPost]

• Israeli security seems outmatched by the prevalence and volume of crimes committed by religious settlers in the West Bank. [Haaretz]

• An official report produced in the wake of the Gilad Shalit swap (for more than 1,000 men and women) suggests regulating and reining in future prisoner exchanges. [Ynet]

• Ex-President Ehud Olmert was indicted on bribery charges in connection with the infamous Holyland real estate scheme. Of course, Olmert has also already been convicted of rape. [Apologies: Pre-caffeine, we wrote this. It was ex-president Moshe Katsav who has been convicted of rape.] [NYT]

• Prominent pro-Israel donor Newton Becker—his beneficiaries included MEMRI and the Zionist Organization of America—died at 83. [Jewish Journal]

Until just over a year ago, the Islamic Republic had hosted a second star: Israeli engineers commissioned by the shah in the 1970s to construct Iran Air headquarters in Tehran put an unmistakable Magen David on the roof of the airport building. But the discovery of the symbol by a Google Earth user in November 2010 scandalized the mullahs. An Iranian news site reproached Tehran’s municipal authorities for failing to remove “this Zionist star symbol, 32 years after the success of the revolution.”

More recent Google Earth images show that the airport star is now covered by black concrete. But the other Star of David—the one remaining in the western Iranian city of Hamadan—attests to millennia of shared Persian-Jewish history.

The problem is that the shrine that houses the prominent star has fallen into disrepair at the hands of the local government, and last year anti-Jewish mobs rallied at the shrine, calling for its demolition. In the absence of a Jewish community capable of defending it, a U.S. organization called Diarna (Judeo-Arabic for “Our Homes”) has decided the only option is to restore the site—virtually.

***

For centuries, Persian Jews marked the holiday of Purim by traveling to the shrine in Hamadan. There they were often joined by Christian and Muslim supplicants seeking divine cures to infertility and other human ailments. According to Persian-Jewish lore, the biblical queen Esther and her uncle Mordechai—celebrated in the Book of Esther for having prevented a mass slaughter of their fellow Jews during the time of the Achaemenid emperor Xerxes I—are buried at the shrine. But construction of the site most likely post-dated by a few centuries the events depicted in the Book of Esther. A different Persian-Jewish queen—Shushan Dokht, wife to the 4th-century Sassanid emperor Yazdegerd I—may actually be buried there.

While the shrine’s origins remain shrouded in mystery, its centrality to Persian-Jewish life is well-documented. “This place is regarded by all the Jews of Persia as peculiarly sacred,” wrote a visiting American journalist in the July 1872 issue of Our Monthly, a long-defunct literary and religious magazine. “Hither they come up on pilgrimage with something of the spirit in which their fathers sought the gates of Jerusalem.”

Venerated though it was, the shrine of Esther and Mordechai was, by the late 1800s, in a state of decay. The Our Monthly writer described “a square room with projections on its sides, the whole between thirty and forty feet in height, or nearly square, and surmounted by a cylindrical tower and dome, near forty feet in height.” From the outside, the shrine was nothing more than “a square brick mausoleum, built for strength rather than beauty. The open midan, or ground above the tomb, is equally uninviting. It is used by the Mussulmans as a wood and timber market and … piled with newly cut trees, branches and fuel. There is not a spear of grass, or leaf or flower near the tomb, but much that is offensive and filthy.”

The site remained in this state until 1972, when Elias “Yassi” Gabbay, then a rising Jewish-Iranian architect, was commissioned to restore it. That year, the shah’s regime launched an extravagant celebration of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, and every minority group in the country was required to participate. The Jews, the country’s oldest minority community, settled that restoring the Hamadan shrine was the best way to capture their contribution to Persian history.

Gabbay did more than just restore the original shrine. He added a subterranean synagogue while retaining much of the original shrine structure and surrounding cemetery, where Hamadan’s most prominent Jewish families buried their dead. “My main goal in approaching the architectural concept was to express the relationship of the Jews of Iran … with the Iranian nation,” he recalled in a 2010 interview with Diarna, which digitally restores Mizrahi heritage sites across the Middle East and North Africa.

The only above-ground portion of the new synagogue’s structure was the roof, which includes a massive skylight in the shape of a Star of David that can be spotted in Google Earth images of Hamadan.

The Islamic revolution of 1979 forced Gabbay and an estimated 60,000 other Persian Jews to leave Iran for Israel and the United States. Like many, Gabbay resettled in Beverly Hills, where he maintains an architectural practice. Since then, the site he restored has been maltreated by Islamist authorities in Hamadan, who have removed the fence designed by Gabbay lest passersby be offended by its ornate Star of David motif. (Never mind that the motif was inspired in part by ancient Islamic design patterns where six-pointed stars are quite common.)

Given the shrine’s precarious condition, Diarna considered it a perfect candidate for digital restoration. An initiative of a Boston-based nonprofit named Digital Heritage Mapping, Diarna combines traditional archaeological and historical scholarship with digital technologies to revive neglected Jewish sites in a region where autocrats and Islamists have sought to eradicate any physical evidence of Jewish life. (Historic sites are virtually revived with online exhibits that include photographs, 3-D images, immersive panoramas, and so on.)

In the case of the Hamadan shrine, Diarna had the benefit of missionary and journalistic accounts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as Gabbay’s black-and-white photographs. Sadly, Gabbay’s original plans for the 1972 restoration were lost after the 1979 revolution, so the architect had to reconstruct them from memory. “Just as people often question the origins of the Esther shrine, so I have to question the accuracy of my memory,” he said in 2010.

The memories of Persian Jews born in Iran are increasingly all that remain of their heritage. The Hamadan shrine is not the only site at risk of destruction. In April 2008, for example, seven ancient synagogues in Tehran’s historically Jewish Oudlajan district were razed to make way for high-rise developments.

Growing up in post-revolutionary Iran as the only son of a secular-minded Shia family, I was fortunate to know Jewish friends of my parents, including a prominent gallery owner and artist who for many years shared a studio with my mother, an abstract-expressionist painter. But the Jewish experience as a whole was something muted and private—not a surprise in a country where anti-Semitic propaganda pervades state-controlled media and where Jews and other minorities are required to hang signs on their stores to warn away unsuspecting Muslims from shopping there. As a child, I found it impossible to even imagine the time when Tehran was home to thriving, bustling centers of Jewish life.

Ideally, governments in Iran and the Arab-speaking Middle East would be rushing to preserve priceless Jewish sites within their borders rather than leaving it up to a team of programmers to restore them in Google’s soulless, if infinite, memory. Viewing Diarna’s end-product—with its three-dimensional computer graphics devoid of imperfections—I could not help but recall French theorist Jean Baudrillard’s warning against postmodern simulacra. In their very perfection and completeness, maps, models, and databases can sometimes overwhelm memory and subjectivity, which are defined by absences, scars, and negative spaces impossible to recreate digitally.

• Speaking of: the Israelis and the Palestinians meet today in Amman. Keep expectations very low. More later. [NYT]

• Amid the latest tensions in Israel, ultra-Orthodox protesters marched in striped prison uniforms and yellow stars. And would you believe some folks found this tasteless? [NYT]

• Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which won a plurality of votes in two rounds of parliamentary voting and is the most popular of the Islamic parties that won majorities, said it will not recognize Israel and will try to cancel the peace treaty. [JPost]

• Hamas and Turkey grew closer as the head of Hamas’ Gaza government visited Istanbul. [NYT]

• Ilan Grapel, the Israeli-American law student, writes for the first time about his detention this summer in Egypt, and defends his trip. [WP]

• The Obama administration is beginning to make plans for helping the Syrian opposition, including a no-fly zone. [FP The Cable]

• Gerald Steinberg and others weigh in on the affair concerning certain anti-Israel tweets and blog posts by Center for American Progress staffers. As I wrote last week, the term “Israel firster” (or the implication that a senator is in AIPAC’s pocket) goes beyond mere criticism of support for certain policies. [JPost]

• Beit Shemesh has turned into the battleground against Haredi misogyny in part because many residents—including the eight-year-old girl whose harassment sparked the latest controversy—are American-born. [Forward]

• Rep. Ron Paul, the prominent Republican presidential candidate recently embroiled in charges over racist and anti-Semitic newsletters published under his name, denied he is an anti-Semite. [Haaretz]

• Meanwhile, several GOP candidates have said they would vote for Paul over President Obama in the general election—including frontrunner Mitt Romney (but not including former frontrunner Newt Gingrich). I’d be interested in the Republican Jewish Coalition’s take on this. [JTA Capital J]

• Conservative journalist Philip Klein, for one, disagrees with Romney. [Washington Examiner]

• The United States isn’t too worried about Iran’s threats to shut the Strait of Hormuz. [Yahoo! The Envoy]

• Due to the ongoing reconciliation talks with Fatah, Hamas has reportedly been ordered to cease attacks on Israel. [Haaretz]

• Six religious settlers have been arrested in connection with the riot earlier this month at a West Bank IDF base. [AP/WP]

• Casino magnate and prominent Republican donor (and Gingrich backer) Sheldon Adelson said he agreed with the former Speaker’s remark about the “invented” Palestinian people. What’s notable is he said it to a gathering of young Jews on Birthright trips. [Haaretz]

• Ignore the painting, admire the sentiment: the New England Patriots bought owner Bob Kraft a tribute to his late wife, Myra. [ESPN]

• Um, Prime Minister Netanyahu has a 180 I.Q., maybe. [JustASC]

Everybody saw this, right? Also: “We understand the East German judge made it a 9.”

• Recent attacks against U.N. forces patrolling the Israel-Lebanon border came from Hezbollah, say Israel and France. Israel is concerned about the potential for escalation. [Haaretz]

• Iran plans to hold naval war games beyond the Strait of Hormuz, in international waters, not too far from U.S. ships. This’ll end well. [AP/WP]

• As the Arab League prepares its visit, 160 more were killed in Syria’s northwest. Or as Bashar Assad calls it, “Wednesday.” [NYT]

• In pleading the insanity defense, the lawyer for Levi Aron, accused killer of eight-year-old Leiby Kletzky, suggested that the inbreeding in that Brooklyn Hasidic community may have led to his client’s mental deficiencies. [NY Daily News]

• Jordan Zane Weiner, meet the world. [Page Six]

The activists sought to secure the right of thousands of Russian Jews—at risk of cultural extinction after years of forced assimilation under Communism—to leave the Soviet Union. Moscow should not receive most-favored trade status from the United States, American Jews insisted, unless and until their Soviet brethren were allowed to emigrate. Under immense pressure exerted by this movement, Congress would eventually pass the Jackson-Vanik amendment in 1974, which conditioned trade with the Soviet Union on Russian emigration policy. In the process, the movement transformed the nature of American foreign policy, helping to establish “the principle that human rights supersede national sovereignty, that democracies are morally bound to intervene in the internal affairs of dictatorships,” as the former activist Yossi Klein Halevi, now an Israeli author and journalist, has written.

Most Iranian Americans are likely unfamiliar with this inspiring saga. But they could learn a lot from its example. They, too, face a totalitarian adversary in the form of Iran’s clerical regime, which has trapped millions of their countrymen for over three decades. And just as the Soviet Jewry movement had to overcome the hostility of a U.S. administration obsessed with realpolitik, Iranian-Americans today are frustrated by a White House seemingly unmoved by the plight of dissidents in Iran. Like American Jews, Iranian Americans are a notoriously fractious bunch, divided by numerous ideological and generational fault lines—and torn between an assimilationist imperative and the urge to preserve their unique cultural and linguistic heritage in the United States.

Unlike the organized American Jewish community, Iranian Americans have been ineffective at mobilizing support for their cause of advancing democracy in Iran or even formulating a coherent political message. Disputes over the meaning and significance of historical traumas—from the 1979 revolution to the failures of the reform movement ushered in by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami—have frequently divided the Persian diaspora. Iranian American activism, moreover, has fundamentally failed at reaching a broad, mainstream audience.

Given the similarities between these two communities, the Soviet Jewry model may help Iranian Americans rethink and revitalize their own efforts to ensure that democratization and human rights are central pillars of U.S. policy toward Iran. Of course, there are contextual differences: Jewish activists in the 1970s and ’80s had the benefit of a Soviet dictatorship open to engagement, whereas the regime in Tehran relishes its isolation and defiance. Nevertheless, Iranian Americans can pick up quite a few lessons from the astonishing successes of the Soviet Jewry movement, which ultimately led to the downfall of Communism in Europe.

Balance the Particularistic Against the Universal

Almost as soon as they launched their movement, the Soviet Jewry activists were faced with a difficult branding dilemma. As Gal Beckerman explains in When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone, his magisterial history of the movement, these activists were animated by profoundly Jewish impulses. “The movement involved the whole soup of Jewish psychology—Holocaust guilt, fears of assimilation, all of these very particularistic Jewish concerns,” Beckerman told me. “But if it were limited to that, you would have just had a very small group of protesters screaming.” Aware of the risk that their movement might play as a narrowly ethnic one in the wider culture, the activists consciously grounded their message in the language of universal human rights and fundamental American ideals, such as religious freedom and freedom of movement. To broaden their impact, they reached out to civil rights leaders from outside the community and carefully framed their cause as a mainstream one.

Iranian Americans have struggled with this difficult balancing act. Too often, their rallies, advocacy literature, and messaging come across as part of a debate within the community. Last year, for example, I helped organize a rally in Boston to mark the first anniversary of the disputed 2009 presidential election in Iran. Benefiting from the counsel of some veteran, non-Iranian activists, we took steps to appeal to the broader Boston community. We billed the event as an “interfaith solidarity vigil,” secured the endorsements of civic leaders from Boston’s various ethnic communities, including the largest Latino-rights organization in Massachusetts, and began the rally with the U.S. national anthem.

Continue reading: Seeking latter-day Sharanskys

Unsurprisingly, Gingrich’s comments set off a firestorm. Some thought his observations were refreshingly honest, others argued they were needlessly provocative and extremely counterproductive. But as many commentators have noted, the Palestinians are one of many peoples whose nationhood is “invented.” In the Middle East alone, invented nations include Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf emirates, and even Turkey. Like the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, these, too, were all once part of the Ottoman Empire. None existed before World War I, after which these jerry-built states united various, and often competing, sectarian, ethnic, and tribal identities.

The real question, then, is not whether Palestinian nationalism is “authentic,” but whether this particular national fiction is useful. Gingrich’s proposed alternative identity for the Palestinians—linking these Arabic-speaking, non-Jewish residents of the territories to the rest of the “the Arab people”—is bad for the region, the United States, and Israel.

The problem is that current Palestinian nationalism is not strong enough. If it were, Yasser Arafat and, later, Mahmoud Abbas might have been more inclined to accept the peace deals offered by Israeli prime ministers and American presidents. If Palestinian leadership were more like the early champions of Zionism, who wanted a state for the Jews no matter its size, then the conflict might have been resolved at any point over the last seven decades.

Maybe the Palestinians are still waiting for a better deal. Perhaps, as some argue, the Palestinians really believe that they’ll eventually manage to drive the Jews into the sea. In any case, one of the major problems is that the decision has never been entirely in the hands of the Palestinians. Even before the United Nations partition plan of 1947, there have always been external regional forces trying to prevent a resolution to the Palestinian problem, since prolonging the conflict enhances their prestige and bargaining position.

From the 1930s to the present, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Syria, and Iran have wrestled over the Palestinian file. Those states’ rationale for interfering in the domestic affairs of a foreign people is based on the presumption of a shared pan-Arab or pan-Islamic sensibility. But even assuming that all Arabs and Muslims really do care an awful lot about the Palestinians—though the status of Palestinian refugees in neighboring Arab states and as the paltry financial aid provided by oil-producing Muslim states strongly suggest otherwise—the notion that U.S. policy should accommodate regional forces because they claim to share a common identity with Palestinians is dangerous.

A region-wide contest to represent the Palestinians not only sets regional powers against each other, but it also channels their often destructive energies against Western interlocutors, primarily the United States. Through 1973, the Saudis fought for their role with their weapon of choice: oil. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Syria’s Assad regime use terrorism, just as Gamal abd el-Nasser did when he ruled Egypt. Therefore, a key goal of American policy-making has been to de-link the Palestinian file from other regional issues and to have the Palestinians represented by one agent: themselves.

Gingrich’s vague formulation cuts directly against the grain of the U.S. regional strategy. If the Palestinians aren’t a nation, which is the Arab nation that American officials are supposed to deal with regarding the Palestinians? Or, more vaguely yet, who is the representative of the “Arab people”? Is Gingrich referring to that entity imagined by the ideologues of Arab nationalism, a single and unified Arab nation?

It should be clear to even the most casual observer of the Middle East that the Arabs are anything but unified. Iraq’s conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, as we now understand, was only the tip of the iceberg in a region where civil war is not an exception but the norm. The Bahraini and Syrian uprisings are effectively sectarian revolutions against the established, and repressive, orders. Even in Egypt, Muslim violence against the Coptic Christian community reveals the true sectarian nature of the region.

The theorists behind 20th-century Arab nationalism recognized the region’s sectarianism and tribalism—which is why they proposed an identity based not on sect or tribe but rather on shared attributes, like language. The inhabitants of the region, from Western North Africa to the Persian Gulf, all spoke some variation of Arabic, thus they were Arabs. Their particularities, whether ethnic (Kurdish, for instance) or sectarian (Christian, Shia, etc.) were insignificant in comparison to their Arab identity. According to ideologues like Sati’ al-Husri, they were Arabs whether they liked it or not.

Accordingly, Arab nationalism has been a coercive and repressive doctrine. Even though it was an idea intended to forestall the civil strife that arises from competing identities, in reality enforcing Arab nationalism has led to bloodshed throughout the Arabic-speaking Middle East. Under Saddam Hussein, Arab nationalism meant Sunni supremacism and the violent suppression of Kurds and Shiites. In Syria, the minority Alawite regime has used the doctrine to keep the Sunnis as well as the Kurds in line. In Lebanon, Hezbollah waves the banner of Arab nationalism in its fight against the Zionist entity, in order to intimidate and rule over other Lebanese sects. Violence and repression are key components of Arab nationalism, because as a totalitarian ideology like Communism and Nazism, it can brook no differences, no particularity.

Respecting that particularity is not only good for the inhabitants of the region but also for the interests of the United States and Israel. The United States has bilateral relations with other nation-states and political institutions like the Palestinian Authority. But this country is ill-equipped to deal with large amorphous bodies like the “Arab people” or, alternatively, the “Muslim world.”

The latter was the intended recipient of Obama’s Cairo speech in June 2009. Unfortunately, it seems not to have occurred to the president that the Muslim-majority Middle East comprises various Muslim sects often at odds, plus non-Muslims as well. By employing this particular fiction, the “Muslim world,” the Cairo speech happened to comport perfectly with the belief of Islamists who hold that non-Muslims and even Shiite Muslims are second-class subjects in the Sunni-majority Middle East, rather than individuals deserving of equal rights.

The “Arab people,” like the “Muslim world,” is an invention—and neither of them should hold much appeal for U.S. policy-makers. Given the nature of our own polity, Americans should take the lead promoting particular identities, even if some of them are formed more recently than others, like that of the Palestinians. This makes them no less worthy of the rights and respect due to other Middle Eastern identities, some of them ancient, like Egypt’s Christian community, or the region’s Jewish minority, which after being ruled by the Ottomans and other regional empires and powers, now enjoys its own state in Israel.

• Prominent progressive rabbi Michael Lerner had his home vandalized—for the fourth time this year. “Palestine Is an Arab Fantasy,” wrote one culprit, apparently channeling Newt Gingrich (seriously). [JTA]

• The story of the “Iranian Schindler,” who saved Persian Jews who had been in Paris. [BBC]

• All the preppiest clothiers (except for Brooks Brothers) were started by Jews. Who knew the “J” in J. Press stood for Jacobi? [Ivy Style]

• David Foster Wallace knew the meaning of “pareve.” [NY Daily News Page Views]

• Apparently Ryan Gosling-themed Tumblrs are a Thing, and so here is the Jewish one. [Hey Girls Shabbat Shalom]

Who needs anti-Semitic graffiti on a synagogue out in Hackensack?

How dependent were Syria and Iran on North Korea for their alleged nuclear weapons programs?
North Korea provided a reactor to Syria, but there’s no evidence they’ve given anything [nuclear] to Iran. They’ve been proliferating missiles into the Middle East for decades; Russia’s not selling them anymore. It’s a valuable source of missile technology for Iran. Syria was completely dependent for fuel cycle capabilities. North Korea didn’t make all these things, Syria would smuggle nuclear-related components from other countries, illegally. On Iran, there’s just no evidence [of collaboration] on nuclear weapons. People have made claims but there’s just no intelligence.

What’s North Korea’s current stance on proliferation?
They understand their proliferation activities are under greater scrutiny than before. I would think they’d be more hesitant. My own guess would be that the succession has been pretty well planned out, and—Kim died earlier than expected, but he was expected to die, and the plan was in place, and I would think they will after a period of mourning want to pick it up again, in three months, two months. They have to have a very intensive mourning take place. Anything can develop, but they’re a very careful, controlled regime, where the elite benefit from having this cult of personality, and they need somebody in the Kim family—require somebody, almost a god-like figure. And I think that’s been planned for several years now. [Kim]’s not going to try to rule alone, and it’s not a one-man-rule system anyway.

Might it improve relations with the United States?
Part of that deal appears to be wanting to negotiate, to put itself in a better situation with the United States. And part of that is classic international relations, where they’re too dependent of China and they don’t view China as a friend, and I think they would like the United States as an ally to play against China. And the United States would want that as well. If the price is concessions on their nuclear program, it can improve its situation, and another price is it doesn’t proliferate to Iran.

So it sounds like—with the caveat that nobody really knows anything about the Hermit Kingdom—that due to the new leader North Korea is less likely to engage in nuclear proliferation than it was, say, a year ago.
I think so, yeah. They understand the danger of proliferating right now. I was there a couple weeks ago, and I think they understand.

Wow. Did you have any inkling Kim Jong-il was about to die?
No, no. You got the impression this wasn’t a country nervous about succession. They were making long-term plans. They knew the Dear Leader was not in the best of health.

Israel Hopes Death of North Korea Leader Will Damage Ties With Iran [Haaretz]

Ron Paul has gained ground after a debate in which his refusal to join the Iran warhawks was front and center. Indeed, in my travels around the country, I don’t meet many neoconservatives outside of Washington and New York. It’s one thing to just adore Israel, as the evangelical Christians do; it’s another thing entirely to send American kids off to war, yet again, to fight for Israel’s national security.

I read this and thought it fairly remarkable. Was he saying Ron Paul was preferable to the rest of the Republican field? And that “yet again” was even more bizarre. I wanted to press Klein and ask him if he meant what he seemed to be saying: not only that an attack on Iran would be fought “for Israel’s national security” but that this would not be the first time—presumably, that Iraq was the same thing. The notion that Iraq was invaded for Israel’s sake, I personally believe, feeds into some of the weirdest and least accurate theories of Jewish neoconservatives pushing George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld into an ill-advised war.

Tablet Magazine contributing editor Jeff Goldberg noticed the same thing and had also emailed Klein, and our emails prompted Klein to respond. As in an email to me, he said that we were misunderstanding his “yet again” (“Jeff had jumped to a silly conclusion,” he wrote; I think the notion that it’s a silly conclusion is itself silly). He then expanded on his beliefs, arguing that while there were Jewish neocons pushing for the Iraq war, they were not actually responsible for it (he fingers Cheney, as would I). All in all, I think Klein’s original post was sloppy at best and likely pretty intemperate; and while his follow-up is helpful, language like “Israel First/Likudnik bloviators,” specifically in reference to people who aren’t actually Israeli or actually members or primary supporters of Israel’s Likud Party, makes me uncomfortable, conjuring as it does charges of dual loyalty that Jews really shouldn’t have to hear anymore.

But I know why Klein feels, as it seems he does, like his back is against the wall, and why he would be frustrated by “the crazed intolerance of many right-wing Jewish commentators.” I brought up in my email with him the fact that no less than Michael Oren had responded to Thomas Friedman’s column last week, with its already-notorious “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby” line. [UPDATE: Friedman clarified the line today.] “This allegation is profoundly disturbing,” Oren said. Whether or not he’s right, Oren is not an intellectual-without-portfolio (anymore). He is Israel’s official envoy to the United States. If criticism of Israeli policy—even when, as in Friedman’s case (or Douglas David J. Rothkopf’s, or Joe Klein’s), it is sloppy, or intemperate, or even worse—garners you an official condemnation from the Israeli government as well as the wrath of ostensibly nonpartisan PACs as well as accusations of anti-Semitism, then we are looking at a stifling of debate that isn’t in the interests of anyone except the Jewish right, which is attempting to turn Israel into a wedge issue in the American Jewish community.

I’m not sure Elliott Abrams warrants the label “sometimes, a feckless shmuck,” which is what Klein called him after this post. But I do wish Abrams had restricted himself to disagreeing with Klein and Friedman on the policies rather than bringing up the blood libel; and what I really wish is that he had urged his readers to, you know, disagree with Klein and agree with him rather than urged various Jewish institutions to rescind their awards and generally cut Friedman and Klein off.

We have a long election year ahead of us, and it could be a useful occasion of hashing out differences on the Mideast. Who knows, if it’s done right, a new consensus—more to the right or to the left of the current one—may actually emerge. But poorly chosen, sloppy, and just plain clownish accusations (and then defenses that are predicated on comma placement) as well as responses that head straight for anti-Semitism and call for communal shunning are not going to get it done.

(By the way, I tried to find a clip of Samuel L. Jackson telling everyone in Do The Right Thing to cool that shit out, but none are embeddable. But the line is “Y’all need to chill that shit out! And that’s the double-truth, Ruth.”)

15 Days Til Iowa: Travel Day [Time Swampland]
Clarification: Israel’s National Security [Time Swampland]
Israeli Officials Escalate War of Words With N.Y. Times [JTA]
Blaming the Jews—Again [Weekly Standard Blog]
Earlier: Ron Paul Moves Into Iowa Lead

A federal indictment earlier this week blew open links between the Iran-backed Shia paramilitary organization that effectively runs Lebanon and the brutal Latin American cocaine trade, in particular the vicious Mexican cartel Los Zetas. If you haven’t read top investigative reporter Jo Becker’s exhaustive following-of-the-money—which includes five continents, untold numbers of used cars, and 85 tons of cocaine—now’s the time. The short of it is that Hezbollah benefits, at times directly, from the Latin American drug trade by laundering money via various means (including those used cars) to Beirut’s Lebanese Canadian Bank. The money quote comes from a U.S. investigator: “They operate like the Gambinos on steroids.”

It’s important for law enforcement to understand exactly how it works. It’s important for the rest of the world, however, to understand that Hezbollah feeds itself with the blood of horrific drug-related violence. This might not surprise those already predisposed to not liking Hezbollah, but in fact this is just one piece of the group’s much larger hypocrisy, which should be leveraged as effective PR in the Arab and Muslim world.

Larbi Sadiki pointed to another Hezbollah hypocrisy earlier this week: its continued support of Bashar Assad’s murderous regime in neighboring Syria—support that isn’t merely passive, but actually includes party head Hassan Nasrallah denying Assad’s atrocities. “When such a wildly popular resistance movement abandons the ideal, much less the practice, of liberation in support of tyranny, it loses credibility with the public,” he wrote. “Fighting Israel as a Syrian proxy is one thing, but opposing the Syrian people’s desire for democratic change is something else entirely.” Elias Muhanna reports that Hezbollah feels more vulnerable with its Syrian patron waning, and “recent polls also show that Hezbollah’s reputation has taken a considerable hit in the Arab world because of its alliance with the Assad regime.” (Contrast all this with Hamas, which has practiced “quiet dissidence,” according to Sadiki, and which is looking to decamp from its current headquarters, in Damascus, for greener pastures in Cairo or even Qatar. This is one advantage of being a Sunni rather than a Shiite group and thus able to forge strong alliances with countries besides Shiite-ruled Syria and Iran.)

So, Hezbollah backs a tyrant who kills his own people (and predominantly Sunnis) and makes its money from the tragedy of other poor oppressed people half a world away. Sounds like a pretty good pitch for Hezbollah’s enemies, including Israel, to make in the region.

(Headline from.)

Government Says Hezbollah Profits From U.S. Cocaine Market Via Link to Mexican Cartel [ProPublica]
Beirut Bank Seen as a Hub of Hezbollah’s Financing [NYT]
Hezbollah’s Hypocritical Resistance [NYT]
Nasrallah’s Fighting Words [NYT Latitudes]
A New Home for Hamas? [FP]

• At an emergency meeting called by Prime Minister Netanyahu, at least one minister supported labeling certain right-wing Israeli Jewish groups as “terrorist organizations” following these events. [JPost]

• Meanwhile, Israeli police play Javert to the Jean Valjeans who have attempted arson at six mosques in the past two months. [Haaretz]

• President Obama asked for his drone back earlier this week. Yesterday, Iran said no. Who saw that coming? [NYT]

• Russia and China are yet again blocking action against Syria at the U.N. Security Council. The current smokescreen is, of course, Why aren’t we discussing the Palestinians? [FP Turtle Bay]

• A worldwide index of religious freedom scored Israel a 0. In fairness, it gave the same score to Afghanistan, China, Turkey, and 49 other countries. [Haaretz]

• On a less un-serious note, Iran may practice closing the Strait of Hormuz, an act which, if actually done, would do a huge number on the world oil market. [Reuters/Yahoo!]

• Fresh out of government, former White House adviser Dennis Ross insists that while Obama sees force against Iran as a last resort, he does not rule it out if it means preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. [Ynet]

• A heartwarming story about totally ruining Christmas for little Christian boys and girls by telling them there is no Santa Claus. Glad tidings! [Slate]

• The Anti-Defamation League issues its most dishonest press release ever, referring to Roberto Benigni as an “acting great.” [ADL]

• Go see Alvin Rosenfeld discuss his book, which we liked. [Museum of Jewish Heritage]

Everyone forgets about Dave Grohl’s turtleneck.

• President Obama asked the Iranians for the U.S. drone, more porridge. [LAT]

• The planned relocation of West Bank Bedouins is prompting international concerns on Israeli designs on their current land. [WP]

• All those hugely anti-democratic bills some Israeli politicians are trying to pass? President Shimon Peres is “ashamed” of them, too. [AP/WP]

• David Mamet does his thing on Israel. Something about the binding of Isaac. [WSJ]

• The U.N.’s death toll for Syria has passed 5,000. [NYT]

• It seems increasingly clear that the U.S. drone that crashed/was brought down in Iran was not in the Islamic Republic’s airspace, er, accidentally. [NYT]

• Adolf Hitler possessed a guide to the Jewish populations of all U.S. cities. Presumably he was studying up for trivia night. [NYT]

• Missiles and airstrikes in Gaza and southern Israel. [Haaretz]

• Gingrich would consider clemency for Jonathan Pollard. [Haaretz]

• In living with cancer, Christopher Hitchens proudly considers himself a shtarker. [VF]

Nobody happens to have 12/30 extras, do they? This is relevant for some reason!

Nobody wants to hear the bad news, which only ensures it will get worse. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s fall in February was heralded with sunny optimism in Washington as the birth of an Egyptian liberal democracy, even though the facts were rather obviously otherwise. It was clear that free elections in Egypt would mean the rise of the Islamists, and last week we saw just that: In the country’s first round of parliamentary elections, the Muslim Brotherhood won the support of 40 percent of the electorate. The Salafists—hard-line Islamists whose 7th-century dress reflects their model for the ideal Islamic state—got 25 percent of the votes. All facts to the contrary, we’re now being told by policy-makers that these Islamists, even those who openly align themselves with Osama Bin Laden, aren’t so scary after all. In other words, the U.S. reaction to the Egyptian mess is that there’s nothing we can, or will, do about it, so best to get used to the new reality.

The same resigned attitude goes for Iranian nuclear weapons. Sure, there’s been plenty of high-toned rhetoric. President George W. Bush said Iran was part of the axis of evil, and President Barack Obama called an Iranian bomb “unacceptable.” But as U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta scolded the Israelis to get back to the “damn table” with the Palestinians last week, he also explained why Washington is ultimately not going to stop the Iranians from getting the bomb. First of all, Panetta explained, a U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran would simply delay the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program, not finish it for good. Even then, he said, the United States “could possibly be the target of retaliation from Iran, striking our ships, striking our military bases.” Furthermore, according to Panetta, a strike could mean “severe economic consequences” that could negatively affect “a fragile economy here in the United States.” It’s not just Panetta who makes this argument: His predecessor, Robert Gates, who worked for Bush before Obama, has made the same claims.

Of course, U.S. officials don’t want Islamists running the largest Arab state, or Iran getting a bomb. But neither Democratic nor Republican policy-makers are willing to pay the electoral and geopolitical price for making sure these bad things don’t happen. Instead, these policy-makers and these analysts protest that once a country is determined to get a nuke, there’s no stopping it. Besides, they claim, even if Iran does get a bomb, we can deter and contain it.

The truth is that the United States can stop the Iranian nuclear program any time it wants. It has the military capacity to turn the lights off across the country, cripple the economy, and bring the regime to its knees—by bombing its oil and natural-gas fields, its ports, power plants, reservoirs, and dams as well as its nuclear facilities. The fact that the United States has the power of life and death over 80 million Iranians may not make the rest of the world comfortable. But there’s no use lying about it. Similarly, American policy-makers continue to pretend that the fall of Mubarak was a triumph for U.S. values when the truth is that it was a catastrophe for U.S. interests. Why are we so confused about our priorities? And why are we insisting on our weakness?

The problem is that at the end of the Cold War the United States government turned away from pursuing our national interests and toward an abstract idea of American transcendence. Talk of interests, allies, balance of power, and so on began to seem a little vulgar. Part of this has to do with the rise of a generation of policy-makers who didn’t know from first-hand experience what it took to win the Cold War. To younger policy-makers, the triumph of the United States was inevitable. It represented, as Francis Fukuyama saw it, the final synthesis of a Hegelian dialectic—the end of history. The reality is that it was messy, and the outcome was never certain.

In the past, U.S. foreign policy-makers saw the world in stark terms. For instance: In the old view, it would be a good thing for the rulers of Iran to fall because they are enemies; and it is bad for Mubarak to fall since he is an ally. The new dispensation is instead premised on catchwords like “consistency.” If we want the mullahs toppled, the new thinking goes, then for the sake of consistency we should also demand Mubarak leave. The United States, you see, is no longer a normal country like all the rest pursuing its national interests. It’s a set of values.

Just one generation ago, this country was led by policy-makers who helped both sides in the decade-long Iran-Iraq war kill each other because they believed that the bloodbath kept American citizens safe. Now we’re governed by men and women who want to make sure the Syrian opposition is sufficiently devoted to pluralism before the White House decides if bringing down the anti-American dictator Bashar al-Assad is a good thing. It’s a noble goal to want Syrians to treat each other as Americans treat each other. But just because it’s a hopeful ideal doesn’t make it sound foreign policy. No one says we have to be as cynical as France, but we do need to conduct our dealings with other countries as though we, too, were a normal country with national interests.

The fact is that there are lots of countries with fine values, like most of Northern Europe. What makes the United States a superpower, the foundation of our prosperity and security, is not our values, but our policies. I am referring specifically to those policies that took us to war against the Germans in Europe and the Japanese in Asia in World War II and the Soviets on four continents during the Cold War.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Let us both commemorate and celebrate the American men and women who handed us as part of our birthright the free trade in Europe and the Pacific that made this country wealthy beyond comparison. A major part of our inheritance includes the Persian Gulf, through which the free flow of oil at affordable prices has made possible much of what we now take for granted, like the Interstate highway system, fresh vegetables on our plate, the social and geographic mobility that is a signature of our way of life.

There is always a price for being American. Everyone knows the cost of bringing the Iranian nuclear program to an end. The Iranians are going to shoot at U.S. troops based in the Middle East and attack soft targets in the United States—the Mall of America, the Port of Los Angeles, Disney World, who knows? And the price of oil is going to rise. The question is, are we are willing to pay for all that? If not, we shouldn’t be surprised when the bubble bursts.

• The Obama administration may be looking to weaken sanctions targeting Iran’s central bank. [Washington Jewish Week]

• If President Abbas chooses not to seek re-election, Prime Minister Fayyad may run to replace him. Unfortunately, Thomas Friedman has been denied the franchise in the Palestinian territories. [JPost]

• Former President Katsav, who’s going to prison for rape, requests our sympathy. [NYT]

• Corruption at Budapest’s Jewish cemetery. Sounds like a Kafka story! Except in Budapest, not Prague. But still! [JTA]

• Yossarian was not a Jew, according to his creator Joseph Heller. [JTA]

Mark Zuckerberg’s photos were leaked because Facebook’s privacy protections are poor. I’ll turn this over to Morpheus:

• Particularly in the wake of the storming of the British embassy Tuesday, the European Union is clamoring for fresh sanctions against Iran. Meanwhile, Iran simply released the 11 “students” detained for doing so. [WSJ/AP/WP]

• German prosecutors allege an Iranian plot to attack U.S. bases there. [Haaretz/Forward]

• Turkey is upping sanctions against Syria, and the conflict looks like it’s spilling over into Lebanon. [NYT/NYT]

• Under Quartet guidelines, President Abbas offered a proposal for going forward with peace talks. No reply from Prime Minister Netanyahu. [Haaretz]

• At a Jewish Manhattan fundraiser, President Obama told donors that Israel was the country’s most important ally. [Reuters/Haaretz]

Anyway, reports from a semi-official Iranian news agency have contradicted themselves over whether the protesters have seized embassy staffers, which would add an entirely new dimension to what is already a huge violation of international law and, technically, sovereign British territory. If any British nationals in Iran are reading this, your government’s advice to you is to stay indoors and await further instructions. We’ll be thinking of you here.

Protesters Storm British Embassy in Tehran [NYT]
Iran Moves to Downgrade Its Relations With Britain [NYT]

• Iranian students (“students”?) have stormed the British embassy in Tehran. [WP]

• This comes following an official downgrading of ties with Britain, which came after further sanctions aimed at Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program. [NYT]

• In Egypt, the news is that the first day of elections went down relatively smoothly and peacefully. [NYT]

• Now that he has held out a month and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is no longer threatening to break up the coalition over it, Prime Minister Netanyahu will likely unfreeze the $100 million in Palestinian Authority tax revenue. [Haaretz]

• Stalin’s daughter died at 85 in Wisconsin (!). Her first two loves were Jewish men; in neither case did her father approve. [NYT]

Given this stated policy, you would think that news of the Syrian opposition gaining ground on Assad’s regime—the Free Syrian Army, for example, now has 17,000 men under arms and has carried off a number of daring operations—would be welcomed in Washington. But you would be wrong.

In the past three months, the White House has failed to realize its stated goal of removing Assad from power. A key reason it has failed isn’t for lack of ability to project power, but rather because it has become distracted by the fractured nature of the opposition—over what comes after Assad—rather than focusing on the far more manageable pursuit of bringing down a long-time U.S. adversary.

Yes, the Obama Administration has built a strong sanctions regime, which is choking off the Syrian regime’s finances. But fearful of owning a potential civil war, the White House has shied away from any talk of force—not only U.S. force but even force on the part of the opposition. Taking up arms will play into the regime’s hands, undermine international support, and “divide the opposition,” the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman said earlier this month.

But it’s too late for such warnings. The Syrian opposition, as Feltman surely knows, is already divided. One faction, the Syrian National Council, has modeled itself after Libya’s Transitional National Council in the hopes of attracting the same international support, including a no-fly zone. The group just released its political program, which says it aims to “build a democratic, pluralistic, and civil state by … breaking down the existing regime, including all of its operatives and symbols.” Another faction, the National Coordinating Committee, has reportedly met with officials from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Assad’s closest—and, increasingly, its only—ally. The Iranians’ purpose in backing the National Coordinating Committee is to create a ready-made ally should Assad fall, much like they backed various actors inside Iraq, such as Moqtada al-Sadr. In Iraq, this competition turned into armed conflict. In Syria so far, it has set the opposition against itself. This group has so far distinguished itself by countering the Syria National Council’s strategy, arguing that the opposition does not want foreign intervention, or a no-fly zone.

The Obama Administration is reluctant to throw its support behind any Syrian opposition group when those factions are already at one another’s throats. But the White House should learn from the Iranians: Choose your horse and ride it. Moreover, it was Washington itself that gave an opening to the National Coordinating Committee—and Tehran—by over-emphasizing the importance of the opposition. The administration ought to be pulling every possible lever to overthrow the Syrian dictator, and U.S. policymakers are making a mistake by getting caught up in the details of the opposition’s weaknesses. What’s more, this obsession with “what comes after” is quickly becoming the undoing of U.S. foreign policy.

***

The White House doesn’t want post-Assad Syria to look like post-Saddam Iraq, torn by civil war. But that outcome is probably unavoidable, regardless of U.S. involvement. Syrian political culture suffers from most of the same pathologies that marked Iraq before and immediately after the 2003 U.S. invasion. The main purpose of authoritarian security states is to stifle political opposition to the ruling regime. Thus it should come as no surprise that the political skills of any opposition group in a country like Syria are going to be rudimentary at best. And, as happened in Iraq, Syria’s opposition movement is going to attract opportunists, especially from the exile community, who have more contact with Western officials even though their understanding of what is happening on the ground is often murkier.

There will be much more conflict to come in Syria, perhaps as much as there was in Iraq. Like in Iraq, Syria’s sectarian strife has deep roots. Syria is historically a Sunni-majority region, dating back to the beginning of the Umayyad dynasty, which ruled from 661 to 750. Some fear that the specter of civil war now threatens Syria, but the truth is that the country’s civil war has been under way since 1966, when the Alawite minority first came to power and the Sunni majority lost its privilege to a heterodox Muslim sect with beliefs both Sunnis and Shiites consider heretical. Certain Sunni factions, spearheaded by the Muslim Brotherhood, rose up against Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, in the late 1970s, a revolt the late president put down with the 1982 massacre in Hama, killing tens of thousands. What we are watching now is the latest effort on the part of the Sunni majority to overturn the system and retake control of the country. This time around, the Sunnis will almost certainly be successful, and the Alawites, and perhaps other minorities, will pay dearly for it.

The Obama Administration is understandably concerned about the country’s various minority communities, even as some, like several Christian clerics, have disgraced—and perhaps further endangered—themselves by siding openly with a dictatorial regime whose business of late has been slaughtering Sunnis. Nonetheless, in the end there is little Washington can do to cool the enmities that have been roiling Syria and the region for more than a thousand years. It was not the presence of U.S. troops that gave rise to civil war in Iraq, and it will not be the absence of them that touches off more killing in Syria. Those conflicts are indigenous to the region.

Given the political character of the Middle East, which the Iraq war dramatically exposed, the Obama Administration is rightly wary of nation building. However, it does not seem to recognize that the desire to manufacture the ideal opposition movement in Syria and other Middle Eastern countries in turmoil is an outgrowth of the same hubris. The United States is limited in its ability to shape the political climate of foreign countries.

And yet policymakers on both sides of the aisle now seem beholden to the so-called Pottery Barn rule famously articulated by Colin Powell when he was George W. Bush’s first-term secretary of State. But, in fact, Washington is not required to buy something it has broken—especially if the damage was caused for the purpose of advancing U.S. interests. The Pottery Barn conviction has effectively become an article of faith in the foreign-policy establishment, and one that will eventually come to deter the United States from taking actions to protect U.S. citizens, allies, and interests. American taxpayers cannot be expected to sign on for foreign adventures if the price-tag is going to include remaking failed states, including those with leaders and publics who might wish us harm regardless of our contribution.

In the end, all Washington can control is what touches us directly. Right now, we want Assad fighting for his life in Syria because it will restrain the regime from projecting power abroad—exporting terror across the country’s borders into Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. With Iran’s lone Arab ally neutralized, the eventual fall of Assad will weaken the regime in Tehran and its regional proxies, especially Hezbollah, whose supply line goes through the Lebanese-Syrian border. For the United States, that simple outcome is a victory that we’ve sought for more than 30 years.

• The United States, Canada, and Britain imposed further sanctions on Iran’s financial and energy industries yesterday, though they stopped short of completely isolating its crucial central bank. [NYT]

• Israel is still freezing the transfer of Palestinian Authority tax revenue in protest of the UNESCO membership. [Haaretz]

• In visiting the West Bank, Jordan’s King Abdullah meant to demonstrate that President Abbas is still the top Palestinian and that the Palestinians’ homeland is not Jordan. [NYT]

• Upholding a promise, Vice President Biden met with a handful of Jewish leaders, who lobbied him—almost certainly unsuccessfully—to lobby the president to free Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. [Ynet/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Much of the West Bank and Gaza is without cell phone and Internet access following what is said to have been an organized hack. [WP Blog Post]

After this punt return last night, many wondered if the New England Patriots’ Julian Edelman is Jewish. He is not. Great play, though.

• The explosion at the weapons depot/secret missile base outside Tehran has drawn the curtain back on Iran’s missile program. [NYT]

• King Abdullah’s hold over Jordan is shaky and getting shakier. [NYRB]

• Bernie Fine has denied the charges. [ESPN]

• Toward the end, Libyans accused Muammar Qaddafi of being a Jew, because it’s Libya. [Forward]

• A disabled Jewish Venezuelan marathoner drew the ire of anti-Semites, because it’s Venezuela. [Time Global Spin]

• New Bravo reality show Shahs of of Sunset is exactly what you think it is. [Hollywood Reporter]

• It would certainly be funny if intelligence was withheld from Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. [AP/FP]

• The Chicago Bears placed rookie right tackle Gabe Carimi on injured reserved, ending his season. You’ll get ‘em next year! [ESPN]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Shalom Auslander has a new Showtime comedy coming out you should watch. [Deadline]

• Tablet Magazine contributing editor Etgar Keret has this contest you should do. [Something Out of Something]

• Macaro/oo/nis: a user’s guide. [Slate]

• The Quandt family, which owns BMW, has pledged $7 million to memorialize forced laborers who worked at the Quandt patriarch’s Nazi factory. [JTA]

Happy pre-Thanksgiving weekend!

When that attack happens, most likely in the early spring, Israel’s second Iranian war will officially begin. The first has been going on through much of the last decade in the battles Israel has been fighting with Iran’s local proxies—Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip—and in the secret war being waged against Iran’s nuclear program. The front lines of this war extend thousands of miles, from Bandar-Abbas, an Iranian port on the Persian Gulf, to the eastern Mediterranean and in the Arabian Peninsula, northeast Africa, and north into Turkey. This secret war involves the interdiction of Iranian arms bound for Hezbollah and Hamas and of vital components bound for Iran’s nuclear facilities. Few of these operations, such as the commandeering of cargo ships carrying missiles, are ever revealed as official Israeli actions.

When senior Revolutionary Guards officers, Iranian nuclear scientists, or key Hamas and Hezbollah operatives die or disappear under mysterious circumstances, Israel never takes credit, but it also never seems to dissuade the media from pushing the Israel-did-it angle. Same goes for Stuxnet, the computer worm that plagued Iran’s nuclear facilities at Natanz and Bushehr, which contained Jewish history clues in its code and featured briefly in a farewell video shown last year at an event honoring departing Israeli Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi. (Stuxnet is widely believed to be the work of Israel, and the Jewish state encourages that view without actually confirming it.) Saturday’s missile-base explosion, which killed Gen. Hassan Tehrani Moghaddam, the founder of Iran’s missile program, was only the latest act in this not-so-secret secret war.

The great champion of clandestine war against Iran was former Mossad chief Meir Dagan. During his time at the helm of Israel’s spy agency, from 2002 until early this year, Dagan argued that the only way to counter Iran’s nuclear threat is through secret warfare, close coordination with the Western powers, and quiet alliances with Arab regimes threatened by Iran, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Dagan is a believer in the Ariel Sharon view of things—namely, that the Iranian nuclear program is a problem for the whole world, not just the Jewish state, and therefore Israel should do everything to avoid seeming like it is facing Iran on its own. In the meantime, clandestine warfare can slow Iran’s nuclear progress.

Netanyahu’s decision to replace Dagan—coupled with Barak’s insistence on removing popular army chief Ashkenazi in February—was seen by many as an intentional strategy to remove opponents of a military strike on Iran from positions of influence. In his last week as spy chief, Dagan infuriated Netanyahu and Barak by telling a group of journalists that Iran would not achieve military nuclear capability until 2015—a clear warning against a military strike in the near future, which he has since repeated emphatically in various forums.

The changes at the top of Israel’s security establishment, along with reports on intensive preparations for a strike, prompted U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta to visit Israel in early October. Panetta publicly stressed during his visit that the United States is “very concerned” about the Iranian threat but emphasized that countering that threat “depends on the countries working together.” Panetta demanded that Jerusalem warn Washington in advance of an attack on Iran, but he did not receive clear assurances it would, according to American diplomatic sources.

Meantime, Israeli preparations continue. In late October, six Israeli Air Force squadrons sent aircraft 1,500 miles across the Mediterranean for a joint exercise over Sardinia with the Italian and German air forces. This is just one of over a dozen such exercises that have taken place in the last three years, in which Israeli pilots have trained in flying long distances over unknown terrain and facing fighter pilots and anti-aircraft batteries of foreign forces. Fighter pilots aren’t the only component in these maneuvers: Aerial refueling planes and search-and-rescue helicopter teams also take part. The object of these exercises is clear: to prepare an air force that primarily operates in the nearby theaters of Gaza and Lebanon to undertake long-range missions.

The lieutenant colonel who commanded the most recent exercise said cryptically after returning to Israel that “there was no mention of the third circle in the exercise, but we are training over distances and preparing ourselves for all terrains so you could say that it contributes to our long-range preparedness.” The “third circle” is the current air-force euphemism for Iran. (The first circle is the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel’s immediate borders; the second circle is countries around Israel.)

***

Ever since Saddam Hussein launched 39 Iraqi Scud missiles against Israel during the Gulf War in 1991, the Israeli Air Force has been preparing for one primary mission, a long-range attack against weapons of mass destruction aimed at the Jewish state. The lion’s share of Israel’s defense budget has been devoted to this. Five new squadrons of the most advanced versions of the F-15 and F-16, specifically modified for the long-range strike roles, have been acquired since 1998. And the numbers of spy satellites, aerial tankers, unmanned reconnaissance drones, and search-and-rescue helicopters have all tripled in the past two decades.

“Ninety-percent of our equipment and training is for a much larger war. The fighter jets weren’t built for attacking Gaza or even Lebanon; the real war is where we will have to prove ourselves,” one squadron commander recently admitted to me. The air force is eager to do just that. As one brigadier general told me last year, “Come the hour, I will have pilots breaking down my office door demanding to go on the mission.” And come that hour, when at least some of Israel’s defense chiefs are expected to counsel against a strike, it will be the Air Force commander, Maj. Gen. Ido Nehushtan, the son of members of the Irgun, who will give Netanyahu the necessary backing, promising the decision-makers that an air-strike on Iran will succeed.

Yet even the most self-confident fighter jockeys cannot ignore the scores of Israeli and American analysts claiming that Israel lacks sufficient planes and its bases are too far away to totally eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. “We have no illusions,” one air force general told me. “We will attack Iran successfully but that won’t be the end of it. Two, or three, or five years later, we will have to go back there again.”

***

The decision to go to war with Iran is not a political one. It is one of the few issues that transcends Israel’s left-right divide. Benny Begin and Moshe Yaalon, two of the most hardline right-wing ministers in the “Octet Forum,” the Israeli Cabinet’s main decision-making body, are currently opposed to an attack because they believe a military strike will cause a massive backlash from Iran and its proxies and should only be a very last resort. The motives of Netanyahu and Barak are more personal and historical than ideological. The prime minister, the son of a historian, views the Iranian issue through the prism of Jewish survival. In his view, safeguarding Israel against a nuclear threat is the generation’s duty, which has fallen to him. As leader of the opposition, from 2006 to 2009, Netanyahu constantly compared Iran to Germany circa 1938 and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler. As prime minister, he has refrained from this terminology but his perspective remains unchanged.

Barak also sees the challenge in generational terms. Two months shy of 70, he looks around and sees no one who, in his opinion, can be entrusted with Israel’s security. Israel’s great founders are gone, save for President Shimon Peres, whom Barak never rated highly (and who is against an attack on Iran). Barak is now the nation’s wise old man, the only responsible grown-up left standing. But his arrogant manner has alienated much of the public and the politicians. Divorced from the Labor party of which he was never an integral part, he leads a splinter faction that does not guarantee him re-election to the Knesset. Convinced that no one else can lead the nation in this challenge, in what could be his last year in government, he won’t let go without ensuring Israel’s security for another generation.

If there are any politics involved in the final decision to attack Iran, they won’t be Israeli. President Barack Obama is the one man who can prevent Israel from going to war. He will have two ways of doing this, if he so chooses. Come this spring, when weather conditions over Iran ensure better bombing results, if the polls indicate him winning a second term, he may have sufficient political and diplomatic clout to order Israel to desist. But in a close presidential race, with a GOP contender accusing him of going soft on Iran, Obama’s only way to block an Israeli attack on Iran would be sending the U.S. Air Force to do the job instead.

Over the years, I’ve had to sit through many such sessions, be it at Teach For America, where new recruits are required to complete a grueling regimen of diversity training, or during my first year at law school. It didn’t take me long to realize that, as a Shia-born Iranian-American in the post-Sept.11 era, I have anecdotes aplenty that, told correctly, can place me right in the sweet spot of the race-gender-class matrix. I could recount how on that dreadful September day a high-school classmate of mine in rural northern Utah yelled out, “Hey, Sohrab, I heard your people bombed New York!” Or I could mention how I’ve learned to preemptively take the tension out of the room when I sense that my Iranian background might be an issue. (“I come from the heart of the axis of evil,” I say.)

In some ways, All-American Muslim, TLC’s new reality-TV show documenting the lives of five families in the Arab enclave of Dearborn, Mich., is this culture-sharing exercise writ large. As the title suggests, the show aims to expose a broad audience to the day-to-day lives of American Muslims who, while assimilated into the culture, must nevertheless balance the various aspects of their identities. The cast of characters includes Fouad, the (literally) all-American coach of the local high-school football team; Jeff, an Irish Catholic preparing to convert to Islam, and Shadia, the heavily tattooed, self-described Muslim redneck engaged to him; Samira, Shadia’s sister, and her husband Ali, who struggle with infertility; Nina, the strong-willed wedding planner who dresses far too provocatively for Dearborn and is fed up with the town’s parochialism; Nawal, the hijab-clad, pregnant newlywed, and her Homer Simpson-esque husband, Nader; and Mike, a policeman, and his wife, Angela, a marketing executive in the auto industry.

The show’s central conceit lies in its use of standard-issue reality-television tropes to frame a community that many viewers might otherwise consider alien. The interplay between the familiar plot developments, musical cues, and confessional interviews—how will Jeff’s mom react to his conversion to Islam? Stay tuned to find out!—and the insular world of American Islam helps normalize the community.

The show deserves praise for capturing at least some of the internal debates within Western Islam, including those on marriage and conversion, head-covering, drinking, and sexuality. “If a girl is going to wear a scarf or a hijab, it is a choice that I think every Muslim woman has the right to make and does make,” Angela, the marketing executive, dressed in a tight-fitting skirt and knee-high boots, argues at one point. Nina, the spunky blond wedding planner, agrees: “Nobody can tell that I’m Muslim. I don’t wear hijab and I don’t wear a T-shirt that says, ‘I am Muslim.’ ” The more devout Nawal—who reminded me of a character straight out of the daytime Islamic guidance shows I had to endure as a child in Iran—clearly doesn’t approve of Angela and Nina opting out. “What about the people that were born into [Islam]?” she asks during a group discussion about Jeff’s conversion. “They don’t have to do it right?” Her sarcastic question is clearly directed at the liberal Nina, suggesting that she is insufficiently pious. Nina shoots her a piercing look in response.

Such exchanges reflect the very lively—and very real—tensions within American Islam, and bringing them to the cultural foreground is a valuable contribution. But the show does not go nearly far enough in terms of exposing American-Muslims’ ethnic, theological, and intellectual diversity. For one thing, most of the show’s characters are Lebanese Shia. And just as The Real Housewives of D.C. intercuts the ladies’ drama with shots of the Capitol and the White House, so does All-American Muslim establish its setting by repeatedly cutting to the Islamic Center of America, a Shi’ite place of worship—in effect implying that the mega-mosque is American Islam’s capital. The clerics who advise the characters on doctrinal matters, too, are invariably Shi’ite.

One could easily forgive this narrow sectarian snapshot of Islam in the United States were it not for the fact that Dearborn is also home to large numbers of Sunni-Arab Muslims. That All-American Muslim eschews showing these divisions could be chalked up to the nature of the medium: Explaining Islam’s centuries-old schisms on a reality TV show is not an easy task. It is nevertheless a troubling move, one that reinforces the notion of a monolithic Islam. (This sort of cultural whitewashing and oversimplification has been a misstep in the work of the Iranian-American writer Reza Aslan—who, along with filmmaker Mahyad Tousi, cofounded Boomgen Studios, which is helping to promote All-American Muslim. Earlier this year, Aslan published Tablet and Pen, a massive anthology of 20th-century Mideast literature that deliberately omitted Jewish authors and modern Israeli literature. (Tablet Magazine’s Adam Kirsch took him to task for this startling omission.)

More troubling still is the show’s overemphasis on theological matters and its overly deferential editorial attitude toward the Shia clerical class. Consider a painful scene in the second episode in which the hitherto unveiled Samira visits two imams seeking spiritual advice on her inability to get pregnant. “Of course there is no physical link between hijab and pregnancy,” the more senior cleric explains. “But according to Islam, when you have hijab … God will cooperate more with you.” The junior cleric chimes in: “So, that’s the goodness of the faith—the spirit and the body and the brain functioning together.”

If these men were, say, Catholic priests, the editors surely would have mocked them endlessly, Luis Buñuel-style. Instead, a soothing melody is heard as the superstitious hokum spills forth from these fonts of clerical wisdom. (Samira, we later learn, cannot afford in vitro fertilization. And since artificial insemination has been prohibited for her by clerical edict, she returns to the hijab in the hope of conceiving a baby.)

All-American Muslim’s drama is set against the larger backdrop of a supposedly rabid, anti-Muslim American culture. Indeed, the show seems to have been conceived as a reaction to rising Islamophobia in the United States “[We’re called] ‘towelheads,’ ” Shadia says in the pilot’s opening sequence. “They say we’re Muslim, we’re barbaric, we’re terrorists,” her brother complains. Later, we see news footage of far-right protesters howling “Muhammad was a pedophile!” at Muslims attending a business conference in Dearborn.

Yet put into a proper perspective, such grievances form less than half the picture. Indeed, perhaps despite itself, All-American Muslim showcases the many ways in which the American experience has allowed Muslims to thrive—a testament to a heritage of religious freedom that has liberated Muslims as never before. In Dearborn, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond, generations of American Muslims—from the pious to the secular-minded—have found safe and open spaces in which to explore and shape their own identities in ways that would be unthinkable for their counterparts trapped in the repressive pressure-cookers of the Mideast.

CORRECTION, Nov. 15: Reza Aslan and Mahyad Tousi’s Boomgen Studios is working on marketing for All-American Muslim. It did not develop or produce the show, as this article initially suggested. The error has been corrected.

Along with Walter B. Slocombe, who served as undersecretary of Defense for Policy under President Bill Clinton, Blackwill detailed his findings in a paper just published by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Israel: A Strategic Asset for the United States” argues that the United States not only shares national interests with the Jewish state—like preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and combating terrorism—but also reaps numerous advantages from the alliance.

The paper offers chapter and verse on Israeli contributions to the U.S. national interest. They include: Israeli counter-proliferation efforts, such as the 1981 bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility and the 2007 attack on Syria’s secret nuclear facility at al-Kibar; joint military training exercises, as well as exchanges on military doctrine; Israeli technology, like unmanned aerial systems, armored vehicle protection, defense against short-range rocket threats, and robotics; missile defense cooperation; counterterrorism and intelligence cooperation; and cyber defense. Blackwill and Slocombe conclude that the alliance is in fact so central to U.S. national interests that U.S. policymakers should find ways to further enhance cooperation with Jerusalem.

Blackwill and Slocombe’s detailed list is a unique event in the ongoing U.S. policy debate over the advisability of this bilateral relationship. Blackwill says that for all the media attention devoted to Israel, he and Slocombe were surprised to find no comprehensive account of Israel’s contribution to the U.S. national interest existed previously. “I figured I’ll just Google it,” he told me this week over the phone. “But there was no existing encompassing list. So, we went item by item, making sure we had the facts straight. We didn’t exaggerate or overstate the contribution.”

The fact that Slocombe is a Democrat and Blackwill is a pillar of the Republican policy establishment is meant to drive home the strategic nature of their argument. According to Blackwill, the alliance has nothing to do with who’s in the White House, whether the Israeli prime minister is Labor or Likud, or how much movement there is on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “It is meant to be a grander argument,” he says. “National interests don’t change, except over the very long term.”

What has changed—in a positive way—is Israel’s ability to advance U.S. national interests. The national-interest case for Israel would have been harder to make 20 years ago, argues Blackwill. That shifted as “defense cooperation in the ’90s began to be enhanced,” he told me. “It’s increased greatly over the last few decades.”

Though Blackwill served as Condeleezza Rice’s National Security Council deputy for Iraq during 2003 and 2004—in Rice’s recently published memoir she calls him “one of the best policy engineers I had ever known”—it would be a mistake to identify him with the famously pro-Israel neoconservative camp of Republican policymakers. Rather, Blackwill traces his intellectual roots to Henry Kissinger, for whom he worked as a staffer during the 1973 Arab-Israeli crisis. And it was Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s secretary of State during that crisis, who was perhaps the first Republican policymaker to understand Israel’s strategic value.

Where President Harry Truman felt a moral responsibility and emotional attachment to Israel, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican commander-in-chief to deal with the newly formed Jewish state, saw Israel is a strategic liability. He believed the Arabs were offended and alienated by America’s closeness to Israel. Eisenhower eventually came to a different understanding—Arabs’ hostility to Israel was far less crucial to the region’s dynamics than he previously thought—but, more significantly, he recognized that the Middle East was a key venue to defeat the Soviet Union.

This was Kissinger’s starting point. With the 1973 war, Kissinger saw that Soviet arms in the hands of Egypt and Syria could not be allowed to triumph over Israel, Washington’s client. During the course of the war, Kissinger came to understand that Cairo could no longer afford the cost of being Moscow’s ally. In order to enable Sadat to jump sides and join the American camp, Kissinger had to prevent the Egyptians from being humiliated and give Sadat a defeat that he could sell to his people as a victory. A peace treaty between Israel and the largest Arab state would both neutralize Moscow’s role in the Middle East and establish Washington as the undisputed power broker in the region. With Israel backed unconditionally by the United States, the Arabs could no longer afford to wage war against the Jewish state, he believed. And if they wanted anything from Israel, then only Washington, as Kissinger understood, could deliver those concessions.

As Martin Kramer explained in his 2006 essay “The American Interest,” the Pax Americana in the eastern Mediterranean was a tremendous accomplishment for U.S. policymakers. At $3 billion in aid annually, Israel’s friendship is a bargain. If the United States had an Israel in the Persian Gulf, another powerful ally it could count on to do its heavy lifting and keep the United States from having to land troops, Washington might well have avoided three decades worth of trouble in that part of the Middle East, from Saddan Hussein to al-Qaida to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The fact that Israel’s strategic value is lost on so many American journalists, analysts, and policymakers is largely a function of dogma, Blackwill argues. Given that so many American groups, from Christian evangelicals and the American Jewish community to the oil lobby, have a position on the U.S.-Israel relationship, it’s hardly surprising the issue generates heated emotions that tend to make the subject impervious to analysis. This affects American decision-making and public diplomacy. For instance, the U.S. Department of State, Blackwill’s home shop, is certainly not known for sending its foreign-service officers out to the Middle East to challenge Arab officials and journalists every time they say something negative about the Jewish state. The U.S.-Israel relationship really does make it harder for American diplomats to do their job—and so they just keep their mouths shut and internalize the Arab argument against the alliance.

But the hazards of the diplomatic profession shouldn’t obscure the facts of the matter for U.S. policymakers. If the alliance with Israel really is a liability to U.S. national interests, there should be concrete evidence to back it up. “We tried to identify episodes when you could plausibly argue that Arab governments exacted a price from the U.S. for its alliance with Israel.” Blackwill said. He and Slocombe found only one example: the Arab oil embargo after the 1973 war.

“Without doubt that embargo was related to the U.S. re-supply during the ’73 Arab-Israeli war,” Blackwill said. “We thought, ‘Well, there have to be other examples. We’re just not looking hard enough.’ But to our surprise, we couldn’t find another example from that instance to today.”

Why, then, is the notion that the United States pays a price for its alliance with Israel such a prevalent theme? “People confuse what Arabs say and what Arab governments do,” Blackwill explained. “No doubt Arabs complain very genuinely about our relationship with Israel. They don’t like it. And it’s not surprising then that U.S. ambassadors send these negative Arab views back to Washington. However, our piece doesn’t argue that the American relationship with Israel is popular in the Arab world. Our approach was to gauge the question analytically, and ask, what action have Arab governments taken? And it turns out that the policies of Arab governments toward the United States are dominated by their overall perceptions of their national interests, not by the U.S.-Israel relationship.”

For instance, as Blackwill and Slocombe speculate in their paper, would the Saudis lower their oil prices “if Washington entered into a sustained crisis with Israel over the Palestine issue during which the bilateral relationship went into steep systemic decline?” The answer, of course, is no. As is the case with all rational actors, what matters most to the Arabs are their own national interests. Yet Blackwill acknowledges that the Arab Spring may change the equation insofar as it empowers potential populist movements that look at the U.S.-Israel relationship from a very different perspective than their governments have.

In any case, the core of Blackwill and Slocombe’s argument is that the alliance with Israel is vital to U.S. interests regardless of how the Arabs see it, or how it’s interpreted by any given American administration or Israeli government. “Israel’s people and politicians have a deeply entrenched pro-American outlook that is uniformly popular with the Israeli people,” they write in their paper. “Thus, Israel’s support of U.S. national interests is woven tightly into the fabric of Israeli democratic political culture, a crucial characteristic that is presently not found in any other nation in the greater Middle East.”

• It is looking more and more likely that the United States will not even need to exercise its Security Council veto to prevent full Palestinian membership in the United Nations. [NYT]

• Israeli naval ships have made contact with the two Gaza-bound flotilla-type boats and informed them the blockade will be enforced. As of early this morning, they were only about 50 miles from shore. Meanwhile, there will likely be more of these. [Haaretz]

• The United States is backing away from earlier plans, made in the wake of the uncovering of the alleged assassination plot, to impose stricter sanctions on Iran’s central bank. [LAT]

• A man (now in custody) threatened the wife and daughter of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. [AP/Vos Iz Neias?]

• Gilad Shalit underwent surgery to remove shrapnel he got during his 2006 abduction. (Which means he’s needed it these past five-plus years.) [Haaretz]

• When Iran launched its first air strikes in 1980 to kick off the decade-long Iran-Iraq War, Hussein insisted to his advisers, “This is Israel.” It wasn’t.

• Hussein worried that Israel would attack his nuclear facility at Osirak. Less than a year later, Israel did.

• To protect that facility, he had it fortified with many sandbags. The sandbags were no match for Israel’s, er, bombs.

• Hussein’s paranoia led him to execute the Iranian journalist Farzad Bazoft for allegedly spying for Israel, a fiasco that led to Britain’s withdrawing its ambassador and, indirectly, the first Gulf War.

• “Once Iraq walks out victorious, there will not be any Israel,” Hussein said. “Technically, they are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq.” No word on whether Israel has accepted the dead man’s vindication as a compliment.

Archive Offers Glimpse Inside the Mind of Hussein [NYT]

It’s strange the White House would miss an opportunity to pose as Israel’s worried and protective friend and ally, especially facing a presidential election campaign that some worry is losing Jewish support and money. After all, administration figures like Vice President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta can’t insist strongly enough that Israel is isolated from the rest of the world and that the United States is the only one in its corner.

Amid all the different theories concerning the Iran plot—that the Iranians aren’t really behind it because they’re too smart, or that it was orchestrated by a rogue element of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards looking to embarrass Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—it is perhaps most useful to look at this recent effort as the final test Iran will face before it gets a nuclear weapon. Seen this way, it is clear that the White House wouldn’t want to highlight Israel’s spot in Iran’s crosshairs, because no matter how many times President Barack Obama tells Israeli officials and Jewish audiences that an Iranian nuclear bomb would be unacceptable, his administration’s real policy position has just been exposed. A demand for more sanctions against Tehran in response to an operation intended to slaughter hundreds of American allies in the U.S. capital—in a series of attacks that would have also caused hundreds of American casualties—makes it clear to everyone, especially the Iranians, that Washington isn’t going to do anything serious about stopping Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.

Because Washington doesn’t want to do anything about Iran, it has little choice but to ignore it—or deny its machinations. Let’s look at the Iranian record in Iraq, and how former and current U.S. officials chose to explain it away. In 2007, Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he doubted that the Iranian government knew about the Iranian-manufactured IEDs killing American soldiers. The same year, Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and a National Security Council staffer under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, claimed that the “The involvement of these outside actors”—that is, Iran-backed militias—“is not likely to be a major driver of violence” in Iraq. And most recently, Biden told a veterans group last summer that “Iranian influence in Iraq is minimal. It’s been greatly exaggerated.”

This gives rise to the notion that the Iranians are endowed with supernatural powers that allow them to wage operations around the world so clever and sophisticated in their planning and execution that they barely show any fingerprints. But it is not Washington’s lack of evidence that creates this idea; rather it is absence of will.

The 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the attack of the U.S. embassy there the year before, as well as the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, all bore the imprint of the Islamic Republic. The 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy in Iran and the 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie clearly did. Indeed, the whole point of Tehran’s policy of terror is to lay claim to its actions and dare the United States to respond—which Washington doesn’t. What Ayatollah Khomeini said about the embassy hostage crisis more than 30 years ago still holds true: “The Americans can’t do a damn thing about it.” Admitting Iran’s involvement in repeated acts of terror would require the United States to act—something American policymakers believe that we are unable to do.

But the reality is that the United States can do something about it, if Washington wanted to. American taxpayers would be rightly aggrieved that our defense budget is so high if our elected leaders can’t stop an adversary that speedboats to harass a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf and includes Toyota pick-up trucks in its order of battle. Surely the far-superior American military is capable of bringing Iran’s armed forces to heel.

The problem is that Obama’s White House, like George W. Bush’s, fears that taking too active a role against Iran and its assets will put U.S. military personnel at risk of Iranian retaliation in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to some U.S. intelligence estimates, Shiite Iran is responsible for far more American deaths and injuries in America’s two Middle East combat theaters than al-Qaida or other Sunni factions. That means that American strategists, civilian and military, no longer consider the U.S. military a deterrent to Iranian actions; rather, the presence of American troops in theaters where the Iranians also operate has effectively deterred the United States from taking action against Tehran.

U.S. involvement in the Middle East and Washington’s policy of not confronting Iran about its openly aggressive behavior have created a situation in which our troops are now effectively being held hostage, a situation that Iran underlines with each new act of aggression and terror. Which is why U.S. policymakers cannot recognize the pending withdrawal from Iraq—or what is effectively the liberation of many thousands of American hostages—as an opportunity to go after Iran. Instead, Washington will continue to wage clandestine operations against Tehran—like killing Iranian nuclear scientists and sabotaging Iranian centrifuges with a computer worm. None of those operations will stop the Islamic Republic from getting the bomb—rather, that secret war, presumably conducted in tandem with Israel, is meant only to deter the Jewish state from attacking Iran in earnest.

Yes, the Iranians hate the Saudis, who reciprocate the sentiment, and the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir, targeted in the disrupted plot, seems especially detested by the Islamic Republic. As the WikiLeaks cables showed, it was al-Jubeir who reminded U.S. diplomats that Saudi King Abdullah “told you to cut off the head of the snake,” meaning Iran. The point of the Iranian plot was to show that the Americans are incapable of protecting their allies, even in the U.S. capital. But as mad as the Saudis are at Washington for not doing anything about the Iranians, sometime down the road they’ll be prepared to grit their teeth and cut a bargain with their foe. There is no such deal in the offing for the Jewish state.

More to the point, the Iranians recognize that unlike Saudi Arabia, Israel is capable of doing something about the Islamic Republic’s ambitions. In the last five years, Jerusalem has waged war against two of Tehran’s clients, Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 and Hamas in the winter of 2008-09. Also, it’s worth remembering that the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1994 attack on a Jewish community center there were retaliations for Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah’s then-leader Abbas Mussawi. (Iran and Hezbollah left their fingerprints on those operations, too. The issue in Argentina was not insufficient evidence but police and prosecutorial incompetence.)

If the only country able and willing to go after Iran’s nuclear program is Israel, the only one who is capable of stopping the Israelis, Tehran realizes, is the United States. And so Iran and the United States now find themselves in one of the Middle East’s oddest alliances, with the United States unwittingly aiding Iran in its effort to get the bomb. If this happens, Tehran will use this new weapon to remake the political map of the Middle East in ways that are very unlikely to benefit the United States, and will directly threaten the survival of its closest ally.