End the Iran Deal Delusions

If you’d ever tolerated or participated in snickering at Jewish communal loyalty and religious feeling, or the persistent effort to sap Jewish morale, Oct. 7 was the day the pinch came. You may have been surprised to discover since then that it is, in the end, impossible for you to join in the sabotage. But where did all these memories of Hebrew school, Birthright, and your grandmother suddenly come from? Since when did the sight of a mezuzah on a doorpost, or burning Shabbos candles in a window, make your heart stop? What are these marks that such apparently trivial things have left on you?

And where have they been all these years?

It’s a question worth asking now, because among the more obvious explanations for Jewish discomfort with our own particularisms (assimilation, liberalism, secularism, and so on), there is another which we haven’t begun to come to terms with yet.

When it came to the Iran deal, there were two types of supporters. One was open to testing the hypothesis that by trading sanctions relief for a temporary stop to Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the United States could strengthen the “moderates” in Tehran at the expense of the “hardliners,” bring Iran “in from the cold,” and oblige it to share power and responsibility for the Middle East with traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel—thereby enabling the United States to resign its policing role in the region and withdraw from its endless wars.

The other type of supporter saw the Iran deal through the lens of American domestic politics. The reason the United States kept getting dragged into Middle Eastern wars even under Democratic administrations, the theory went, was that Jewish organizational power and financial resources gave the “Israel lobby” the whip hand in Democratic foreign policy. To stop American Jews from persuading Washington to fight Israel’s wars, you needed to break their stranglehold on Democratic politics. By placing Iran’s nuclear weapons program under the protection of a U.S.-backed international agreement, and realigning U.S. interests in the Middle East with the most credible anti-Israel force in the region, the United States could extricate itself from its alliance with Israel, which—along with the “Israel lobby” and the “Jewish vote”—would cease to be politically relevant.

What united these two types of support for the Iran deal was not necessarily ideology or partisanship or even loyalty to Barack Obama. It was a misconception, to put it generously, about basic realities.

The first type of supporter failed to grasp that Iran is interested in revolutionary hegemony, not stability or cooperation, and that its homicidal designs on Jews and Americans are literal, not rhetorical. The second type didn’t understand, or refused to accept, that Jews control neither Democratic nor Republican foreign policy, both of which frequently violate the security interests and ignore the pleadings of the Jewish state.

For a while, you could perhaps be forgiven for holding the first of these two delusions, though the work of conflating them was done by Obama himself. From 2013-16, the president, his Secretary of State John Kerry, and other administration officials frequently deployed antisemitic conceits to tar opponents of the Iran deal as “donors” and “lobbyists” with loyalties that ran up against the interests of their own country. You either supported the Iran deal, went the PR blitz, or you supported war. And if you didn’t support the Iran deal, you were the “same people” who led America into war in Iraq.

Never mind that a plurality of American Jews supported the Iran deal while non-Jewish Americans opposed it by a margin of 2 to 1. If you didn’t support it, you were a “Likudnik” in thrall to a foreign power. The elected officials representing your interests—especially the Democratic ones—made for an “unseemly spectacle,” as The New York Times put it, “of lawmakers siding with a foreign leader against their own commander in chief.”

It is difficult to overstate the change in fortunes this implied for American Jews. Until then, being an American had always meant having more than one identity, and belonging to a subgroup with its own special relationship to the United States. The whole point of America is to be free to identify as a Jew—or Irish, or Korean, or Sikh—without relinquishing your right to your identity as an American, which in turn serves as a bridge between you and other communities of Americans. Such conditions, almost unique in the world, are why the American moment has been one of the brightest spots in 3,000 years of Jewish history.

America as a whole has historically benefited from these conditions, too—the lucky recipient of the endowments of its various subgroups. In the case of the Jews, the oldest and most hunted witnesses to history, one of our contributions to American society has been a heightened threat perception—the ability to sense danger, sometimes earlier than others. In the case of the Iran deal, the danger was as much to American power as it was to Jewish security.

And yet at the moment of peril, our radar was off. It had been shut off. By warning America’s Jews not to indulge our particularisms, the authors of the Iran deal helped neuter our ability—insofar as we had the power at all—to effectively warn our country off the disastrous path which eventually led to Oct. 7, and to the brink of wider war.

It should be easier now, however, to see these people for what they are. Those who like to put down your American patriotism and your Jewish communal pride, who weigh Zionism against racial and theocratic autocracy, who balance the genocide of European Jewry against the suffering in Gaza and the United States against the most perverted imperialist powers of the past—these are not your “allies,” and we are not theirs. They are demented freaks who can’t comprehend the most ordinary human sentiments and have never had their faces shoved in realities. The question, for God’s sake, is not, “Can you make a plausible case for détente with an antisemitic dictatorship bent on shattering American power and eradicating Israel?” The question is, “Do you honestly believe that argument? Could you put up with Israel’s destruction, or couldn’t you?”

From now on, we would all do well to be certain on that point.