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Obama Misses the
Mark on Iranian Anti-Semitism
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The President himself, apparently stung by criticism
that his approach to Iran is facilitating rather than preventing its path to
the bomb and that he bears primary responsibility for the tensions in
American-Israeli relations, initiated this discussion when he recently gave
an extensive interview to Atlantic magazine
journalist Jeffrey Goldberg on May 21. Then, on May 22, the President spoke
at Adas Israel, a Conservative Washington, D.C. synagogue whose congregants
include many of the city's politics and policy leaders. There, the President spoke of "unbreakable bonds" and a
"friendship that cannot be broken" between the United States and
Israel. He said he was "interested in a deal that blocks every single
one of Iran's pathways to a nuclear weapon — every single path." The
President eloquently recalled the role American Jews played in the Civil
Rights Movement and spoke of "the values we share."
A week later, foreign policy analyst Michael Doran,
whose excellent commentary about Iran I have discussed previously in this blog, wrote a "Letter to My Liberal Jewish
Friends" in which he argued that the existence of shared values, though
important, was not the key issue. It was, instead, the necessary criticism of Obama's policies towards Iran's
nuclear program.
In the interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, the President finally laid out in
public for the first time his view of the role of anti-Semitism in the
government in Tehran. As a historian who has written a great deal about
anti-Semitism, I welcome this terribly belated public discussion of
anti-Semitism in the American foreign policy world. A year ago almost to the
day, on June 2, 2014, I published "Taking Iran's Anti-Semitism Seriously" in the American
Interest magazine. Adam Garfinkle, that journal's fine editor, combines
an insider's grasp of US foreign relations with an understanding of the
nature of anti-Semitism, which he discussed in an essay in 2012. In my essay, I wrote:
The scholarship on the
history of anti-Semitism hasn't yet had a significant impact on the policy
discussions in Washington about Iran. Perhaps too many of our policymakers,
politicians, and analysts still labor under the mistaken idea that radical
anti-Semitism is merely another form of prejudice or, worse, an
understandable (and hence excusable?) response to the conflict between
Israel, the Arab states, and the Palestinians. In fact it is something far
more dangerous, and far less compatible with a system of nuclear deterrence,
which assumes that all parties place a premium on their own survival. Iran's
radical anti-Semitism is not in the slightest bit rational; it is a paranoid
conspiracy theory that proposes to make sense (or rather nonsense) of the
world by claiming that the powerful and evil "Jew" is the driving
force in global politics. Leaders who attribute enormous evil and power to
the 13 million Jews in the world and to a tiny Middle Eastern state with
about eight million citizens have demonstrated that they don't have a suitable
disposition for playing nuclear chess."
On April 6 I returned to these themes in this blog:
"The Iran Deal and Anti-Semitism." Here I expressed
concern about Obama's reference to "the practical streak" in the
Iranian government. So I was very pleased to see that Goldberg had decided to
raise precisely this issue in his now much-discussed—within some
circles–interview with the President. Goldberg thought it was difficult to
negotiate with people who are "captive to a conspiratorial anti-Semitic
worldview not because they hold offensive views, but" in his words
"because they hold ridiculous views." Obama responded as follows:
Well the fact that you
are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn't preclude you from being interested in
survival. It doesn't preclude you from being rational about the need to keep
your economy afloat; it doesn't preclude you from making strategic decisions
about how you stay in power; and so the fact that the supreme leader is
anti-Semitic doesn't mean that this overrides all of his other
considerations."
In reply to Goldberg's oblique comment that
anti-Semitic European leaders had made irrational decisions, Obama stated:
They may make
irrational decisions with respect to discrimination, with respect to trying
to use anti-Semitic rhetoric as an organizing tool. At the margins, where the
costs are low, they may pursue policies based on hatred as opposed to
self-interest. But the costs here are not low, and what we've been very clear
[about] to the Iranian regime over the past six years is that we will
continue to ratchet up the costs, not simply for their anti-Semitism, but
also for whatever expansionist ambitions they may have. That's what the
sanctions represent. That's what the military option I've made clear I
preserve represents. And so I think it is not at all contradictory to say
that there are deep strains of anti-Semitism in the core regime, but that
they also are interested in maintaining power, having some semblance of
legitimacy inside their own country, which requires that they get themselves
out of what is a deep economic rut that we've put them in, and on that basis
they are then willing and prepared potentially to strike an agreement on their
nuclear program."
Because Goldberg spoke vaguely about "European
leaders," the President either did not have to or did not choose that
moment to speak about his understanding of the role of anti-Semitism in the
Nazi regime and during the Holocaust. That is unfortunate, because it
seems—to this historian at least—that his grasp of the subject leaves
something to be desired.
The consensus among the numerous scholars who have
worked on the subject is that for the Nazis, anti-Semitism was not primarily
a form of discrimination or an organizing tool. It was an ideology that
justified mass murder and did so not for the ulterior purpose of organizing
others but because they believed that exterminating the Jews in the world
would save Germany from destruction and eliminate the primary source of evil
in the world. The extermination was carried out for the sake of these
beliefs. Nor was this ideology at the margins of Nazi policy; it was at its
center.
The President's comments to Goldberg raise questions
about whether the President fully or accurately understands the link between
ideology and policy during the Holocaust. As I wrote in The Jewish Enemy,
the Nazi leadership interpreted the entire Second World War through the prism
of anti-Semitic paranoia in such a way as to interpret the war as one,
incredibly, launched by "world Jewry" to exterminate the German
people. Anti-Semitism then was a key interpretive framework that the Nazis
employed to misunderstand the political realities of the time. If the
President understands this dimension of anti-Semitism it was not evident in
his interview with Goldberg.
Of course, Nazi Germany is gone and Hitler is dead.
So a policy question facing any President of the United States now and in
years to come remains the following: What is the place and the nature of
anti-Semitism in the Iranian regime, and what impact does this ideology have
on its foreign and military policy toward the United States and its allies,
including Israel?
For the first time in his six years in office, the
President publicly acknowledged what scholarly observers of Iran, such as Tel
Aviv University's Meir
Litvak, among others, have pointed out for the past two decades, namely
that indeed "there are deep strains of anti-Semitism in the core
regime." Aside from the obvious rejections of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's
Holocaust-denial circus, this may have been the first time that any official
of the United States government during the Obama years has said anything
remotely approaching the President's remark about "deep strains...in the
core regime." On the contrary, during this era of euphemism, even
pointing to the regime's radical anti-Semitism could raise suspicions of
"Islamophobia."
So President Obama's long-overdue acknowledgment of
what has been obvious to informed observers for decades is most welcome. Yet,
in the same sentence in which he acknowledged this inconvenient truth, he
suggested that the ideological imperative would give way to practical and
rational interests in maintaining power. In so doing, he diminishes the
impact of the ayatollahs' radical anti-Semitism on the whole spectrum of
Iran's foreign and military policy.
On May 25, two of the President's most astute critics
who write regularly on foreign affairs in widely-read venues took up the
issue of his understanding of anti-Semitism in the Iranian regime. The Wall
Street Journal's Bret Stephens published a column entitled "The Rational Ayatollah Hypothesis," in which he
asked what self-interest drove a regime to deny the Holocaust or how it could
"shore up its domestic legitimacy by preaching a state ideology that
makes the country a global pariah?" He rightly pointed out that
"the Jew-hatred of the Iranian regime is of the cosmic variety: Jews, or
Zionists, [are] the agents of everything that is wrong in this world, from
poverty and drug addiction to conflict and genocide. If Zionism is the root
of evil, then anti-Zionism is the greatest good—a cause to which one might be
prepared to sacrifice a great deal, up to and including one's own life."
And Walter Russell Mead, an editor-at-large of the American Interest
magazine, posted "Obama, Iran and Anti-Semitism," in which he wrote:
There are many forms
of prejudice and bigotry, and they are all twisted and ugly, but Jew hatred
may well be the most damaging to the hater's ability to understand the world.
Jew hatred takes the form of a belief that conspiratorial groups of
super-empowered Jews run the world in secret, cleverly manipulating the news
media and the intelligentsia to hide the truth of their control. Someone who
really believes this isn't just a heart-blighted ignorant boor; someone who
believes this, lives in a house of mirrors, incapable of understanding the
way the world actually works.
For Stephens, Mead, and historically informed
contemporary observers, the radical anti-Semitism that lies at the core of
the Iranian regime is not primarily or only a prejudice or, to use the more
common term, a kind of racism that rests on distorted and false pejorative
views of Jews. Rather, the ayatollahs' anti-Semitism is of the radical sort
that in the past led both to an absurdly irrational yet deadly
misunderstanding of world realities and to the Holocaust. It is an
anti-Semitism that, in Saul Friedlander's terms, produced the era of
extermination following an era of persecution. The views the President
offered to Jeffrey Goldberg indicate either that he does not understand the
nature of radical anti-Semitism, or does not believe that the ayatollahs are
sincere in what they have written and said since Khomeini's exile writings in
the 1970s and the assertions that he and his and his successors have repeated
since coming to power in 1979. He appears to assume a moderation and
pragmatism in Tehran that is belied both by that regime's core beliefs and
its actions.
The policy implications of these differing
understandings of Iran's anti-Semitism are profound. If anti-Semitism is a
form or prejudice and an organizing tool that allows for the kind of
rationality we have witnessed in other nuclear powers such as the Soviet
Union and China, then a policy of containment and deterrence of a nuclear
Iran makes a certain sense. Michael Doran has made a cogent argument that
this is, in fact, the policy that the Obama administration is pursuing. If,
on the other hand, the anti-Semitism of the Iranian regime shares the
qualities of irrationality that we historians of the Holocaust have
documented in Nazi Germany, then a policy of prevention or preemption is
essential because nothing could be worse than an Iran with nuclear weapons.
As I have written before this is not a matter of a left and right. It is
matter of how seriously one takes the Iranians at their word and how one
assesses the connection between ideology and policy in this instance.
Although President Obama's grasp of the history of
anti-Semitism may be imperfect, his recent remarks signal an important shift
in Washington: At last, the discussion of the nature and meaning of radical
anti-Semitism has moved from the world of scholarship into the public debate
about US foreign policy. The Iranian leaders may still insist on conditions
that are so untenable that the President will be unable to present a deal to
Congress by June 30th. If a deal does emerge, Congress will then have thirty
days to examine and debate the agreement. Should that occur, I hope that the
members of Congress will raise the issue of Iran's anti-Semitism not only as
a form of prejudice but as a fundamentally irrational world view that is
incompatible with a system of containment and deterrence. In preparation for
that debate, the various members of the foreign policy scene in and out of
government, in the think tanks and in the media, would be well advised to
spend these early summer weeks reading the books and essays that we
historians have written about the longest hatred as well as the above
mentioned essays by journalists and policy analysts in order to gain an
accurate understanding of its current manifestation in Teheran.
Jeffrey Herf is a professor of
History at the University of Maryland-College Park and a fellow at the Middle
East Forum. His recent works include: Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (2009) and
The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust
(2006). |
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