The single most serious risk to Israel, as the former Iranian president Akbar Rafsanjani once put it, is that: “The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything, however it would only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.” Iran’s expanding nuclear capabilities (and its opacity about them) should alarm the Western world a lot more than apparently it does.
But the dangers to Israel from moves at the I.C.C. — or, for that matter, from campus protests, boycott and divestment efforts or various kinds of arms embargoes — are minimal. Contrary to some opinions, Israelis are not “settler-colonialists.” Jews believe they are originally from the land of Israel because they are. And Zionism, far from being a colonialist project, is the oldest anticolonialist struggle in history, starting during the Roman era, if not the Babylonian Captivity before it.
Like Iran, Israel still has profound domestic vulnerabilities, only some of which came to the fore in the months of protest over judicial reform that preceded Oct. 7. That’s to say nothing about right-wing extremism, the resistance of the ultra-Orthodox to fulfill their civic obligations or the ultimate question of an eventual Palestinian state. But none of those need put the deepest convictions of Zionism at stake: that Jews have the right to rule themselves as a sovereign state in their original homeland.
For Iran’s rulers, the risks are graver. They’ve always claimed to be the vanguard of an Islamic revolution, but they seem to have forgotten that revolutions have a history of consuming their own. Iran’s people, by and large, don’t want to be Islamists. But Israel wants, and will fight, to remain itself.
Hãy là người đầu tiên trả lời thảo luận chung này.