Netanyahu's real motivation: Column
Just when it seemed that President Obama was getting close to concluding a deal with Iran — a country whose leadership has denied the Holocaust, called to wipe Israel off the map and was developing nuclear capabilities — Israel found a way to intercede.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who had said that the interim agreement with Iran was a historic mistake, is now joining the Republican Congress in an attempt to force Obama's hand or undermine the negotiations altogether. Insisting on addressing Congress on Tuesday, despite growing criticism, Netanyahu repeats that the deal taking shape is endangering Israel's existence.
Is Netanyahu playing politics two weeks before competitive elections back home? Certainly. Is it a personal vendetta against Obama? Maybe. But there is something else at work here: how the Jewish state has processed, or failed to process, the trauma of the Holocaust.
In the aftermath of World War II, Israeli foreign policy rested on the idea that if you want to make history, you must forget history. This idea allowed the government to negotiate with Germany over diplomatic relations and financial restitution on the basis of self-interest rather than emotions. It resulted in a tremendous economic growth and greater security for the fledgling state.
Holocaust privatization
But then came the Adolf Eichmann trial of 1961, bringing home to all Israelis the horrific personal stories of the survivors and ushering in what historian Hanna Yablonka called "the privatization of the Holocaust." Starting then, Israel gradually embraced the opposite idea, the notion that those who are unwilling to remember history are doomed to repeat it, as the organizing principle of its foreign policy.
This also led to greater prosperity and security for Israel.
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But whereas the earlier philosophy was based on Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's practical vision and the cold calculus of a few professional policymakers, the latter was based on a set of powerful emotions experienced by the whole nation. Due to the language barrier and the general intensity and vitality of life in Israel, foreign observers often fail to grasp the extent to which the trauma of the Holocaust has penetrated every aspect of Israeli life.
As a result of decades of intensive educational programs, the Holocaust has become the central building block of the national identity of many Israelis. A 1992 study among university students studying to become teachers found that close to 80% identified with the statement, "We are all Holocaust survivors." And in present-day Israel, hardly a day goes by without some mention of Holocaust in the media.
Underlying this national preoccupation are the twin emotions of anxiety and rage, along with the refusal or inability to tolerate any feelings of helplessness. "Never again will Jews go like lambs to the slaughter" is a phrase inculcated in the mind of every Israeli child.
Psychological burden
More than anything else, it is this psychological burden that will determine Israeli reaction to the West's negotiations with Iran. If the Obama administration can reduce Israeli anxiety, it will mitigate the rage, the corollary of which is the call to bomb Iran. But there is no reducing the anxiety without addressing the underlying fear of helplessness.
Translation: If the "breakout time" assumed by a potential agreement is sufficient for America but not Israel, the Americans must formally and publicly commit to Israel to use military power as soon as Western or verifiable Israeli intelligence detect an Iranian violation.
Alternatively, the U.S. should provide Israel with the military capability it would need to strike Iran within a mutually agreed upon breakout time. Only with such ironclad guarantees for a pre-emptive strike will Israel be able to tolerate inaction without experiencing the kind of helplessness it equates with the passive submission by the European Jews to the Nazi machine.
In the absence of such guarantees, any ambiguities inherent in a possible accord with Iran will inevitably collide with the Jewish state's mantra of "never again," and regardless of the consequences — to self and others — the Israeli Defense Forces will spring into action.
And should Netanyahu succeed in scuttling the negotiations, the question would no longer be whether there would be war, but rather when — and who, America or Israel — would go to war.
Alon Gratch is an Israeli-American clinical psychologist, organizational consultant and the author of the forthcoming bookThe Israeli Mind, to be released in September.
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