Thoughts on the Iran-Israel Conflict

As we follow the conflict between Israel and Iran by the hour over the past week, many of us may recall a time before 1979 when Israel and Iran were close allies. Back then, there were regular El Al flights between Teheran and Tel Aviv. Sixty percent of the oil that fueled Israel came from Iran through a discreet pipeline. Israeli intelligence trained Iranian security forces back then. Israeli agriculture experts aided farmers in Iran and many Iranian students came to Israel to study. The connection of the Jewish people with the ancient Persians goes back to Cyrus the Great, who had conquered Babylonia and allowed the Jewish exiles to return to their homeland should they choose to do so. The Sassanian Empire in Persia became a center for Jewish life. It was here that the Babylonian Talmud was produced. Prior to the revolution in 1979, some 80,000 Jews lived in Iran and thrived there. Synagogues operated freely, kosher food was available, and Jewish schools flourished.

In 1979, all of that changed, with the toppling of the Shah’s regime and the rise of the militant Shi’ite government of Ayatollah Khomeini who returned from exile and established the current regime. Within days, Iran cut ties with Israel, the former Israeli embassy was turned over to Yasser Arafat, and the past era of cooperation of allies was ended abruptly. Khomeini minced no words, “We must all rise to destroy Israel.” Israel was now characterized as the “Little Satan” alongside the American “Great Satan.” The Palestinian cause now became sacred to the new regime. Khomeini’s successor, the current Supreme Leader Khamenei has built on that legacy. He has repeatedly described Israel in pathological terms, calling for its eradication and denying the legitimacy of Jewish self-determination. He went far beyond opposing the state to denying the right of the Jewish people to exist. In spite of this, some 10,000 Jews still live in Iran, continuing the strong ties between the Jewish people and the Persian people which go back over millennia. We can’t deny the Shah’s faults as an authoritarian dictator, but clearly, he did an enormous amount to build up the Iranian nation and to ally himself with Israel and other western states.

Aside from the issue of the creation of a nuclear weapon, it should be clear to Israel’s critics who might claim the current conflict as an unjustified attack upon another sovereign nation, that Iran has been waging this irrational war for decades, primarily through its proxies including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis among others. The current conflict brings the battle front home to Iran. For such a regime to become a nuclear threat not only to Israel, but to all the surrounding nations, to the whole world, is totally unacceptable. The people of Israel, in spite of the counter-attacks by a weakened Iran and additional casualties incurred by bombs that have gotten through Israel’s defenses, seem to be united in the current effort.

We offer our prayers for the safety of all those in Israel and hope for a speedy resolution of the situation. However, already, we have seen world media accepting the inflated casualty counts produced by the Iranian regime just as they have with the false narratives coming out of Gaza. The Ayatollah has shut down any outside sources of information that could verify the numbers of dead and wounded and there is no reason to believe that anything they report is accurate. No one is denying that there are casualties of war, but we do not have to accept inflated numbers designed purely to elicit sympathy for a decidedly unsympathetic regime from a gullible world.

My colleague in Jerusalem, Rabbi Professor David Golinkin, President of the Schechter Institutes, Inc. and President Emeritus of the Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies, issued a d’var Torah this week linking the story of the spies in this week’s Torah portion to later events in Jewish history up to the current war. In the parashah, Moses sends twelve princes of the tribes into the land of Canaan to bring back a report prior to the entrance of the Israelites to the Promised Land. On one hand, they affirm the words of God that it is a land “flowing with milk and honey.” Yet, on the other hand, they announce that the people of this land are powerful, the cities are fortified and very large. They conclude that we cannot attack that people for it is stronger than we are. All the men are giants and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves and so we must have looked to them. This was the mixed report of ten of twelve spies. The other two, Joshua and Caleb, had a very different viewpoint. “Let us by all means, go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it.”

Rabbi Golinkin admits that the ten spies were correct, conquering the land inhabited by such strong people was an impossible task for this band of former slaves who had just left Egypt. Caleb and Joshua were crazy, but as it turns out, they were absolutely correct. The former slaves had to die out in the wilderness over the next 40 years and then Joshua would lead the people into the land flowing with milk and honey and Caleb would survive to settle in Chevron near the tombs of the patriarchs and matriarchs of our people.

Golinkin then jumps from the time of the initial conquest of Canaan, to the beginnings of the Zionist movement. He writes of Theodor Herzl visiting Baron Maurice de Hirsch, one of the richest men of his time with a plan for a Jewish state in Eretz Yisrael. He also wrote a pamphlet in his diary entitled “Address to the Rothschilds.” He read it to philanthropist Jacob Schiff, who told him that the plan was the product “of an overstrained mind” and he urged Herzl to take a rest and seek medical treatment. “Who was right?” asks Golinkin. “Objectively, Hirsch and Schiff were correct. What possibility was there for a nation scattered throughout the world for 1800 years, speaking dozens of languages, to return to their historic land and found their own state?”

Herzl famously wrote in his diary in 1897, “In Basel,”  - where he held the first Zionist congress – “I created the Jewish state. But perhaps five years hence, in any case, certainly fifty years hence, everyone will perceive it.” He was off by one year. Many of us raised in Jewish youth movements and summer camps, grew up singing Herzl’s motto, “Im tirzu ein zo Aggadah,” If you will it, it is no fairy tale. The song concludes with the final lines of the Hatikvah, “lihyot am chofshi b’artzeinu, b’eretz Zion Yerushalaim,” to be a free people in our own land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem.

Rabbi Golinkin then turns to the current war with Iran and says it is just as crazy. “After decades of being threatened with genocide by the fanatical leaders of Iran, Israel took on a country of 92 million people, 10 times larger than Israel’s population, and 74 times larger than the State of Israel and has thoroughly defeated that genocidal country in surgical strikes aimed at nuclear and military targets, doing its best to avoid killing innocent civilians.”

Golinkin claims that the “philosophy of the State of Israel has always been the same as the philosophy of Caleb and Joshua, ‘Let us by all means, go up…for we shall surely overcome it.’” Such a philosophy takes courage and, to be realistic, requires intense preparation, and does not always meet with initial success Our faith as Jews has been in the ultimate triumph of what we perceive to be right. With Divine assistance we believe we can accomplish any worthy goal. Im tirzu ein zo Aggadah.

As the fighting continues, we pray for the ongoing success of the Israel Defense Forces, for the safety and security of all the inhabitants sheltering in the land, and ultimately for peace and tranquility throughout the region.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Edward Friedman