"Existential threat" recently entered the political lexicon, courtesy of Israeli paranoia. The expression sounds portentous, but all it seems to mean is that someone's or something's existence is in jeopardy. If so, the world is full of existential threats. But the expression is seldom used to refer to any of them except when the threatened party is Israel. Thus Iran's still "aspirational" nuclear weapons program or, sometimes Iran itself are existential threats and so is Palestinian "terrorism." An existential threat makes an excellent casus belli, a justification for war.
It is unclear, however what users of the expression think is threatened: is it the existence of the state of Israel as a state not of its citizens, but of the Jewish people? Or is it the physical existence of the inhabitants of that state? Those who promote the expression relish its ambiguity. It serves their purpose well.
In reality, of course, there is nothing in the offing emanating from Iran or occupied Palestine that rises to the level of an existential threat in either sense, notwithstanding some remarks of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. According to conventional wisdom, the Iranian threat is the more serious one; in reality, it is the more fanciful. Even were Iran to succeed in building a nuclear device -- an unlikely prospect in the short term, since, according to all available evidence, they are trying only to build the capacity, not the weapon itself -- they would have to be suicidal to use it against Israel for any purpose other than deterrence. Israel, after all, is the most bellicose state on the planet, judging by the number of wars it has started; and in addition to being otherwise armed to the teeth, it has more than two hundred of its own "deterrents" at the ready. Does anyone think that, if threatened, Israel's leaders would be sane enough not to use them? They're crazy, but not that crazy.
Ahmadinejad may not have all his marbles either but he isn't crazy enough to risk annihilation, and neither are the theocrats who hold ultimate power in the Islamic Republic. Nevertheless, Iran's nuclear program makes sense. The Iraq War demonstrated how urgent it is for Iran, and other countries in the way of imperialism's designs, to be able to deter American and Israeli arms.
It is well to keep this in mind as Israel agitates for permission to bomb Iran from its protector of last resort, us; and as face-to-face Israeli-Palestinian negotiations resume in Washington under American auspices. An Israel-Iran war would be so harmful to American interests that it is hard to see how even an abjectly servile Congress and administration would permit it. Israel may just have to learn to live with that existential threat. But, on the Palestine question, count on Israel to get its way -- again.
Getting its way means having the latest round of negotiations fail. That is almost certain to happen because there really is an existential threat that America will continue to let Israeli leaders deal with in their own way. The threat has nothing to do with those who resist the Israeli occupation -- "terrorists," according to conventional parlance. It comes from the fertility of Israeli Arabs and the Palestinians living under the Israeli occupation. What they wield is a "demographic bomb," as they call it in Israel, a birth rate that threatens the existence of a Jewish state in mandate Palestine. This is why Israel has not annexed the territories it occupies, and why a "two state" solution is acceptable to many Israelis. It is the only remotely acceptable way to assure that the Jewish state will remain predominantly Jewish.
Israel could tolerate Bantustans under its control, but a viable Palestinian state with which Israel lives in peace would be unacceptable; a point Israel's leaders, left and right, have always understood. It would undercut the state's rationale and therefore, ultimately, its legitimacy. This is why peace has remained elusive, despite the fact that the general contours of a negotiated settlement, acceptable to all who believe in a two state solution, have been clear for decades. The details were spelled out at Taba in January 2001 during the final days of the Clinton administration. In the ensuing years, Israel has created more "facts on the ground" and, thanks in part to Israeli and American connivance, the Palestinian Authority has been severely weakened. But it would not require Solomonic wisdom to bring Taba up to date. Even Hillary Clinton could do it.
However it isn't going to happen. Because Israel holds almost all the cards while the Palestinian Authority holds almost none, the only way forward is for the United States to force Israel to make peace; it could do it, but it won't. And Israel won't do it on its own -- not just because many Israelis harbor hopes for a Greater Israel or because the Israeli political class is in the thrall of a nefarious and religiously driven settler movement. The more important reason is that if there were peace, Israel's reason for being and therefore its hold over "diaspora" Jews and indeed its own population would diminish, not abruptly but gradually and inexorably.
Leaders of the Israeli political and military establishment understand this. It is why they have conjured up an existential threat from Iran, and why, regardless what they say, they repeatedly draw back from making peace with the Palestinians.
The animating principle of the Zionist movement from the 1890s on has been that Jews need a state to serve as a refuge in a world in which anti-Semitism is a force of nature. That thought never gained much traction before the Nazis took power in Germany, and even then it was resisted by secular Jews committed to universalist ideologies and also, for theological and philosophical reasons, by Orthodox and Reform Jews. In time, universalist ideologies faded and Zionism hijacked Judaism. Meanwhile, as Jewish assimilation has proceeded at full throttle in the United States and other Western countries and with anti-Semitism no longer much of a concern, Israeli nationalism has all but monopolized Jewish identity politics.
Because the Jewish religion, shorn of its Zionist shell, is a non-starter for most Jews today, and because inter-marriage is so prevalent, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain a sense of Jewish identity on either religious or ethnic grounds. That leaves only Israel. But, as Israeli society sheds its historical ties to secularism and socialism, Israel has become hard to love or even to admire. No wonder that so few diaspora Jews would even think of living in the Promised Land or that so many Israelis live abroad.
There is, of course, still the memory of the Nazi Judeocide, and Zionists exploit it for all it's worth. But as time passes, that memory becomes less serviceable; and not all the Holocaust museums in the world can maintain its effectiveness. The Zionist movement succeeded in appropriating moral capital from the devastation Nazi Germany wreaked upon European Jewry, but it has spent that capital recklessly, and there is not much of it left.
Enter Iran's bomb. If that existential threat did not exist, it would have to be invented, as indeed it has been. The Palestinians' demographic bomb does not have to be invented. But its specter is hardly scary enough to do the job on its own.
In the end, it probably will become clear to almost everyone, in Israel and out, that the Zionist idea is unworkable. Then, despite itself, Israel will either become a normal state -- a state of its citizens, with a large Jewish population -- or, more likely, most of its Jews will depart for places many of them would rather live anyway. But these welcome changes won't happen without a fight, and without imperiling the world.
Therefore, as Israel again talks peace while blocking a peaceful settlement, count on it continuing, without dissimulation, to agitate for war with Iran. Within the higher echelons of the American government, only the military understands how unwise it would be to let Israel have its way. But we cannot count on them. It is therefore urgent to mobilize to the point where cowed and corrupt Democrats and Republicans cannot fail to take notice. Israel must be forced to make peace, whatever the implications for its ethnocratic character; and Israeli paranoia about Iran must be quashed. If not, it will be Israel itself that poses the ultimate existential threat - not just to itself, but to us all.
Edmund C. Case: Can the Jewish Community Encourage In-Marriage and Welcome Interfaith Families?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/28/AR2009052803614.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-dana/price-tag-reprisals-again_b_708720.html
Copy and paste in google if the link fails.
Arabs controlled East Jerusalem, West Bank, Gaza and there were far fewer refugees.
No Palestinian state was proposed, none was demanded, not a SINGLE resolution from U.N. that Jerusalem is made an "open city."
These facts clearly point to the reality that the conflict is not pro Palestinian but rather Anti israel,
And those who deny self determination rights of Jews couldn't care less about Palestinian welfare.
Proof-- Arab people viciously oppress Palestinians refugees and their descendants in their countries.
And those in the West who loudly proclaim their support for Palestinians blithely and hypocritically avoid ANY mention of oppression of Palestinian by other Arabs.
It is the intolerance for Middle Eastern Jews and their self-determination effort that drives the entire agenda.
Among Palestinians, real debate has been suppressed and is usually conducted in private or in Arabic. Almost never in the foreign press.
It is even worse in the West.
Most of Palestinian academicians and their Western appeasers sling the most astonishingly biased agitpop specifically designed to sway Western opinion: There's little evidence of a rational debate or even acknowledgment of other other side rational debate. Sincere Intention towards reconciliation is rarely evident. It is mostly revanchist in tone and substance.
Those who are more objective, keep their opinions to themselves fearful of jeopardizing their own careers and indeed lives. This is true even in the West.
And certainly, those who run universities in Gaza or West Bank are incapable of producing real debate. Most still refer to Israel as Zionist entity and cast doubt on any…ANY... aspect of Israeli and Jews that may be even remotely seem as positive.
In such environment a rational debate towards re-conciliation is rather difficult.
Under manufactured tensions, exaggerated fears and (non-existent) weapons of mass distraction is where the cryptic ethnic cleansers and expansionists do their best work. Israel has a long history of sucker punch, run and them claim that the big bad Arab bullies are picking on them.
They ran out of Arab cardboard villains so now they have to enlist the hapless Iranians to fill the role while they put the final touches on greater Israel. Another major war, perhaps one they can draw Syria into via Hezbollah or one they can coax the Hamas idiots into proxy keystone guerrillas for Iran will give them further pretext and smokescreen for bulldozing the rest of Palestine..
If only the intelligent population of Israel would rise against this charade and take back their country form the rightists who are actually wrongists..
The civilized world is way past tired of this charade. Most thinking people including Jews see through this game.
Only the US Congress is almost wholly bought into the various myths and crocodile fears
Keep writing about this Mr. Levine. People are catching on faster than you think.
Oh!!! Great Goddess and Great Spirit for they are all a part of CHI, thank you for guiding me thus far on my life's journey.
Guide me this day spiritually, mentally, emotionally and physically that I may be in tune with thee and learn the lessons thou has to teach me that I may know the interconnection of all things in thy seamless web of life where everything belongs and nothing is lost and becoming, transformation, regeneration, mutation, evolution and change are the way of all things.
Oh!! Great Goddess and Great Spirit for they are all a part of CHI, let me always be aware that the web that connects each to me weaves its tapestry throughout my being uniting me with all for separateness is an illusion for all are one.
And let me always rest content in the arms of the unfolding universe and always be aware that we are prisoners of preconditioning and only through self discipline, meditation and self cultivation can we break free of those prisons so we may find our spiritual path and grow in enlightenment and spirituality.
The talks are set to last a year. Long enough to get a clearer picture of US forces capability in the region. The situation in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be improved with Israel being front and center as the occupiers of Palestine. For Obama to use these talks as a tactic to relieve the battle-field stress of Israel creating new recruits for terror. Make no mistake; the Pentagon has told the president just how impossible it is to stabilize any campaign against the terrorists while Israel continues its policy of extermination and apartheid.
Netanyahu will never give up the policy of Greater Israel, and Obama has no mandate for peace from the American people, and less chance of confronting Israel for any permanent solution. The status quo is good enough for Israel, but endangers American troops every day. The Pentagon knows....President Obama knows...and now the American people know; what Israel has known all along, "land for peace" means for the Israeli government to continue confiscating Palestinian land, and peace will come when every Palestinian agrees to stop trying to prevent the creation of Greater Israel.
israel is the real threat to world peace
As is well reported by competent analysts and the Israelis themselves over generations, Israel has seriously compromised it's own existence by essentially permanently incorporating Palestine into Israel by it's illegal half-century of 'occupation/ethic cleansing/annexation'
Now Israeli Prime Ministers themselves are shouting from the rooftops that Israel cannot remain a Jewish democracy, cannot remain an apartheid state, but also cannot adopt a binational state solution.
What a basketcase
Israel is as big a liar as Wolfowitz - which is not surprising, since they are exactly the same camp
The Israeli use of their term 'Existential threat' is more precisely their 'Expedient Lie Necessary' to justify mousetrapping America into another disastrous Israeli 'Clean Break War' to forestall the strategic disaster of getting Occupied Palestine ripped ouf of her clutches, and to retain her hegemonic ability to bully the rest of the Middle East at will, even if doing so causes blowback to the US like 911 and other forms of resistance.
Israel is more an existential threat to America than Iran is to Israel.
Israel and her Israel Lobby and her Neocons are destroying, have destroyed America, to further her agenda including her 'Clean Break' plans and as such they are enemies of America.
Israel is lying and manipulating us into another diastrous war for her just as her minion Wolfowitz lied us into Iraq
"Israel is lying and manipulating us into another diastrous war for her just as her minion Wolfowitz lied us into Iraq"
Oh Momma - come to kitty!
Thank you for the kind of article that's a staple in Israel. Israelis live, breathe, eat & sleep Politics.
And Existential Threats?
Discussed every day.
Still - You just started a wide debate at our place. And are seen as correct on most of your points.
However, we trust Jewish Leadership wont start WW III and hope that the small group of neo-cons wanting another war in the Middle East will be held in check by honest men.
Israel's leaders are "sane" but some in the Diaspora seem to be spoiling for a fight.
At a conference at the National Press Club, Mullen said he has spent a significant amount of time with his Israeli counterpart, IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, and that "it's very clear to me that a nuclear weapon in Iran is an existential threat to Israel," according to a transcript released by his office.
Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei: Foreign Policy's Passport blog reports on his latest tweet, in honor of the holiday: "Israel is A Hideous Entity in the Middle East Which Will Undoubtedly Be Annihilated."
The commander of the Basij militia, Mohammad Reza Naqdi, said "the Zionist entity would be wiped out within 15 years, in the worst-case scenario."
"The nations of the region are able to eliminate the Zionist regime from the face of the earth," said Ahmadinejad, adding the Israeli "regime has no future. Its life has come to an end."
Whom should the readers believe: Ayatollah Khameni, Admiral Mullen, Mohammad Reza Naqdi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? Or you?
Iran would seem to at least philosophically pose an existential threat to Israel, would it not?
Nuclear or not, Iran and its proxies are more than capable of eroding, or destroying, Israel. If you support that notion, so state.
But it is worse than imprudent to trivialize the above remarks as mere rhetoric. Cite another example, if you can, of another state that so blatently and unabashedly called for another's destruction, not the mere overthrow of its leadership.
AHMADINEJAD: Look here, my views are quite clear. We are saying that if the Holocaust occurred, then Europe must draw the consequences and that it is not Palestine that should pay the price for it. If it did not occur, then the Jews have to go back to where they came from.
Quotes out of context may distort. The quote may be read in its entirety: May 29, 2006, issue of Der Spiegel. Read it. Sound like regimen change to your ear?
2. Why would Shiite Iran help sunni muslims. Unlikely
3. Words coming from Iran are rehtoric in my opinion
Based on above, I would have to agree with premise of article