Israel, Arabs must break the Mullahs’ rise

The movie “Agora” captivatingly depicts the burning of the Great Library at Alexandria in 391 A.D. The city’s elites — torchbearers of science — are shown beset, then overrun, by a vengeful tide of Eastern Christianity. Enabled by an indolent, fattened Rome, the devout, frenzied rabble conquers the library, murders its pagan sages and incinerates millennia of scholarship — a testament to God’s supremacy. To some, this hallowed arson was dawn to the Dark Ages; in its wake, the bright lamp of Western thought was left a barely flickering ember. The lesson: The West, despite its ostensibly immense strength — or, perhaps, because of it — is ever fragile, ever wavering. The confluence of comfort, political cowardice and fanatical zeal is its undoing. 

And so it was with the Iran deal. The unprecedented wealth and military might of Western democracies were exposed as a Potemkin village. Rather than bending the Islamic Republic to its will, the West signaled in no uncertain terms that it is categorically averse to adversity. Its desperation was broadcast by myriad false deadlines and retreating red lines. Thrown to the wolves were the West’s allies, and the idea of Western resolve itself. 

Through it all, Israel refused to come to terms with the West’s fickleness. It stubbornly clung to the dream that the West could be shaken from its complacency. It watched as, at the moment of truth, its increasingly shrill pleas fell on ever-deafer ears. 

The dispiriting minutiae of the deal will be history’s indictment of its crafters. But they should also compel alarmed soul searching in Israel. For what were the fruits of relying on an all-powerful West’s hesitant haggling? What did Israel achieve by outsourcing its security? A dogged Iran can keep its bloody saber, it can still grip it by the hilt and rattle it menacingly, and it can use it as a bludgeon. It just can’t unsheathe it, yet. This is what happens when consumer culture is trusted in the bazaar of believers.

But it was always Israel and its neighbors — not Washington, D.C.; Paris; or London — that would bear the brunt of the West’s mistakes. Like lifeblood, billions will now course through unclogged financial arteries to Iran’s merchants of death. Military centrifuges will continue to be engineered. Suspect installations will be sheltered from inspection by weeks of arbitration. And Iran will, soon enough, acquire game-changing new arsenals. This deal will, like an anvil, tip the sectarian scales in Shiites’ favor, and place the Mideast on unprecedented war footing.

And what of the West’s reassurances? Fictitious “snapback” sanctions, it is said, will come crashing down on a now flush Islamic Republic, should it cheat. But, we are reminded, it was the sanctions’ failure to stop Iran that made the present bargain necessary. 

The West has no stomach for others’ struggles. When it matters, it will always choose the deceptive comfort of inertia over its friends’ vital interests. 

As proof, there were countless practicable alternatives, short of war, to this deal. There was the option of suffocating sanctions to choke the mullahs — sanctions that China and Russia would have happily endorsed should military devastation have been the plausible alternative. There were endlessly better deals to strike than the current patchwork of compromises stitched together by wishful thinking. There was the option of robust support for a revived Green Revolution. And, niceties be damned, there should have been the looming threat of targeted military strikes. 

But it was clear all along that strikes were unthinkable, that the West would never free itself from its pathology of least resistance. To look to a frivolous West and choose to see its Churchillian forebears, to lazily rely on it as a parent — instead of steering it via incentives, as Iran did — that was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s inexcusable blunder. One can easily imagine the Obama administration trading this gilded surrender to Iran for a Rose Garden agreement between Israel and the Arab League. Instead of taking the bull by the horns, Israel, as in the shtetl, begged others to protect it. 

The blanket of false security that is trusting in the West is what Israel must now shed. Israel must make it clear that it will no longer gamble its children’s future on the fantasy of Western wisdom. Decades of disastrous Euro-American advice and decisions on war and peace should make it abundantly clear that Israel must now embrace its location, look east, chart its own course and aggressively seek a pact with the Arabs so as to break the mullahs’ chokehold — even in defiance of Western dictates. It must, in so doing, be willing to weather the storm of Western discontent and treat its lopsided condemnations as what — would that it is not so — they likely are: the exhausted gasps of a fat, collapsing Rome.

Philippe Assouline is a lawyer and advocacy strategist currently pursuing a doctorate in international relations and political science.