Israel, surrounded by adversaries since its inception, has legitimate reasons to view Iran’s nuclear ambitions as existential. To downplay these fears is to ignore history, geopolitics and the chilling statements of Iranian leaders
Over the past several days, many experts and television anchors have been saying that the American air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were unprovoked.
In the view of these ‘experts’ and TV journos, Iran has never held out an existential threat to Israel. Yet, Israelis, particularly their Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, have repeatedly said throughout the global fora that Iran had been trying to develop a nuclear weapons programme whose only target was Israel, and which if not checked or eliminated, would have been used to wipe their country out of existence.
It is necessary to put such claims of experts and journalists to the test of reality based on facts. I have on many occasions seen on several electronic and print media outlets Janab Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former president of Iran thunder in his public speeches that Israel and the Jews are “a curse on civilisation” and need to be wiped out of existence, sooner or later. Such violent threats were Ahmadinejad’s high-water mark when in office.
He was twice elected president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran is a much larger country than tiny Israel (whose geographical spread is more in metres than miles), and until its Islamic takeover in 1979, was also quite well-armed. On the other hand, Jews had just about got back on their feet after centuries of suffering and struggle and began life as the state of Israel in 1948. It should also be borne in mind that since the birth of Christianity, Jews have been the target of persecution, particularly in Europe.
Throughout the Middle Ages, they were forbidden from owning land and seeking Government employment. Their livelihood depended mostly on trading and money-lending, and/or the practice of professions like medicine and law. Their confidence and morale suffered a near-death blow when the Nazis unleashed genocidal horror upon them in the form of the Holocaust.
Anti-Semitism sounds like a mild expression, but for the Jews, its effects have been calamitous. Now that yet another war in West Asia has broken out, and Iran’s nuclear facilities have been struck by the Israelis and Americans, would that country care to tell the world why they had been building such a large and complex nuclear programme, with many of its facilities buried deep underground if it was really for peaceful purposes as the Iranian mullah regime had been claiming? If it was for a nuclear deterrent, who was Iran itself afraid of? Who was Iran’s serious threat? Was it Russia, China or the US? Other than these powers, there appears to be no country for Iran to be afraid of, and it has been geopolitically aligned with both Moscow and Beijing and against Washington. Possession of nuclear weapons, arguably, is a legitimate national desire, especially if a country perceives a threat to its existence or is threatened.
But Iran’s nuclear programme, which is under international safeguards as the country is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and therefore, has voluntarily committed to forsake a nuclear weapons programme, rules out this excuse.
Its obscurantist, religiously bigoted regime has been suspected to be clandestinely pursuing a weapons programme under the cover of a peaceful one, and the Iranian efforts to acquire centrifuges and other nuclear equipment, far beyond peaceful nuclear uses, have done nothing to allay these suspicions. It is easy to understand the Israeli reaction to the Iranian programme, provided one is not blinded by ideological blinkers.
The Jewish state, after coming into existence in 1948, in the face of fierce opposition from all its Arab neighbours, has constantly had to wage war merely to safeguard its existence. The Jews did not have any country they could call their own before 1948. Imagine how precious their homeland must be to them, unlike many other people who take their countries and existence for granted.
Because of its technological development, far superior training and access to the most sophisticated American weapons plus its development of weaponry, Israel has bested every Arab adversary that sought to erase its existence. This has been the case throughout.
Arab politicians and jihadist elements never made a secret of their desire to bring about the elimination of Israel. “Evil Zionist regime”, “Death to Israel”, and “We will wipe you off the face of the earth” have been routine threats against Israel over the decades, forcing the latter to be always on alert, becoming a highly militarised state in the process.
We have already mentioned the former Iranian president Ahmadinejad above. The late Yasser Arafat, deceased chief of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was hostile to Israel throughout his life, never ceasing to boast that “Very soon, all of Jerusalem will be the capital of the Palestinian state”.
For a Jew, Jerusalem is his very flesh and blood; indeed, his very life. Such utterances were nothing less than existential threats. Some Arab regimes sought to acquire the nuclear weapon against Israel.
Saddam Hussein of Iraq was suspected to be developing one in his Osirak reactor, which Israel wiped out in a surprise air raid in 1981. Given this history, it is naïve of today’s experts and TV anchors to be so dismissive of an Iranian nuclear threat.
(The writer is a former Member of Rajya Sabha and a well-known columnist. Views are personal)
