So who is more vulnerable: Israel or Iran?
As former Iranian President Akbar Rafsanjani once said, the most serious risk to Israel is that “even one nuclear bomb inside Israel would destroy everything, but it would only harm the Islamic world.” It is not unreasonable to assume such a scenario.'' Iran's growing nuclear capabilities (and the uncertainty surrounding them) should alarm the Western world more than it appears.
But the danger to Israel from the action at the ICC, or for that matter campus protests, boycott and divestment efforts, or arms embargoes of various kinds, is minimal. Contrary to some opinions, Israelis are not “settler-colonialists.” Jews believe they come from the Land of Israel. And Zionism, far from being a colonialist project, is the oldest anti-colonial struggle in history, beginning in Roman times, if not the Babylonian Captivity before that.
As for the idea that Jews in Israel should return to their ancestral lands, like the French pied-noirs in Algeria, where and what is that? Is it the land of Russian pogroms, Arab genocide, or the Holocaust? Israel's harshest critics tend to miss the point, but Israelis do not. They have nowhere else to go, a fact underscored by the wave of hatred currently engulfing the Jewish diaspora community. The more pressure is put on Israel to yield in the face of the enemy, the more Zionism it will create. Nothing defines Jewish identity more than these daily reminders of prejudice.
For Iran, the main threat to the regime comes from within and from below. It's easy to forget that before the big protests over scarves and women's rights in general in 2022, there were big protests over fuel prices in 2019 and protests over the state of the economy in 2018. It is also often forgotten that ten years earlier, there was the 2009 Green Revolution over election fraud and the 1999 Iranian student protests.
Although the regime has proven adept at suppressing dissent through ultra-violent means—my colleague Nick Kristoff has written forcefully about the use of gang rape as a means to suppress dissent ( The increasing frequency and persistence of these protests (which somehow failed to generate much outrage in places like Columbia and Berkeley) should tell us something. is.
