Feet, Pythons, and Nuclear Things

The Vancouver Province today offers Canadians four or five front page (website) stories about the multiple severed feet that have turned up about the province over the past several months. On the Eastern side of Canada, a Globe and Mail’s lead story details a Montreal woman’s discovery of a 40-inch python under her bed in a basement apartment. Not something she put there.

Summer’s slow news days, maybe. But not so slow as all that. After all, last Friday, the New York Times published an op-ed by Benny Morris on the need for much more war in the Middle East. Reading this op-ed, early this morning, pretty much ruined my day, my week, and perhaps my entire life. Morris is a highly respected Israeli historian, and one of the things he is respected for is that he produced the first scholarly work demonstrating that the Israelis had forcibly expelled the Palestinians from their homes in 1948. The reigning ‘truthiness’ in Israel for many years had been that the Palestinians had fled because (a) the Arab countries told them to, and (b) the Palestinians were cowards. Which was why they had no 'right of return.' Turns out Morris was right. The Israeli army had forced the Palestinians from their homes, and in that act lies much of the Palestinians’ claim to ‘a right of return.’

So, when Benny Morris writes, I read attentively. He’s demonstrated his ability to think past and through the information that clogs our minds. Unfortunately, what he’s writing in the New York Times scares me much more than loose feet or loose pythons. His pitch is as follows: If Iran ever gets a nuclear weapon, Iran will destroy Israel with it; thus, Iran must never get a nuclear weapon. Israel, he says, will ‘almost surely’ bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities 'in the next four months,' but this attack might not be entirely successful. As a result, Israel would ‘subsequently’ have to use its nuclear weapons to destroy Iran. Such a nuclear attack is not in the United States’ or Iran’s interests, he allows. Better to have the U.S. bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities in the next four months because they have much more military power at their disposal and will be more successful [and Iran can't retaliate by destroying the U.S.]. But the U.S. probably won’t do it, so Israel will have to. Whether the Israelis are successful or not, the Iranians will strike back at Israel, and then there comes the nuclear war we’ve all been trying to avoid. But, what is Israel to do?

This is, I think, a pretty straight reading of Morris’s essay, which gives few to no reasons for any of his assumptions. There are a couple of responses on the Huffington Post here and here. None of this made me feel like being smart or funny or silly today. Or maybe ever, or for the next four months, whichever comes first.