Blue and White ( Israel Resilience Party and Yesh Atid ) on Iran .

Benny Gantz   -  He would wait until Iran attacks

Moshe Ya'alon  -  Now believes there is no existential threat from Iran

Gabi Askenazi - In 2010 along with  Dagan he prevented Netanyahu from attacking Iranian nuclear  sites 

Yair Lapid  -     There is no evidence that he understands that  Iran cannot be deterred. He would not have supported the Iran Deal if he understood that the MAD doctrine would not work with Iran

Conclusion :  If you want not to be nuked by Iran - Bibi is a better choice . In life you make choices based on how much each component weighs - if we are attacked by Iran with nuclear weapons all other choices are meaningless.

But Bibi has a problem. The 'anyone but Bibi' mentality has taken its toll .  And here is the proof. The reaction of a colleague upon reading my post  -" I get it, but I'll be damned if I vote for him. I'd rather suffer a nuclear winter. "

Israeli election campaign is heating up

Cartoon by Guy Morad

 

Iran                                              Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran,  

                                                    Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran, 

                                                    Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran, 

                                                    Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran

              

                                     Teacher, Benny is copying from me!

However funny this cartoon is,  it still ignores the fundamental difference between Netanyahu and Gantz: Netanyahu is fully aware that Iran cannot be deterred from attacking Israel with nuclear weapons  regardless of the consequences, whereas Gantz does not seem to understand the danger.

Will Iran and MAD be discussed in the coming Israeli elections? Of course not.

In her article Is Gantz falling from grace?, Ruthie Blum writes: “The good news is that Gantz has little to no chance of heading the next government. He couldn’t even sustain positive press coverage for a full week. “

This is debatable. The constant attacks at Netanyahu through the years have eroded support for him and the “anybody but Netanyahu” mindset is spreading.  

The fact that Bibi is the only Israeli leader apart from Michael Oren who has quoted Bernard Lewis’s warning about Mutually Assured Destruction not being a deterrent for the Iranian leaders is irrelevant to the majority of Israelis.  First, most Israelis have never heard of Bernard Lewis. Second, most Israelis know nothing about Twelver Shisim and their eschatology and hence many believe that Bibi has being crying wolf regarding Iran for years.  Third, they are convinced that other Israeli leaders could easily take Netanyahu’s place including handling the Iranian threat although none of them ever mentioned Iran having no problem with mutual destruction.

The combination of the above results in that nobody in Israel ever discusses the possibility of an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel due to the death of the MAD doctrine which managed to prevent a nuclear exchange during the Cold War.    

To put it in Orwellian terms, “a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words“  The two words together - Iran and MAD - do not exist in the vocabulary of Newspeak. 

    

Benny Gantz on Iran

Benny Gantz (R) and Moshe Ya'alon (L) at an event in Tel Aviv, January 29th, 2019. 

In June 2016, at Ben-Gurion University, Benny Gantz put the threat from Iran on 5th place in significance of the dangers threatening Israel, so after the lecture I came up to him and asked him should we not be more concerned about Iran since according to Prof. Bernard Lewis   “for people with this mindset, Mutually Assured Destruction M.A.D. is not a constraint; it is an inducement... “ and therefore  Iran cannot be deterred, only preempted.  

His answer – Israel will defend itself if attacked.

I am afraid that would be too late.  It seems Benny Gantz does not take Bernard Lewis seriously enough, if he understood whom I was quoting in the first place.  

Russian logic

Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said:  "The practice of delivering arbitrary airstrikes against a sovereign state should be ruled out. The escalation of hostilities in the region is not in line with the interests of Middle East states, including Israel."

So according to Maria Zakharova, not preventing Iran, whose Brig. Gen. Aziz Nasirzadeh just stated that Iran’s young airmen were prepared for the day when Israel will be destroyed, from entrenching itself on Israel’s border is actually in line with Israel’s interests!?

Following this logic, the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland,1939, Finland,1939, Baltic states, 1940, Czechoslovak coup d’etat and the defenestration of Jan Masaryk, 1948, invasion of Hungary, 1956, Czechoslovakia,1968, Afghanistan,1979, and Russian invasion of Georgia, 2008, and Ukraine, 2014, had all been in the interests of these respective invaded sovereign states.

When it comes to Russia, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Iran, you seem to be lost.

Bertrand Russell on meeting Lenin

I wish we had heard Bertrand Russell’s impressions of Lenin in my high school history lessons.  
excerpt from the audio:

Lenin: Oh dear me no, we are not establishing peasant proprietorship, you see there are workers and some rich peasants and we stirred up the poor peasants against the rich peasants and these soon hanged them to the nearest tree . Ha, ha, ha, ha! 

Bertrand Russell:  I did not much like that.