Yakov Rabkin: Israeli Militarism Has Not Made the World Safer for Jews

Historian Yakov Rabkin explains Israel’s war on Iran by noting that the Islamic Republic remains the last major state to support the Palestinian struggle for justice. The reason for targeting Iran, he argues, is not that its leadership’s purported wish to exterminate Israelis—a claim repeated over and over—but rather that Iran has defended the rights of the Palestinian people when the rest of the world turned away. Israel considers the prospect of equal rights for everyone between the river and the sea an existential threat and has even committed genocide in Gaza to protect its system of Zionist apartheid. Israelis have been convinced that only the current regime can keep them safe, while the Zionist state has become perhaps the most dangerous place for Jews. Netanyahu’s description of his country as a "new Sparta" reaffirms the delusion at the heart of Zionism: that Israel must maintain a state of permanent warfare to defend Jews from a hostile world where antisemitism is allegedly endemic and eternal.

Israel’s brutality continues to alienate Jews and non-Jews alike. Aware that support for Israel is melting and that Israel is on "thin ice” even in the United States," Netanyahu mobilized the maximum pressure of the Israel lobby to involve Trump in the current military adventure.

Rabkin notes that Israel, by claiming to be the state of Jews wherever they live, has become the main cause of antisemitism rooted in the conflation of Judaism and Zionism. In the interview with EIR's Harley Schlanger, he also discusses the origins of Zionism in 16th‑century Britain and the support for a "Jewish state" by British imperialists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a tool
to advance their geopolitical interests.