An Israeli Attack Against Iran "Would Destroy Chance of Peace for Generations"

Source: Global Research
Richard Silverstein

In an interview in The Nation, David Grossman, Israel’s leading novelist and moral conscience, expresses the conviction that Bibi Netanyahu and Ehud Barak want a war against Iran:

…He said he had “a very bad feeling” that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak were going to order an attack, even against America’s wishes. “There is a dynamic to all these warlike declarations,” he said.

I’ve written often in the past about David Grossman as an admirable, but attenuated figure.  As a liberal Zionist who is a moral bellwether for Israeli centrist and leftists, but one who is constrained by many of the limitations inherent in those defending major elements of the Israeli status quo.  With Grossman, the glass is always both half empty and half-full.  He is someone always willing to sound the alarm about the worst depredations of the rightist governments who have afflicted Israel for the past decade or more.  But he is also someone who never wants to be too far ahead of his countrymen.  He is one of them, and feels their moral confusion and remains constrained, as they are, about Israel’s predicament and how to get out of it.

The good news is that Grossman has launched an assault on Bibi and Barak’s plan to assault Iran.  He’s gone so far as to accept that an Iran with a nuclear weapon would be far less bad than an Israeli attack on Iran in order to prevent this outcome.

In both Larry Derfner’s Nation interview and Grossman’s own Haaretz op-ed (Hebrew), he’s offered cogent analysis of the thinking of the Israeli leadership.  He’s especially good at placing their mindset in the context of Jewish history:

He [Netanyahu] has this idea that we are the people of eternity, am ha’netzach from the Bible, and our negotiations, as he sees it, are with eternity, with the primal currents of history and mankind, while the United States, with all due respect, is just another superpower like Rome or Athens or Babylon, and we’ve survived them all,” said Grossman. “I’m afraid that this way of thinking might encourage Netanyahu to take the step” of attacking Iran.