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28.08.2022

Editorial

Direct talks with Iran

עיתון בין אויבים

A newspaper among enemies

Last Monday, the Iranian Defense Minister spoke about his country's great progress in command and control of ballistic missiles. "These missiles will be tested in exercises, and in the end, they will also be activated," said the Iranian minister. Right after this line about ballistic missiles, he added a vague line about weapons that Iran will develop in the coming years "so that no one can threaten Iran"
Of course, we are all interested in the question of whether he means nuclear weapons, and whether Iran is also developing a policy of ambiguity? But the more important question in our opinion is how did we get to this point of the threshold of balance of horror? Was it possible otherwise, and is it possible otherwise? Has political rationality been absent from Iran since the Islamic revolution and was Netanyahu's policy towards Iran rational, or maybe this policy is also motivated by the rampage of passions that are foreign to the political sphere?
In other words, is Iran's motive not the destruction of Israel but the threat to it as described by the Iranian Minister of Defense in the sentence "so that no one can threaten Iran", or at least was this matter examined in depth before Binyamin Netanyahu started a warlike policy towards Iran starting in 1996. He of course did it on the assumption that Iran is the ultimate threat to Israel, and it wanted to destroy it (and he had every reason to assume so from the statements of the Iranian oppressors from Khomeini to the current Khamenei) but if in Netanyahu's war room there would have been an assumption that Iran was responding to the threat on her, and her political intention is not to create a threat, or if there was a person in Netanyahu's war room whose job it was to balance the picture received from the scene, the person whose products the Agranat Committee called Ifcha Mistabra, maybe we would not now be on the threshold of a balance of horror.
Of course, as average viewers, we all recognize that Iran is the ultimate threat, after all, it is back and threatens to destroy us, as well as the tyrant who stands at its head who demonstratively peruses the protocols of the elders of Zion with joy, and also the tyrant of his likeness who sits in Lebanon sees us gathering with our children and our meager baggage at airports and seaports on our way to our death march; And this is where an arms race rightly stems from for two decades. But did the blatant threats cause us not to separate in an intellectual sense between the justified arms race, and the unequivocal assumption that Iran is an ultimate threat, without checking whether Iran is acting out of political rationality and reacting to the threat? Just as Netanyahu probably believes that he is doing this for Israel. Political thought is an obviously unscientific fluid matter despite all the beliefs associated with it. Or maybe we should refine it and say that it is scientific as Immanuel Kant means about human science, which is a sensory event.
In an arena where the rampage of passions is involved, it is very difficult to separate all the political components, and try to look at them anew, decades after the rampage began. But this is not a simple matter. Here, an error in interpreting the scene could lead to a mega war, one that would leave its mark on the Middle East, and especially on Israel and our people, for generations. That is why every effort, every effort, is equal and worthy. Even if it involves vomiting.
And on the brink of the failure of Netanyahu's policy, i.e., on the brink of Iran's nuclearization, (and according to the vague words of the Iranian Defense Minister, even the Vienna Agreement will not prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon), Israel must try to open direct talks with the Iranian oppressor. Not to let the West speak for us, and not to wage wars for us, even though it is possible that the Iranian Israeli arena is too big not only for Iran but also foor us. Or as the rational Yitzhak Rabin said, you should take a pill against nausea. So, you should take the pill and try to talk to the scoundrel who is at the head of Iran. Perhaps there is, after all, in the thicket of raging passions, tunnel with a light at the end, the light of rationality.