A shameful moral silence on Iran

Mordechai Ben-Dat

Some time before the March 31 deadline for a framework agreement between Iran and the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany (P5+1) was to expire, Mohammad Reza Naghdi, the head of Iran’s religious-based Basij militia of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, declared: “The destruction of Israel is non-negotiable” (my emphasis). This defiantly savage proclamation was quickly reported. The Times of Israel carried the story on deadline day, March 31. 

Once these explicit words of official Iranian policy were uttered, one would have thought that the P5+1 team, and especially the American secretary of state, John Kerry, the team’s head negotiator and its main spokesperson, would have demanded an official explanation of the statement from the Iranian chief negotiator, Mohammad Javad Zarif. One would have expected that Kerry would unambiguously condemn the Iranian call for the genocide of the people of Israel as an offence to humanity and conscience. One would have expected that he would denounce the Basij leader’s statement as inherently counter to the very negotiations at hand. One would have expected that he would at least have called a timeout from the proceedings – if not an actual halt – in order to demonstrate the team’s utter revulsion with Iran’s murderous foreign policy objectives.

But there was no such reaction by the secretary of state. Indeed, there was no reaction. Period. Perhaps he shook his head in disapproval, but there is no record even of this. “Just more bluster from the persistent but basically misunderstood Iranians,” Kerry may have thought. “Nothing too serious. Anyway, we have heard it before. No sense risking offending Zarif and his boss Ayatollah Khamenei. They might walk away from the negotiations!” Kerry probably said to himself. Or words to that effect. 

There is no suggestion, alas, that American conscience was rattled or offended that day by Iran’s reaffirmation that it intends to wipe Israel off the map. Even days later there is no evidence that American sensibilities were distressed by the Iranian pronouncement. Kerry has remained silent on the matter. U.S. President Barack Obama said it would be a “misjudgment” to demand of Iran, as the Israeli prime minister suggested, that the Shia Muslim theocracy acknowledge the legitimacy of a sovereign Jewish Israel. 

Three days after the Basij commander’s statement was reported, acting U.S. State Department spokesperson Marie Harf was asked about it. Specifically, she was asked whether such disturbing Iranian pronouncements should be raised in the negotiations over the nuclear agreement. “No,” she replied. “This is an agreement that doesn’t deal with any other issues, nor should it.”

The American response is shocking, as well as morally pernicious. 

The fact that Iran’s nuclear aspirations are not tied to its foreign policy objectives is the deep structural flaw in the U.S. administration’s approach to its negotiations with Iran. It is simply, as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu characterized, “unconscionable.”

In an article published in the Washington Post last month, Jewish Agency head Natan Sharansky perceptively wrote, the “United States appears to have lost the courage of its convictions. We have yet to see the full consequences of this moral diffidence, but one thing is clear: the loss of America’s self-assured global leadership threatens not only the United States and Israel, but also the people of Iran and a growing number of others living under Tehran’s increasingly emboldened rule.” 

In his commentary on Parshat Shmini, Rabbi Marc Angel wrote about human responsibility when confronting evil: “In the face of contemporary evil, silence is morally repugnant. One must scream out, one must protest, one must demand justice. Remaining silent makes one an accomplice. The silent onlooker is a tragic figure who, because of moral weakness, brings suffering upon him/herself and upon others.”

The problem with American foreign policy regarding Iran is not only its lack of courage, as Sharansky suggests. To borrow from Rabbi Angel, it is also its shameful moral silence.