This is a weekly series I have, you can find previous Torah studies here. Today’s will be pretty short, because I’ve had some wine and am sleepy.
the people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large;
So report ten of the twelve scouts sent by Moses to survey the Promised Land in this week’s parsha: Sh’lach.
The land is bountiful, milky and honeyish, but the enemy is too great. Peaceful prosperity cannot be attained: the “Amalekites dwell in the Negeb region.”
“We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we,” say the scouts.
“They number ten times those in our midst.”
“They have many thousands of ballistic and dozens of hypersonic projectiles.”
“Their protective barriers are too great and impenetrable.”
“We cannot possibly attack that people.”
The two other scouts, Caleb and Joshua, feel differently:
“The land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land.
If pleased with us, God will bring us into that land, a land that flows with milk and honey, and give it to us;
only you must not rebel against God. Have no fear then of the people of the country, for they are our prey: their protection has departed from them, but God is with us. Have no fear of them!”
So peaceful prosperity is within reach, and God will side with those who seek it.
A patron’s overwhelming force will lift the Israelites’ swords and crush those who wish for their destruction.
Later on, once (spoiler alert) Moses has died, Joshua will lead the Israelites across the Jordan River and into their Promised Land.
But first, he’ll need to overcome the city of Jericho—a heavily fortified outpost that contains within at all the destructive power necessary to wipe out the Jews.
As Joshua approaches, he sees that “Jericho was shut up tight because of the Israelites; no one could leave or enter.”
Jericho’s walls were too strong; there was nothing the Israelite army could do to breach them. But after a week of preparations and minor skirmishes, the priests blew their shofars, God’s fist landed a mighty blow of its own, and the walls came tumblin’ down.
So far so good; the city being ultimately defenseless, now all the military targets can be destroyed and the Israelites’ safety be ensur—
They exterminated everything in the city with the sword: man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey.
Ah shit.
Why does the Bible keep doing this? It builds up these nice, neat narratives, which I can super-subtly-and-artistically relate to current events, and then it’s gotta go and get super duper genocidey.
What the fuck, man!
Right, well, so, obviously we should treat this as more of a cautionary tale. When you’re fighting for something obviously righteous-seeming—the Land of Milk and Honey; a peaceful existence for the State of Israel—and you’ve got an ultimately-powerful patron paving your way to victory—God; the US Military—you need to not get too carried away.
In the city of Jericho, one virtuous prostitute named Rahab helps hide a couple of Israelite spies. “I know that GOD has given the country to you,” she says (Joshua 2:9).
In Iran, there are very many virtuous people—those who recognize that peace rightfully belongs in the region. They’re the people whose cooperation has enabled regime-destabilizing Mossad operations; those who have suffered terribly for their activism against a totalitarian regime.
Those who look forward to living in a democratic, non-nuclear, dovish Iran.
Only Rahab the prostitute and her family were spared by Joshua, along with all that belonged to her, and she dwelt among the Israelites—as is still the case.
The virtuous Rahab was invited to share in the Land of Milk and Honey.
All those many virtuous, peace-loving Iranians must be invited to share in a peaceful Middle East.
Addendum: Is Regime Change Actually A Possible Outcome Of This War?
has argued compellingly that it is.Iran is not Libya, Afghanistan, or Iraq. It has a history of parliamentary democracy that goes back over a century, and even continues in a certain form to this day under the current regime.
If the ruling Islamist regime were toppled, he thinks, the parliamentarian democrats could whoosh in and fill the vacuum.
And that toppling wouldn’t even take much US involvement! It’d look much more like Syria—where after we just consistently funded democratic-ish opposition to the Assad regime, the regime eventually crumbled, and the democratic-ish opposition whooshed in to fill the vacuum.
This is a good story, and I really want it to be true of Iran—but I think it isn’t.
made an excellent appearance on ’s Making Sense podcast the other day. They had a particularly riveting back-and-fort on the prospects of regime change:Harris: We don’t think the thirst for a new government coming from the Iranian people themselves would accomplish, effectively, a coup in the aftermath of some decapitation strike from Israel?
Rettig Gur: They’ve spent 46 years doing nothing but figuring out how to prevent that from happening. And they have degraded the organizing capacity of every single power base in Iranian society, to the point where it may not be doable.
Rettig Gur goes on to describe a much more involved process: a systematic disembowling of the regime, its various militaries and paramilitaries, its entire political apparatus and its brutish internal security forces. The ultimate hope can only be to “open a window” for internal dissidents. To disrupt the persecution long enough for some sort of homegrown solution to emerge.
In other words: regime change absolutely will not happen overnight. If we try to rush this, we may end up leaving a power vacuum in a country of 90 million people with no clear candidate to fill it. That would be bad!
Israel—and now America too—will have to fight this war much more systematically if they’d like to accomplish anything good. It’s possible they’ll achieve regime change—but only that; not even probable, much less guaranteed.
The other option: come to the negotiating table. Clearly the regime would rather not risk its own destruction. Probably it’s possible at this point to get a deal much better than the JCPOA—one with fewer sanctions eased, stricter oversight ensured, and maybe even some restrictions on non-nuclear Iranian weapons programs. (E.g., hypersonic missiles, drones, warfighting AI, etc.)
My guess is that that’s where we’ll end up—many Iranians will continue to suffer, but the threat to Israel will be neutered, and the Middle East will become more hegemonic and safer.
A final gripe, which is downstream of that last point: the media has got to stop calling these things “escalatory.” The American strikes on Fordo are preemptive and preventative—they’re ultimately peace-directed, even if they do involve some big scary explosions. A mis-matched war like this doesn’t end via restraint—it ends via beating the shit out of your enemy until they sue for peace.
I, for one, welcome the shit-beating.
What these attacks are going to uncover is how far one can actually push the Iranian regime until they bite the bullet and actually build a nuke. They've been very patient about not doing one so far, but surely there's only so much that they're willing to tolerate.