Opinion | Who’s in More Trouble: Israel or Iran?

So which country is more vulnerable: Israel or Iran?

The single most serious risk to Israel, as the former Iranian president Akbar Rafsanjani once put it, is that: “The use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything, however it would only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.” Iran’s expanding nuclear capabilities (and its opacity about them) should alarm the Western world a lot more than apparently it does.

But the dangers to Israel from moves at the I.C.C. — or, for that matter, from campus protests, boycott and divestment efforts or various kinds of arms embargoes — are minimal. Contrary to some opinions, Israelis are not “settler-colonialists.” Jews believe they are originally from the land of Israel because they are. And Zionism, far from being a colonialist project, is the oldest anticolonialist struggle in history, starting during the Roman era, if not the Babylonian Captivity before it.

As for the idea that Israeli Jews should return, like the Algerian French pieds-noirs, to the lands of their forebears — where, and what, is that? The lands of Russian pogroms, or Arab massacres, or the Holocaust? Israel’s harshest critics tend to miss the point, but Israelis don’t: They have nowhere else to go, a fact underscored by the waves of hatred now engulfing Jewish diasporic communities. The more pressure is exerted on Israel to relent in the face of its enemies, the more Zionism it will generate. Nothing so crystallizes Jewish identity as these daily reminders of bigotry.

For Iran, the principal threat to the regime comes from within and below. It is easy to forget that before the 2022 mass protests over headscarves and women’s rights more broadly, there was the 2019 mass protests over the price of fuel and the 2018 protests over economic conditions. Or that, 10 years earlier, there was the 2009 Green Revolution over the stolen election, or the Iranian student protests of 1999.

Though the regime has proved adept at suppressing dissent through ultraviolent means — my colleague Nick Kristof has written powerfully about the use of mass rape as a means of suppressing opposition (something that somehow failed to generate much outrage at places like Columbia or Berkeley) — the increasing frequency and durability of these protests should tell us something.