I’ve always wondered how then-UK prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who signed an agreement with Hitler in September 1938, thought he had created “peace in our time.”
How could a veteran statesman and politician believe he could trust and appease Adolf Hitler?
The Nuremberg Laws, stripping Jews of their German citizenship, had already been passed. Jewish-owned businesses had already been boycotted. Jewish doctors and lawyers had been stripped of their licenses. Jewish children had been kicked out of state schools, and Jews had been banned from public swimming pools.
Was the demonic leader behind all this a person to be trusted?
Kristallnacht came six weeks later.
I have felt a dark cloud hovering over me since the United States announced it was signing a Memorandum of Understanding, or, as some commentators have called it, a Memorandum of Misunderstanding, with the Islamic Republic of Iran.
What is an MOU? It is a handshake agreement. I hear my late American-born father’s voice saying, “We shook on it,” making an agreement as binding as any 100-page contract.
Just as Chamberlain’s agreement seems impossible in retrospect, I wonder how anyone can trust a regime that has already killed tens of thousands of its own citizens.
Thankfully, in the Chamberlain-Hitler agreement’s case, God sent Winston Churchill, who said, “Do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup.”
In August 1939, prominent physicists, prompted by Leo Szilard and with the imprimatur of Albert Einstein, wrote to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning that nuclear chain reactions might make extremely powerful bombs possible.
Roosevelt then began the federal research program that led to the Manhattan Project. Szilard, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Eugene Wigner, Hans Bethe, and Niels Bohr, all with Jewish mothers, were among the scientists who helped beat the enemy to this weaponry.
Time to intensify our search for new local means of defense
Thankfully, Israel doesn’t have to invent a bomb. Nonetheless, as we face existential threats, it is time to intensify our search for new local means of defense.
The Memorandum of Understanding, coupled with the unexpected and rankling criticism of Israel by our greatest allies, is cause for apprehension and a call for action.
Let’s look at a few of the latest declarations.
On June 16, US President Donald Trump claimed, “Without us, there would be no Israel. Without me, there would be no Israel.”
In case you missed it, US Vice President JD Vance added, two days later, “Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time.”
“If I were in the cabinet of the Israeli government, I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world,” Vance went on to say.
“Israelis who think Trump is their problem need to wake up and smell the reality of the situation that the country is in,” he added.
“You’re a country of nine million people. You can’t just kill your way out of solving every single national security problem that you have.”
Speaking at the G7, President Trump said critics of his Iran deal should ask why “those so-called geniuses” did not “blow up General [Qasem] Soleimani,” a remark widely understood as aimed at Israel.
So-called geniuses.
We all know we can be geniuses, but we aren’t always.
We have a careless side and a sometimes misplaced optimism and laissez-faire attitude toward life. It allows us to charge ahead with gusto despite the cautionary tale of our history and thorny current events. But it can blind us to warnings.
For example, instead of learning something from the films we produced marking 50 years since the surprise attack of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, we fell for the obfuscation of October 7, 2023. Recently revealed Hamas documents from 2022, including “building a strategic deception plan,” showed how our enemy deliberately lulled us into complacency.
And how many of us have asked ourselves, having watched the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, why we still lack a sufficient military answer to the drones attacking our soldiers and even tanks in Lebanon?
A weakness in underestimating the enemy
We do have geniuses. Let’s look back half a century, not at the Yom Kippur War, but at the rescue at Entebbe.
Yes, we already have geniuses in the army and in our military-industrial facilities. There aren’t enough. We need to draft the nation’s best thinkers. Brethren and lovers of Zion from abroad should be invited, too.
Einstein was 60 years old when he signed the Einstein-Szilard letter addressed to Roosevelt warning of Nazi Germany’s nuclear advancements. Physicists Szilard and Isidor Isaac Rabi were 44.
Despite our world-changing achievements, we have a weakness in underestimating the enemy.
How many times have we all thought with pain and horror about the senior military figures who dismissed the reports of the intelligence and female surveillance soldiers, the tatzpitaniyot, before October 7?
We have the warning. Genius tends to be spread across all sectors. Although Talmudic study reputedly sharpens the mind, the geniuses in the extreme religious sector aren’t pulling their weight, not only in the army but also in contributing fully to the defense and growth of the country.
Too many lack the advanced skills in math and science that a modern state at war requires. They have to stop wasting their own time and the country’s patience on demonstrations against service, education, and responsibility.
Another area of concern is the slide in national math scores. According to the OECD, Israeli students scored below the OECD average in mathematics, and only 63% reached at least basic Level 2 proficiency in math, compared with an OECD average of 69%.
And that was before October 7, so we can’t blame the war. There has been no evidence of a rebound.
Instead of bemoaning the ineffectiveness of Zoom lessons, we should develop creative approaches to deliver the most engaging remote learning. Zoom isn’t going away. When a war or epidemic breaks out, it’s too late to discover we have no solutions.
I asked my friend Dr. Esi Sharon Sagie, who headed the grisly two-year volunteer forensic dentistry effort to identify the dead after October 7, how she was different after the experience.
She said she no longer wastes time on unimportant tasks.
She recently completed a PhD and has taught forensic identification all over the world. That doesn’t mean she has neglected her family and students, or that she has stopped enjoying life. But the nonsense has to go.
That should be our national motto now.
The formal part of the Manhattan Project took three years.
We will have to work faster.■
The writer is the Israel director of public relations at Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. Her latest book is A Daughter of Many Mothers, co-written with Holocaust survivor and premier English-language witness Rena Quint.