How not to remove autocrats

Once upon a time, the autocratic leader of a large country was assassinated following a well-orchestrated plan. The assassins had supposed that the killing of the leader would create the conditions for a vast popular uprising, the complete end of the country’s repressive regime, and universal freedom for its people. Instead, the regime rallied, the son of the slain leader was installed and the narrative that quickly developed was “it’s the Jews’ fault.”

The scenario I’m describing isn’t a fable, nor is it an exact parallel to the current regime-change war that Donald Trump has launched against Iran with the collaboration of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Yet it was a key turning point in the history of our Jewish ancestors, and it carries lessons that can’t be ignored.

On March 13, 1881, Tsar Alexander II succumbed to injuries inflicted by a bomb thrown by a member of the Narodnaya Volya (“People’s Will”) revolutionary anarchist group. For better or for worse, there was no mass uprising, and the revolution that actually overthrew the tsar didn’t happen until 37 years later, when World War I fatally weakened the Russian monarchy. Given that the tsarist regime was replaced by a Bolshevik government that eventually proved every bit as dictatorial, and more recently, by the reactionary system we have come to know as Putinism, there is an open question about whether the repressive autocracy of the earlier centuries ever really left Russia.

Only one Jew, a woman named Hesya Helfman, was part of the 22-member committee of anarchists that ordered the assassination. This didn’t stop the new tsar, Alexander III, from enacting laws imposing new restrictions on the Jews of the Russian empire. Perhaps more importantly, more than 200 pogroms against the empire’s Jewish settlements happened in that year and the next one. The scale of the pogrom wave was such that it triggered the first massive emigration of Ashkenazi Jews that brought my great-grandparents and perhaps some of yours to the United States.

An upsurge in anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric started here very quickly after Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested to the media on March 2 that Israel’s determination to launch its attack on Iran may have forced Trump’s hand in moving us forward with the U.S. military’s participation in the strikes. While he, and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, who made similar comments, tried to walk things back, it was too late. The incendiary media figure Tucker Carlson, along with Nick Fuentes and others in the domestic antisemitism food chain on the far right and the far left, were already referring to our “war for Israel” — removing all responsibility from our president who launched this war. Give that a few days to filter through social media and we get events like the monstrous antisemitic attack on Temple Israel of Bloomfield, Michigan, while children were in preschool there.

Still, most Americans simply don’t believe that as horrific as Iran’s theocratic regime is, it is an immediate or direct threat to our country that would require massive preemptive warfare. Mr. Trump’s initial justifications for the attack, like suggesting that Iranian “long-range missiles” could “soon reach the American homeland,” had to be walked back by other administration spokespeople.

Will regime change actually be the result? Just like Russian tsars in the 1880s, the Iranian clerical regime has large reserves of aligned fighters under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Force and the related Basji, a volunteer militia, whose power has not been destroyed by the various assassinations of leading mullahs and military leadership. Despite the U.S. and Israeli bombing campaigns, will ordinary Iranian civilians, who have no arms, readily risk going back into the streets to face the machine guns, gas, and rocket-propelled grenades wielded against them? Has “regime change” dictated by the forces of an outside power ever worked?

Despite the relative success of air attacks at weakening Iran’s traditional armed forces, the Islamic Republic’s loyalists have continued to demonstrate the determination and capability to effectively shut down the shipping of international oil through the Persian Gulf in retaliation. Americans, still trying to make sense of the high costs of daily life here, are not likely to be infinitely patient with the resulting spikes in the price of gas without a better explanation for our participation in the war than has been given so far.

While the idea of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is distressing and dangerous, many military experts believe that the massive warfare we have been seeing would only cause the regime to race toward development. Alongside Trump’s repeated torpedoing of opportunities for a negotiated arrangement that contains Iran’s nuclear ambitions since 2018, his turn toward assassinations would seem to make any emerging Iranian government more eager to hold onto a weapon than to part with it.

Despite the ongoing collaboration between Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu, Israel wasn’t responsible for the president’s decision to bring our country into this war, just as Israel wasn’t responsible for his decision to invade Venezuela, or perhaps now Cuba, to threaten armed attacks on American allies like Denmark, or to discontinue aiding Ukraine. And of course, neither are the Jews, in Israel or here.

Israeli Jews of course will have to make their own assessment of their country’s role in this new war and whether anything could come out of it that serves their long-term interests. Certainly, hitting back at a power that has repeatedly maligned them, committed many acts of terror, and bankrolled their most serious adversaries may feel good at the moment. If we think that this is a straightforward decision for them, however, I would say that we are ignoring the fact that Netanyahu has a vested interest in keeping people’s attention on something else while this year’s Knesset elections are pending and the promised investigations into his responsibility for the lack of preparedness of the country before October 7 are nowhere near started.

Americans again and again need to reject and combat antisemitism from whatever source. But we will also have to think as the Americans we are as we evaluate Donald Trump’s new war.

Mark Lurinsky of Montclair recently retired from a career in public accounting. He is an activist in local politics and a member of the steering committee of J Street’s New Jersey chapter.

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