‘Peace, Peace’: The Prophets’ Warning and the Deal with Tehran

The word doing the heaviest lifting in the present diplomacy is the word “peace,” and the prophets of Israel had a precise name for peace that is announced rather than achieved. They called it a lie, and they did not soften it. “They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly,” Jeremiah said of the men who told a frightened people what it wished to hear, “saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace.” I am a Christian, and I come to this subject as a guest in a house not my own; but the prophet I am quoting is yours before he is mine, and his warning belongs to this hour as if it had been written for it.

Consider what a deal with the Islamic Republic actually proposes to do, and what it leaves untouched. It proposes to manage a timeline. It addresses centrifuges and stockpiles and breakout windows — the machinery of the threat. What it does not, and cannot, address is the thing that makes the machinery dangerous, which is the intention of the men who own it. You can freeze enrichment. You cannot freeze a creed. A regime that has woven the elimination of the Jewish state into the very fabric of its self-understanding, that has made enmity toward Israel not a policy but a pillar of its legitimacy, is not pacified by a pause it regards as tactical. It is merely handed time, and cover, and money, and the priceless gift of the world’s averted eyes.

Ezekiel saw this kind of arrangement and gave it an image I cannot improve. He spoke of builders who threw up a flimsy wall, and of the prophets who came behind them and “daubed it with untempered mortar” — whitewash over rubble, a thing that looks from a distance like a fortification and is in truth a hazard, because it persuades the people behind it that they are safe. And then, said the prophet, comes the test that whitewash cannot survive: “there shall be an overflowing shower; and ye, O great hailstones, shall fall; and a stormy wind shall rend it.” The danger of the daubed wall is not merely that it fails. It is that it fails precisely when it is most needed, and that those who trusted it are left worse off than if they had built nothing at all and known their danger plainly.

That is my fear for the present “peace.” Not that it is a deal — nations must sometimes deal with their enemies, and only a fool pretends otherwise — but that it is whitewash: that it will persuade the watching world it has solved what it has merely deferred, and that the deferral will strengthen the aggressor while it isolates the threatened. For there is a pattern here that anyone who reads history with open eyes will recognize, and that the Jewish people have learned at a cost no one else has paid — that the great powers are perpetually willing to purchase their own quiet, to call the purchase peace, and to charge the bill to whoever happens to be standing closest to the danger. Today, as so often before, the one standing closest is Israel.

I am aware of the honest reply, and I will not pretend it carries no force. Is not any agreement better than another war? Is not a managed danger preferable to an unmanaged one? Sometimes, yes. But a managed danger is a mercy only if the management is real, and a deferral that fortifies the very regime it claims to restrain is no mercy to anyone — least of all in the long run, and least of all to the people held in that regime’s sights. There is a peace that is the absence of war, and there is a “peace” that is merely the interval in which an enemy is permitted to grow stronger while his target is talked into lowering its guard. The prophets were not against peace. They were against calling the second thing by the name of the first.

Why does a Christian raise his voice here at all? Not to instruct Israel in her own danger; she understands it better than any outsider can, having buried the cost of every earlier illusion. I raise it because I revere the same Hebrew prophets the Jewish people gave to the world, and because their warning was never addressed to Jerusalem alone. It was addressed to every place where men prefer the comfortable announcement to the hard truth — and the chancelleries of the West are full of such men just now, daubing their wall and admiring the finish. To them, and not to Israel, the prophetic word is owed: that “peace, peace” is not peace, and that saying it more confidently does not make it so.

And I will add, because it is my conviction and I will not hide it behind a careful silence, that the keeping of Israel has never finally rested on the wisdom of her negotiators or the goodwill of her allies, and does not rest there now. That is a larger subject than a single column can carry. But even the reader who sets every theological claim aside can weigh the plain prophetic point, which is a matter of clear sight and not of creed: that a wall of untempered mortar is more dangerous than an honest gap, because the gap, at least, is known.

The prophets of Israel were not pessimists. They were realists who loved their people too well to flatter them, and who refused, at real cost to themselves, the popular and pleasant lie. The friend of Israel — Jewish or Christian, near or far — owes her that same refusal now. When the announcement comes, as it surely will, that peace has been secured, the question to ask is the one Jeremiah and Ezekiel taught us to ask: is this peace, or is it only the saying of it? Look hard at the wall. Notice the whitewash. And do not be found among those who, when the storm comes, are surprised.