In a provocative new argument from his recently published book, “The Preventive State,” renowned legal scholar Alan Dershowitz asserts a forceful justification for a preemptive military strike against Iran’s nascent nuclear program.
Drawing parallels to the inaction against Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Dershowitz contends that international law not only permits such action but that the cost of not acting could be catastrophic.
Dershowitz argues that if diplomacy fails and Iran approaches the threshold of developing a deliverable nuclear weapon, Israel, potentially with or without U.S. support, would be compelled to act.
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“No democracy can afford to wait until such a threat against its civilian population is imminent,” said Dershowitz.
He champions the right of both Israel and the United States, under international law, to protect their citizens and soldiers from a “threatened nuclear holocaust,” even if it necessitates preemptive military action, akin to Israel’s 1981 strike on Iraq’s Osirak reactor.
Such action, he emphasizes, should be considered “if that is the only realistic option” and if it can be undertaken “without an unreasonable number of civilian casualties.”
While acknowledging the potential for high casualties in any conflict, Dershowitz suggests a “cost-benefit case for preventive military action,” asserting that the cost of inaction could be “far greater.” He further posits that Israel’s recent actions could be viewed as reactive and legitimate responses to Iran’s direct missile attacks and indirect assaults via proxies in Yemen, Lebanon, and Gaza.
A central tenet of his argument is the “false negative” — the failure to take preventive action due to an inability to fully grasp the averted catastrophe. He points to the mid-1930s when Britain and France, despite military strength, failed to act against a still-weak but increasingly aggressive Nazi Germany. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, expressed surprise at their inaction. The result, Dershowitz laments, was the deaths of “tens of millions of innocent people.”
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“Had Israel failed to act against Iran by last week,” Dershowitz warns, “such a ‘false negative’ could have resulted in millions of deaths from a nuclear armed fanatical regime, that has pledged to destroy ‘the Zionist devil.'” He acknowledges the unknowable nature of averted disasters: “We’ll never know for certain what harms Israel’s preemptive action may have prevented, because history is blind to the predictive future.”
Dershowitz directly addresses the criticism faced by leaders who undertake preemptive action, drawing a parallel to George W. Bush’s decision regarding Iraq’s suspected nuclear arsenal in 2003. He argues that had Britain and France taken preventive action in the 1930s, even with a hypothetical 15,000 casualties, the leaders would have been condemned as “warmongers” because the “tens of millions of lives their actions saved” would remain unknown.
This “dilemma of invisible false negatives,” Dershowitz explains, often leads to inaction. He contends that while the “tens of millions of deaths” resulting from the failure to act against Hitler are recognized, the leaders responsible for that inaction are not “generally blamed as much as action that directly and visibly produces a body count.”
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Finally, Dershowitz defends Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been criticized for acting too quickly and not waiting for diplomatic resolutions. Dershowitz asserts that a “satisfactory deal that would have absolutely assured that Iran would never obtain nuclear weapons was never likely,” as Iran’s insistence on enrichment, a pathway to weaponization, made negotiations a tactic to “buy time.” Therefore, Dershowitz concludes, “Netanyahu was right, as a matter of law, morality, and diplomacy, to do what he did, when he did it.”
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