The world is anticipating or dreading the possibility of U.S. and/or Israeli attacks on Iran, given Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to wipe Israel off the map and the development of that country’s nuclear energy program.
This week, The Chronicle spoke with several Israelis living in the Milwaukee area, as well as some Jews who emigrated from Iran, for their perspectives on this situation.
Israeli Gonen Liberman, 43, of Mequon has lived for some nine years in the Milwaukee area. Married, with a middle-school-aged daughter, Liberman owns Iron Creations, a business that makes wrought iron fences, gates, furniture and sculptures. He said his family plans to return to Israel in a few years.
Liberman said he and his family and friends in Israel are worried about the threat posed by Iran, but he has confidence in Israel’s military power.
Liberman would like to see Western imposed economic sanctions given more of a chance, he said in a telephone interview last week.
“Sooner or later Israel may have to act, but it’s better to finish with the diplomatic way first,” he said. He sees Ahmadinejad as an unpopular leader and believes that the economic sanctions are working.
“It would be best to increase that pressure,” he said. “We don’t want to hurt the Iranian population.”
She, too, sees Iran as a big threat, capable of doing anything. She believes that Israel is trying to talk to Iran through a variety of channels. “We can’t do anything direct with them,” she said.
Eisenstein believes that “Israelis hope that the U.S. can do something, put more pressure on Iran.”
Whether Israel should attack Iran to keep it from attacking first is a difficult question, she said. “I think if it’s going to be very real, maybe we should do the first step,” though that would be very risky.
Here, it is all very far away, she said. Maybe after returning to Israel, “I might feel more scared.”
Astrid Beroukhim, 62, of Fox Point, and Benny Rokni, 46, of Mequon were born and raised in Iran.
Beroukhim, Rokni’s aunt, left Iran in 1967 as a newlywed with her husband, who is a physician. After living in Pennsylvania, New York and Madison, they settled here in 1973. She works as a real estate agent.
Though Beroukhim said animosity did exist between Jews and Muslims in her country, she never experienced anti-Semitism while growing up there.
But her brother, Isaac Rokni, Benny’s father, would have been killed had he stayed in Iran because he worked for the Jewish Agency for Israel, assisting Iraqi and Iranian Jews immigrate to Israel, she said.
Beroukhim said she has mixed feelings about Iran. “On one hand, they are a real threat to Israel because they support terrorism through Hezbollah … but it’s hard to believe they would be directly involved” in attacking Israel.
“If we get into a war with Iran then we will be in a war with Iran and the surrounding countries for another 100 years,” she said, “but Iran will not be able to hit Israel because [Israel has] such advanced interception capabilities.”
Beroukhim and her family and friends “are always worried about the fanatics — Muslims and Jews,” she said.
Some American Jewish hawks and neoconservatives, she said, “want to bomb the hell out of Iran, but [if that happened] they would be killing people like me.” Though she believes most American Jews are moderate and liberal, Beroukhim fears Jews on the right more than the Iranians, she said.
“Israel cannot bomb Iran without creating a lot of other problems. It’s better to reach out to [Iran] as maybe not friends, but as a respectable country,” she said.
She referred to the fact that the U.S. and Britain overthrew Iran’s last democratically elected government in 1953, when then Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh nationalized his country’s oil industry, and “brought the Shah and his corrupt family” to power. “If democracy had happened then, Iran would be a different country today,” she said.
Rokni, who works as a consultant for HK Systems, a company that does warehouse and distribution automation, was sent out of Iran by his parents when he was 16.
He and his brother came to live with the Beroukhims and he graduated from Nicolet and Marquette University. He is married with a daughter and son. His parents eventually followed and settled here as well.
Noting that Iranians are not Arabs and that it is a country with a great cultural history, Rokni said that he and his family have had heavy hearts about this situation for many months. Both he and Beroukhim would like to see the citizens of Iran take control and effect regime change internally.
Rokni, who described himself as more conservative than his aunt, said that the Ahmajinedad regime, “cannot be allowed to have nuclear power and that is not an Israel problem, it is a world problem.”
Rokni believes that the majority of Iranians do not like the regime. However, he said, “if Iran is attacked, I think Iranians, even those who do not support the regime, will rally around it.”
He said there is a lot going on in Iran that is not reported in the West and that “the sanctions are working. Iranians are aware that the world is not looking favorably on their government and the people are fed up with the prices” they are forced to pay because of the sanctions.
Like all of those interviewed for this article, Rokni does not think that Israel will act without approval of the U.S., but he added, “At the end of the day, if there are no options, I would not be willing to just sit back.” He would support a pre-emptive attack by Israel.
“But,” he cautioned, “that would be a very dangerous and a very costly decision. It would be an ugly action and Iran would retaliate through Hezbollah.”
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