People in Connecticut with ties to Israel or to Iran are speaking out about the fighting between the two nations. While there are different opinions on the conflict, they’re worried about someone on the ground there.
“There's a combination of resolve and solidarity, along with understandable fear and concern,” said David Waren, President of the Jewish Federation of Greater Hartford, who spoke with Connecticut Public in the days leading up to U.S. airstrikes against Iran.
Waren, who has many friends and relatives in Israel, said the fighting between Iran and Israel has been a topic of virtually every conversation he's had in the Jewish community recently.
““I've talked to a number of Jewish residents in our region, including some employees of ours who have children in Israel, some of them on summer programs,” Waren said. “They've been working to try to ensure their kids are safe, and then to bring them back in the midst of the fighting.”
Despite fear for loved ones abroad, Warren says Israel was right to strike targets connected to Iran's nuclear program.
“Israel had no choice in launching this defensive operation, faced with a sworn enemy on the cusp of acquiring nuclear weapons with the very specific purpose of wiping out the Jewish state,” Warren said.
Speaking prior to the U.S. strikes, Warren said he thought the United States should join Israel in bombing Iran's nuclear program.
“Not because it’s in Israel's interest, but because it's in America's interest,” Warren said. “The Iranian capacity to threaten American interests has already been demonstrated. This is a real opportunity with Iran weakened, to finish the job.”
Iranian-Americans in CT feel ‘anxiety, uncertainty’ over conflict
Hartford International University professor Hossein Kamaly told Connecticut Public last week he hoped the United States would not bomb Iran, based on how other U.S. military action in the region has fallen short of the intended outcome.
“Looking at what has been going on in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria over the past couple of decades, what has been the result of warfare?” Kamaly said. “The Taliban is in place [in Afghanistan]. Is Iraq as stable as one wishes for? Is Syria a safe place now?”
Kamaly is hoping for a quick end to the fighting. He was born in Iran and has relatives in the Tehran area.
“I have a niece in Iran, who was speaking with my daughter on the phone on Father’s Day, I overheard my niece tell my daughter ‘I love you; we love you’ and there was a trembling in her voice,” Kamaly said. “There was an anxiety, uncertainty. That has been echoing in my mind.”
Dr. Ramin Ahmadi with Yale-New Haven Health says he's also worried about relatives in Iran, but he also hopes that the bombing might bring down the repressive Iranian regime.
“This war, there is a mixture of fear and excitement,” Ahmadi said. “The excitement is about liberation and is about the possibility that the Iranian regime will be destroyed.”
Ahmadi left Iran at the age of 18, around the same time he saw the regime act against his classmates.
“Some of my very good friends, because they were communist, they were socialist, they were killed, they were executed right out of high school. So I came with that baggage, with that memory, of what this regime did to that young generation back then,” Ahmadi said. “Ever since, year after year, we have seen atrocities after atrocities.
A protracted war would be in no one's interest, Ahmadi said.
On Monday afternoon, a couple dozen people gathered in Hartford to protest against “imperial violence” in both Iran and Gaza.
“Stop the bombing!” read a social media message posted by CT Palestine Solidarity Coalition.
CT’s U.S. senators split on intervention
After the weekend U.S. bombings of Iran, members of Connecticut’s federal delegation weighed in. U.S. senators representing the state say President Trump skipped a major step before launching strikes on Iran this weekend.
In a statement, Sen. Chris Murphy said the strikes against Iran were unlawful.
“Donald Trump, a weak and dangerously reckless president, has put the United States on a path to a war in the Middle East that the country does not want, the law does not allow, and our security does not demand,” Murphy said.
Murphy said he had been briefed on the intelligence and spoke out against U.S. involvement.
“There is no evidence Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States,” he said. “That makes this attack illegal. Only Congress can declare preemptive war, and we should vote as soon as possible on legislation to explicitly deny President Trump the authorization to drag us into a conflict in [the] Middle East that could get countless Americans killed and waste trillions of dollars.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal took questions on the strikes at a Monday press conference in Hartford. Asked if he believed Trump did the right thing in attacking Iran, Blumenthal did not question or criticize the decision itself.
“A nuclear-armed Iran is an unacceptable threat to the world, including the United States,” he said. “I want to know what the immediate threat was for this action and what the results were in accurate, specific terms – whether we have just set back the effort by a little bit or effectively taken a step toward ending it entirely.”
Shortly after Blumenthal’s remarks, news broke that Iran struck a U.S. base in Qatar.
“The main point is now we need to stand with our allies, like Israel, [and] provide protection for our personnel – 40,000 troops and other personnel in the area,” Blumenthal said. “We need to pursue a path toward peace, restraint, diplomacy, [and] international engagement.”
Like Murphy, he also called on the president to go through Congress.
“Bombing another country is an act of war,” Blumenthal said. “The president – any president – is required to come to Congress, inform and seek approval before beginning a war. This president has done neither. He owes the public, not just Congress, an explanation, and he must come to Congress to inform and seek approval under the Constitution. It's a bedrock principle of constitutional law. I hope he’ll respect it.”
Connecticut Public's Chris Polansky contributed to this story.
