Iranophobia

THE LOGIC OF AN ISRAELI OBSESSIONBy Haggai Ram

Stanford University Press

Copyright © 2009 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6067-6

Contents

Preface…………………………………………………………………………………..xiIntroduction………………………………………………………………………………11 Inaugurating Iran’s Radical Alterity: Shifting Geopolitics, Oxymoronic Voices…………………..232 Modernity in Crisis: Israeli Pipe Dreams of Euro-America and the Iranian Threat…………………503 Iran and the Jewish State’s Repertoires of Violence in the Post-9/11 World……………………..734 The Unclassifiable: Iran’s Jews in Zionist/Israeli Imagination………………………………..96Postscript: A Few Comments on a “Known Rapist”………………………………………………..120Notes…………………………………………………………………………………….135Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………187Index…………………………………………………………………………………….211

Chapter One

INAUGURATING IRAN’S RADICAL ALTERITY

Shifting Geopolitics, Oxymoronic Voices

The Army should use tanks and machine-guns against the masses, deploy firing squads facing the strikers, and give the secret police and its agents a free hand. –An unnamed Iran expert explaining how the Shah can save his throne, January 1979

IT IS POSSIBLE to argue today, with the benefit of hindsight, that like many other revolutionary struggles in the colonial and postcolonial world, the 1979 Iranian revolution has run out of vital sources of energy and creativity and is left with an exercise of power bereft of any pretense of the exercise of vision. As a consequence, the revolution’s “anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares,” to borrow from David Scott. Nonetheless, it cannot be discounted that this revolution certainly was “one of the central social revolutions of the twentieth century,” as Eric Hobsbawm contends, not the least because it was waged against a perverted kind of modernity that “betrayed every humanistic principle [which] modernity is supposed to represent.”

Reflecting on the historiography of the Chinese Revolution, Arif Dirlik asks, “Why is it that revolutions which seemed to make eminent sense only decades ago, no longer make any sense?” Yet to both Israeli experts and laypersons the 1979 revolution made no sense almost from the very beginning. The reason for this was that their understandings of the revolution were deeply embedded in colonial (or modernist) conceptions of violence, whose nature and implications Talal Asad describes as follows:

However reprehensible it was to liberals, the violence of Marxists and nationalists was understandable in terms of progressive, secular history. The violence of Islamic groups, on the other hand, is incomprehensible to many precisely because it is not embedded in a historical narrative-history in the “proper” sense. As the violence of what is often referred to as a totalitarian religious tradition hostile to democratic politics, it is seen to be irrational as well as being an international threat.

Hence Israelis relegated the revolutionary struggle to the realm of disorganized, untamed, “irrational” violence of the kind that historians of medieval and early modern Europe, as well as of modern colonialism, purportedly come up against periodically. Indeed, to these Israelis the 1979 crisis in Iran was the kind of violence that apparently had no causes and motivations other than “inciting riots, murder, conflagration, torture, and bringing the life of [a] country to a standstill,” to cite one Israeli commentary on the 1979 revolution.

The revolution, it is safe to argue, was directed against a ruler whose blatant elitism and brutality were fashioned after colonial and imperial ideals of modernization. It should not come as a surprise, then, that his fate was similar in kind to that of other postcolonial rulers-or juntas-for whom nationalization “simply mean[t] the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are the legacy of the colonial period.” As mentioned, Arif Dirlik believes that historians of the Chinese Cultural Revolution would later forget its radical discourses and radical alternatives to capitalist modernity. That dismissal of past perspectives, as Dirlik explains, rested not on some “objective” ground, but on the “desire to forget past perspectives that have become uncomfortable owing to changes in the historian’s environment and consciousness.” By contrast, Israelis who monitored the events in Iran refused to view the 1979 revolution as an intellectually formative event from the very start. The act of “forgetting,” which in the Chinese case was bound up with important transformations of the present, did not come up in this instance because, to these Israelis, there was nothing worth “remembering” in the 1979 revolution to begin with.

In retrospect, it is not at all surprising that Israeli experts following the Iranian crisis immediately engaged with the art of “forgetting,” that their narratives of the revolution were instantaneously ridden with silences that have made the whole history of Iran since 1979 into one sorry story of violence, corruption, ineptitude, and waste. For in making sense of the revolution and its aftermath, they drew on much of the same “expert non-knowledge” that has long been in circulation about Palestinian realities (and Palestinian resistance). “The story of Western civilization advancing in the East through its proxy Israel,” anthropologist Ted Swedenburg explains, “has consistently pushed Palestinians to the margins”:

Forced to lurk in the West’s shadow, the “wild” Palestinian Other has occasionally managed to blast his or her way onto center stage with explosive charges and machine-gun bursts. Such disruption of the Western [and Israeli] narrative only lasted for a flicker of the television screen … for they were apprehended as irrational interruptions of an unfolding story of Western progress rather than as statements within a plausible counternarrative.

Echoing long-standing conceptual vocabularies on the murky, impenetrable, irrational, and violent nature of Palestinians (and indeed of “Orientals” in general), Israeli conceptions of the Iranian revolutionaries’ motivations and actions completely overlooked the concrete historical contexts of oppression or injustice in which they operated, and denied them the imaginative, improvisational practices through which “we” ceaselessly elaborate our world. “Their” actions were simply seen to be dictated by the very nature of “their” (religious-cum-violent) culture.

Yet it would be wrong to conclude that dominant Israeli readings of the Iranian revolutionaries were essentially restatements of older themes about Palestinians and other “unruly” Muslims, in the sense coined by Edward Said, referring to the complex movement of “social and historical affiliation” of traveling ideas and theories. Israeli narratives of the revolution and its aftermath also worked differently for Israelis because they displayed a moral panic deriving from the Jewish state’s cultural and ethnic “outsiders within,” as well as a reaction to transformations in that state’s relations with the Arab world since the late 1970s.

The issue of moral panic will have to wait until the next chapter. Nonetheless, in this chapter I explore the production of these narratives within the context of Israel’s shifting strategic concerns. To exemplify this issue I first trace the evolution of these narratives in “real time,” that is during the time of the revolution’s unfolding in the years 1978-1979. These narratives, consisting of false historical analogies, huge generalizations about human behavior, and huge assumptions about world historical processes, read more like a testimony on behalf of the “Murderous Humanitarianism” of the Shah regime than a testimony on behalf of its Iranian victims. In the second section I will move on to break through the seemingly stable authority of these narratives and reveal their ambivalences and fractured nature, and through them, the unresolved tensions and contradictions inherent in the Jewish state’s conflicting reality, as will be explored in Chapter 2.

SETTING IN PLACE THE GREAT DIVIDE: “KHOMEINISM AND HUMANISM”

I begin my discussion with three anecdotes, the first two dating back to the 1979 revolution and its immediate aftermath, and the latter from the year 2001. On January 16, 1979, following months of stormy and violent demonstrations, the Shah left Iran for an exile he would not return from. A few days earlier, when it became clear that the Shah’s days as Iran’s all-powerful ruler were numbered, a cartoon appeared in Davar, a newspaper belonging to the Histadrut, which captured the gist of the ways in which Israelis came to understand the unfolding crisis in Iran. In this cartoon, the vast array of groups that joined forces to depose the Shah are all reduced to a figure of a bearded, turbaned, cloaked cleric. The cleric is seen setting free “the genie of the revolution” out of a bottle representing “the reaction of Islamic radicals to modernization.” This cartoon clearly reveals the imagination at work in the minds of those Israelis who closely monitored the crisis in Iran. Through the genie’s image, the revolution is stripped of any concrete or plausible context. Instead, it is presented as an exotic scene from A Thousand and One Nights, a spectacle conjured of a purely religious instinct, the purpose of which is to foil Iran’s majestic march toward modern statehood and modern nationhood.

Similar silences were introduced during the international ordeal that began in Tehran on November 4, 1979, when some four hundred Iranian militant students stormed the U.S. embassy and took all diplomats and employees there hostage. In the midst of this crisis, in March 1980, the late Ze’ev Schiff, Ha’aretz‘s expert on military and security affairs, reported on a conference held in Tel Aviv University in which Middle East experts from Israel and the United States convened to discuss the implications of the Iranian revolution and the hostage taking. Schiff was particularly impressed with Columbia University’s professor of Middle East studies, Richard Bulliet, who “for quite a while … talked enthusiastically … about the positive aspects … and the humane side of the revolution.” “It is remarkable,” Schiff wrote, “that you can always find Americans who think differently and raise question marks about the position of the mainstream.” And yet in his essay Schiff said not a word about Bulliet’s “different” modes of thought. Readers interested in the assumptions and reasoning of the American professor regarding revolutionary Iran would find none. Instead, Schiff concentrated on the negative impression Bulliet left on “most Israelis” present in the audience, who, like Schiff, were shocked to discover that “what seemed insanely murderous to many of his countrymen, seemed perfectly sane and understandable to him.” Paradoxically, although Schiff ‘s declared intention was to introduce original and provocative views on the revolution and the hostage crisis, all he ended up doing was reproducing what he himself defined as “the position of the mainstream.” The other stance, in this case the one voiced by Bulliet, was entirely absent from his account.

Moving forward to the twenty-first century, on February 12, 2001, the Channel 2 morning television show “Caf Tel’ad” commemorated the Iranian revolution’s twenty-second anniversary with Brigadier Gen. (res.) Itzhak Segev, Israel’s last military attach to Iran. Segev was summoned to the studio to relate his part in the operation of smuggling out a group of Israelis from the compound of the Israeli mission in Tehran, after it had been captured by Iranian demonstrators on February 11, 1979-the day the Shah’s army surrendered to the revolutionary forces. Against the backdrop of ominous, gory footage of the Iran-Iraq war (which broke out nearly two years after the event!), the announcer introduced Segev to the spectators as follows: “His story sounds like an Iranian-style … fictional Hollywood script.” Thus, in this instance, the revolution, the escape story, and the Iran-Iraq war were all presented as a clutter of unrelated topics. In view of the total disregard of any essential context that would make the Israeli embassy’s capture intelligible, it comes as no surprise that the announcer treated the whole affair as somewhat of a fairy tale, an “Iranian style” Hollywood script. It is no coincidence, too, that Tel’ad decided to take notice of the revolution’s anniversary by recounting the Israelis’ escape from the embassy-rather than, say, trying to explain the revolution and its broader implications on their own terms. In the absence of any clearly demarcated contexts, the program left two critical questions unanswered: Why did the revolution take place, and Why did a host of Iranian demonstrators storm the Israeli embassy in the first place? The fact that these questions were never raised stands as testimony to the implicit assumption-which, being self-explanatory or “normal,” does not need explanation-that the revolution and the raid both stemmed from the Iranian people’s Islamic provenance and the unprovoked hatred that this “Islam” nurtures against Jews in general and the Jewish state in particular.

These are merely three examples of the massive self-censorship by analysts who, by remembering only what fitted with their ready-made categories, gave testimony to a pervasive amnesia in the Israeli public sphere regarding Iranian history. As we know well today, to gain a fuller perspective on the revolution, the hostage crisis, and other episodes in Iranian history, it is necessary to situate them in the related contexts of royalist despotism and Iran’s entanglement with the history of colonialism since the early nineteenth century. In the absence of any talk about the implications of despotism and colonialism in Iran, Israeli experts left the impression that the Iranian revolution occurred in a timeless vacuum, hence providing yet another vivid example of the well-known colonial gesture of “dismissing the possibility that the native can look back at you as you are looking at him.”

Yet it should be emphasized that these lacking images of the revolution became prevalent in Israeli public culture only gradually. At the beginning Israelis demonstrated a great deal of sensitivity to the complex revolutionary situation and were even willing to try to get to the bottom of the deeper roots and motivations of the crisis. Sometimes, too, they even expressed empathy with the revolutionaries and their causes, an empathy that Israelis have invariably lacked with respect to previous “Oriental” coups, revolutions, and popular upheavals in the modern Middle East. This mind-set, it seems, was first and foremost the outcome of one basic heartfelt wish: that the secular, pro-Western revolutionary forces gain the upper hand, even if that meant putting an end to the Shah regime, which-as will be seen in Chapter 2-was Israel’s longtime ally. “In our secret hearts, perhaps in our naivet, we still hoped that Bakhtiyar [leader of the National Front, appointed prime minister by the Shah on the eve of his departure] would regain control and put things the way they were,” was the reminiscence many years later of an Israeli official and entrepreneur who had operated in Iran for nearly a quarter of a century up to the 1979 revolution.

Capturing the gist of this mind-set, Michel Foucault, who covered the revolution for the Italian newspaper Corriere della sera, remarked ironically that “Many here [in the West] … are waiting for and hoping for the moment when secularization will at last come back to the fore [in Iran] and reveal the good, old type of revolution we have always known.” Yet the dawning realization that a different (read Islamist) scenario would most likely unfold in Iran finally prompted Israelis to cast the revolution into the realms of radical alterity. It should be borne in mind that as the struggle developed and as the popularity of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini grew, so did Islamist expressions of the popular protest become more prevalent. As a result, Israeli analysts-who had watched the revolution through hyper-secular eyes and hence assigned religion to premodern “savages”-became concerned with what they perceived as the overtaking of the Iranian polity by regressive clerics. Put differently, as long as they believed that the revolution would remain faithful to what Dipesh Chakrabarty described in the context of colonial India as “the rule of institutions that delivered us from the thrall of all that was unreasonable and irrational,” they could identify with it and even show empathy for its instigators. But when it seemed to them that the revolution strayed from these institutions they were quick to label it a diehard expression of reactionary anti-modernity.

As previously noted, in the early stages of the revolutionary upheaval, in late summer 1978, Israeli figures from the media, government, and academia revealed a remarkable understanding of the complexity of events in Iran and attempted to place them in their multiple and sometimes conflicting contexts. Such sensibilities enabled them to trace the roots of the crisis to the destructive impact of the Shah’s policies rather than to violence running rampant outside the boundaries of modernity. “Explanations that relate the causes of events to the actions of hotheaded fanatic groups are too simplistic and do not fully elucidate the problem,” noted Haifa University historian Gad Gilbar. Attention should instead be focused, he said, on the Shah’s projects of modernization in the 1960s and 1970s (collectively known as the White Revolution reform program), which created “serious problems [such as] a dearth of human resources, severe communications problems, massive urbanization by village populations, transportation difficulties, storage problems and a serious shortage in apartments.” Other analysts traced Iranians’ grievances to a pervasive sense of cultural alienation deriving from the Shah’s reckless Westernization, and to “inflation and corruption that spread like a plague.” Still others noted the Shah’s political repression-“by means of the armed forces and the vast secret police, the SAVAK”-as an important determinant in the formation of the resistance movement.

(Continues…)

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