Iran, Israel: The good, the bad and
the ugly By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
In light of the political uproar caused by the
comments of Iran's president against Israel, it is
important to examine the comments, which call for
the destruction of the state of Israel, within the
context of Iran's overall foreign policy.
Iran's foreign policy since the revolution
of 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini greeted
Yasser Arafat as his first foreign visitor, has
been consistent in terms of a radical
pro-Palestinian orientation.
During the Khomeini era, Iran
remained steadfast in its call for the full
resurrection of Palestinian rights and their
(armed) struggle for self-determination, this
despite the overt pro-Saddam Hussein
policy of the Palestinian
Liberation Organization during the Iran-Iraq war
of the 1980s and, worse, the Iraqi regime's
recruitment of many Palestinians in the war
against Iran.
During the 1990s, however,
with a new pragmatic turn in Iran's foreign policy
initiated by powerful cleric Hashemi Rafsanjani,
Iran's position with respect to the Arab-Israeli
conflict became somewhat modified. Case in point:
after the signing of Oslo Agreement, Iran's
leaders, including the foreign minister, stated
publicly that they would abide by the will of
Palestinian people and respect the decisions of
their political leaders.
At the same time,
Iran officially maintained a healthy skepticism
regarding Israel's fulfillment of its Oslo
promises, and once Oslo was pronounced dead by
Israeli officials, who violated their agreement
not to build new settlements and to press forward
for full Palestinian autonomy and self-rule, the
Iranian government and the official press felt
their cynicism to have been justified. This, in
turn, prompted a more vigorous pro-Palestinian
effort, in part by utilizing the Organization of
Islamic Conference led by Iran during the first
term of president Mohammad Khatami.
The
Khatami era featured a policy mixture of
moderation and hard line, reflecting Iran's
political factionalism. Khatami's policy of
rapprochement with the West, particularly western
Europe, coinciding with an Iranian Jew (Moshe
Katsav) being Israel's president, raised
expectations of a more lenient approach by Tehran
toward the peace process.
A number of
influential Iranian foreign-policy experts, such
as Mahmood Sariolghalam, gave theoretical depth to
this new approach-in-the-making by explicitly
linking the lack of progress in Iran-US relations
to Iran-Israel hostility, arguing that some 80% of
the former was caused by the latter.
However, Israel's leading the global march
against Iran's nuclear program, Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's iron-fist policy vis-a-vis the
Palestinians, and the US government's
unwillingness to "reward" Iran for its cooperative
behavior after September 11, 2001, eg, in
Afghanistan, where Iran was instrumental in the
bloodless takeover of Kabul by the pro-Iran
Northern Alliance, collectively eroded any hope
for a significant change of Iranian policy toward
the Arab-Israeli conflict, officially wedded to
the creation of a Palestinian state in place of
today's Israel.
Yet, this did not
constitute the entire sum of Iran's policy, and
whisperings about the need to revise the policy in
favor of an alternative based on a "two-state
solution" grew noticeably louder during the
Khatami presidency.
Complementing this new
thinking was Khatami's initiative of a dialogue
among civilizations at the United Nations, which
in turn made more transparent the policy
ramifications of Iran's pre-Islamic history and
identity; the latter includes the legacy of Cyrus
the Great's edict in 534 BC which, after
liberating the enslaved Jews in the Kingdom of
Babylon, allowed them to return to their promised
land.
Of course, Khatami's dialogue among
civilizations was primarily geared toward Islam
and Western civilizational dialogue. Nevertheless,
to the extent that this dialogue looked inward at
Iran's own contribution to world civilization, it
had a clear, though mostly latent, impact in terms
of causing a new awakening about the relevance and
importance of Iran's complex, part-Islamic,
part-pre Islamic and specifically "Persianist"
history and identity.
This "dual identity"
does not pertain to a distant past : it is,
rather, a staple of everyday life in Iran and, in
terms of the cultural orientation of Iran's
foreign policy, is highly relevant to the nuances
of this policy, which has been experiencing
certain readjustments since the passing of the
Khatami era and the onset of a more militant
presidency under Mahmud Ahmadinejad.
Such
readjustments have been partly dictated by the
winds in Iran's vicinity, and related
Americophobic national security concerns, much to
the detriment of Iran's moderate politicians
headed by Khatami and, to a lesser extent,
Rafsanjani, who openly yearned for the restoration
of relations with the US.
Yet, today, the
walls of mistrust between Iran and the US which
Khatami talked about have grown substantially
higher, despite the fact that post-Saddam Iraq
features a convergence of interests between the
two countries (highlighted by recent comments by
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice regarding
dialogue between the Iranian and US embassies in
Baghdad, shortly thereafter reciprocated by Iran's
interior minister).
Unfortunately, such
positive developments, representing tiny cracks in
the glacier of a quarter century of mutual
animosity, are now held back by what appears to be
an off-the-cuff statement by Iran's president who,
by all indications, is a foreign-policy amateur
still on the learning curve of global diplomacy.
Ahmadinejad's incendiary comment that
Israel must be wiped off the map runs against
Iranian history, which harks back to Cyrus the
Great's tolerance of a Jewish state. Iran's
spiritual leader recently welcomed Israel's
withdrawal from Gaza as "positive", and yet
Ahmadinejad has labeled it as a "joke".
The timing of Ahmadinejad's comment, which
coincides with the new Washington-led campaign
against Syria over the UN report on the
assassination of former Lebanese prime minister
Rafik Hariri, should not be overlooked, for it may
have been calculated to offset any undue pressure,
or even strike, against Syria, on which Iran
counts as a backbone of support in the Arab world.
The question, important for the makers of
Iran's foreign policy, is the proper weight and
attention to be allocated to Israel,
notwithstanding reports of Israel's growing
meddling among the Kurds, and other activities.
This question popped open in January 2002 with the
Israeli interception of Karin-A, carrying an
alleged Iranian arms shipment loaded at an Iranian
island in the Persian Gulf.
The backlash
against Iran at the time was partly internal, as
the moderate majlis (parliament) deputies called
for an official inquiry, some even pointing at the
unruly Revolutionary Guards and their self-styled
foreign policy. On the other hand, a number of
foreign-policy experts tended to see a redeeming
value in that scandal, in terms of Iran's military
"showing its teeth" and using that as leverage
with Washington.
Similarly, one wonders if
Ahmadinejad's comments were not deliberately
calculated to solicit a more negotiated response
from Israel and the US down the road, with Iran
willing to discuss the terms of adopting a less
militant posture towards Israel. For the moment,
it is fair to conclude, albeit provisionally, that
the president's comments were not coordinated
aspects of a carefully-planned approach, but
rather a personal statement of ideological
preference. Regardless of what lay behind the
timing of Ahmadinejad's comments, it is abundantly
clear by the backlash it has caused in European
capitals and elsewhere that Iranian foreign-policy
interests have not been particularly well served
by such public statements, representing fresh logs
in the furnace of the anti-Iran campaign within
the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is
about to deliberate the next course of action on
Iran. In a word, Iran has been somewhat
undermining itself in the battle for world public
opinion with respect to its right to nuclear
technology, by making official statements that
kindle the images of another Holocaust.
How Iranian hardline politicians think
that they can advance Iran's nuclear rights while
simultaneously pursuing such counter-productive
public diplomacy remains a puzzle. The
continuation of such an approach, representing
clear discontinuity with past diplomacy,
irrespective of Ahmadinejad's initial promise of
maintaining policy continuity, will only harm
Iran's interests and bolster the position of
global forces pushing for Iran's isolation and
marginalization.
A prudent Iranian foreign
policy should avoid steps that directly or
indirectly help the cause of the anti-Iran global
forces orchestrating a wide-ranging public
campaign to rationalize a future military assault
against Iran's nuclear installations. The
legitimacy deficits of such sinister plans against
Iran have now been partially remedied by the harsh
anti-Israel statements of Iran's president, and
one only hopes that the president's advisors and
other responsible officials of the Iranian
government realize the extent of damage to Iran's
national interests that can be caused by an over
commitment to an ideological principle.
This principle is in dire need of
realistic overhaul in line with the changing
context of Iran's foreign-policy needs and
priorities in a turbulent Middle East.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-authored "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism",
The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume X11,
issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
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