Iran averts aid ship collision with Israel
By Mehdi Jedinia
After weeks of planning and a fair amount of talking up the story, Iran has
finally made it clear that it is not after all sending a ship carrying
humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Sending a vessel under an Iranian flag might have been just the kind of
propaganda coup Tehran would like - but it could also have ended in a direct
confrontation with Israel.
On May 31, nine Turkish activists were killed when Israeli special forces
boarded an aid vessel trying to break through the maritime blockade of Gaza.
The fate of the Turkish vessel and the publicity surrounding it sparked a
debate in Iranian political circles about whether to press ahead with plans to
send a vessel.
Under the auspices of Iran's Red Crescent Society, preparations
began to load a ship with humanitarian aid cargo at the southern port of Bandar
Abbas. But, signs soon emerged Iran was hesitating on a speedy dispatch of the
vessel when Red Crescent officials said the Egyptian authorities had refused to
issue a permit allowing it to traverse the Suez Canal north to the
Mediterranean. However, a spokesman for the Suez Canal authority said Egypt
would never block any Gaza-bound aid ship from using the canal.
Then, on June 28, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Bighash, a member of the parliamentary
committee for national security and foreign policy, said Tehran was in talks
with Moscow on the possibility of sending a ship via a more roundabout route.
This would take it from an Iranian port on the Caspian Sea through the
Volga-Don Canal in Russia to the Black Sea, and from there to the
Mediterranean.
The final decision to call off the trip was announced by the head of Iran's
Committee for the Support of the Intifada, Hossein Sheikholeslam, who made it
clear that Israeli threats of a military response were too much.
"Israel sent a letter to the United Nations stating that the presence of
Iranian vessels in the Gaza area would be viewed as an act of war and would be
dealt with as such," he said.
Iranian officials will have taken note as Turkey won credibility in the Muslim
world for its effort to break the Gaza blockade. They did not want to be
upstaged, especially since they felt Tehran deserved some recognition for all
the years of political and financial investment in the Palestinian cause.
At the same time, Iran was not best placed to exploit the situation. The
widespread violations of civil rights in Iran after the 2009 presidential
election and the deadlock on the nuclear dispute had both damaged its
credibility among those who might otherwise have welcomed its intervention.
Greta Berlin, a co-founder of the Free Gaza Movement which organized the convoy
in which the Turkish vessel was boarded and seized, refused to accept aid from
Iran. Her group "does not accept donations from extremist governments and
groups", she said.
For Iranian politicians, however, the real issues concerned policy, principle
and pragmatism. Should they dispatch a vessel and challenge Israel head-on,
regardless of the consequences? Or should they stand down because the risks
were too high?
Both these positions were hotly defended by parts of the political
establishment - as was a third argument, representing a combination of the
first two.
Hardliners in the government and in the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps,
IRGC, wanted to run the risk of conflict with Israel. Some mid-ranking IRGC
commanders from the 1980s war with Iraq, as well as more junior commanders,
believed it was a good opportunity to take on the Israelis. They argued that
Iran would score a lot of points in the Muslim world and would subsequently win
over other regional governments by confronting them with a fait accompli.
They also reasoned that a military confrontation of limited scope would benefit
the regime domestically, by letting off some of the steam built up by the
post-election unrest in Iran. The hawks included Ali Shirazi, who represents
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the IRGC naval forces, and whose
brother heads the military affairs section of the supreme leader's office.
Shirazi said that if Khamenei granted permission, IRGC naval vessels would
escort aid convoys to Gaza. The supreme leader failed to authorize this plan,
and Shirazi's proposal was officially dismissed shortly afterwards by Hossein
Salami, deputy commander-in-chief of the IRGC.
In recent months, some advocates of confrontation had even suggested launching
a pre-emptive attack, or else prodding allied insurgent groups in the Middle
East to provoke Israel into a response. At an unofficial meeting of
middle-ranking IRGC commanders in late June, Brigadier-General Saeed Ghasemi
talked about the need for a pre-emptive strike on Israel.
Ghasemi has direct experience of military engagement in the region as a former
member of the Mohammad Rasulallah Corps, an IRGC unit sent to Syria after the
1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. More recently, he backed a sit-in staged at
Mehrabad International Airport in December 2008 by members of the para-military
Basiji movement demanding to be sent to fight in Gaza.
The advocates of confrontation with Israel found themselves opposed by cooler
heads among former diplomats, officials and even retired military commanders,
who took the view that challenging Israel under the present circumstances would
not be in Iran's interests, and would only land it in a predicament with no
clear way out. The alternative that some in this camp proposed was to engage in
international diplomacy to weaken Israel's position.
"Iran can try to gather international condemnation of Israel in political and
diplomatic circles," said Hossein Alayi, a former commander of the IRGC joint
chiefs of staff. Other opponents of a military confrontation were less
confident about the efficacy of diplomacy.
An editorial on the Iranian Diplomacy website, run by Sadegh Kharazi, who
served as a senior Foreign Ministry official under president Mohammad Khatami,
in an editorial, described as pointless a proposal made by Iran at an emergency
meeting of foreign ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Conference in
Jeddah on June 6. "These meetings are good for propaganda, but nothing
practical will come out of them," it said.
Afshar Soleimani, a former Iranian ambassador to Azerbaijan, questioned why
Tehran was so keen on engaging the United Nations with regard to the
Palestinians when it refused to obey United Nations resolutions relating to its
own program.
In the end, the approach the Iranian government adopted was to combine the
rhetoric of the hardliners with the discretion advocated by the pragmatists. In
other words, it decided to do what Iranians call "indicating left and turning
right".
Proponents of this dual approach believed the Israeli attack on the Turkish
ship could be exploited for domestic propaganda purposes while avoiding actual
conflict. This would allow Iran to maintain intact its longer-term interests in
the Middle East.
According to this view, the propaganda war should be stepped up, but not
principally to provoke Israel. Instead, by hinting at the real possibility of
confrontation with Israel, Tehran would both appease the hardliners and
simultaneously redirect some of the anger still rankling among opposition
supporters.
The swift, tough action demanded by the hardliners would be kicked into the
long grass through procrastinated negotiations, and ultimately by blaming other
governments and organizations for failing to act on Iranian proposals and
preventing aid from reaching Gaza.
Esfandyar Rahim-Mashai, a close adviser to President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, was
among those who backed this nuanced approach. It was also favored by the
managing body at the Foreign Ministry, which is under the sway of the
conservative Motalefeh Party.
Immediately after news broke that the Iranian aid ship had been canceled,
Mohammad Reza Sheibani, the deputy foreign minister in charge of Middle Eastern
affairs, and until recently ambassador in Beirut, made the position as clear as
it is likely to get by saying the issue was still on the Ahmadinejad
administration's agenda.
In other words, the plan can remain on the government's agenda indefinitely,
but only as a plan.
Mehdi Jedinia is an Iranian journalist in Washington. He was formerly the
editor-in-chief for the English daily Tehran Times.
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