Status Updates From Iranophobia: The Logic of a...

Three acclaimed Iranian films, “The Colors of Paradise” (2000), “Baran” (2001), and “Kandahar” (2001), were shown in Israeli movie theatres either in the midst of the second Intifada or immediately after the attacks of 9/11. As with many other films produced in Iran, Israeli critics and moviegoers loved to love these films

Take, for example, Yosef Lapid, leader of Shinui Party. When asked in 2002
why he was so worried, Lapid replied, "Because we are in a corrupt, lazy, backward Middle Eastern environment. What keeps us above water is our cultural difference. The fact that we are a forward outpost of Western civilization."

"When I watch [Shas supporters] on television, [that is] all those black people . . .I panic. Their appearance reminds me of Iran and [the] violent demonstrations in which the Shiites beat themselves until their blood comes oozing out. Sometimes I say to myself: “Good Heavens, they look exactly like them!” That’s why I voted for [Shinui] at the parliamentary election."

(businesswoman ,1999)

The phrase “this is not Iran” is intimately related to the increasing alarm with which secular Israelis from across the political spectrum have watched the ascendancy, since the 1980s, of Shas Party to the center of the political and public stage in Israel. Shas is an ultra-orthodox party associated in the main with Israel’s Mizrahi community.

A typical example is the phrase “This is not Iran” (kan lo iran ), which was penned by Meretz, the center-to-left secular Zionist party, as its slogan for the 1992 election campaign.

In January 1979, while the Shah was still waging of survival, Israelis already had noted a perceived resemblance between Khomeini’s “religious reactionary regime” and the religious Zionist settlement movement.

The entry of the Mizrahim into Israeli politics as a force to be reckoned with was not the only serious threat to Israeli ethnocracy, however. So, too, were Likud’s open embrace of “traditional” or “exilic” Judaism and the rise of the religious Zionist settler movement since the mid-1970s

Two years before, in 1977, the Likud party had won the national election, ending nearly thirty years of Labor party rule. Personifying the antithesis to Labor’s quasi-socialist ethos, Likud appealed to many Mizrahi Israelis, mostly first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants from Muslim countries, who were continuously being treated by members of Israeli ethnocracy as second-class citizens

Israel drew hope from Iran that its fantastic undertaking of constructing a Euro-American enclave in the heart of the Orient was a feasible task.

Thus to varying degrees both Israel and Iran at the time of the Shah were guided by political theologies whose strategic objective was to transform Oriental subjects—Jews and Iranians, respectively—into deracinated replicas of Europeans, even while they remained affliated to their own religious cultures.

Indeed, Aryanism was a potent force in Iranian nationalism even before the Shah came to power. However, as I have shown elsewhere, the inculcation of Aryan identity became the highlight of the Shah’s modernization programs in the 1960s and 1970s, the so-called White Revolution

“With a country the size and shape of Israel . . . probably four or five hits will suffice. No more Israel," predicted historian Benny Morris.

It is for this reason that Melman and Javedanfar painstakingly reproduce dominant Israeli doomsday scenarios, according to which the clerical regime would not hesitate to drop a bomb on Israel in order to achieve its Islamist millenarian agenda.

In The Sphinx the authors are primarily concerned with situating Iran’s nuclear program in its multiple contexts, a welcome endeavor that carries the potential of reducing exaggerated Israeli anxieties about Iran.

The book The Sphinx, coauthored by Yossi Melman (Ha’aretz ’s expert on espionage and international terror) and Meir Javedanfar (an Iranian-born Is-raeli and an independent Iran expert), went to the bookstores in spring
2007.

Indeed, that explains, as revelations emanating from the “Iran-Contra” (or “Iran-gate”) plot also clearly demonstrate, why Israel set out to arm Iran in its war with Iraq.

Anxiety about Iran among Israelis owed much of its intensity and scope to older Zionist-Israeli ideas about the Muslims and Arabs, and it shared much of the same imagery that was prevalent in American public culture.

Trita Parsi, in his informative history of the triangular relationship among Iran, Israel, and the United States, suggests that the ascendancy of the Labor Party to power in 1992 and the ensuing Israeli-Palestinian Oslo peace process were watershed events in the history of Israeli-Iranian animosities.

To begin with, I propose that Israeli anxieties about Iran since 1979
should be attributed to the Jewish state’s shifting geopolitical concerns—especially in light of the Israeli-Egyptian peace process of
1977–1981, which was concurrent with the unfolding Iranian revolution and its immediate aftermath

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,.. 🤔

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.

And so, are Israel and Iran—“Zionism” and “Khomeinism”—really two worlds apart, like a mosquito stands in relation to a helicopter or a fish to a submarine? I don’t share this view.

Asked if he was a “salient Europist,” [Avraham] Burg replied
“Completely. Completely. I see the European Union as biblical utopia.
I don’t know how long it will hold together, but it is amazing.
It is completely Jewish.

The Israeli media, too, have been anxious to consign Israeli realities to an imaginative Europe—“a hyperreal Europe,” in Chakrabarty’s terminology.

The emergent Mizrahi politics of identity was not the only cause of their alarm, however. In addition, the 1977 Likud victory occasioned the rejuvenation of “traditional”-cum-“exilic” Judaism, while also prompting the entry, for the first time since the foundation of the state of Israel, of an ultra-Orthodox haredi party (Agudat Yisrael) into coalition government

Representing “the eruption o the ‘repressed’ in Israeli society and culture,
the rise of the Mizrahim* posed a grave threat to members of the Israeli ethnocracy


*Jews of Middle East descent

"Dr. Ram’s main original contribution is a comparison between Zionism and Khomeinism. I see no fault in such intellectual drills,..."
-David Menashri (Israel’s most prominent expert on Iran)

Fortunately (for me) I survived the backlash

(b) that Israeli scholarly research on the Middle East and Iran has remained impervious to innovative analytical tools and paradigms used in other disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences in ways that are reminiscent of the “epistemic self-suffciency” of Orientalism as a mode of knowledge production;