Owlseyes ’s Reviews > Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession > Status Update

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.