Fundamental Misconceptions About Israel, Iran
Friday, July 19 Trita Parsi and Roi Ben-Yehuda co-authored an article entitled Essential things Israelis and Iranians should know about each other that appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (הארץ). The article represented a sophisticated attempt to create a somewhat circumscribed space within Neocon-Zionist-dominated American discourse to discuss Iranian-Israeli and Iranian-American issues rationally.
Not only does the article's content feel somewhat quaint and antiquated because Americans have begun to discuss much more openly the pernicious effects of the Israel Lobby on American politics and foreign policy, but its reflexive genuflection to demonstrably false Zionist beliefs provides good evidence of the problems arising both
- from discussing Israel and Zionism without a good understanding of Eastern European Jewish studies and also
- from collaboration with an Israeli American fairly thoroughly indoctrinated in Zionist-American-Jewish mythology.
Here is an annotated version of the article. A blue sidebar adjoins the original text.
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| By Trita Parsi and Roi Ben-Yehuda |
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| The looming Iran-Israel confrontation has a seemingly deterministic quality to it. Listening to the politicians, one gets a sense that powers beyond our control are pulling us toward a 21st-century disaster. Yet a great deal of the force propelling us into confrontation is fueled by ignorance and dehumanization. Israel is demonized as "Little Satan," while Iranians are portrayed as irrational Muslim extremists.
Indeed, mutual ignorance of our respective societies plays into the hands of the hard-line leaders who are calling for blood and destruction. They manipulate and distort; above all, they do everything to prevent us from recognizing that the enemy has a face. |
"Hard-line leaders" can get away with distorting the issues because far too few members of the public have a sufficiently thorough understanding of the Eastern and Central European social political cultures from which the State of Israel descends.
| Not that either of us is naive enough to believe that mere knowledge of one another will offer a miraculous solution. We do believe, however, that mutual understanding will go a long way toward allowing us to feel empathy and compassion for each other, and to sound off at those calling for bloodshed and war. |
Here are some essential things Iranians and Israelis should know about each other:
1. Israel is a vibrant yet incomplete democracy
On his visit to the United States last fall, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad famously stated that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Well, in Israel there are plenty of homosexuals, and they are the only ones in the Middle East who have an annual gay pride parade in their capital city. |
The authors' point is unclear.
Sexual identities represent social constructs. Western "gay-ness" does not really exist in Middle Eastern cultures except within Israel, which is really a transplanted mixed Central and Eastern European Jewish society.
As a fundamentally alien entity in the ME, the Zionist state hosts sexual identities that were already well-developed among German Jews and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim by the early 20th century.
Both groups have been active proselytizers for regendering Western society according to Yiddish models for at least the last 90 years.
As Columbia Professor Joseph Massad points out in Desiring Arabs, non-Westernized (and many Westernized) Arabs that engage in homoeroticism have no interest in the Yiddish regenderization program and generally reject Western homosexual identity, which Massad calls the Gay International.
| Democracy in Israel means that every citizen and group (Jewish or otherwise) has the right to express him/herself and assemble in public. Also, that every citizen is equal under the law has voting rights, religious freedom, access to education, health care, opportunity. |
To believe that non-Jewish citizens are equal in an officially Jewish state is logically equivalent to believing that non-white citizens would be equal in an officially white state.
The State of Israel is an Eastern European ethnic fundamentalist völkisch racist formal democracy that has aspects of ethnocracy but is really dominated by a political military economic oligarchy. Such state organizations are common in modern Eastern European history and only denial or lack of familiarity with modern Eastern European political structures can explain the mischaracterization of the Israeli state. All sorts of official and unofficial bias are built into the Zionist system. David Kretzmer goes through the legal discrimination in detail in The Legal Status of the Arabs in Israel.
| Undoubtedly, Israel's democracy is still a work in progress. The fusion of religion and state has limited people's rights and freedoms (for example, Israelis of different faiths cannot legally marry one another in the country), and the de facto secondary status of Israeli Arabs is an affront to the country's democratic ideals. |
Israel does not fuse religion and state in a Jewish counterpart of Islamist ideas like al-Islam din wa-dawla.
Zionist ideology slices and dices Jewish religion in order to support an ethnic fundamentalist political program in exactly the same way other similar Eastern European political movements like Greater Serbianism have used Christian religion.
While the second class status of Israeli Arabs (a Zionist ideological term) may be an affront to American democratic ideals, limiting the political voice of Israeli Palestinians (the term preferred by most Israeli citizens descended from the native Palestinian population) is a fundamental principal of Zionist ideology.
| Fortunately, many people in Israel are assiduously working to change the system from within. |
Not only is it hard to find Israeli Jews willing even to discuss Zionist völkisch racism honestly, but Israeli Jews have no real ability to reform the Israeli state because Zionist politics from the earliest days of the Zionist settlement until today have been completely dominated and controlled by the transnational hyperwealthy Jewish political economic oligarchic elite that has funded the Zionist movement and the Zionist settlement from the beginning
| 2. Iran is a vibrant quasi-democracy
It is far from a full democracy, but neither is it a complete dictatorship. Its severe limitations notwithstanding, Iran has a lively civil society and possesses most of the building blocks for a successful democracy down the road. Iranians' struggle for democracy dates back to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. Since then, Iranians have learned two important lessons.
First, war and democratization don't mix. As tensions between Iran and the outside world increase, the first to pay are Iran's pro-democracy and human rights activists. For Iran to move toward a democratic system, it needs peace and tranquility; bombs and surgical strikes will achieve the opposite.
Second, when you carry out a revolution, you know against whom you are revolting, but not necessarily for whom you are waging the revolution. Iranians have little appetite for another revolution. As unpopular as their current government is, they prefer gradual and manageable change.
3. Streets are named for poets
Just like Iran, Israel puts great value on the written word. In Israel, streets are named for poets - writers who have revived a people and its ancient language. |
The official Israeli national poet Chaim Nachman Bialik wrote in 1934 in The Present Hour:
"I too, like Hitler, believe in the power of the blood idea."
Figure 1 Rehov Bialik (Bialik Street) in Tel Aviv
The claims of national and linguistic revival are simply Zionist propaganda.
The Truth about National Revival
Tel Aviv University Professor Shlomo Sand has correctly pointed out that Judaism spread out from Palestine [and Mesopotamia], but the ancient inhabitants of Palestine never emigrated from their homeland. Modern ethnic Ashkenazim and German Jews have no ancestral connection to Palestine.
During the 19th century ethnic Ashkenazim began to develop political consciousness as a Yiddish ethnic group, which Zionist ideologists reinterpreted as a pan-Judaic ethnonational group in order to legitimize the theft of Palestine from the native population.
The Truth about Linguistic Revival
Modern Israeli Hebrew (MIH) is fundamentally relexified Yiddish. The vocabulary has some similarity to that of Arabic, but the grammar and the meanings of words have much more affinity to Yiddish, German and Slavic than to any Semitic language including Biblical or Mishnaic Hebrew. (See Les origines des juifs actuels, The Origins of Modern Jewry and Two-tiered Relexification in Yiddish, Jews, Sorbs, Khazars, and the Kiev-Polessian Dialect, by Paul Wexler.)
Except for vocabulary Modern Israeli Hebrew has much more in common with Esperanto than with Rabbinic, Mishnaic or Biblical Hebrew.
| It is the pen and imagination, more than the sword and muscle, that have been responsible for the creation of this nation. |
The creation of the State of Israel was the result of the joint efforts of
| Israel's historical roots are traced in a book; its people are called the "People of the Book"; and its founding father, Theodor Herzl, a playwright, liked to write books. It is no surprise then that Israel leads the world in new book titles per capita per year. |
The Bible develops the spiritual concept of Israel, but many scholars doubt the historicity of ancient Israel, which in any case has no connection with the modern völkisch nationalist concept of the Jewish people. The phrase "People of the Book" originates with Islam and served as the legal basis for tolerance of religious dissenters within Islamic society at a time when similar space for freedom of belief did not exist in the Christian world.
Central and Eastern European Jews developed a bookish orientation as a persistent side effect of the role that Jewish trading networks played in the international economy from late antiquity and through the 1600s.
| As in Iran, everyday conversations in Israel are as likely to be peppered with literary references as with practical concerns.
4. Iranians are lonely and distrustful
Much like Israelis, Iranians feel painfully isolated in the Middle East. They are surrounded by people with whom they share neither language nor religion. Iran is majority Persian and Shi'ite; its neighbors are majority Arab and Sunni.
Nor does Iran have many friends beyond the Middle East. If anything, the international community has never treated them fairly, Iranians believe. In the last century alo ne, Iranians have contended with colonization and decades of foreign intervention, not to mention an eight-year war against Saddam Hussein, in which the entire world sided with Iraq.
The United Nations didn't consider Saddam's invasion a threat to international peace and security; it took the Security Council more than two years to call for a withdrawal. Another five years passed before it addressed Saddam's use of chemical weapons. For the Iranians, the lesson was clear: When in danger, Iran can rely on neither the Geneva Conventions nor the UN Charter for protection. Just like Israel, Iran has concluded that it can rely only on itself. |
The above comment ignores a major difference between the Zionist and the Iranian relationship with international law.
The Iranian government has suffered frequent disappointments when the international comm unity has refused to apply international law in conflicts that have involved Iran. Despite such disappointments the Iranian government has persistently reached out to governments and peoples throughout the Arab world, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the successor states of the Soviet Union, Asia and even to the USA in an ongoing effort to improve Iran's international relations.
| 5. Zionism is not a dirty word
In a show of disrespect, many leaders in Iran refer to Israel as the "Zionist regime." While being called a "regime" may not be flattering, for most Israelis, Zionism is not a dirty word.
From within, Zionism is a national liberation movement, whose aim it is to create a safe haven for Jewish people, culture and national identity. Zionism is the Jewish people's answer to the centuries-old impulse to erase them from history. When Ahmadinejad and his ilk speak of Zionism's imminent doom, they are in fact strengthening the very movement they seek to eliminate.
Israelis joke that Israel is the only country in the world where the words "dirty Jew" mean a Jew who has not taken a shower. In a way, this joke encapsulates the essence of Zionism. Everything else is commentary. |
The comment is an attempt to control the discussion of Zionism and the State of Israel by depicting normal political analysis as equivalent to traditional anti-Jewish slurs.
Normal Political Analysis
While most non-Jews and many Jews that study Zionism fairly quickly conclude that it represents an extremely repugnant form of racist politics, the expression "Zionist regime" is no more disrespectful than expressions like socialist regime, liberal regime, Labor regime, conservative regime, royalist regime or Tory regime.
Zionists object to such usage because it separates the politics from the government. There is a South African government today, and there was a South African government before the end of Apartheid, but the Apartheid regime has fallen. Because Zionism is an integralist ideology, Zionists are unwilling to tolerate any suggestion that the government of the State of Israel might one day have a non-Zionist orientation.
By claiming that critics of Zionists are flinging slurs, Zionists have been able to short-circuit any sort of rational comparative political analysis of Zionist beliefs and practices, and Zionists often manage to argue that Zionism is perfectly legitimate as a national liberation movement even though by almost identical logic German Nazis could have asserted the legitimacy of German Nazism as a national liberation movement.
Not only do Zionists in general reserve to themselves the right to make Hitler analogies while a significant fraction of them rail against Islamofascism and accuse Palestinians of pogrom politics, but the Zionist intellectual leadership has also worked hard to render any comment about the obvious similarities of Zionism and German Nazism as beyond the pale of acceptable political speech.
Zionists have also been running a long term social project to indoctrinate the American public with the idea that only anti-Semite would compare the
Nakba (
Holoexaleipsis) to the
Holocaust
- even though conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are generally worse than the situation in German Nazi occupied Poland circa 1940 and
- even though Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim were up to their eyeballs in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide long before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and the WW2 mass murder of Jews began.
Anti-Jewish Slurs
The term dirty Jews may not in fact originate with anti-Jewish gentiles. In Yiddish shmutsike yidn (equivalent to German schmutzige Juden) constitute the lowest class of Jews after proste yidn. Yiddish also provides a euphemism for this class in אורחי פּרחי (orkhe porkhe). If treated as loshn-koydesh, this phrase means fleeting travelers, itinerants or hoboes, but porkhe is probably the Polish word porch, which means a scabby, mangy, low-class, mean, stingy, nasty or vulgar person. Porch (adjective parszywy) overlaps in connotation to a large extent with shmutsik or schmutzig.
Not only can the traditional Yiddish class terminology still be heard in Israel albeit often in Modern Israeli Hebrew calques, but far too many Israeli and non-Israeli Jews have no reluctance whatsoever to slander Arabs as dirty, and the phrase arabushim melukhlakhim is on the lips of far too many Hebrew-speaking Jews.
Here is an example of Zionist Jewish defamation of Arabs from Theodor Herzl's book Alt-Neuland (Old New Land).
| Kingscourt und Friedrich beeilten sich auch fortzukommen. Sie fuhren auf der schlechten Eisenbahn nach Jerusalem. Auch auf diesem Wege Bilder tiefster Verkommenheit. Das flache Land fast nur Sand und Sumpf. Die mageren Äcker wie verbrannt. Schwärzliche Dörfer von Arabern. Die Bewohner hatten ein räuberhaftes Aussehen. Die Kinder spielten nackt in Straßenstaube. | Kingscourt and Friedrich hurried to get away. They traveled on the miserable railroad to Jerusalem. Even on this route, scenes of the deepest depravity. Flat land almost only sand and swamp. The spare cultivated fields as if scorched. Colorless villages of Arabs. The inhabitants looked like robbers. The children played naked in the street dust. |
| 6. Sympathy with Palestinians, but no desire for conflict with Israel
Ahmadinejad's venomous rhetoric notwithstanding, Iranians don't spend much time thinking about Israel. They are far more concerned about Iran's crippled economy and rampant corruption. While the sympathies of most Iranians fall squarely with the Palestinians, this is not an issue they feel their country must be a ctively involved in. |
Likewise, few populations or governments that considered Apartheid South Africa or Nazi Germany repugnant were spoiling for a war with either of these two states.
Yet as Jabotinskian Zionist political power wanes in the USA and Zionist Jewish political economic oligarchs come under increasing scrutiny, now may not be the time to enter into polite discussion with American Zionists.
As more and more gentile and Jewish Americans become critical or even hostile to the State of Israel, proposing an American tilt from Israel to Iran makes a lot of sense.
Such a political shift is hardly unprecedented in American history. Under President Nixon, the United States recognized the PRC as the legal government of China despite more than two decades of alliance with the RoC.
Neocons and Zionist Americans have no problem with regime change, invasion, and massive population dislocation in Arab and Muslim countries. Not only is turnabout is fair play, but the Zionist intelligentsia and its allies shamelessly argue for military intervention in the Sudan ethough there is a far better argument for regime change, invasion, and forced transfer of (Zionist interloper) population in the case of Israel than there ever was in the case of Iraq or is in the case of the Sudan.
As a side effect of declaring Israel a terrorist enemy state, the US government could force those responsible for wrecking the US economy to pony up the cash and assets to fix it. At the very least, if the USA treated Israel as an enemy state, Arabs and Muslims would no longer consider American leaders hypocritical in claiming to support democracy, human rights and anti-racism.
| Iranians will fiercely defend their independence and territory, yet they have no desire for conflict with Israel. Iranians remember Alexander's sacking of Persia, the Arab conquest in the seventh century C.E., the Mongol invasion, and the 1953 CIA coup against Iran's democratically elected prime minister. But there is no recollection of any conflict with the Jewish people because there hasn't been one. Most Iranians would like to keep it that way. |
Of course, Iranians have no historical memory of conflict with the Jewish people. The Jewish people is a modern construct less than 200 years old. Conversely modern German and E. European Yiddish Jews have no historical relationship with Persian-speakers even if some of the ancestral pre-Ashkenazi populations
- that lived in the region of the Black sea and
- that were probably incorporated into the Judaizing Khazar empire
may have had kinship connections to populations within neighboring Iranian political entities.
Yet Zionists do have scriptural sources like the Book of Esther that can be used to incite hostility against Iranians, and no Iranian political entity, whatever its ideological or religious orientation, is likely to accept permanently a status quo in which any Levantine entity has hegemony over a region that Iranian states have historically considered their natural geopolitical sphere of influence.
Roi Ben-Yehuda is an Israeli-American writer living in Spain. He is a regular contributer to Jewcy and France 24. His blog can be read at Roi's Word Weblog
Dr. Trita Parsi is the author of "Treacherous Alliance - The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the US" Yale University Press, 2007), a Silver Medal Recipient of the Council on Foreign Relations' Arthur Ross Book Award, the most significant award for a book on foreign affairs.
www.tritaparsi.com |
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