The Ayatollahs' Democracy: An Iranian Challenge

by Hooman Majd

  “But one of the conditions that the United States has for improved relations with Iran, spoken or unspoken, is that Iran not act in any way against Israel,” I said.

  “We haven’t committed any act,” said Bojnourdi. “We’re just airing our opinion! We say Israel has occupied land, that Palestinians should be able to return to their homes, and the Jews who are there can remain. Let there be a free referendum for all the people of Palestine, including the Jews, to decide what kind of government should rule there [the standard line of the Iranian government]. But when Russians are brought in, when Germans are brought in—they’re not Palestinian. The Jews who are Palestinian can of course remain there.” Ayatollah Bojnourdi’s cell phone, which had rung repeatedly with an Islamic prayer ring tone, rang yet again. He looked at his abbah (robe) hanging on a coat hanger, and where the cell phone was stashed. I sensed that he was eager to finish the conversation.

  “Thanks for your time,” I said, getting up from my chair. “I know you’re very busy.”

  “Thank you,” he said, not offering any more of his time, as he usually does. “The Jews of Iran are absolutely free,” he repeated. “As long as they don’t support Israel,” he then added.

  AYATOLLAH BOJNOURDI’S pronouncement that Jews are free to pursue any activity as long as it is legal rang in my head when I sat in a cab a few days later on the way to the Tehran Jewish Committee, Anjoman-e-Kalimian-e-Tehran, a legal and nonprofit organization set up and registered under the laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Anjoman is the owner of the property and the manager of Dr. Sapir Hospital, and is the largest Jewish organization in Iran, its name being slightly misleading, for in truth it acts as the Iran Jewish Committee. Although membership is not obligatory for Tehran Jews (nor indeed any Iranian Jews), most do belong, and its members elect the Jewish member of Parliament, many of which have historically been directors or chairmen, such as Moreh-Sedegh was, of the committee. The Anjoman’s headquarters occupies the third floor of a modern building on Sheikh Hadi Street, in a nice neighborhood in the less grimy part of midtown Tehran, opposite the Firooz-Koohi high school. There were no guards outside the building, nor any on the landing at the third floor, and the doors to the offices were wide open, much like the welcoming gates of the Yousefabad Synagogue.

  The day I visited, Farhad Aframian, a board member and head of the Cultural Committee, was sitting in the expansive conference room, on a brand new chair whose plastic covering, like that on the others around the table, had not yet been removed. Farhad, an affable young man I had previously met at Sapir Hospital, welcomed me (even though my appointment was with Dr. Rahmatollah Raffi, the then director of the Anjoman) and handed me three issues of the committee’s magazine, Ofegh Bina, of which he was the chief editor. The back (or front cover, depending on whether one is looking at the English, or the Hebrew and Farsi sections) of the March 2008 issue of the self-described “Culturl [sic], Social and News magazine of Tehran Jewish Committee,” published quarterly, contained the following statement (in all three languages and scripts):

  The news is short, but has a long story. 40 Iranians (the real number is 27) immigrated to Israel. I’m speaking to all Jewish Iranians. During all your life, do you ever remember any second in which you have been Iranian, nor [sic] Jewish? Or do you ever remember a second in which you have been Jewish, nor Iranian? Being Iranian and being Jewish, at least for us are not two concepts, patched together. It’s the story of head and body; if they are separated, neither head is head nor body is body. The Jewish Iranian will always be Jewish Iranian. Denying his Iranian identity is actually denying his Jewish identity. Do the conspirators and/or their audience not know that if a Jewish Iranian denies his being Iranian, he will no more be Jewish, too?

  The editorial, which continued inside the magazine, referred to a number of Iranian Jews who immigrated to Israel in December 2007, whose arrival in Tel Aviv was broadcast by the Israeli and foreign news media, and whose statements about persecution back home in Iran were widely used in anti-Iran media reports. At the time, Iran’s Jewish community quickly sprang into action, condemning the groups responsible for offering the immigrants $10,000 each to go to Israel (earlier in 2007, the amount was doubled from $5,000 because no Iranian Jews had accepted the original offer, and at that time both Maurice Motamed and Siamak Moreh-Sedegh openly condemned the relief groups and the Israeli government for their attempt at “buying” Iranian Jews’ “identity”). The community also condemned what it maintained were lies the immigrants told on their arrival in Israel, lies, it said, written for the immigrants by their sponsors. (To be fair to both the Tehran Jewish Committee and the Iranian government, some of the statements were indeed demonstrably false, such as the claim that the Ahmadinejad government had shut down Jewish schools and forbidden the teaching of Hebrew.) The Anjoman and the Jewish member of Parliament view it as their responsibility to protect the interests of Jews living in Iran, and, as almost every one told me, any story less than sanguine about the life of Jews in the Islamic Republic only hurts the Jewish community, first, by drawing unwarranted and negative attention to it, and second, by casting aspersion on the loyalty of Iranian Jews to the nation. There is no doubt that most of the Jews who remain in Iran, working, living, and even prospering among their Muslim fellow citizens, are loyal, nationalistic Persians who like living in their homeland. However, it must be a tedious chore to have to constantly be on guard against any suggestion, even if it comes from well-meaning foreign sources, that they would be happier either under a different regime or living in a different country.

  Only a few days earlier, Farhad Aframian had had an engagement party and celebration to which he had graciously invited me, but I had been unable to attend, though not because of what Mrs. Hasidim had told me when I visited the Jewish hospital. The government of President Ahmadinejad had requested, she explained, that Jewish groups not invite Muslims to their functions, which were allowed by law to serve alcohol and to feature pop music and mixed-gender, unmarried dancing, all of which is proscribed to the general population but in any event is flouted in many Muslim homes. Farhad was adamant that life for Jews in Iran was really quite good and that he had no intention of leaving, and, he said, he had visited European cities such as Paris and Vienna, where he thought anti-Semitism was more pronounced than in Tehran. Farhad was proud of his magazine and has ambitions in the media world. He handed me another set of magazines to give to former president Khatami, whom he knew I was related to and would be seeing while in Tehran.

  Khatami is immensely popular in the Jewish community, and not just because of his landmark visit to the Yousefabad Synagogue. His outreach to all minority groups in Iran, his calm demeanor, and his nonconfrontational approach to foreign policy, as well as the general liberalization in post-revolution Iranian society that took place during his eight years as president, resulted in an optimism among Jews that they had not felt since the overthrow of the monarchy. Although Jews in Iran tend to stay away from politics, I sensed from everyone I spoke to, on or off the record, that they were looking forward to a potential Khatami candidacy in the presidential election of 2009, which, along with the U.S. presidential election, was the most talked-about issue of the day in the late summer of 2008. Farhad and I chatted for a few minutes until Dr. Raffi, an active surgeon and director of the Anjoman, entered the conference room, apologizing for his tardy appearance. Farhad got up to leave us to ourselves.

  “Next time I’ll take you to the Kosher Kebab restaurant ‘Tapoo’ on Felestin [Palestine] Street for lunch,” he said before he walked out.

  “Palestine Street?” I asked. “A government sense of irony?”

  “No,” he replied with a smile. “The Jewish high school, ‘Moussa ben Amran,’ is also on Felestin Street, which used to be Kakh [Palace] Street, and where the Israeli Mission was located before the revolution. Now the Palestinian Embassy has taken its place—hence Felestin Street.”

  Dr. Raffi and I sat down at the end of the hu
ge table, under a gold-leaf-framed, oversized page from the Torah, dual portraits of Ayatollahs Khomeini and Khamenei, also framed in gold, and near a large Iranian flag in the corner.

  “We’re an umbrella organization for all of Iran’s Jews,” he told me, “and we coordinate with Jewish associations in cities such as Shiraz, Esfahan, and Kermanshah, but also much smaller cities such as Rafsanjan, where there may only be a few Jews living. We pay for the expenses of these associations, and the government of the Islamic Republic is supposed to give us 300,000,000 tomans a year [about $320,000], but with the new government budgetary plan, it has unfortunately been reduced by 20 percent. We try to spend none of that money in Tehran, but rather on the Jewish associations in other cities and towns.”

  “Well,” I said, “that can’t be enough to cover expenses, can it?”

  “Not in the least!” replied Raffi.

  “So where does the rest come from?” I asked.

  “From some land that we used to own and have sold—the interest on the cash in the bank, we also receive some small donations, and we have income from rent on some stores we own. We spend it all.”

  “And are you involved in any political activity?” I asked.

  “None,” he said emphatically. “The Tehran Jewish association is not involved in any political activity whatsoever! We live under the Islamic Republic of Iran, comfortably,” he added, “and our activities are cultural, societal, etc. Because we have a Jewish member of Parliament, all political issues are handled by him.”

  “What are your relationships like with Iranian Jewish groups outside Iran, such as in California or New York?” I asked him.

  “We have friendly relations, but that’s it—just relations,” said Raffi. “We have very good relations with the Jewish Federation of California, for example, but there’s no kind of monetary assistance, neither asked for nor volunteered by them, but we maintain contact so that we are aware of each other’s activities.”

  “And do you have any contact with Iranian Jews who’ve settled in Israel, but travel regularly to Iran?”

  “No,” said Raffi, firmly. “There are Jews who take that risk, for it’s illegal, and the government seems to turn a blind eye, but we’re really trying to persuade the government that it should be easier for Jews to go to Israel, not to live, but to visit the holy sites such as the Wailing Wall. Iranians who make pilgrimages to Mecca aren’t Arab, after all, but they do so because of their religion. The same would be true for us: it wouldn’t make us Israeli, but we should be able to freely go and visit our holy sites. In fact, I maintain that if that were the case, no Iranian Jew would ever settle in Israel,” he said. “But we have no contact or association with Jews who live in Israel,” he repeated.

  “Can you go to Israel yourself, for religious reasons. Can you get permission from the government?” I asked.

  “If they give permission—it’s not official, but if they give permission, we’ll go, and if they don’t, we won’t. We don’t put any pressure on the Islamic Republic to give that permission—even the fact that they turn a blind eye to those who do travel, that’s good enough, a small thing is better than none.”

  I WANTED to visit a couple of ordinary working-class Jewish families in their homes during my stay in Tehran in 2008. The opportunity presented itself when Ali, who works for my friend Khosro (whose house I stay in), asked me one day if I would like to meet some regular Jews, friends of his, he told me, who were not very high up on the social ladder but were exactly the kind of Jews who might one day require the services of Dr. Sapir Hospital or might decide to emigrate to the United States or to Israel. I had said yes, of course, and he was to arrange to take me to their homes one afternoon. On the day before our appointments, Ali called the house to say the Jewish families had begged off.

  “To tell you the truth,” he said, “they’re a little afraid. How do they know how a foreign writer will portray them, or what will come across? They’re not looking for trouble.”

  I was disappointed, but I understood. My experiences with the Jewish community in Iran were no different from other experiences: the paradoxical nature of the government, the people, the culture, and the society at large is as confusing as ever, and peculiarly Persian in character. Synagogues, hospitals, committees, kosher restaurants, and Hebrew schools operate freely in a Muslim theocratic state, but the government celebrates “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The president denies the Holocaust as “fake” and a “hoax,” but the Jewish member of Parliament openly and fearlessly criticizes him, and a government-run national television station runs a smash-hit mini-series (Zero Degree Turn) about an Iranian diplomat who saved many Jews from precisely that Holocaust (based on a true story). Jews are completely free, but not free to support Israel. Jews are equal citizens, except when they’re not. Iranian Jews must not travel to Israel, except when they do. Iranian-Israelis are not welcome back in Iran, except when they are. Iranian government censors block the New York Post on the Internet, but not the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz. It is almost a necessity to be Iranian to understand, and to be Iranian in order to be comfortable with Iranian life and all of its paradoxes. And Iranian Jews are nothing if not Iranian. But for Iranian Jews, particularly those who, like Dr. Raffi, also live in the United States (in his case, Los Angeles), if only part-time, there is yet another paradox to consider: the United States, their second home, is a frequent critic of Iran and an avowed opponent of the Islamic regime under which they live in relative freedom, but it is an ally and friend, no best friend, with Saudi Arabia, where Jews are not even technically allowed to visit, let alone live.

  Dr. Rahmatollah Raffi and Farhad Aframian, two generations of Iranian Jews who choose, despite their ability to leave and settle elsewhere, to live and work in Iran, one day gave me a ride from Sapir Hospital to a street corner near my home. As Dr. Raffi drove through the narrow alleys of the onetime Jewish ghetto and then along traffic-clogged main roads, as aggressively and expertly as any Tehran cabbie, we talked about Iranian politics, the subject of the day, which it always seems to be in Iran among any group of Iranians, regardless of race, religion, or creed. And as he pulled up to the corner of Manouchehri and Ferdowsi, across from the heavily fortified British Embassy, Raffi turned to me and said, as an Iranian Jew discussing the politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran, “Amm’a, ma razzee hasteem”—“But, we are content.”

  IRANIAN JEWS may be content, or merely content—and perhaps they would be even more content, as many have told me, under a reformist president like Khatami or Mousavi, although not for religious freedom reasons. But that is not the case for Iranian Baha’is, whose population is ten times that of the Jewish population inside Iran. Unlike Christians and Zoroastrians, and much more than Jews, Baha’is have been persecuted in Iran, even under the monarchy, ever since their religion was founded in the nineteenth century, by a Muslim cleric named Baha’ullah. (Christians and Zoroastrians, it might be said, actually have a somewhat easier time than Jews, for they do not have Israel hanging over their heads, like the sword of Damocles. Most Iranian Christians are Armenian, and there has never been the suggestion that, even after the independence of Armenia—which happens to enjoy very close relations with the Islamic Republic, closer in fact than neighboring Azerbaijan, a Shia land—they might be more loyal to that nation than their own. And Zoroastrians, being the purest Persians, have no such worries either.) The clergy consider Baha’is, who are as Iranian as any Muslim, heretics, and although the last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, granted them almost complete religious freedom, many Muslims for generations, regardless of religious conviction, have viewed them with suspicion. Those who accept their Ayatollahs’ pronouncements simply believe they are a heretical branch of Islam that must be eliminated, and some of those who are less religious, even secular, have bought into the propaganda that Baha’ism is a political movement disguised as a religion, with the intent of destroying Islam. Ever since the late nineteenth century, Iranians have been tau
ght that the British (always the bogeymen) created the Baha’i faith to weaken the influence of Shia clerics in Iran, as part of a plot to keep Iran under British control.

  The fact that Baha’is are proscribed from political activity by their faith, something conspiracy-minded Iranians view as suspicious to begin with, has made them an easy target for authorities, and the fact that their prophet is buried in Israel and their holy site is in Haifa (which was a British mandate when he died) makes them almost more of a target than Iranian Jews. During the era of the last Shah’s father, fundamentalist clerics and townspeople, but not the government, instigated pogroms of Baha’is, but under the Islamic Republic, the harassment and persecution of Baha’is has been institutionalized. As an unrecognized minority, they cannot attend university if they proclaim their faith, they cannot hold government jobs, and they cannot organize or meet as a group, although the government denies that these restrictions exist (and they don’t on paper or in the law).

  Occasionally, Baha’i elders, leaders of the community, are arrested and charged with spying for Israel, as were seven of them in 2008 and 2009, and other Baha’is have been executed for spying or treason in the thirty-year history of the Republic. The Islamic government denies that it persecutes or arrests anyone for religious reasons, but the fact remains that Baha’is are afforded none of the protection that Ayatollah Bojnourdi claims is offered to Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians in their own land. Unfortunately, few Iranians, even human rights activists, stand up for their Baha’i compatriots, perhaps because they know they would not have the support of the people, a people who are still heavily prejudiced against the faith. In the aftermath of the 2009 election, Baha’is arrested and accused of sedition or being agents of Israel received scant attention from either the opposition, normally quick to denounce all post-election arrests and trials, or Iranian human rights activists in general, with few exceptions. While there was sympathy among the masses, even conservatives, for protesters accused by the state in show trials, there was little evidence of sympathy for the Baha’is.