by Ray Takeyh
As with much in the Islamic Republic, Iran’s animosity toward Israel can be traced back to Khomeini’s dictates.10 In his eyes, the unforgivable sin was the original one, namely, the creation of a Jewish state that displaced Palestinian Muslims. In a sense, Iran’s antagonism toward Israel exceeded even its opposition to the United States. After all, the United States may have been a pernicious imperial power, but it is America’s conduct, not its right to exist, that is contested. Israel, on the other hand, is seen as an unlawful entity, irrespective of its actual policies and behavior. No peace compact or negotiated settlements with the aggrieved Palestinians could ameliorate that essential illegitimacy.11
This ideology was soon enunciated by Iran’s empowered revolutionaries. Among Khomeini’s first declarations was a call to Muslims to “prepare themselves for battle against Israel.”12 Rafsanjani went so far as to publish a book, Esra’il va Qods-e Aziz, claiming that resistance to the Jewish state was the sacred duty of “every Muslim and anyone who believes in God.”13 Thus when President Ahmadinejad calls for “Israel to be wiped off the map,” as he did in a speech in October 2005, he is reflecting an entrenched ideological position embraced by many figures within Iran’s Islamic polity. The international community and media may be hearing such denunciations for the first time, but for those who have paid close attention to the deliberations of the Islamic Republic, such intemperate rhetoric is not particularly new.
As with its depiction of Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war, Iran’s view of Israel lapsed into a religiously defined image. This was a struggle between a pristine Islamic civilization and a blasphemous Zionist creed. In this conflict between good and evil, light and dark, it was a religious obligation to resist the profane Jewish entity.14 The liberation of Jerusalem was not considered a sole Palestinian responsibility but an Islamic obligation to be undertaken by the entire Muslim world. Such a conflict would lead to the destruction of Israel and to a greater Islamic cohesion and solidarity. It was natural, even inevitable, for the new Islamic regime in Iran to lead this crusade.
In essence, Iran’s position exceeded the calculations of both the Arab states and mainstream Palestinian organizations. For the past three decades, the Arab struggle has implicitly acknowledged the reality of Israel and has sought territorial concessions to establish a Palestinian homeland. At times terrorism and at times diplomacy were employed to redraw the boundaries, but all such schemes recognized the existence of Israel. The Iranian policy was not designed to readjust territorial demarcations but to evict the Jewish populace from the Middle East. The sacred land of Islam was not to be partitioned to accommodate Zionist aspirations but reclaimed for the Muslim world.
Given the provocative nature of Iran’s stance, once in power Khomeini sought a subtle differentiation between Iranian Jews and the State of Israel. On the one hand, Khomeini’s pan-Islamic ambitions and his perception that the vitality of the revolution was contingent on its export implied that he could not envision a Middle East that featured a thriving Jewish state. Yet he also began to somewhat temper his indiscriminate denunciation of Jews within Iran, and he even assured the local Jewish community that “Islam will treat Jews as it treats other groups of the nation. They should not be put under pressure.”15 Although since the overthrow of the Shah the legitimate fear of persecution and discrimination have led many Jews to leave Iran, its Jewish community remains the largest in the Middle East outside Israel.
As the theocratic regime consolidated its power, it appeared at pains to differentiate its opposition to Zionism from its hostility to the larger Jewish community. The mullahs have often acknowledged the sufferings that the Jews experienced in Europe, attributing them to Christendom’s inhumanity. The treatment of Jews in Europe was contrasted with the relative tolerance of Islamic civilization, where Jewish communities prospered for centuries. The creation of Israel was condemned as an attempt by Europe to assuage its conscience at the expense of the Palestinians. In his polemical and fundamentally flawed 1997 book on Israel, former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati insisted that the West sought to resolve its “Jewish problem” by foisting them on the Arabs.16 Another former Iranian official, Sirius Nasseri, chimed in, stressing that the Palestinians paid the “price of European crimes in Auschwitz and Treblinka.”17 Again, President Ahmadinejad’s comments regarding the need to relocate Israel to the European continent is not necessarily novel, but it is part of a larger discourse of the Islamic Republic.
As with many regimes in the Middle East, Iran has indulged in its share of Holocaust revisionism. The infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been routinely published by state agencies, and prominent Holocaust deniers are at times offered a platform in Iran for spewing their odious views. The Supreme Leader Khamenei has even gone so far as claiming, “There are documents showing close collaboration of Zionists with Nazi Germany, and exaggerated numbers relating to the Jewish Holocaust were fabricated to solicit the sympathy of world public opinion, lay the ground for the occupation of Palestine, and justify the atrocities of the Zionists.”18 In essence, Khamenei views the Holocaust as a fabricated narrative to justify a Jewish homeland. Even in this context, Ahmadinejad’s denunciation of the Holocaust as a “myth” stands in contravention of the Islamic Republic’s previous rhetoric, which at least stipulated that a grave genocidal crime did take place in Europe, although the number of fatalities may have been exaggerated to validate the Zionists’ strategic determinations.
A similarly incendiary and insensitive approach has characterized Tehran’s attitude toward the ideology of Zionism. While Iran’s clerical leaders may have sporadically displayed a benign attitude toward the local Jewish community, their condemnation of Zionism has been stark and categorical. To them, Zionism is a racist, exclusionary ideology that should be opposed by all who care about human rights. Iran’s propaganda insists that Zionism was inflicted on the region by the force of arms, sustained by bloodshed, and perpetuated by the sinister designs of politicians inclined to achieve power by subjugating the indigenous population. The complex history of the Zionist movement and its claims and aspirations were typically caricatured, as fiery sermons, Jerusalem days, and conferences calling for the annihilation of Israel replaced a rational assessment.
The persistence of Iran’s hostility to Israel cannot be attributed solely to its Islamist pretensions, however, as the strategic benefits that the theocracy derives from its policies serve to reinforce its anti-Zionist posture. At a time when Arab regimes have gradually conceded the legitimacy of Israel, and regional debates revolve around the dimensions of the Jewish state as opposed to its actual existence, there appeared a real opportunity for Iran to step into a vacuum, embracing an inflammatory approach to Israel that also enjoys support on the Arab street. By stressing its categorical opposition to Israel, Iran brandished its Islamist credentials, gaining widespread support in unexpected quarters. At a time when a number of influential Arab leaders have signed treaties with Israeli politicians, Iran appeared resolute, defiant, and powerful. To be sure, Iran has not had any direct military confrontation with Israel and has often suggested that, given the geographic necessity, the brunt of the conflict be borne by front-line states and the Palestinians themselves. As such, Iran’s opposition to Israel has always had a degree of convenience, insisting on hostility without direct engagement in the conflict. The facts are that Iran’s armed forces have never suffered the devastation at the hands of Israel that the Egyptian military did and Iranian cities have never been targeted by the Israeli air force as Jordanian cities were during successive Arab-Israeli wars. The theocracy essentially exploited the Palestinian struggle to assert its influence, garner popular approbation, and affirm its claims as a regional power.
It can be argued that without the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iran’s essential insularity would have endured. The Islamic Republic’s ardent embrace of the Palestinian cause has allowed it to transcend its isolation and inject its voice in the most important debates in Arab politic
s. It is unlikely that without mutual hostility to Israel, for example, Iran could have forged such intimate ties with the secular Syrian regime. Moreover, the Arab-Israeli tensions that often played out in the tragic country of Lebanon offered Iran an opportunity to enter the politics of the Levant. It was only after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that Iran began to energetically organize the long-quiescent Shiite population of southern Lebanon, eventually creating and nurturing the lethal Hezbollah organization. In essence, it was not so much the revolutionary sermons and Islamist calls but the reality of conflict between Israel and its neighbors that allowed an opportunistic Iran to assert its influence beyond its borders at a limited cost.
Given Iran’s sustained antagonism toward Israel, how does one explain the secret arms deals between the two states that commenced in 1981, culminating in the notorious Iran-Contra scandal? As we saw in chapter 7, from Iran’s perspective the outbreak of the war with Iraq altered its entire strategic and political calculations. Facing a formidable Iraqi army, generously supplied by both the Western powers and the Soviet Union, an isolated Iran required weapons from any source possible. The ideological imperative of resisting Israel and the practical requirements of the war now clashed, forcing Tehran to prioritize its hostilities. Given the imminent Iraqi danger, Iran was compelled to engage in transactions with the despised Israeli state that fundamentally violated its revolutionary doctrine.
In the meantime, Iraq’s invasion in 1980 created considerable anxiety in Jerusalem. Despite the Islamic Republic’s belligerent rhetoric, Israel still identified Saddam’s regime, with its nuclear determinations and pan-Arabist ambitions, as its foremost challenge. Foreign minister Moshe Dayan even stressed that if U.S.–made weapons did not soon reach the Islamic Republic, Iran would collapse, leaving Israel to face a triumphant Saddam.19 Thus began one of the most sordid, amoral episodes in the politics of the Middle East. Secret meetings in Europe, Israeli delegations to Tehran, and eventually large-scale shipments of arms became the order of the day. The intriguing aspect of the arms deals is that they continued even after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, when Iran was actively mobilizing the Shiite community against Israel. Paradoxically Israel was dispatching arms to Iran while Tehran and Jerusalem were engaged in a proxy war in southern Lebanon.
For some observers the arms transactions reflect the propensity of the two antagonists to transcend their animosities and displace ideology for practical considerations as a guide to their relations. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the arms deals, as they were forged in compulsion and cynicism. The Islamic Republic’s ideological animosity was in no way ameliorated, since Khomeini continued to denounce Israel, while Iran materially assisted a wide variety of anti-Israeli terrorist organizations. The Israeli position was best described by one of its officials, who conceded at the time, “One of the main reasons for cooperation between the two countries is the likely access of Iraq to the atomic bomb and its unconditional support for the PLO. Baghdad is our first enemy.”20 Although in subsequent years Israeli devotees of Ben-Gurion’s “outer ring” concept have romanticized these arrangements as potentially foretelling a different relationship with Iran, such anticipations are misplaced and self-serving. To read too much into such furtive and sporadic deals, and view them as indications of a potential shift in Iran’s ideological antipathy toward Israel, is a mistaken assessment of the events. Two antagonists fortuitously sharing the same immediate foe came together to deal with their more urgent threat while determined to confront each other at a later date.
Whatever Iran’s disdain for Israel may be, it shares no borders with the Jewish state nor is it taken into the counsel of Arab states plotting their strategy. Thus, the only manner through which Iran can express its hostility toward Israel is terrorism. More than any other factor, it is Iran’s militancy toward Israel that has done much to transform it into a pariah state relying on unsavory terrorist organizations that share its pathologies.
THE INSTRUMENTS OF TERROR
During the past three decades, Iran has forged intimate ties with leading Palestinian militant groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, as well as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, which it essentially created. Hamas, however, has its own sources of power and has been the beneficiary of much assistance from the Gulf sheikdoms as well as the Palestinian community itself. It is thus not an organization beholden to Iran, nor does it necessarily adhere to the dictates of the theocratic regime. In terms of Palestinian resistance, Iran has been much closer to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a smaller but deadlier organization. Overshadowing all these groups are Iran’s ties with Hezbollah, a Shiite force in Lebanon, much more in tune with the messages of Iran’s clerical class. As the Islamic Republic plots its strategy, it must be aware that a potentially successful peace process and the changing dynamics of Lebanese politics may yet diminish its influence over its unruly clients. A more concentrated focus on Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah denotes the precariousness of relying on terrorist organizations as a means of projecting power.
Islamic Jihad evolved in the 1980s as a splinter group from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Many of its leaders and rank-and-file members were recruited in Israeli prisons and radicalized during the struggle against the occupation. From the start, Islamic Jihad emphasized violence as the only suitable means of fostering change, and pointedly dismissed negotiation and compromise. It hews to a stern fundamentalist vision portraying the conflict with the Jewish state as a battle between good and evil, between heresy and belief. The members of Islamic Jihad are dedicated to its absolutist belief system, indoctrinated in its strict discipline, and committed to its code of secrecy. Unlike Hamas, Islamic Jihad does not operate an extensive social welfare network, but views itself as a small vanguard force that will employ terror to destabilize and ultimately dislodge the Israeli state.21
Iran’s Islamic revolution proved a source of inspiration to the Jihad activists; it demonstrated the power of religion and the ability of the devout to overcome superior force. Khomeini’s own teachings and determined opposition to both the United States and Israel offered a powerful model of emulation. Among the Palestinian organizations, Iran soon emerged as a sustained benefactor of Islamic Jihad. Although a Sunni organization, the sectarian divide was papered over as Islamic concepts of jihad and martyrdom were invoked as unifying symbols between a Shiite state and a Sunni movement. Islamic Jihad allowed Iran to have an inroad into Palestinian politics and an ability to claim credit for Palestinian resistance that ultimately compelled Israel into negotiations. Muhammad Baqer Zolqadr, deputy minister of the interior and former second in command of the Revolutionary Guards, echoed this sentiment: “The Palestinian Intifada was born because of the Islamic Revolution and it is the consequence of the Iranian people’s steadfastness vis-à-vis the superpowers.”22
Today, the continued conflict between a hawkish Israeli government and a recalcitrant Palestinian leadership has enhanced the fortunes of radical groups pressing for violence and terror. The resounding electoral triumph of Hamas in the parliamentary elections of January 2006 denotes the cost of a stalemated peace process. In such a milieu, Islamic Jihad and Iran effectively exploit the Palestinian grievances to advance their claims. However, a reinvigorated peace process, offering Israelis viable security and the Palestinians their long-cherished dream of statehood, will inevitably diminish Islamic Jihad’s power and Iran’s influence. In the end, the Islamic Republic may yet have miscalculated with its failure to craft a constructive agenda and basing its policy exclusively on the changing fortunes of a small terrorist organization.
Just north of Israel, Lebanon has always been a hotbed of conflict between sectarian forces, culminating in a bitter civil war in the 1970s and 1980s. Following the Israeli invasion of 1982 to evict the Palestinians, who were using Lebanon as a sanctuary to launch terror attacks, Iran became more directly involved in Lebanese affairs. In conjunction with its Syrian ally, Iran began to mobilize the Sh
iite community, offering financial and military assistance to its militant allies. The Shiites constituted the largest communal group in Lebanon but were traditionally excluded from positions of political and economic power. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and diplomats energetically organized the various fledgling Shiite organizations and essentially created Hezbollah. Through provision of social services, an impressive fund-raising capability, and an increasingly sophisticated paramilitary apparatus, Hezbollah gradually spread its influence, subsuming many of the remaining Shiite associations and assuming a commanding position in Lebanon’s politics.23
Hezbollah first came into the American consciousness when its suicide bombers attacked the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 U.S. soldiers. At Iran’s behest, Hezbollah went on a string of kidnappings and hostage takings, some captives eventually bartered away for U.S. arms during the Iran-Contra Affair. In the 1990s, Hezbollah’s operatives were also implicated in the killing of Iranian dissidents in Europe and an attack against a Jewish community center in Argentina. A grim record of suicide bombings, assassinations, and kidnappings soon made Hezbollah a terrorist organization with an impressive global reach. Even before the rise of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah had assumed a prominent place in the world of fundamentalism, as it not only introduced new tactics to Islamist resistance such as suicide bombings but also ingeniously utilized religion to justify its use of indiscriminate violence.