Treacherous Alliance

Treacherous Alliance
The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and the United States, (Yale University Press).
by Trita Parsi

Excerpt
There are few Western cities where Persian pop music blasts at full
volume in shopping malls. Yet this is a daily, natural occurrence at
Jerusalem’s high-security downtown bus terminal. Here, in the
equivalent of New York’s Penn Station, eighteen-year-old Israeli
soldiers wait for their rides home, assault rifles slung over their
shoulders, Persian pop legends Moin and Ebi pounding in their ears.
Most of the CD stores here are owned by Iranian Jews, and over the past
twenty years they have created a market for Persian pop in the very
heart of the Jewish State.

When one scratches the surface of the ferocious Israeli-Iranian
enmity, an affinity between the two cultures emerges. In many ways they
are more alike than different. Both tend to view themselves as somewhat
superior to their Arab neighbors. Many Iranians think of the Arabs to
their west and south as culturally inferior; as brutes who had the good
fortune to have Persians as neighbors who could civilize and refine
them.

Similarly, having defeated the Arabs in numerous wars, most Israelis
have little respect for their capabilities. “We know what the Arabs can
do, and it isn’t much,” an Israeli analyst told me arrogantly, months
before the war with Hezbollah in 2006 might have sobered him a bit.
Incapable of suppressing their sense of superiority or of convincing
the Arabs to let go of their own stereotypes of Persians and Jews,
Israelis feel they are left with no option but to view true peace as
unattainable.

Some Israelis have all but given up the dream of living at peace
with their neighbors, whether through true friendship or minimal but
mutual recognition and acceptance, and have settled for a vision of “no
war, no peace” built on a bedrock of Israeli military preponderance.
The Iranians drew a similar conclusion centuries ago. “The Arabs are
out to get us,” Israelis and Iranians often think as they go about
their daily lives.

Perhaps most importantly, both view themselves as culturally and
politically disconnected from the region where they are forced to face
their regional foes through the lens of a Manichean mindset.
Ethnically, the Jews of Israel are surrounded by a sea of Arabs who may
not always have been at war with Israel, but who have never been at
peace with Israel. Culturally, Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe
dominate Israeli society, even though the profile of Mizrahi, or
Oriental, Jews has risen in recent years. And religiously, of course,
Israel is unique regionally and globally as the only state based on the
Jewish faith.

In perhaps a natural response to the long Jewish history of
persecution, Israel has a penchant for mistrusting the outside world.
According to this mindset, international institutions and global
alliances can never substitute for Israel’s own ability to protect
itself. At the end of the day, a UN Security Council resolution can
never protect Israel as well as two hundred nuclear warheads, Israelis
believe. “These are weapons of peace,” an Israeli general told me
proudly, failing to see the contradiction in terms.

The Iranians aren’t terribly different. Proud heirs to a
civilization that precedes Islam by at least two millennia, they are
the first to point out to Westerners that they are not Arabs. Iran, or
the Land of the Aryans, as it is believed to mean, is largely populated
by peoples speaking Indo-European tongues. Persian (or Farsi) is
linguistically closer to French and Swedish than it is to Arabic,
although it includes many Arabic words and is written in the Arabic
script.

And though Iran was Islamized in the seventh century A.D., the
Persians kept their language, cultural traditions, and the special
quality that to this day connects them to their Zoroastrian past. The
Iranian New Year, Nowruz (New Day), has been celebrated in Iran for
more than three thousand years and remains the largest Iranian holiday
today, far outshining any Islamic festival. When Ashura, the Shiite
Muslim day of mourning commemorating the martyrdom of Hussain ibn Ali,
the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, at the Battle of Karbala in the year
A.D. 680, coincides with Nowruz, a day of rejoicing, the Zoroastrian
soul of Iran wins in spite of the wishes of Iran’s clerical rulers.

Even as Muslims, the Iranians distinguish themselves from their
surroundings by following the Shia line of Islam rather than the much
larger and dominating Sunni camp. And like Israelis, Iranians are
deeply suspicious of the outside world. While Jews have been persecuted
and have survived a Holocaust, Iranians have fought colonization,
annexation, decades of foreign intervention, and, last but not least,
an eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, in which virtually the
entire world--including the United States--sided with Iraq.

When Saddam invaded Iran in 1980, the UN didn’t consider it a threat
to international peace and security; it took the Security Council more
than two years to call for withdrawal of the invading forces. (Compare
that to Saddam’s 1990 assault on Kuwait, when a Security Council
Resolution [UNSR 660] passed within twelve hours of the invasion,
demanding an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces.)
Another five years passed, mainly because of American procrastination,
before the UN addressed Saddam’s use of chemical weapons against
Iranian soldiers and civilians. (The United States and Western European
countries either directly sold components for chemical weapons to
Saddam or knew and quietly approved of such sales.)

Even then, Washington ensured that the UN resolutions would be
watered down to protect Saddam. The United States later cited these
same crimes to justify its invasion of Iraq in 2003. 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.

Blog: treacherousalliance.com
Personal Page: tritaparsi.com