The Hopkins event about Iran the other day in Washington was a Realist event. It was led by Francis Fukuyama, who has left neoconservatism for his own brand of realism. And the discussion revolved around realist scholar Trita Parsi’s book on Iran and Israel, Treacherous Alliance, which describes the rivalry between the countries as a strategic power struggle, in which ideology tends to be so much rhetoric. Parsi pointed out that in 1980, even as Iran was publicly calling Israel "a tumor" that needed to be removed from the Middle East, Israel’s foreign minister was urging the U.S. to get over its differences with Iran and embrace Iran in its war against Iraq. Our differences: at the time, Iran was still holding our hostages!
Parsi’s thrust was that some degree of nuclear capability on Iran’s part is inevitable. Iran doesn’t even know whether it wants a bomb, but it wants the fuel. Michael Hirsh of Newsweek echoed this; he said that the best outcome was a deal in which Iran got "some kind of capability… under an international consortium." A pragmatic president like Hillary Clinton would make such a deal, he predicted, if we haven’t bombed Iran by then…
M.J. Rosenberg expressed a Jewish point of view. His comments warmed my heart because they were openly Jewish, he spoke of "my people, the Jews." There was no attempt to dissimulate, which is what the neocons do. Because they have power, they hide their Jewish agenda. It’s generated suspicion, rage, The Israel Lobby (and thrown me back into my Jewishness).
Challenging the Realists on Ahmadinejad, Rosenberg said, "I lose my calm rationality… [this] is really scary stuff." He elaborated: "I know the Israelis pretty well. They will put up with lots of criticism. There is probably nothing you can say about Israel as a state that they haven’t heard before.. and are prepared to swallow." But the Holocaust denial crossed a line. Even the Palestinians honor the Jewish experience in Europe. " When Ahmadinejad sought nuclear capability and meanwhile was denying the Holocaust, it appeared that he was going to "destroy the survivors of the self-same Holocaust that you say didn’t take place!"
Hirsh and Parsi were calmer. Hirsh said that on his visit to Tehran earlier this year, he found intellectuals and politicians more willing to trash Ahmadinejad in private meetings with him than the similar class in Washington is wont to go after Bush. He felt that Ahmadinejad had turned down his anti-Holocaust rhetoric in his speeches this week.
Parsi echoed this. He said that the Holocaust denial had caused a "tremendous amount of anger" in Iran’s Jewish community. That community has always been "agnostic" about Zionism and accepted its government’s criticism of Israel. But "what Ahmadinejad did was to cross a red line" in the Iranian discourse. There has been pushback–uncovered in the U.S. Parsi described Op-Eds in Iranian newspapers criticizing Ahmadinejad and television shows describing the suffering of Jews in Europe during World War 2. One show told about an Iranian diplomat who had helped French Jews escape the Holocaust. "That is something happening right now in Iran," he said.
Meantime, Iran’s Jewish population has gone from 100,000 in ’79 to 25,000 now, he said. I gotta finish the book to find out why…
