[R-G] Israel's Jewish Problem in Tehran

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/cook030807.html>
Israel's Jewish Problem in Tehran:
So Why Hasn't Iran Started by Wiping Its Own Jews off the Map?
by Jonathan Cook

Iran is the new Nazi Germany and its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
the new Hitler.  Or so Israeli officials have been declaring for
months as they and their American allies try to persuade the doubters
in Washington that an attack on Tehran is essential.  And if the
latest media reports are to be trusted, it looks like they may again
be winning the battle for hearts and minds: Vice-President Dick Cheney
is said to be diverting the White House back on track to launch a
military strike.

Earlier this year Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel's opposition leader and
the man who appears to be styling himself scaremonger-in-chief, told
us: "It's 1938 and Iran is Germany.  And Iran is racing to arm itself
with atomic bombs."  Of Ahmadinejad, he said: "He is preparing another
Holocaust for the Jewish state."

A few weeks ago, as Israel's military intelligence claimed -- as it
has been doing regularly since the early 1990s -- that Iran is only a
year or so away from the "point of no return" on developing a nuclear
warhead, Netanyahu was at it again.  "Iran could be the first
undeterrable nuclear power," he warned, adding: "This is a Jewish
problem like Hitler was a Jewish problem. . . .  The future of the
Jewish people depends on the future of Israel."

But Netanyahu has been far from alone in making extravagant claims
about a looming genocide from Iran.  Israel's new president, Shimon
Peres,  has compared an Iranian nuclear bomb to a "flying
concentration camp."  And the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, told a
German newspaper last year: "[Ahmadinejad] speaks as Hitler did in his
time of the extermination of the entire Jewish nation."

There is an interesting problem with selling the "Iran as Nazi
Germany" line.  If Ahmadinejad really is Hitler, ready to commit
genocide against Israel's Jews as soon as he can get his hands on a
nuclear weapon, why are some 25,000 Jews living peacefully in Iran and
more than reluctant to leave despite repeated enticements from Israel
and American Jews?

What is the basis for Israel's dire forecasts -- the ideological
scaffolding being erected, presumably, to justify an attack on Iran?
Helpfully, as George Bush defended his Iraq policies last month, he
reminded us yet again of the menace Iran supposedly poses: it is
"threatening to wipe Israel off the map."

This myth has been endlessly recycled since a translating error was
made of a speech Ahmadinejad delivered nearly two years ago.  Farsi
experts have verified that the Iranian president, far from threatening
to destroy Israel, was quoting from an earlier speech by the late
Ayatollah Khomeini in which he reassured supporters of the
Palestinians that "the Zionist regime in Jerusalem" would "vanish from
the page of time."

He was not threatening to exterminate Jews or even Israel.   He was
comparing Israel's occupation of the Palestinians with other
illegitimate systems of rule whose time had passed, including the
Shahs who once ruled Iran, apartheid South Africa, and the Soviet
empire.  Nonetheless, this erroneous translation has survived and
prospered because Israel and her supporters have exploited it for
their own crude propaganda purposes.

In the meantime, the 25,000-strong Iranian Jewish community is the
largest in the Middle East outside Israel and traces its roots back
3,000 years.  As one of several non-Muslim minorities in Iran, Jews
there suffer discrimination, but they are certainly no worse off than
the one million Palestinian citizens of Israel -- and far better off
than Palestinians under Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.

Iranian Jews have little influence on decision-making and are not
allowed to hold senior posts in the army or bureaucracy.  But they
enjoy many freedoms.  They have an elected representative in
parliament, they practice their religion openly in synagogues, their
charities are funded by the Jewish diaspora, and they can travel
freely, including to Israel.  In Tehran there are six kosher butchers
and about 30 synagogues.  Ahmadinejad's office recently made a
donation to a Jewish hospital in Tehran.

As Ciamak Moresadegh, an Iranian Jewish leader, observed: "If you
think Judaism and Zionism are one, it is like thinking Islam and the
Taliban are the same, and they are not."  Iran's leaders denounce
Zionism, which they blame for fueling discrimination against the
Palestinians, but they have also repeatedly avowed that they have no
problem with Jews, Judaism, or even the state of Israel.  Ahmadinejad,
caricatured as a merchant of genocide, has in fact called for "regime
change" -- and then only in the sense that he believes a referendum
should be held of all inhabitants of Israel and the occupied
territories, including refugees from war, on the nature of the
government.

Despite the absence of any threat to Iran's Jews, the Israeli media
recently reported that the Israeli government has been trying to find
new ways to entice Iranian Jews to Israel.  The Ma'ariv newspaper
pointed out that previous schemes had found few takers.  There was,
noted the report, "a lack of desire on the part of thousands of
Iranian Jews to leave."    According to the New York-based Forward
newspaper, a campaign to convince Iranian Jews to emigrate to Israel
caused only 152 out of these 25,000 Jews to leave Iran between October
2005 and September 2006, and most of them were said to have emigrated
for economic reasons, not political ones.

To step up these efforts -- and presumably to avoid the embarrassing
incongruence of claiming an imminent second Holocaust while thousands
of Jews live happily in Tehran -- Israel is now backing a move by
Jewish donors to guarantee every Iranian Jewish family $60,000 to
settle in Israel, in addition to a host of existing financial
incentives that are offered to Jewish immigrants, including loans and
cheap mortgages.

The announcement was met with scorn by the Society of Iranian Jews,
which issued a statement that their national identity was not for
sale. "The identity of Iranian Jews is not tradeable for any amount of
money.  Iranian Jews are among the most ancient Iranians. Iran's Jews
love their Iranian identity and their culture, so threats and this
immature political enticement will not achieve their aim of wiping out
the identity of Iranian Jews."

However, this financial gesture may not only be unwelcome but
self-fulfilling too, if past experience is the yardstick.  Israel
introduced a similar scheme a few years ago, when Argentina's economy
plunged into deep recession, broadcasting an offer of $20,000 to every
Jew who settled in Israel.  Months later the Israeli media reported a
rise in anti-Semitic attacks in Argentina, only adding to the pressure
on Jews there to leave.  Of course, there was no mention of a possible
causal connection between the attacks and Israel's generous offer to
Jews to abandon their homeland as other Argentinians sank into
poverty.

But if financial enticements -- and a possible popular backlash --
fail to move Iranian Jews, there is good reason to fear that Israel
may resort to other, more dubious ways of encouraging them to
emigrate.  That is certainly a path Israel has chosen before with
other communities of Arab Jews, whom it has regarded either as a pool
of potential spies and agents provocateurs to be used when needed or
as "human dust," in the words of Israel's first prime minister, David
Ben Gurion, to be recruited to Israel's "demographic battle" against
the Palestinians.

In "Operation Susannah" of 1954, for example, Israel recklessly
recruited a group of Egyptian Jews to stage a series of explosions in
Egypt in a bid to discourage Britain from withdrawing from the Suez
Canal zone.  When the plot came to light, it naturally cast a shadow
of disloyalty over Egypt's wider Jewish community.  Following Israel's
invasion and occupation of Sinai two years later, the government of
Gamal Abdel Nasser expelled some 25,000 Egyptian Jews and, after
others were imprisoned on suspicion of spying, the rest soon left.

Even more notoriously, Israel went to greater lengths to ensure the
exit of the Arab world's largest Jewish population, in Iraq.  In 1950
a series of bombs targeted on Jews in Baghdad forced a rapid exodus of
some 130,000 Iraqi Jews to Israel, convinced that Arab extremists were
behind the attacks.  Only later did it emerge that the bombs had been
planted by members of the Zionist underground, supported by the
Israeli government.

Now, Iran's Jews may find themselves treated in much the same manner
-- as simple human fodder.  Stories are growing of Israel exploiting
the free movement between Iran and Israel enjoyed by Iranian Jews and
their Israeli relatives to carry out spying operations on Iran's
nuclear programme.  Such reports have come from reliable sources such
as the American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, citing US
government officials.

The fallout from such actions is not difficult to predict.  Besieged
by the US and the international community, Tehran is cracking down on
dissent and minority groups, fearful that its own grip on power is
shaky and that the well-publicised subversion being carried out by US
and Israeli agents is likely only to be stepped up.  So far most
officials in Tehran have been careful to avoid suggesting that Iran's
Jews have double loyalties, as has the local Jewish community itself,
both of them aware of Israel's interests in provoking such a
confrontation.  But as the strains increase, and Israel's need to
prove Tehran's genocidal intent grows ever stronger, that policy may
end up being forfeited -- and with it the future of Iran's Jews.

More important than the welfare of Iranian Jewish families, it seems,
is the value of Iranian Jews as a propaganda tool in Israel's battle
to persuade the world that coexistence with the Muslim world is
impossible.  For those who want to engineer a clash of civilizations,
the 3,000-year-old Jewish legacy in Iran is not something to be
treasured, only another obstacle to war.

Jonathan Cook, a journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, is the author
of Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic
State (Pluto Press).  His website is <www.jkcook.net>.

--
Yoshie