Reviewed by Joel Gordon
Iran’s revolution appears to hang in the balance. As rifts within the ruling elite are played out in the streets, the world watches with anticipation, not least the United States which struggles to walk a fine line between encouraging dissent and forging a new understanding with the clerical regime.
Yet the Israeli government, as if stuck in a time warp, continues to publicly promote its right — and ultimate readiness — to launch an attack against the Islamic republic. Israelis may well have reason to look upon Iran with suspicion, even apprehension. Yet the ‘rising tide of anxiety’ amongst average citizens is, according to the author of Iranophobia, ‘utterly irrational and exceedingly disproportionate’ to any threat that may emanate from Tehran.
Haggai Ram’s provocative, even ‘blasphemous’ study confronts the ‘logic’ — or illogic — of Israel’s ‘obsession’ with the Islamic republic. An Israeli historian of Iran who is tied to neither the defense establishment nor intelligence community — a rare commodity — Ram is well positioned to place Israeli-Iranian relations in context, to dismantle persistent mythologies, and to even suggest that Israel’s worst nightmares are rooted deeper within its own changing society and polity than in Iran’s aggressive intentions or capabilities.
If the Islamic revolution has run out of energy, as many asserted well before recent elections, Ram recalls it as a central moment in the 20th century. Israelis, much like discontented Iranians, especially those too young to recall the Peacock throne, have fallen victim to the ‘art of forgetting’ history. Israeli Iran experts, perpetuate this by engaging in ‘massive self-censorship.’
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The Zionist and Pahlavi nation-building projects shared a desire to stand outside and above the wider Arab and Muslim world in which they found themselves trapped, to produce ‘new’ Jews and Iranians who were ‘deracinated replicas of Europeans.’
Israel’s ‘unqualified endorsement’ of the Shah’s ‘oppressive modernity’ translated into a relationship with SAVAK, the secret police, which was second only to the Americans’. The recollections of a ‘wondrous love affair’ that Ram has read in the memoirs of secret agents, diplomats, and businessmen, is of course understood differently by many Iranians.
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Ram sees a glimmer of hope in growing reluctance to blindly accept state dogma regarding Iran (recent polls suggest that most Israelis no longer favour military action). If his book is read and not simply dismissed as blasphemy, Israelis might better understand and question their complex relationship with an old ally.
Joel Gordon is a professor of history at the University of Arkansas
Iranophobia: The logic of an
Israeli obsession
By Haggai Ram
Stanford University Press, CA
ISBN 978-0-8047-6068-3
220pp. $19.95