What Netanyahu needs to understand about Iran
- By Sumantra Maitra
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E-mail China.org.cn, March 6, 2015
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Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint session of the US Congress on March 3, 2015 at the US Capitol in Washington, DC. Netanyahu was invited by House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress without informing the White House. [Xinhua photo] |
I was fortunate to meet Dr. Meir Litvak at a conference on the Middle East at Otago University a couple of years back. Dr. Litvak, one of the most affable Israeli professors and experts on Iran, was arguing single-handedly against the anti-Israeli bias generally evident in hostile liberal western academia while defending Israeli interests during the early optimistic days of the Arab Spring. I was skeptical, of course, so during the lunch break I approached him with questions about Netanyahu's extension of Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory.
"Of course I don't think settlement extension is a prudent course of action," he said, and then went on to explain that Israel does not really worry about Palestine, but about Iran-backed Hezbollah. Will a nuclear-armed Iran be an existential threat to Israel? "Supposedly…since they have a declared goal of obliterating Israel," he said.
But will it really come down to nuclear annihilation? "I would prefer to say no without trying to predict the future."
Reading about the Israeli prime minister's speech on Iran's nuclear ambitions and the nuclear deal between the P5+1 and Iran, I couldn't stop wondering whether Mr. Netanyahu has ever had a conversation with Dr. Litvak. Maybe Bibi would do well to form a committee with actual experts on Iran before trying to lecture on the dos and don'ts of dealing with the Islamic Republic.
Kenneth Waltz, one of the greatest international relations theorists of the last century, wrote one last article on Iran's nuclear ambitions a few years back, just before his death. He mentioned that the problem dogging the international relations community and the political class in the United States is the idea that Iran is a suicidal power.
Iran was one of the first countries to form a comparatively modern nation state on the basis of religion after a violent revolution. The marriage of religion and statehood has happened before, of course: Israel itself and Pakistan are two examples of states founded on the basis of religion, but they were created by colonial powers, rather than through organic formation that resulted from a revolution. The Iranian revolution also took place during a time when the majority of the Arab states in the Levant and the Maghreb outside of the Gulf States were secular and left-leaning, often influenced by the Soviet Union. It was in this context that a leftist secular revolution against the Shah started in Iran, a revolution that was later hijacked by Shiite theocratic elements.
I am not ashamed to mention here that as an analyst I was also initially skeptical about Iranian intentions. But over the years, I have observed that Waltz was right in pointing out that Iran is no different from any other regional power or aspiring hegemon. The regional rivalries between Iran and the Arab states are laced by Shiite and Sunni denominational differences, but at the end of the day they are no different from the centuries-old geopolitical rivalries between the Turks, Greeks, Persians, Assyrians and other Levantine Arab warlords and tribes. In this game the Iranians have natural allies in Shiite-majority Iraq or other Shiite groups like the Houthis in Yemen, or groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. In fact, Hamas is traditionally a Sunni group, which further proves that Iran will deal with any group regardless of its religious orientation, as long as it supports Iran's own geopolitical interests.
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