Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Haggai Ram is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. His publications include Reading Iran in Israel (2006, published in Hebrew) and Myth and Mobilization in Revolutionary Iran (1994).

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Iranophobia

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface...............................................................................................xiIntroduction..........................................................................................11 Inaugurating Iran's Radical Alterity: Shifting Geopolitics, Oxymoronic Voices.......................232 Modernity in Crisis: Israeli Pipe Dreams of Euro-America and the Iranian Threat.....................503 Iran and the Jewish State's Repertoires of Violence in the Post-9/11 World..........................734 The Unclassifiable: Iran's Jews in Zionist/Israeli Imagination......................................96Postscript: A Few Comments on a "Known Rapist"........................................................120Notes.................................................................................................135Bibliography..........................................................................................187Index.................................................................................................211

Chapter One

Shifting Geopolitics, Oxymoronic Voices

The Army should use tanks and machine-guns against the masses, deploy firing squads facing the strikers, and give the secret police and its agents a free hand. -An unnamed Iran expert explaining how the Shah can save his throne, January 1979

IT IS POSSIBLE to argue today, with the benefit of hindsight, that like many other revolutionary struggles in the colonial and postcolonial world, the 1979 Iranian revolution has run out of vital sources of energy and creativity and is left with an exercise of power bereft of any pretense of the exercise of vision. As a consequence, the revolution's "anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares," to borrow from David Scott. Nonetheless, it cannot be discounted that this revolution certainly was "one of the central social revolutions of the twentieth century," as Eric Hobsbawm contends, not the least because it was waged against a perverted kind of modernity that "betrayed every humanistic principle [which] modernity is supposed to represent."

Reflecting on the historiography of the Chinese Revolution, Arif Dirlik asks, "Why is it that revolutions which seemed to make eminent sense only decades ago, no longer make any sense?" Yet to both Israeli experts and laypersons the 1979 revolution made no sense almost from the very beginning. The reason for this was that their understandings of the revolution were deeply embedded in colonial (or modernist) conceptions of violence, whose nature and implications Talal Asad describes as follows:

However reprehensible it was to liberals, the violence of Marxists and nationalists was understandable in terms of progressive, secular history. The violence of Islamic groups, on the other hand, is incomprehensible to many precisely because it is not embedded in a historical narrative-history in the "proper" sense. As the violence of what is often referred to as a totalitarian religious tradition hostile to democratic politics, it is seen to be irrational as well as being an international threat.

Hence Israelis relegated the revolutionary struggle to the realm of disorganized, untamed, "irrational" violence of the kind that historians of medieval and early modern Europe, as well as of modern colonialism, purportedly come up against periodically. Indeed, to these Israelis the 1979 crisis in Iran was the kind of violence that apparently had no causes and motivations other than "inciting riots, murder, conflagration, torture, and bringing the life of [a] country to a standstill," to cite one Israeli commentary on the 1979 revolution.

The revolution, it is safe to argue, was directed against a ruler whose blatant elitism and brutality were fashioned after colonial and imperial ideals of modernization. It should not come as a surprise, then, that his fate was similar in kind to that of other postcolonial rulers-or juntas-for whom nationalization "simply mean[t] the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are the legacy of the colonial period." As mentioned, Arif Dirlik believes that historians of the Chinese Cultural Revolution would later forget its radical discourses and radical alternatives to capitalist modernity. That dismissal of past perspectives, as Dirlik explains, rested not on some "objective" ground, but on the "desire to forget past perspectives that have become uncomfortable owing to changes in the historian's environment and consciousness." By contrast, Israelis who monitored the events in Iran refused to view the 1979 revolution as an intellectually formative event from the very start. The act of "forgetting," which in the Chinese case was bound up with important transformations of the present, did not come up in this instance because, to these Israelis, there was nothing worth "remembering" in the 1979 revolution to begin with.

In retrospect, it is not at all surprising that Israeli experts following the Iranian crisis immediately engaged with the art of "forgetting," that their narratives of the revolution were instantaneously ridden with silences that have made the whole history of Iran since 1979 into one sorry story of violence, corruption, ineptitude, and waste. For in making sense of the revolution and its aftermath, they drew on much of the same "expert non-knowledge" that has long been in circulation about Palestinian realities (and Palestinian resistance). "The story of Western civilization advancing in the East through its proxy Israel," anthropologist Ted Swedenburg explains, "has consistently pushed Palestinians to the margins":

Forced to lurk in the West's shadow, the "wild" Palestinian Other has occasionally managed to blast his or her way onto center stage with explosive charges and machine-gun bursts. Such disruption of the Western [and Israeli] narrative only lasted for a flicker of the television screen ... for they were apprehended as irrational interruptions of an unfolding story of Western progress rather than as statements within a plausible counternarrative.

Echoing long-standing conceptual vocabularies on the murky, impenetrable, irrational, and violent nature of Palestinians (and indeed of "Orientals" in general), Israeli conceptions of the Iranian revolutionaries' motivations and actions completely overlooked the concrete historical contexts of oppression or injustice in which they operated, and denied them the imaginative, improvisational practices through which "we" ceaselessly elaborate our world. "Their" actions were simply seen to be dictated by the very nature of "their" (religious-cum-violent) culture.

Yet it would be wrong to conclude that dominant Israeli readings of the Iranian revolutionaries were essentially restatements of older themes about Palestinians and other "unruly" Muslims, in the sense coined by Edward Said, referring to the complex movement of "social and historical affiliation" of traveling ideas and theories. Israeli narratives of the revolution and its aftermath also worked differently for Israelis because they displayed a moral panic deriving from the Jewish state's cultural and ethnic "outsiders within," as well as a...