Book Review: Unpacking an Israeli Obsession
Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession by Haggai Ram. Stanford University Press (2009).
In the context of frequent rhetorical sparring and escalating threats of nuclear destruction, little common ground is said to exist between Israel and Iran. Enmity between the two states is often framed as the product of irreconcilable geopolitical, ideological, and strategic differences. Iran’s support of terrorist organizations that seek Israel’s destruction, the regime’s religious character, and supposedly anti-Semitic leadership all appear to ensure confrontation between the two states. This supposedly self-evident “reality” is commonly invoked by politicians, claims-makers and the media. On the one hand, Israel is often portrayed as an oasis of democracy and shared values in a region supposedly characterized by Muslim extremism. Iran, on the other hand, is generally seen as decidedly “Other.” Governed by a hermetic group of religious radicals, the image most commonly presented of Iran is one of repression, backwardness and a lack of “rationality” with regard to geopolitics. If indeed Israel is seen as the primary exemplar of Western “modernity” in the Middle East, Iran is discursively constructed as a useful binary. It is precisely this seemingly self-evident dichotomy that Haggai Ram seeks to interrogate in Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession, a lucid account of Iran’s place in Israeli society’s social imaginary.
While much scholarly work on Israeli-Iranian relations frames tensions in geopolitical terms, Ram’s innovation is to evaluate the cultural and discursive foundations of those terms. Employing the sociological concept of “moral panic,” Ram takes on the commonly held notion that Iran and Israel are “natural” enemies. Instead, Iranophobia suggests that Israel’s “moral panic” finds its roots in cultural anxieties relating to Israel’s precarious conception of itself as essentially “Western.” Ram’s analysis argues that fear of Iran is in fact deeply connected to tensions generated by the presence of non-Western Jewish immigrants in Israel. These groups are seen as calling into question the state’s Ashkenazi (European) “ethnocracy” and complicating Israeli society’s perception of itself as fundamentally European and “modern.” The conception of Iran and Iranian culture as essentially non-Western, as some kind of “Other,” allows Israeli society to conceive of itself and build an identity in contrast to that country and its people.
Iranophobia begins with a discussion of Israeli-Iranian relations in a historical context, sketching a process of “Othering” that, in Ram’s words, represents the inauguration of Iran’s “radical alterity.” While official diplomatic relations did not exist during the time of the Shah, the regime represented for many Israelis a golden-era in Israeli-Iranian relations. Military cooperation and significant business ties were cemented, while Israeli businessmen frequently spent long vacations indulging in Tehren’s “Western” amenities and nightlife. Ram points out that both the Israeli and Iranian state shared a modernization process that ultimately sought to “transform oriental subjects…into deracinated replicas of Europeans, even while they remained affiliated to their own religious cultures,” later contending that “Israeli-Iranian relations before the revolution therefore rested on mutually constitutive perceptions of each other as carriers of the Western mission in the Middle East.” This point is significant, as it serves to buoy later claims with regard to Israel’s anxiety over Iran in the post-Shah period. If, for a moment, Iran had managed to transform itself into a nation that embodied the “civilizing” effects of Western “progress”—much like Israel—the Iranian Revolution seemed to point to the fact that politics and ideology could transform a country and people “back” into non-Western subjects. Ram explores how the Iranian Revolution seemed to have an important resonance in Israel, where officials and journalists openly despaired that the capitalist modernity and “progress” embodied by the deposed monarch would be replaced by a “regressive,” atavistic revolution. Pointing to the geopolitical shifts of that period, Ram argues that the shared ambition for a united Israeli-Iranian front against their perceived mutual enemies in the Arab world began to shift as Israel made piece with Egypt. Insofar as Ram suggests that Israeli society requires the perception of an existential threat, the concomitant peace with Egypt and unfolding Iranian Revolution witnessed a shift from fear of the “Arab threat” to that of the “Iranian threat.”
In subsequent chapters, Ram sketches the process by which Israel’s perceived “modernity” increasingly requires the amplification of the Iranian threat. This fear allows Israeli society to symbolically exorcize its own “unmodern” elements—which, according to Ram, consist of the increasing number of Middle-Eastern Jewish immigrants (Mizrahim) that are uncomfortably perceived to be questioning the future of secular, Western Zionism. Ram explores the tensions embodied in Israel’s claim to a shared Western culture, consistently undermined both by the possibility of Middle Eastern Jews “assimilating” Israel into the surrounding region, as well as the nascent settlement movement that belies the notion of secular democracy through its state-sanctioned religious mission. Thus, “what lies at the bottom of Israeli anti-Iran phobias is the disheartening feeling that present day Iranian realities are, in effect, actualizations of the Jewish state’s future.”
Later chapters explore post-9/11 relations between the two countries and the treatment of Iranian Jews by Israeli immigration officials and envoys from Jewish organizations. After 9/11, an apparent thawing of relations between the United States and Iran seemed to gain momentum as the countries appeared willing to cooperate in overthrowing the Taliban, a mutual enemy. Ram contends that the prospect of a diplomatic horizon between the United States and Iran was particularly disconcerting to Jerusalem. With somewhat less attention to empirically grounded evidence that for the most part characterizes Iranophobia, Ram suggests that the 2002 Karine-A affair (in which a freighter supposedly bound for the Palestinian territories with Iranian weaponry was intercepted by Israel) may have been an attempt by Israel and her supporters to undermine US-Iranian relations.
Later in the decade, Iran is seen as being used as a cover for Israeli military action. During the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli leaders frequently invoked Iranian influence as a rationale for the ferocity of the Israeli response to Hezbollah. These invocations of Iranian influence allowed Israel to argue that it was functioning as a bulwark against the supposedly inevitable confrontation between Judeo-Christian values and the dangerous forces of radical Islam. By conflating the war in Lebanon against Hezbollah with the “Iranian threat,” Israeli military and civil leaders sought ideological cover for an extremely destructive war. Ram shows how politicians and commentators sought to associate Iran with the very creation and identity of the forces being fought in Lebanon. Eschewing any reference to political, cultural, and historical factors that might have led to the rise of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the war became seen as a fight between the secular Jewish state and the dark forces of global Islamic extremism. This discourse emphasized the Iranian state’s role in supposedly manipulating its “satellites” in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, while ignoring the historical context in which these groups emerged. As Ram points out, from the point of view of mainstream Israeli public opinion, “Israel’s offensive war on Hezbollah was, in effect, a defensive war against Iran.”
The final chapter of Iranophobia explores the multiple, if somewhat bizarre, attempts by Israeli officials to convince Iranian Jews to immigrate to Israel. Unable to understand the continued presence of Jews in a state supposedly characterized by virulent anti-Semitism, Israeli immigration agencies offer Iranian Jews everything from housing to monetary gifts in order to facilitate their migration. Once again, Ram points out the contradictions that are embodied by Israeli society’s relationship to Iran and its Jews. Ram argues that the Shah’s attempt to “aryanize” Iranians and convince them that they were “really European in their origin” meant that Israelis were willing to lend tacit support and legitimacy to a continued Jewish presence in Iran. After the Shah, bereft of these de-orientalizing forces, Iranian Jews were expected to immigrate to Israel in order to participate in the “civilizing” mission of that state. Though many Iranian Jews have emigrated abroad, a significant number chose not to settle in Israel, but rather in the United States or Europe.
With some 30,000 Jews remaining in Iran today, Ram unpacks the simplistic assumption that their history has been one of unending persecution. Rather, he argues that the trajectory of Iranian Jews has been complex (much like minorities in societies throughout the world), comprising periods of discrimination and violence along with significant periods of cooperation and inclusion into the larger society. While pointing out the unevenness of this trajectory, Iranophobia correctly suggests that recognizing only histories of violence and exclusion appear particularly limiting and are consistently undermined by the historic record.
Though Iranophobia employs Moral Panic Theory in an innovative way through an understudied case, at times the theoretical arguments Ram proposes could benefit from a more sustained engagement. While a fundamental aspect of moral panic is the notion of the social reaction’s disproportionality, Ram does not consistently make the case that the responses are disproportionate to the material threats. This omission reflects Ram’s desire to avoid the danger of sliding into the realm of strategic and security analysis. Iranophobia indeed makes a compelling argument for a reassessment of the basis of Israeli-Iranian enmity; however, Ram elides the geopolitical implications of a nuclear-armed Iran. While his analysis of Israeli responsibility for this threat is quite useful, there are moments when the notion of moral panic does not seem an appropriate metaphor for the possibility of nuclear warfare between two nations. Indeed, Moral Panic Theory—as originally conceived by practitioners at the Birmingham Centre—sought to explain how the social uproar over relatively minor incidents was rooted in deeper cultural anxieties. Thus, Stanley Cohen’s classic work on the social reaction to small-scale disturbances at a British seaside resort is shown to relate more to anxiety over shifting post-war value systems than to the incidents themselves. While in some respects this framework aptly describes the cultural anxiety around the Mizrahim—Israel’s so-called “Others within”—it appears somewhat less analytically robust in describing the reaction to a nation of 65 million.
Whether the threat from Iran is overemphasized or not, it seems somewhat less feasible to assess the relations of two (nearly) nuclear powers within a framework whose very meaning suggests a situation that is not constitutive of a serious threat to society. This is not to say that the threat Iran poses has not been overemphasized by the media and claims-makers (“moral entrepreneurs” in the language of Moral Panic Theory). However, this does not necessarily negate the very real threat of confrontation between the two countries today. In particular, as Ram seeks to analyze the cultural reaction to Iran rather than the geopolitical aspects of this confrontation, it becomes difficult to assert the essential disproportionality of the response without engaging with the geopolitical realities of the relationship. Though Iranophobia covers new ground in articulating the discursive logic of this reaction, at times a more critical engagement with the veracity of Israeli claims would go a long way in proving the disconnect between fears and reality. These challenges aside, Iranophobia presents an innovative approach to studying Israeli-Iranian relations and should be seriously engaged with by anyone interested in the cultural foundations of this relationship. As consent among the local population is essential for any state’s long-term geopolitical strategy, the discursive underpinnings of society’s reaction provides unique analytical insights, as Ram has proved to great effect in Iranophobia.
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