Stanford University Press Blog

Israel’s Restrictions on Mobility, Large and Small, Are Also Threats to Collectivities, Large and Small

Higher Education, visas, and dispossession

AMAHL BISHARA

Section of the separation wall outside Bethlehem with graffito of the word "hope". Photograph by Mohammad Al-Azza, used with permission.

 

Israel has issued a harsh new set of restrictions regarding who will be allowed to teach in Palestinian institutions of higher education. Lecturers must have “unique expertise in their field” as determined by none other than the Israeli military authorities. If approved, they will not be able to teach for a cumulative period longer than five years. These regulations constitute a serious attack on academic freedom. Institutions of higher education are a backbone of society especially for a people in struggle. Israeli authorities have also put additional requirements on other travel to the occupied Palestinian territories. The regulations require that visitors provide names and identification numbers for everyone they plan to visit, set strict procedures and time limits for the visas of students and volunteers, demand for some high deposits for security of NIS 70,000 (approx. US$20,000), and further limit visa possibilities for foreign spouses of Palestinians.

These regulations are rights violations on several levels, but what I wish to emphasize here is that these Israeli limitations on mobility—like others—are also restrictions on Palestinian collectivities. Many of the faculty who have typically sought positions in Palestinian universities are Palestinians in diaspora or the spouses of Palestinians with local status. Thus the new regulations impact Palestinians disproportionately. They would require that travelers on tourist visas disclose family relations and land ownership or expected inheritance. Moreover, if one is the spouse of a Palestinian, one cannot apply for student, lecturer, foreign expert, or volunteer visas, effectively making it impossible for spouses to work, study, or volunteer. For these spouses, achieving permanent residency to live and work in the occupied territories without a visa is extremely difficult.

The regulations as initially issued in the spring of 2022 had been placed on pause for the summer in the face of opposition coming from multiple academic institutions and members of the US Congress. A dozen Congresspeople sent a letter to the Biden administration elucidating the problems created by the academic visa restrictions and asking the administration to state its position on the policy. While some of the strangest rules were removed—like the requirement to declare a romantic relationship to military authorities within three months of its commencement—the core of the regulations remain. The most recent version has been analyzed by HaMoked (see also this podcast and report in Mondoweiss).

Israeli exclusions limit connections among Palestinian families and curtail exploration of personal histories. These restrictions could prevent Palestinian students from learning from Palestinian professors whose parents might have left a generation or two ago.

These 2022 regulations build on existing restrictions, both formal and informal. Foreign faculty in Palestinian colleges and universities have long faced insecurity of access and arbitrary restrictions on visas. Generations of Palestinians (and others seen to be aligned with them) know of the tension of passport control, have sat in the small rooms where one might be pulled aside for interrogation. They know the dread of being banned from entry for ten years. Since 2017, Israel has prohibited the entry of boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) supporters into Israel, the global corollary of Israel’s anti-boycott law, which subjects Israeli citizens to sanction if they support boycott. The initial denial of entry to US Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib in 2019 is just one of the most prominent examples of Israel’s politicization of its visa policy.

Middle East Studies Association Conference 2022

 

MESA is a favorite event of the year for us at Stanford University Press, and we are excited to see you all in person. In addition to our booth at MESA, we offer this virtual space to showcase highlights from the last year of Middle East studies publishing at SUP.

 

Virtual Exhibit

2022 Award Winners

MESA Resources

 

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Virtual Exhibit

Announcing new books, published in the last year. We’re offering 30% off and free North American shipping on these and other recent SUP Middle East titles with discount code S22XMESA-FM through our virtual exhibit ».

 

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2022 Award Winners

 

 

 

Cleft Capitalism: The Social Origins of Failed Market Making in Egypt »

AMR ADLY

• Winner of the 2021 Roger Owen Book Award, sponsored by the Middle East Studies Association (MESA).

Looking Beyond Pride Month

Palestine, the global LGTBQ community, and the future of activism.

SA’ED ATSHAN

Free for commercial use. Via Pixabay

The global LGBTQ community has now reached a point that celebrations of Pride mark the month of June across the world. Yet this also begs a number of pressing questions, including whether a global queer community exists in the first place, what is exactly meant by “pride,” and what types of events are privileged this month? Furthermore, who has the ability to define these terms and to make these decisions? Examining the contemporary intersection of queer rights and the question of Palestine provides insights on the promise—and limits—of global LGBTQ politics.

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique », my book on the transnational queer Palestinian solidarity movement, was published by SUP in 2020. In it, I examined events relevant to the movement reaching the year 2018. Thus, while much has remained constant over the past four years, much has also changed significantly.

My ethnography revealed the potential of global queer solidarity across lines of difference. There are shared struggles against patriarchy, homophobia, racism, and colonialism that tie LGBTQ activists together despite disparate geographies and positionalities. At the same time, the realities in Palestine are similar to contexts elsewhere, in that queer agency is intimately connected to socioeconomic status, political and religious ideologies, family and education background, urban and rural divides, and other factors. These conditions shape whether one is able to lead a life free from structural and physical violence in the face of homophobia. While privileged queer people in Ramallah and New York each benefit from the forces of cosmopolitanism, the former must contend with life under military occupation while the latter live under a sovereign state.

FIGHS Event Series: Writing and Publishing Gulf History and Heritage

 

 

This event celebrates the publication of Stanford University Press’s 200th book in Middle East Studies and highlights the press’s unique strength in the burgeoning field of Gulf Studies.  The event will feature a moderated conversation between SUP’s Middle East Editor, Kate Wahl, and two SUP authors: Farah al-Nakib, author of Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life » , and Todd Reisz, author of Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai ».  The conversation will explore the role of university presses in fostering academic communities and critical scholarship, the relationship between urban studies and architecture, and the role of heritage studies in Gulf and Middle East Studies.

Register here »

Middle East Studies Association Conference 2021

 

MESA is a favorite event of the year for us at Stanford University Press, and we’ll miss seeing you all in person. To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the MESA Book Bazaar, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Middle East studies publishing at SUP.

 

Announcing the MESA 2021 Book Award Winners

New Books

2021 Middle East Studies Catalog

2021 Award Winners

Digital Publishing Initiative

MESA Resources

 

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Announcing the MESA 2021 Book Award Winners

 

Nikki Keddie Book Award

• Elise Burton, Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity »
• Honorable Mention, Rosie Bsheer, Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia »

 

Roger Owen Book Award

• Amr Adly, Cleft Capitalism: The Social Origins of Failed Market Making in Egypt »
• Honorable Mention, Aaron Jakes, Egypt’s Occupation: Colonial Economism and the Crises of Capitalism »

 

Fatema Mernissi Book Award

• Niloofar Haeri, Say What Your Longing Heart Desires: Women, Prayer, and Poetry in Iran »

 

Albert Hourani Book Award

• Honorable Mention, Caterina Scaramelli, How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey »

Movements of Rage

Understanding stochastic violence

GLENN E. ROBINSON

November 2020— Memorial in Desider-Friedmann-Platz, Vienna By Bwag - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

 

On November 2 at 8:00 pm, Kujtim Fejzullai opened fire on civilians in Vienna, Austria, killing four and wounding two dozen more before being killed himself. Born in Austria and of Albanian heritage, Fejzullai became known to Austrian counterterrorism officials when he attempted to cross the Turkish border to join ISIS in Syria, a crime for which he served eight months in prison. As far as we know, Fejzullai never actually made contact with ISIS officials; he seems to have planned and carried out his terror attack completely on his own. He declared his allegiance to ISIS on social media before launching his attack. ISIS acknowledged that it was surprised by the attack, calling Fejzullai a “soldier of the caliphate” – a phrase normally reserved for previously unknown sympathizers who carry out a violent act. Thus, it appears that very little could have been done to prevent this radicalized individual, acting alone but inspired by ISIS, from carrying out his deadly rampage.

Welcome to the fourth wave of global jihad.

As my new book Global Jihad » details, there have been four distinct waves of global jihad. The most recent fourth wave is part of the broader phenomenon of stochastic violence: i.e. violence that is inspired and social media driven. Following the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001, Abu Musab al-Suri feared for the future of armed jihad itself. A committed jihadi, Suri had fought in the first round of the Syrian civil war in the early 1980s, advised the GIA in Algeria’s bloody civil war in the 1990s, and likely had a hand in some of Europe’s most notorious acts of terror. Suri wanted to create a jihadi system that could withstand the constant crush of security and military forces, built on emerging internet technologies, and held together by an always evolving wiki-narrative that made sense of all the disparate acts of jihadi violence. Nizam, la tanzim he declared: “a system, not an organization.” Jihadi organizations were too easily defeated, but a networked system that linked together individuals and small groups from around the world was a durable form of jihadi action. It required, at its center, acts of jihad fardi, or personal jihad: attacks by ‘lone wolves’ or small groups.

The idea of stochastic terror was first launched by American neo-Nazis, and only made possible by the advent of the internet and social media.

Middle East Studies Association Conference 2020

 

MESA is a favorite event of the year for us at Stanford University Press, and we’ll miss seeing you all in person. To capture some of the spirit of gathering together in the MESA Book Bazaar, we offer this virtual space, showcasing our new authors, award-winning books, and highlights from the last year of Middle East studies publishing at SUP.

 

Virtual Events

New Books and New SUP Authors

2021 Middle East Studies Catalog

This Year’s Award Winners

SUP Author Panels at MESA

From the SUP Blog Archives

New in Stanford Digital Projects

MESA Resources

 

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Virtual Events

 

Book Talk: A SUP Virtual Event

Kate Wahl, editor-in-chief, and SUP authors Narges Bajoghli and Sherene Seikaly discuss book publishing. In a broad-ranging conversation, they share experiences with and advice about writing and research, developing proposals and manuscripts, and approaching publishers.

 

Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures

Recorded on July 22, 2020, series editors Joel Beinin and Laleh Khalili join in conversation with SUP authors Darryl Li and Nahid Siamdoust and editor-in-chief Kate Wahl to discuss the state of the series and publishing interests for the future.

 

Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism, by Mana Kia

Recorded on July 31, 2020, Mana Kia discusses her new book with Nile Green, Afshin Marashi, and Katherine Schofield.

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Virtual Event for Stanford's Middle East Series

A look at SUP's Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Culture series

 

Last week, Stanford University Press hosted a virtual event about our Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Culture series ».

This event featured series editors Joel Beinin and Laleh Khalili leading a wide-ranging conversation on the current state of the field as well as Stanford University Press’s own contributions. Fellow panelists include series authors Darryl Li (The Universal Enemy) and Nahid Siamdoust (Soundtrack of the Revolution). Kate Wahl—SUP’s Publishing Director, Editor-in-Chief, and acquisition’s editor for the Middle East Studies list—hosted.

Arab Angelenos

Routes to the Southland

SARAH M. A. GUALTIERI

Mural depicting the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots. Zoot Suit Riots photo by Gareth Simpson. Via Flickr. No changes were made. CC BY 2.0.

 

Last fall, I returned from a trip to an academic conference, landing at the busy Los Angeles International airport. Like thousands of other travelers, I made my way to the ride-share pick up area to meet my driver. He greeted me amicably and we chatted about the new, much flaunted but much criticized, traffic arrangements at the airport. I asked him who was still taking taxis, since Uber and Lyft seemed to have solidified the hold on the ride-share market. He replied without pausing: Middle Easterners. He explained to me that because of their limited English skills, their desire to “stick together,” and their inclination to pay for services with cash, they dominated the ranks of both drivers and passengers. While his tone was not overtly hostile, I recognized immediately the insidiousness of this purported explanation. He had casually grouped Middle Easterners separately , apart  from other kinds of people, and ascribed to them traits that signaled their unassimilability and perpetual foreignness. I had seen this kind of slippage at work so many times before whereby Middle Eastern, and Arab immigrants in particular, were not considered capable of being American. They are, to use the words of anthropologist Suad Joseph, subject to “the hyphen that never ends.”¹

This process of othering pervades not only daily interactions like my drive from the airport, but also academic cultures and institutions. California historiography, for example, has little to say about Arabs in the state, while ethnic studies scholarship tends to view them as recent immigrants. Neither can account for the deeply-rooted presence of Arabs in Southern California or for their vibrant civic life – a vibrancy captured in a 1940 Los Angeles Times article that described an outdoor festival, or mahrajan, as “the biggest event of the year for the more than 15,000 members of the Southland’s Syrian colony.”²

Arab Routes » redresses these absences and charts the complex patterns of movement, multiple homes, and expansive family networks that are central motifs in the history of the Arab communities in Southern California. Long overlooked in the study of Arab migrations, Los Angeles and its environs are the ideal location to trace these histories. Ethnically diverse, economically dynamic, and connected to the Pacific and to Latin America, the city attracted thousands of Syrian migrants in the first half of the 20^th century. Today, it has the largest population of Middle Eastern origin and descent in the United States. Arab Routes places their stories at the center of a larger narrative about the mutability of the concept of home, the attachment to multiple national identities, and the impermanence of settlement.

Lebanese Uprising

The corruption of debt.

HICHAM SAFIEDDINE

Beirut 2019– Protest against Lebanon's council of ministers. Photo taken by Jessica Wahab, the license holder is NicolasGaron - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0. Image has been cropped.  Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

There is no shortage of corruption in Lebanon. According to Transparency International, people in Lebanon are the most likely in the MENA region to describe their politicians and state institutions as highly corrupt. From the smallest bureaucratic transaction to the largest government contract, billions of dollars are drained from people’s pockets through bribery and from the public purse through embezzlement. But the focus on liberal forms of corruption, as defined by Transparency International and other international actors, has reduced the crisis to a problem of bad governance. The ready accusation of “endemic” or “rampant” corruption is proposed by global consultancy groups, parroted by Western political leaders, and put to government officials by Western mainstream media. Such accusations are coupled with a rehearsed formula to solve the crisis: austerity, more transparency, an end to clientelism, and drastic fiscal reforms. 

Such a diagnosis sits well with elites in the Global North eager to exonerate themselves and lay all the blame on their Global South counterparts. It also drowns the debate in legal and financial jargon about the rule of law and fiscal mismanagement, with few results. Lebanon’s law against unlawful enrichment was passed 20 years ago but undermined whistleblowers rather than perpetrators.Meanwhile, other major and invisible sources of corruption, such as chronic debt, are either discussed in passing, or invoked to justify more of the same antidote: austerity measures that include cutting major social services, and subsidies that benefit the majority of the population. Outwardly, these cuts are about ending corruption. In effect, they redirect government expenditures to service public debt - that is, pay the rich lenders - and make way for profitable foreign investment. In Lebanon, corruption induced by debt has reached gigantic proportions, with serious consequences for the state and society alike. Debt is the primary source of lawful enrichment. Lebanon has become the world’s third most indebted nation, with public debt estimated at $80bn in 2018 - a whopping 151 percent of GDP.

Exile

Sato Moughalian, author of Feast of Ashes, on the beginnings of the Armenian Genocide.

SATO MOUGHALIAN

Between 1915 and 1916–  A refugee Armenian woman and child receiving food aid. Public Domain. By American Committee for Relief in the Near East,REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-DIG-ggbain-26556. Via Wikimedia Commons.

 

In light of the passing of Tuesday’s House resolution recognizing the Armenian Genocide we present an excerpt from Feast of Ashes: The Life and Art of David Ohannessian» by Sato Moughalian. It is our hope the following excerpt will provide historical context on why this resolution is important.

On March 18, 1915, on the western front, British and French naval forces launched a campaign to breach the Dardanelles strait—the narrow waterway separating Europe from Asia—and enter the Sea of Marmara, aiming their warships for the capital and the Black Sea. The Allied armada suffered fierce bombardment. Three Allied battleships sank, one with more than six hundred men onboard. Three more ships were badly damaged.

The British Fleet admiral⁴⁸ called off the offensive. The Royal Navy regrouped, summoning Australian and New Zealand battalions from Egypt as well as Indian Army troops.⁴⁹ When the reconstituted Allied fleet returned to menace the Aegean waters once again, the Ottoman War Ministry dispatched gendarmes into the interior to search Armenian homes and schools for hidden weapons and evidence of treachery. The smallest suspicion of disloyalty to the regime was cause for punishment.

In late March, days after the Dardanelles attack, Turkish gendarmes began to raid Armenian homes and properties in the provincial capital of Brussa, where Ohannessian had recently spent time restoring the tiling of the Green Mosque. One Sunday at dawn, officers entered the city’s Armenian Orthodox church, smashing walls in a fruitless search for arms. The police arrested nearly two hundred and fifty Brussa Armenian intellectuals and business and religious leaders. Thirteen were hanged immediately, and the others were exiled to the interior, tortured, and shot.⁵⁰ Afterward, chetes burned their bodies.⁵¹

In Constantinople, Young Turk leadership, fearful of foreign reprisals for the growing numbers of mass arrests and executions of Armenians throughout the provinces, set a powerful plan into motion. Secreted from the gaze of the capital’s large European community, members of the State Security Directorate and the police force’s Department of Political Affairs composed blacklists of the capital’s most influential, active, and accomplished Armenians. They were all to be exiled into the Anatolian interior. A spy network, directed by Constantinople’s police chief and his assistant, surveilled the subjects carefully, noting their daily movements. The committee hatched a scheme for hundreds of officers to mobilize and apprehend more than two hundred eminent Armenians in a single, grandly orchestrated strike.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Turns Towards Hollywood

Going beyond the label of propaganda in regime media.

NARGES BAJOGHLI

Parade of IRGC tank transporters. Photo by Mohammad Sadegh Heydari via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC Attribution 4.0 International

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A professionally produced video surfaced on Iranian social media the last week of August. A young soldier in the Revolutionary Guard stands on a train in the Tehran metro. Some young boys around him begin to beat-box and the soldier raps to the passengers:

 

Why are you sitting

Join me

We are all from one home

In happy times and hard times, sticking together is what endures

Our future is bright, as long as we stick together

We all have to be ready to heal each other’s wounds

 

Given the passengers reactions in the video it becomes obvious that the rapper and his beat-box boys have shown up unannounced on the metro train. The intention seems to be a depiction of the Revolutionary Guard as “of the people,” a soldier who at once is connected to the tired commuters as well as has the attention of the younger riders who are supposedly enjoying his rhymes. The camera focuses on ordinary passengers, who either look on amused or indifferent as the soldier raps about unity in the face of economic hardship from US sanctions. Not only do the lyrics communicate national unity in the face of domestic and international pressures, but the video forefronts passengers who are read as working and lower-middle class Iranians. The rapper is a young soldier in the Revolutionary Guard, immune from accusations of grift, corruption, and the accumulation of vast wealth that his older counterparts are widely critiqued for by Iranians today.

When the music video ends, the only credit reads: Director: Eighty Million Iranians.

How do we make sense of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard – an organization now formally designated a “foreign terrorist organization” by the US government – beatboxing and producing rap videos that claim to speak on behalf of a nation? There’s nothing new about national militaries using media to conjure unity. So, what’s the big deal here?

Finding hidden imagery in an Illuminated Page

A guided tour of the Zeytun Gospel’s Canon Tables reveals the extraordinary life of a matchless Armenian artwork

HEGHNAR ZEITLIAN WATENPAUGH

A bifolium of two different sets of illustration from the Getty display of the Zeytun Gospels canon tables. Photograph: J. Paul Getty Museum. Ms, 59, fols 3v-6r. Digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

Consider this page from the Canon Tables of the Zeytun Gospels, now at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

The illuminated page features an architectural frame supported by three columns. Between the columns are golden grids that contain letters written in the Armenian alphabet. The letters stand for numbers, and the grids are concordance lists of passages that relate the same events in two or more of the four Gospels. In the Middle Ages, canon tables almost always preceded the Gospels. They occupied several pages and were among the most elaborately decorated passages in a manuscript. The Canon Tables of the Zeytun Gospels were created in 1256, the first signed work of Toros Roslin, now recognized as the greatest medieval Armenian illuminator. On this page, you see areas of geometric ornament enhanced with gold ink and jewel-like colors. When you look closely at the ornamental field, you find pairs of partridges and blue birds hidden in the gold leaf, pecking at tendrils. There are two faces staring out from the upper section, their expressions enigmatic. The column capitals are actually ox heads rendered in blue. Plants and animals surround the architectural frame. At the top of the page, two roosters stride confidently towards a jeweled vase, their tail feathers outlined in gold. Flanking the frame are floral motifs and pomegranate trees where two species of birds frolic.

 

One of the matching pairs of Canon Tables by Toros Roslin. Ms. 59,  fol. 5v and 6r. Digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program.

Roslin conceived of his canon tables as matching pairs. When you opened the book, they appeared on two facing pages that echoed each other’s decoration. You can see how the matching page features a similar arrangement, with the same roosters, ox-head column capitals, and pomegranate trees (see Ms. 59, fol. 5v and 6r). As your eye travels from one page to the other, you delight in discerning differences: the roosters nibble at the bottom of the vase rather than striding towards it, the birds are all different, and on the lower row they peck at the column capitals. The hidden faces in the architectural frames have vanished, leaving behind indigo arabesques emerging from horns of plenty.

History Stands alongside the Woman in the White Tobe

The Legacy of Sudanese Fashion and Politics

MARIE GRACE BROWN

Three female students at Khartoum University, two of whom are in white tobes; Khartoum, 1951. Sudan Government photograph: Crown copyright. Reproduced by permission of Durham University Library.

 

By now the image is familiar. A lone woman, with arm outstretched, stands on top of a car in a crowd of protesters. She is dressed in an impeccable white cotton garment, called a tobe; her gold disk earring catches the fading evening light. The woman, identified as university student Alaa Salah, is one of thousands of Sudanese who have been demonstrating against the government since December 2018.

For those unacquainted with Sudan’s history, the aesthetics of the photo are what make it so striking. The soft folds of the tobe and the oversized earring stand in sharp contrast to the surrounding sea of smartphones. But for Sudanese audiences, the tobe is an instantly recognizable marker of national identity. Many have noted the garment’s links to kandakas, the Nubian queens of the Kush dynasty (established in the eighth century BCE). But Salah and her white tobe also reference a more recent history of women’s public engagement and activism: a moment in which Sudanese fashion and political protest operated hand in hand.

Meaning “bolt of cloth,” the tobe is a rectangular piece of fabric –several meters long, which Sudanese women wrap around their bodies and heads whenever they are in public. First introduced in the eighteenth century, the tobe did not gain widespread popularity until the twentieth. Young girls donned the tobe on their way to school and a nascent class of professional women: teachers, nurses, and midwives all adopted the white tobe as their uniform. This connection to women’s progress earned the tobe its status as Sudan’s “national costume.”

Iran and the Crisis of International Reputation

Why the Iranian Jewish Community is Not a Paradox

LIOR B. STERNFELD

January 16, 2015- Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry prepare meet at the Palais Coburg Hotel in Vienna, Austria to discuss the implementation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

 

As the world marks the 40^th anniversary of the 1979 Revolution, Iran is still considered an anomaly among the nations of the world, seen as a fanatic country that is paradoxically both “Islamic” and “Republic.” This oddity allows western observers to exclude Iran from the moral framework we apply to other countries and blatantly ignore complexities that may force us to change our view. The relationship between Iran, Israel, and the U.S. merits unpacking, especially after the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) made through the diplomatic efforts of the EU, the Obama Administration, and Iran’s foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Despite the broad consensus of intelligence agencies worldwide (including American and Israeli) that Iran continues to abide by the parameters of the agreement, Israel has pushed for JCPOA’s revocation since day one, and Trump made it one of his campaign promises. Prime Minister Netanyahu has insinuated that Iran is inherently anti-Semitic, stating "Iran is committed to Israel's destruction” and  has alleged  that Iran is planning a genocide against Israel (a sentiment VP Pence reiterated just recently). Netanyahu makes these allegations of Iran’s antisemitism when advocating for annulling the agreement, and as we have recently seen in the U.S. antisemitism is an elastic concept. The U.S. followed suit to justify the withdrawal and imposition of new crippling sanctions on Iran.

Dehumanizing Iran with these disingenuous, broad-brushed generalizations is necessary when presenting it as an irrational and anti-Semitic state.  This dehumanization allows the world to ignore both Iran’s commitment as a signatory to the agreement and the effects of the sanctions on the Iranian people, and while the Iranian regime has a lot to answer for, it is mostly for crimes against the Iranian people, not reckless international behavior. The same dehumanization contributes to the  dismissal of the Iranian Jewish community and the reduction of their existence to merely a fig leaf for the Iranian government to insulate against accusations of anti-Semitism. Iran and Iranian Jews share a long and winding history, which cannot be simply reduced to whether Iran is or is not anti-Semitic.