Stanford University Press Blog

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.

The Second Revolution

Negar Mottahedeh, author of Whisper Tapes, on the women's demonstrations of 1979 in Iran.

NEGAR MOTTAHEDEH

A group of women hold hands during an anti-Shah rally. ©2019 David Burnett/Contact Press Images

 

International Women's Day. March 8, 1979  Tehran woke up to snow and to the news of Ayatollah Khomeini’s new pronouncement on mandatory veiling only days after the victory of the Iranian Revolution. The snow made it hard to move around the capital. Iranian women poured onto the streets regardless, carrying umbrellas with handwritten slogans on them, chanting against the imposition of compulsory veiling. Men were also on the streets. But most of them came in support of Khomeini, the leader of their revolution, and his new decree. They occupied the main streets and squares of the city, blocking the women’s procession and chanting the taunt Ya roosari, ya toosari, “Cover your head, or be smacked in the head.”

Arriving at one of the squares of the Iranian capital, a high school student broke ranks with the rest of the women, shouting in defiance, Dar bahar-e azadi, jay-e azadi khali! “In the spring of freedom, it is freedom that is absent!” This was the ur-form of a chant that in turn evolved, as would a meme on social media platforms today. As mediating practices connecting protestors, such chants and slogans would be adopted, reused, reworked, and redistributed on handwritten posters and by word of mouth during the Iranian demonstrations of 1978–79, playfully and strategically creating new cultural ideas in response to changing political and social needs.

Their voices, confident and self-assured the women called out to the men:  Ma tamasha-chi nemikhahim, be ma molhaq shavid! “We don’t want spectators, come and join us!”

Tribalism in the Classroom

How British educational policy exacerbated social fragmentation in Palestine.

by SUZANNE SCHNEIDER

Inside a classroom in what was then British-ruled Palestine, circa 1925. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In April 1946 the Director of Education for the Government of Palestine, Jerome Farrell, penned a lengthy memorandum about the state of Jewish and Arab education. Directed to the Colonial Office in London and written during the waning days of the British Empire, Farrell’s memo came in the wake of two commissions (the McNair Commission and Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry) that examined the role of education in producing Palestine’s impending political crisis. One of the recurring themes in both commissions’ reports was the improper politicization of Palestine’s school for nationalist ends, a matter about which Farrell found himself in total agreement. What he could not agree with was the recommendation—found in both reports—that the government should grant both Jewish and Arab communities increased educational autonomy going forward. As he wrote,

if unselfishness, peace and goodwill are principal aims of education it will be difficult to reconcile the two relevant recommendations which each Report in effect makes and which, bluntly stated, are (a) that a ‘fiery nationalism’ shall be eradicated from the schools, (b) that control of education shall be vested in fiery nationalist politicians.

The attempt to keep politics out of the classroom did in fact represent a very real form of colonial power, one which labored for the preservation of British rule.

The Dead Negev Doctrine

By manipulating law and geography Israel is dispossessing the Bedouins of their historic lands.

by OREN YIFTACHEL, AHMAD AMARA, and ALEXANDRE KEDAR

Photo by Physicians for Human Rights. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

"When will the state understand that we are here to stay? These are our lands for hundreds of years; everybody knew this—the Ottomans, the British and the Israelis. These lands are our soul, our life, our identity. Even if they demolish Araqib 100 more times, we shall return". (Sayach Altouri, Shaikh of 'Araqib, January 4, 2018).

These words were spoken at a special event convened in the small village of ’Araqib following the release of the shaikh from a short period of custody for "trespassing" on his ancestors land. It also followed the 124th demolition of their village by the authorities, and the reconstruction of its modest homes by the Bedouin residents.

’Araqib is but one of many flashpoints in the protracted conflict over land in the Negev, where dozens of indigenous Bedouin communities, numbering 110,000 people, are still living in localities that are not recognized or planned, with their residents subject to more than 1,000 house demolitions per year (that’s four times the number of demolitions that occur in the occupied West Bank). The indigenous communities, who have lived in the area for hundreds of years, are denied basic services such as water, electricity, roads or schools.

As Bad As Death

For Syrians, military strategies of food deprivation, siege, and starvation are both present and past.

by MELANIE S. TANIELIAN

Photo by Ben White. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

In a Cairo newspaper, under the headline “News from Syria,” a journalist relayed a harrowing account of one family’s exodus from their war-torn home:

A Moslem family arrived in Egypt from Tripoli, Syria, about a couple of weeks ago. The account of their escape reads more like fiction than reality. During many a long night, patiently and secretly, the work of building a small skiff was carried on inside the house; and, as soon as it was completed, the frail boat was launched on a rather rough sea. Even the old mother was dumped down in the boat under the cover of darkness, and the journey to a place of safety—the name of which is withheld for obvious reasons—was a long drawn agony; the occupants of the boat were almost all the time waist deep in water, and it was only through tireless and desperate baling that the constant danger of sinking was averted. To have thus braved such a voyage the situation left behind must have been as bad indeed as death.

Today, this story of escape, of war-hardened migrants braving the waters of the Mediterranean, does not sound like fiction at all. The reality of the twenty-first century is that such perilous journeys in unsafe vessels remain one of the few options left for those fleeing wars and violence, and those seeking to escape economic hardships—conditions, in other words, “as bad indeed as death.” The sea, an unforgiving mediator on which many refugees have staked their lives, has taken its toll: The United Nations High Commissioners for Refugees reports that in 2015 over a million migrants (the daily average reaching 2,700), most escaping the ongoing conflict in Syria, arrived in Europe by sea. But this story of a desperate Syrian family fleeing their home by makeshift boat is not one of those stories: It is the account of a journey undertaken nearly a hundred years ago by a family whose trek was one among thousands in its own time, though few such journeys were remembered. And while it bears striking resemblance to what we see in the daily headlines of 2017, this article was documenting the trauma of another war, the First World War, that much like the chaos taking place today, made home front conditions unlivable.

Given conditions on the ground, it is little wonder that Syrians today are following the same path trod by thousands of Syrians a century go, escaping their homes by any means necessary.

Israel’s Expanding Permit Regime

How racial hierarchy and bureaucracy are reshaping Jerusalem.

by YAEL BERDA

Separation wall between Israel and Palestine, 2005. Photo by Dafna Kaplan. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

For Palestinians living outside Israel’s 1948 borders, life is precarious and heavily regulated by a persistent procedural violence that limits their freedom of movement and shapes daily life. In the West Bank, impediments on the freedom of movement take the form of physical checkpoints, roadblocks, and a massive network of walls and fences manned by heavily armed guards and state-of-the-art surveillance technology. For Jerusalemites who are not Israeli citizens but hold identity cards distributed to them when Israel annexed the eastern part of the city in 1967, mobility has been somewhat easier. And though maintaining life in Jerusalem presents a financial and political burden to many Palestinian families, it’s a hardship many take on, as they understand that living in Jerusalem protects them from the draconian permit regime that restricts the mobility of neighboring Palestinians in the West Bank. At least, such was the case until recently.

Today, Palestinians who are stateless, but residents of East Jerusalem face a new threat to their political rights and freedom of movement in the form of new legal and bureaucratic plans to reshape the city through the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of residents from its jurisdiction.

Palestinians who are stateless, but residents of East Jerusalem face a new threat to their political rights and freedom of movement.

The new plan is yet another instance in which the Israeli government has attempted to move Palestinians from East Jerusalem to the occupied West Bank. For decades, the policy of the Israeli Ministry of Interior was called the “silent transfer,” which consisted of ever-mounting procedural demands to prove one’s center of life was in Jerusalem, or have one's residency status revoked. The building of the separation wall in the early 2000s caused thousands of families who had lived in East Jerusalem, beyond the wall encircling the West Bank, to seek housing, work, and education within the wall. This put extreme pressure on education, sewage, and welfare infrastructure—systems that were underfunded and underdeveloped compared to their counterparts in Jewish Jerusalem.

Remembering Refugee Children

Life for Iraqi Jews in Israel was not easy, particularly for the youngest among them.

by ORIT BASHKIN

Displaced Iraqi Jews, 1951. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Between 1949 and 1951, some 123,000 Iraqi Jews who were denationalized by the Iraqi state migrated to Israel. These Jews, I suggest, were not native sons returning to their homeland, but rather immigrants arriving at a new location, where they encountered prejudice and discrimination. Most of them resided in transit camps, known as Ma‘abarot. Originally, these camps were perceived as sites in which Jewish migrants would stay for only a brief period of time, yet many Jews remained there for much longer periods (between one to seven years), living in tents, huts, and shacks where poor sanitary and hygiene conditions, poverty, and neglect ran rampant.

The transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces.

 

Impossible Exodus » tells the story of Iraqi Jews' first decades in Israel, who, faced with ill treatment and discrimination from state officials, engaged in various forms of resistance.

My book, Impossible Exodus, sheds light on Iraqi Jewish life in the Ma‘abarot of Israel; on the communists and activists who participated in strikes, sit-ins, and demonstrations, on the Iraqi mothers who managed to get their children out of the cycle of poverty, and on the teachers who, without state permission, organized classes and schools. The most difficult chapter for me to write concerned Iraqi Jewish children, not only because these children were the fathers and mothers of childhood friends of mine but also because of the resonance of their experiences with those of current refugee children, Syrian and Yemenite in particular, who, like the Iraqi children whose history I was reconstructing, lost a sense of home and normalcy—and also because it is always difficult to write about the sufferings of the most helpless and vulnerable.

Indeed, the transit camps where Iraqi Jewish children resided were dangerous spaces. Mothers aborted because ambulances could not reach these camps. Mice, rats, and insects threatened the children's health. In Jerusalem, land mines were found in the vicinity of one camp. In 1954, a child living in the transit camp at Holon was killed when he was playing by a dunghill, and an old shell exploded. As families were living in tents and shacks and lighting was mainly in the form of oil lanterns and candles, these temporary houses caught fire. A two-year-old baby was burned alive in one such fire; there were no water tanks to put it out and no phone with which to call the fire department. Near Haifa, three children met with the same fate when their tent caught fire. They were raised by their widowed father, who tried to commit suicide twice after the tragedy.

Global Media in the Holy Land

From satellite TV to contraband texts, media has played a critical role for Palestinians in Israel.

by MAHA NASSAR

Control room of Arabic-language satellite TV channel. Photo by Deirdre Kline, 2008. Public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).

Flip through some of the eight hundred or so Arabic satellite television stations available today, and you’ll find many programs that would look quite familiar to American audiences. On the popular MBC 1 station, you can watch Good Morning Arabs and Arab Idol, both of which are produced and hosted in Arabic, but have formats nearly identical to those of their American counterparts. Programming on MBC 4 would look even more familiar, with popular American shows like Project Runway and CBS’s The Talk broadcast in English with Arabic subtitles. The programs’ sidestepping of political sensitivities and frequent product placement exemplify the commercialized, corporatized global media that has come to the Arab world in recent decades.

But there is another type of global media, one with a longer and more interesting history. Long before satellite television and the internet became the primary modes of communication and entertainment in the region, written texts, especially books, newspapers, and journals, were being hand-copied, printed, sold, mailed, and smuggled across geographic and political divides. Far from being commercialized entertainment, this written media was utilized by political organizers and intellectuals to subvert official state narratives, challenge government policies, and connect otherwise isolated peoples to one another.

Hard Luck and a Dose of Pluck

A newly translated Judeo-Tunisian novella opens a window onto life under colonial rule.

a Q&A with LIA BROZGAL and SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN

A young Jewish woman in Sfax. Source: Géographie pittoresque et monumentale des colonies françaises: Tunisie. Paris: Flammarion, 1906.

Published in Tunis in 1938, Ninette of Sin Street is one of the first works of Tunisian fiction in French and is now available in English for the first time. The story peers up at colonial society from the gutter, rather than down from the balcony of high politics. It is about ordinary, everyday life and, as such, is a study in power relations as they took shape on the ground and in the street, amidst the intricacies of French colonial rule, religious difference, and class discrepancy. This volume offers the first English translation of Vitalis Danon’s best-known work. Professors Lia Brozgal and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, editors to the English edition, answer some of our questions about the novella below.

 

Q:

Who and what is the story of Ninette of Sin Street about?

 

A:

LIA BROZGAL: Ninette tells the story of its titular protagonist, Ninette, a young Jewish woman living in the town of Sfax in the 1930s—a period during which Tunisia was under French rule. Ninette, as we learn, has grown up in poverty; she is an orphan making her way in a complicated, harsh world; she is destitute and has sometimes resorted to prostitution for a few coins. She is also the single mother of a little boy named Israel. Her primary concern, when the novella opens, is getting her son enrolled in the local Jewish school so that he can learn a trade and become, as Ninette says “honorable.” As she recounts her travails—always with a dose of pluck—we travel with her from the poor district of Sfax to Tunis, the capital, and back again as Ninette makes her way in the world.

Modern Iran in 8 Songs

From classical melodies to rap, Iran’s music reveals its long struggle for political freedom.

by NAHID SIAMDOUST

Public domain via Pixabay.

 

Soundtrack of the Revolution » offers a striking account of Iranian culture, politics, and social change to provide an alternative history of the Islamic Republic.

Music was one of the first casualties of the Iranian Revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini decreed early on that music was “opium for the masses” and so it was banned in 1979. But music has deep roots in Iranian culture and quickly crept back into public life. Indeed, in the absence of a free official public sphere, music has offered one of the most important vehicles for political expression in the face of government repression, creating a channel of mass communication that has transformed public culture within the limits of an authoritarian state. At the same time, Iranian music tells the story of the evolution of the state itself, from a severe republic of mourning to one that allows for a certain type of controlled fun. Now more than thirty-five years on from the revolution, both the children of the revolution and their music have come of age and the art they have produced offers a striking account of Iranian culture, politics, and social change. Taken together, the eight songs below shed light on issues at the heart of debates in Iran—about its future and identity, the quest for political freedom, and changing notions of religiosity.

A Wandering Alien

There is no "us" and "them"—we're aliens when we can't identify with others.

by BAHIYYIH NAKHJAVANI

"Refugees Welcome." Photo from Dulles International Airport in Virginia, capturing crowds protesting the Trump administration's executive order on immigration. Photo by Geoff Livingston. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

I first came across the word “alien” in a non-stellar context when I had to sign a card identifying myself as one, soon after the Immigrants Act of 1962 was passed in the UK. Even though my family had been the only Persians living in Uganda, I had never felt like an alien growing up there. But the sense of being one came home to me forcefully in cozy Rutland. I walked into the local constabulary of the small market town thinking I was a fourteen year old human being; I left, duly registered, feeling as though I had just been dropped out of a flying saucer from outer space.

I first came across the word “alien” in a non-stellar context when I had to sign a card identifying myself as one, soon after the Immigrants Act of 1962 was passed in the UK.

Like many other adolescents, I wandered in elliptical orbit after that till marriage transformed me from one of “them” into one of “us,” and I graduated from being an Iranian student to becoming a UK-citizen-by-marriage. And my induction into this select club happened once again in Kampala, Uganda, the town of happy childhood, the place where my grandfather would be buried soon afterwards, his Jewish Iraqi bones enriching forever the blood-red soil of the high Kikaaya hill.

But Uganda was to haunt me some years later, as I stood in a queue at Pearson International Airport, waiting to pass through Canadian immigration. By then, although the passport had stuck, the marriage had not, and having entered the US on one visa, I was obliged to leave it to apply for another, as a divorcée. However, as bizarre as American logic seemed to me, even then, it was nothing compared to the Canadian sequel waiting for me on the other side of the border.

By a stroke of fate, my arrival in Toronto coincided with that of some two thousand Indians fleeing Uganda from Idi Amin. And given my links to that country, the immigration officer behind the desk, whose nametag clearly announced Polish ancestry, was understandably suspicious. So I was hauled to one side and subjected to a cross-examination. Who was I? Where was I coming from, and where did I really belong? Was I an illegal immigrant?

The Road to MESA

Rethinking the history of area studies in the United States.

by ZACHARY LOCKMAN

The annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) that opens this week will celebrate the organization’s fiftieth anniversary. That makes it a good time to take a new look at the history of Middle East studies as an academic field, and more broadly at the historical trajectory of area studies in the United States.

Most accounts of the emergence of area studies as a distinct set of academic fields embodied in a range of institutions (centers, departments, faculty lines, graduate programs, academic associations, scholarly journals, funding streams, fellowship programs for training and research, and so on) treat this phenomenon as largely or exclusively a product of the Cold War and of the needs of the U.S. national security state to which it gave birth. But my research suggests that postwar area studies actually had significant roots in developments in the U.S. academic and foundation worlds during the interwar period. These included efforts from the late 1920s onward, orchestrated mainly by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to promote and modernize the study of the world beyond the United States and Western Europe, develop more effective modes of language training and overcome what were widely perceived as excessively rigid disciplinary boundaries—themselves a product of the reorganization of U.S. academia along disciplinary lines in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It was the unprecedented munificence of the big foundations, and not government funding, that made area studies into a relatively well-established and durable component of U.S. higher education.

The Political Stakes of Anthropology

Studying the Middle East at the height of US empire reveals the politics of academia.

by LARA DEEB and JESSICA WINEGAR

Supporters of academic boycott during the annual business meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Denver, Colorado, November 21, 2015. Photo by Alex Shams.

The consummate image of the scholarly life is that it is defined by the free and impassioned pursuit of ideas. We conduct research and we teach; we produce, question, and impart knowledge. Yet all of us working in colleges and universities know that the life on which we once, perhaps naively, embarked is also filled with politics, much of it quite fraught. Perhaps nowhere is this more salient today than in the field of Middle East studies. In particular, anthropological study focused on this region provides a compelling lens through which to view some of the key stakes in the political struggles of academe and their relation to broader structures of power—particularly as the region has taken center stage in US imperial ambitions.

US global engagements in the Middle East and North Africa has for decades influenced how and why people research and teach about the region.

Those ambitions have, on the one hand, precipitated significantly more interest in funding work on the region and hiring scholars to research and teach about it. On the other hand, since at least the 1970s, academics who research or teach topics against the grain of dominant US national narratives about and interests in the region have faced the prospects of not having their research funded, not being hired, being accused—by parents, students, administrators, and people unassociated with academe or their campus—of bias and even treason in their teaching and public lectures, being targeted by blacklists and hate mail, and even losing their jobs.

Reading the Middle East

Cultivating textual literacy in the classroom challenges dominant narratives around the region.

by BETTY S. ANDERSON

Public domain via Pixabay.

At almost any moment of the day, images and headlines from and about the Middle East bombard us: battle scenes from Aleppo and Mosul; characters on NCIS tasked with debating the nature of Islam as the detectives simultaneously hunt down a Muslim terrorist; Facebook friends posting news articles about the status of Middle Eastern women; beheadings in Saudi Arabia; Miranda expounding on the “niqwab” (yes, that’s how she pronounced the word) in Sex and the City 2; refugees being rescued en route to Europe; rallies in support of victims in Paris and Orlando; trailers for American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty; and on and on. These images and messages come through as fragments, mostly passively imbibed, often broadcast to attract support for a show or a film or a politician, with the Middle East merely acting as a convenient tool to tell a story relevant only to America. However, these fragments collectively construct a cohesive narrative of a region defined by faith, wracked with conflict, seething with female oppression, dangerous to us, and requiring our salvation. Harking back to Edward Said and Orientalism, it is a place away from here but imagined primarily through our own society’s lens.  

Images and headlines from and about the Middle East bombard us. These fragments collectively construct a cohesive narrative of a region defined by faith, wracked with conflict, seething with female oppression, dangerous to us, and requiring our salvation.

The Mission of Medina

How Saudi religious education has dynamically expanded the influence of Wahhabism.

by MICHAEL FARQUHAR

Congregants at the Mosque of the Prophet in Medina, 2009. Photo by Omar Chatriwala. CC BY 2.0 via Wikipedia.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, many Muslim communities around the world witnessed the growing influence of Salafism, a style of Islamic religiosity characterized by a distinctive set of creedal and legal principles which are understood by its adherents to reflect the beliefs and practices of the earliest generations of Muslims. The rise of Salafism, with its perceived rigidity, antimodernism and exclusivism, has been the cause of considerable anxiety on the part of Muslim and non-Muslim observers alike.

What exactly is the “export version of Wahhabism” and through what channels has it been disseminated to the wider world in recent decades?

Seen as an alien intrusion in many of the communities within which it has gained a foothold, it has come to be associated in the popular imagination with atavistic brutality, misogyny, sectarianism, anti-Semitism and political violence. In the clamor to understand the nature of this phenomenon and to explain how it has achieved such seemingly unprecedented momentum, it has become common to invoke a form of cultural imperialism emanating from Saudi Arabia. A 2012 article from France 24, quoting an expert on the region as explaining that Salafism is an “export version of Wahhabism” and that “the Saudis have been financing [Wahhabism] around the world,” is emblematic of this line of thinking. Elsewhere, Saudi religious sway has similarly been identified as a source of social conflict across the Global South, from Indonesia to Kashmir. Meanwhile, alleged creeping Wahhabism in Muslim communities in Europe and the United States has time and again been condemned as “a Saudi export we could do without.”

On the face of it, efforts to explain the worldwide rise of Salafism in these terms, as the product of an extension of Wahhabi influence made possible by Saudi oil money, appear to offer an appealingly neat and compelling narrative. Yet on closer inspection, this narrative raises as many questions as it initially seems to answer. What exactly is the “export version of Wahhabism” and through what channels has it been disseminated to the wider world in recent decades?