Will 2013 see an escalation in tensions between Israel and Iran? The Frontline Club in association with BBC Arabic brought together an expert panel to decipher the drumbeat of war and predict what 2013 may hold.
Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow began by telling an audience at LSE’s Sheikh Zayed Theatre on 12 December, that the consequences of military strikes would be “unbelievably catastrophic”.
- From left: Meir Javedanfar, Azadeh Moaveni, Jon Snow, Abdel Bari Atwan, and Scott Peterson debate war and peace between Israel and Iran in the Sheikh Zayed Theatre at the London School of Economics.
Abdel Bari Atwan, editor-in chief of the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi, opened the debate by stating he feels war is imminent. Iran is tripping into the same fate that awaited Iraq during the last two decades, he said:
“When I say the comparison with Saddam Hussein and Iran, it is because the Israelis…want these weapons actually to be exclusive to the Israelis so they can scare the people from the Middle East and they can actually expand as they like…
The Israelis are preparing themselves… The war against Gaza, which lasted about eight days, it was to test the Iranian missiles [from Hamas]…to test the Iron Domes, which [are] supposed to actually intercept all kinds of missiles…from Iran in particular.”
Toward this agenda, America supported Israel, Atwan said:
“[The U.S.] doesn’t want any regional superpower to possess nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in order to threaten [its] domination of the oil fields in the Gulf. That’s facts… Saddam Hussein tried to do so, and he paid the price – his regime [was] deposed. The Iranians are repeating the same mistakes in the eyes of the Israelis and the Americas.”
Israeli-Iranian analyst Meir Javedanfar disagreed:
“It’s not because we don’t want the Iranians to have nuclear weapons. It’s because of this regime… [It] has called for Israel to be eliminated, time and time again… [It] has put its hatred into action. We saw in the Second Intifada, 700 Israelis were killed by suicide bombings paid by Iranian money, half of it at least… You would not want that regime to have a nuclear weapon.”
Moreover, Javedanfar added:
“I don’t think there will be war… We see that the sanctions and the diplomacy are [already] hurting the Iranian regime very badly…
[And] I don’t see Ayatollah Khomeini having the confidence to tell his officers that, ‘tomorrow we’re going to kick out all the IAEA inspectors, we’re going to take that enriched uranium…and we’re going to make a bomb with it,’ because the moment he does that, that’s the moment he’s going to risk an American attack.”
Other panelists Azadeh Moaveni, former Middle East correspondent for Time magazine and Scott Peterson, journalist and photographer, agreed with Javedanfar that war seems improbable.
Javedanfar thought injustice in Palestine, rather than nuclear saber-rattling in Tehran, was ultimately Israel’s greatest danger:
“Israel’s security? You know what? We can beat the Iranian regime. The Iranian regime doesn’t scare me. [But] if these guys, the Palestinian people, don’t have a state, that is an existential threat to the security of the state of Israel.”
The panel mostly agreed, with relief, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been particularly vocal in antagonizing Iran, seems somewhat isolated on this issue within Israel itself.
When the topic turned to sanctions against Iran, echoes of Iraq reemerged. Moaveni argued that they destroy goodwill and are excessively cruel.
“It is becoming impossible to be middle class anymore in Iran,” she said. “This is the slow dying of the Iran middle class… Do we want to impoverish another major Middle Eastern middle class the way we’ve done [in Iraq]?”
Snow ended the discussion by highlighting the need for the West to engage Iranians with the respect he thinks they crave. And to resolve tensions, he offered his own alternative:
“When you spend time on the streets in Shiraz, in Tehran… you meet young people who look west. This doesn’t happen anywhere else in the region. These people look remorselessly west… And, you go around, and you ask people, and they want ipads! That’s why I’ve always said: if you want to bomb Iran, bomb it with ipads… That’s what people want… They want life. And they want joy… It isn’t as if they crave a prayer-mat.”
Watch the full event here:
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Anyone familiar with the Middle East knows that Ashdod is Israel’s biggest port, nearly a quarter of a million people some 40 miles north of the Gaza Strip. What he or she will be less likely to know—and it is no accident—is that until October 1948, when the combined forces of the Israeli army and accompanying Zionist terrorists arrived, this place was a Palestinian town called Isdud. Its 5,000 Palestinian Arabs were duly driven out (apart from those murdered on the spot), and made their way south to Gaza, where to this day they and their myriad descendants remain in poverty and apparent hopelessness as registered refugees, victims and prisoners of the Israeli military occupation and Western bias and ignorance.
Abdel Bari Atwan, author of A Country of Words: a Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page is the famous son of one of these dirt-poor Isdud families, born two years after the nakba, or catastrophe, that overtook his people when Israel was created. When he revisited his family’s original home a few years ago, his North African Jewish driver had no idea there had ever been a place called Isdud. When Bari (as he insists his non-Arab friends call him), treading through the stinking ruins of a former Palestinian site, Café Gaben, bumped into a Jewish settler, the man said to him, pointing at the ancient detritus: “…that is the past.” “No,” Bari said, “it is also the future.”
It is this kind of fierce determination and will to survive that characterises Gaza and the Gazans. It is also why I described Gazan hopelessness, in my first paragraph, as “apparent”. Anyone who has been to what is now a virtual concentration camp will know that Gazans do not buckle under. The Abdel Bari Atwan story is an epic version of the Gazan refugees’ refusal to accept the overwhelming, demeaning, life-threatening odds that Israel and the West have imposed upon them, the Arab states also doing their bit in this saga of criminal international politics.
Bari fought and harried his way – with his family’s typically Palestinian, almost sacrificial help – from the penury and oppression of Deir al Balah and later Rafah camps through a series of joe-jobs and secondary education in Jordan then Egypt, university in Cairo and progression up the rickety journalistic ladder in Libya, Saudi Arabia and London’s vibrant Arabic media to become editor, in 1989, of Al-Quds al-Arabi (Arab Jerusalem). This is his own newspaper, his own radical mouthpiece and unique, outspoken reflection of the inequities, crimes and joys of the Middle East. He is probably, following the deaths of Yasser Arafat, Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish, the best-known living Palestinian. His newspaper is so popular that it is banned in as many Arab countries as he himself is – Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt and Jordan among them.
Al-Quds al-Arabi is no one’s mouthpiece. Bari lists his many differences with Yasser Arafat and most other Arab politicians, and his inside knowledge of Islamic leaders whom our media and politicians demonise is a useful reality check. One of his Islamist interlocutors spells out how Tony Blair made the British an international target for terrorists (cf, the recent Mumbai outrage).
For all his valid criticisms of the British, for what they did to his Palestine, and of the Americans and the Israelis, Abdel Bari makes clear that for the honest Arab journalist his own governments, secret services and often inane fellow citizens pose his greatest threats. He also gives salutary space to the BBC’s record of pusillanimity in the face of Blairite and Israeli pressures on the Palestinian issue.
If this is a cheering, proud and opinionated tale of human determination, humour and iconoclasm, it also portrays the unique sadness of the Palestinians. While most emigrants cherish the knowledge of an original home available for revisit or return, the Palestinian Arab has no such grounding. “I feel,” writes Bari, “that my cultural identity has become blurred with time and that to some extent I have lost my roots…I wonder if history has condemned us [Palestinians] to a permanent state of psychological exile.” A Jew would know exactly what he means—or would have, once.
As our own British Government joins and intensifies the persecution and isolation of the Gazan people, partly because in democratic elections nearly three years ago they voted for a party Britain does not–or is told not to—approve, Abdel Bari’s book is the perfect guidebook to what has happened, why, and how it goes on and on and on.
Reviewed by Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East Correspondent. A Country of Words: a Palestinian Journey from the Refugee Camp to the Front Page by Abdel Bari Atwan is published by Saqi Books £20