Doctorin Note: Mr. Parsi is a co-founder and current President of the National Iranian American Council (www.niacouncil.org)and promotes normalizing relations with Iran. I thought we should keep up on his efforts.
An Iranian-Israeli alliance will be hard to revive
By Trita Parsi
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
There is a romantic suggestiveness to the relations between Persians and Jews that has survived the hostility between Iran and Israel. As comfortable as it may be to remember the heyday of Israeli-Iranian ties as such, there has never been anything romantic about the real political cooperation they enjoyed before the Iranian revolution. Today, the same forces that once brought the two together are fueling a rivalry between them that perplexes those trapped in the romantic memories of yesteryear.
The essence of the Iranian-Israeli entente in the 1960's and 1970's was not the inevitability of a non-Arab alliance against the Arab masses per se, but a congruence of interests formed by the configuration of power in the region. Iran and Israel shared interests because they shared common threats - the Soviet Union and militant Arab states. In the power balance of the region at the time, an Iranian-Israeli entente made sense regardless of the non-Arab makeup of the two countries.
But the balance thrived in a logic of its own in which the very basis of the alliance was threatened if either country managed to improve relations with its neighbors. Since Arab-Israeli hostilities ran deeper than Arab-Persian grievances, Israel needed Iran more than vice versa. Correspondingly, any political or diplomatic development that undermined the basis of this relationship was more likely to benefit Iran than Israel.
Indeed, Iran - whose relative power was surging in the 1970's and which aspired to play a dominant role in the affairs of the region and beyond - was bound to betray the alliance since its rapid growth defied the very equilibrium the entente was founded on. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi aptly understood that he could neither obtain nor maintain Iran's position as the pre-eminent power of the Persian Gulf through arms and oil alone. Iran needed to be seen as a legitimate power in the eyes of the Arabs as well, which meant it could not forever treat the Arabs as enemies and balance them through Iranian military might. Not only was a more conciliatory policy necessary, therefore, but befriending the Arabs also guaranteed Iran's long-term security most efficiently.
Improved Iranian-Arab relations, however, could not be achieved while Iran maintained close ties to Israel. Only weeks after signing the Algiers Accord with Iraq in spring 1975, the shah described the need for a new approach to regional affairs to Egyptian journalist Mohammed Hassanein Heikal: "We followed the principle 'my enemy's enemy is my friend,' and our relations with Israel began to develop. But now the situation has changed ... I think occasionally of a new equilibrium in the region ... Perhaps [it] can be integrated into an Islamic framework."
Having sealed Iran's hegemonic position in the Persian Gulf in strategic terms through the Algiers Accord, the shah began distancing himself from the Jewish state in order to win Arab acceptance. Iran was at its peak. It had befriended Egypt, neutralized Iraq, quadrupled its oil income and taken advantage of Israel's closeness to the U.S. to establish an unsurpassed position in the Middle East. Iran outgrew much of its need for Israel.
In spite of the Iraq-Iran war, Iran's Islamist leaders added an ideological motivation to the strategic reorientation away from the Iranian-Israeli alliance. Israeli strategists, guided by David Ben Gurion's "periphery doctrine" that propagated alliances with non-Arab states of the Middle East periphery in order to weaken the Arab states of the vicinity, struggled with the loss of Iran. Common threats to Iran and Israel still existed, they reasoned. Throughout the 1980's, Israel unsuccessfully sought to establish ties with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Iran, failing to realize the strategic reasoning behind the policies of the regime. However, while Iran rejected cooperation with Israel, the shared threats prompted it to refrain from translating its anti-Israel rhetoric into operational policy.
However, the end of the cold war also ended the Iranian-Israeli cold peace. The distribution of relative power shifted toward Iran and Israel and formed a new bipolar structure in the region. The defeat of Iraq in the Gulf war of 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union improved the security environments of Iran and Israel - but also left both states unchecked. Without Iraq balancing Iran, Iran would now become a threat, Israeli hawks argued.
By late 1992, prior to Iran's sponsorship of Palestinian extremists, Israeli Labor party officials began to publicly depict Iran as an existential threat. They argued that Iranian rhetoric reflected intentions and, having been freed from the chains of Iraq, Iran was acquiring the capacity to turn intentions into policy. While the threat depiction resembled prophecy more than reality, it underlined that the Arab-Israeli peace process had turned the periphery doctrine on its head: To convince a skeptical Israeli public that peace could be made with the Arab vicinity, it was necessary to bolster the threat portrayal of the Iranian periphery.
At the time, Iran was keener on peace making with Washington than seeing to Israel's destruction. Much like the shah, the mullahs were seeking a key role in Persian Gulf affairs. But now, the legitimacy Iran needed didn't come from the Arabs, but from America. Tehran believed that its behind-the-scenes cooperation with America in the 1991 Gulf war would be rewarded through Iran's inclusion in the postwar regional security arrangement. But when U.S. President George H.W. Bush's administration declared that Saddam Hussein was saved in order to balance Iran, Tehran concluded that it could only compel the U.S. to accept an Iranian role in the region by undermining American policies.
The American-Israeli push during the 1990's (when President Bill Clinton was in power) to create a new Middle East order based on Iran's isolation prompted Tehran to turn its anti-Israel rhetoric into policy. It began supporting violent Palestinian groups in order to undermine the American-Israeli endeavor by hitting its weakest link - the peace process. Yet while Iran's obstructionism played a minor role in undoing the Oslo process, the latter's collapse removed a strategic threat and enabled Tehran to contemplate moderation in its Israel policy. For instance, President Mohammad Khatami re-adopted Iran's pre-Madrid policy in which Tehran accepted any Israel-Arab arrangement acceptable to the Palestinians.
Currently, if a U.S.-Iran accord can be achieved that grants Iran a key role in Persian Gulf security matters, its interference in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will lose strategic utility. However, Israeli pressure for a hawkish American policy toward Iran - driven by fears that Washington might betray Israeli concerns through a rapprochement with Tehran - only strengthens the strategic value of continued involvement in the conflict from the Iranian side.
Today, Washington again believes it has to choose between addressing the Iranian conundrum or the Palestinian conflict. But American re-engagement in the peace process, while continuing the policy of isolating Iran, will repeat Clinton's miscalculation of 1994 and produce the same failure.
Whatever Washington chooses, with Iran and Israel being the two most powerful nations in the region with aspirations for primacy, a Persian-Jewish alliance against a declining Arab world will be hard to revive, regardless of the identity of the Iranian government or the fond memories of the romantics.
Trita Parsi, a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University SAIS in Washington, is writing his dissertation on Israeli-Iranian relations. This commentary first appeared in bitterlemons-international, an online newsletter