http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=124110&d=29&m=6&y=2009&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion
Monday 29 June 2009 (06 Rajab 1430)
Between Tel Aviv, Tehran
Uri Avnery | Arab News
Hundreds of thousands of Iranian citizens pour into the
streets in order to protest against their government! What a wonderful sight!
Gideon Levy wrote in Haaretz that he envies the Iranians.
And indeed, anyone who tries these days to get Israelis in
any numbers into the streets could die of envy. It is very difficult to get
even hundreds of people to protest against the evil deeds or policies of our
government - and not because everybody supports it. At the height of the war
against Gaza, half a year ago, it was not easy to mobilize 10,000 protesters.
Only once a year does the peace camp succeed in bringing a hundred thousand
people to the square - and then only to commemorate the assassination of
Yitzhak Rabin.
The atmosphere in Israel is a mixture of indifference,
fatigue and a "loss of the belief in the ability to change reality", as a
Supreme Court justice put it this week. A very dramatic change is needed in
order to get masses of people to demonstrate for peace.
For Mir Hossein Mousavi hundreds of thousands have
demonstrated, and hundreds of thousands have demonstrated for Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. That says something about the people and about the regime.
Of course, the Iranian regime is not democratic in the way we
understand democracy. There is a supreme guide who fixes the rules of the game.
Religious bodies rule out candidates they do not like. Parliament cannot adopt
laws that contradict religious law.
All this is not entirely foreign to Israelis. To understand
Iran, we have only to look at one of the important Israeli parties: Shas. They,
too, have a supreme guide, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who decides everything. And in
comparison with the frequent outbursts of Rabbi Ovadia, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is
a model of moderation.
Elections differ from country to country. It is very
difficult to compare the fairness of elections in one country with those in
another.
At one end of the scale were the elections in the good old
Soviet Union.
At the other end of the scale there should stand that bastion
of democracy, the US. But in elections there, only nine years ago, the results
were decided by the Supreme Court. The losers, who had voted for Al Gore, are
convinced to this very day that the results were fraudulent.
Our own elections are clean, more or less, even if after
every election people claim that in the Orthodox Jewish quarters the dead also
voted. Three and a half million inhabitants of the occupied Palestinian
territories also held democratic elections in 2006, which former President
Jimmy Carter described as exemplary, but Israel, the US and Europe refused to
accept the results, because they did not like them.
So it seems that democracy is a matter of geography.
Were the election results in Iran falsified? Practically no
one of us - in Tel Aviv, Washington or London - can know, because none of us
really knows what is happening in that country. We can only try to apply our
common sense, based on the little information we have.
Clearly, hundreds of thousands of voters honestly believe
that the results were faked. Otherwise, they would not have taken to the
streets. But this is a quite normal among losers.
Some time ago, Germany's excellent 3Sat television channel
broadcast an arresting report about Tehran. The crew drove through the main
street from the north of the city to the south, stopping frequently along the
way, entering people's homes, visiting mosques and nightclubs.
I learned that Tehran is largely similar to Tel Aviv at least
in one respect: In the north there reside the rich and the well-to-do, in the
south the poor and underprivileged. The northerners imitate the US, go to
prestigious universities and dance in the clubs. The women are liberated. The
southerners stick to tradition, revere the ayatollahs and detest the shameless
and corrupt north.
Mousavi is the candidate of the north, Ahmadinejad of the
south. The villages and small towns - which we call the "periphery" - identify
with the south and are alienated from the north.
The sole Western outfit that conducted a serious public
opinion poll in Iran prior to the elections came up with figures that proved
very close to the official results. It is hard to imagine huge forgeries,
concerning many millions of votes, when thousands of polling station personnel
are involved. In other words: it is entirely plausible that Ahmadinejad really
won. If there were forgeries - and there is no reason to believe that there
were not - they probably did not reach proportions that could sway the end
result.
There is a simple test for the success of a revolution: Has
the revolutionary spirit penetrated the army? Since the French Revolution, no
revolution has succeeded when the army was steadfast in support of the existing
regime. Both the 1917 February and October revolutions in Russia succeeded
because the army was in a state of dissolution. In 1918, much the same happened
in Germany. Mussolini and Hitler took great pains not to challenge the army,
and came to power with its support.
In many revolutions, the decisive moment arrives when the
crowds in the street confront the soldiers and policemen, and the question
arises: Will they open fire on their own people? When the soldiers refuse, the
revolution wins. When they shoot, that is the end of the matter.
In Iran, Khomeini won when, in the final test, the soldiers
of the Shah refused to shoot. That did not happen this time.
I am not an admirer of Ahmadinejad. Mousavi appeals to me
much more.
His denial of the holocaust - an idiotic exercise in itself -
only adds to Ahmadinejad's image as a primitive or cynical leader. No doubt, he
is a sworn enemy of the State of Israel or - as he prefers to call it - the
"Zionist regime". Even if he did not promise to wipe it out himself, as
erroneously reported, but only expressed his belief that it would "disappear
from the map", this does not set my mind at rest. It is an open question
whether Mousavi, if elected, would have made a difference as far as we are
concerned. Would Iran have abandoned its efforts to produce nuclear weapons?
Would it have reduced its support of the Palestinian resistance? The answer is
negative.
It is an open secret that our leaders hoped that Ahmadinejad
would win, exacerbate the Western world's hatred of him and make reconciliation
with America more difficult.
ALL through the crisis, Barack Obama has behaved with
admirable restraint. American and Western public opinion, as well as the
supporters of the Israeli government, called upon him to raise his voice,
identify with the protesters, wear a green tie in their honor, condemn the
ayatollahs and Ahmadinejad in no uncertain terms. But except for minimal
criticism, he did not do so, displaying both wisdom and political courage.
IRAN is what it is. The US must negotiate with it, for its
own sake and for our sake, too. Only this way - if at all - is it possible to
prevent or hold up its development of nuclear weapons. And if we are condemned
to live under the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb, in a classic situation of
a balance of terror, it would be better if the bomb were in the hands of an
Iranian leadership that keeps up a dialogue with the American president. And of
course, it would be good for us if - before reaching that point - we could
achieve, with the friendly support of Obama, full peace with the Palestinian
people, thus removing the main justification for Iran's hostility toward Israel.
The revolt of the northerners in Iran will remain, so it
seems, a passing episode. It may, hopefully, have an impact in the long run,
beneath the surface. But in the meantime, it makes no sense to deny the victory
of the Iranian denier.
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