Max Marder

A new round of sanctions against Tehran, signed into law this weekend, have caused the Iranian rial to plummet to historic lows, depreciating 12% against the dollar. The conventional wisdom is that this is a sign that the sanctions are working. But this conclusion is a misconception given what the Obama administration and its European allies want to achieve.

Sanctions are an economic weapon for a political purpose. Hurting the Iranian economy is not enough when the goals of the sanctions are to destabilize the regime or at the very least force it to dismantle its nuclear weapons program. While the sanctions are undoubtedly affecting Iran’s economy, they are unlikely to achieve their political aims and will probably hurt Western economies in the process.

The biggest threat to the Iranian regime is not Western sanctions but its own citizens. The Green Revolution in 2009 posed the biggest challenge to clerical rule in 30 years. The Arab Spring has demonstrated the power of the people in deposing their autocratic leaders themselves.

US interference in Iranian affairs is only counterproductive. Western and Iranian leaders are equally blameworthy for the economic crisis, which has been a distraction from political activism instead of a generator of one. Iranians are running to trade rials into Swiss francs instead of planning revolutions.

The sanctions, which target Iran’s central bank (in some circles, an act of war in itself), effectively forces global actors to choose: Iranian petroleum or business with American financial institutions. Because of the fragility of the global economy, many US allies like Japan, India and South Korea face an impossible choice.

The sanctions will irk the Turks, Iran’s neighbor and trading partner, who have advocated for fuel swaps instead of aggressive sanctions in dealing with Iran’s nuclear weapons program. Ankara imports a third of its oil from Iran, which it sees as a hedge against dependency on Russian energy.

This says nothing of the irritation this will cause Russia and China, both permanent members of the Security Council, and critics of past rounds of sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

Middle East expert Juan Cole goes so far as to make the compelling point that while the sanctions, if effective, could reduce Iran’s income from oil and hurt the regime, the devaluation of its currency would help make Iran’s exports more affordable and attractive. Cole also points out that the US may grant exceptions to allies who are dependent on Iranian energy and that non-NATO members, primarily Russia and China, will be able to circumvent the sanctions, easing pressure on the regime.

Importantly, this round of sanctions had resulted from—and will perpetuate—a feedback loop of Iranian-Western confrontation that at worst will result in a catastrophic war. Case in point, in response to the new sanctions this week, Iran has test fired cruise missiles, launched naval exercises in the Gulf, and threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, the shipping lane through which a sixth of the world’s oil passes.

It’s also sad that Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the ire of the West for almost two decades, always takes center stage over Iran’s deplorable human rights record, the source of much more death and suffering. Fraudulent elections, violent repression of dissent and torture will continue to cause more injustice than an Iranian nuke ever will. In this sense, the aggression towards Iran is for all the wrong reasons. Like the Iraq War, which unseated a vicious and genocidal dictator, the campaign against Iran is really about Western self-interest, regional hegemony and power politics instead of human rights.

Unfortunately, this round of sanctions and the vitriol from the campaign trail fits into the Iranian leadership’s narrative perfectly. They see themselves as the heirs of the great Persian legacy, entitled to recognition as a great civilization. In this narrative, it has been Western intervention and power, from 17^th and 18^th century imperialism; to the 1953 CIA and MI-6 coup against democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddeq; to helping Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, which has hurt Iran. To the Iranians, they are under siege from the West. The West is doing little to refute that claim.

Iranians ask: if the Americans, Israelis, North Koreans and Pakistanis can have nuclear weapons, why not us?

Tragically, this Kafkaesque maelstrom of attrition could easily lead to war over Iran’s nuclear program. Many of the neoconservative advocates of the Iraq War, leading Republican presidential candidates, and Israeli leaders are calling for a preventative strike against Tehran.

While the Iranian regime may be brutal, it is not suicidal. The Ayatollahs aren’t crazier than the decision-makers in North Korea or Pakistan. Even Israeli Defense Minister and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak has said that an Iranian weapon isn’t an existential threat to Israel.

Iran’s pursuit of a weapon is not based on a desire to annihilate Israel, which would in turn ensure its own destruction. Iran’s nuclear ambitions ostensibly stem from three things: national (and civilizational Persian) pride, preventing invasion and attaining regional hegemony vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The Iranian nuclear program under the Shah (and revitalized in the 1980s partly by Green Movement leader Mir Hussein Mousavi) saw it as a counterweight to Iraq.

In effect, going to war with Iran would transform a situation which would cause zero casualties (a nonexistent, imaginary Iranian nuclear strike) into a war which would cause thousands of Israeli and American lives and possibly send the global economy back into the cellar.  Furthermore, war would be unlikely to prevent Iran from continuing or restarting its nuclear progress once the dust settled.

The Iranian nuclear program is spread throughout the country and located underground. American and Israeli officials have testified that it would be difficult, even in a full-scale invasion, to dismantle the entire program, especially while Israel would be absorbing thousands of rockets and long-range ballistic missiles fired by Hezbollah and the Iranian military.

Green Movement members have even stressed that a military attack would sideline the domestic opposition to clerical rule and help to solidify support for the regime.

What is clear (and also impossible in an election year) is that, if robust diplomacy fails, the US must be prepared for the eventuality that Iran will achieve nuclear breakout capacity if it wishes. War and sanctions won’t deter the regime. The clerics have seen what happened to Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi after he surrendered his program. They have seen how the late Kim Jong Il successful outmaneuvered the West using enriched uranium as leverage. American aggression will only harden the theocracy’s nuclear resolve.

In short, sanctions will hurt the Iranian economy but not its leadership or its nuclear weapons and in the process, the US is further damaging the prospect of rapprochement with Iran, its relationship with key allies and its own economy.

The inflation and economic crisis in Iran is much more pronounced than it has been after other rounds of sanctions. Because of this, Tehran has simultaneously issued military threats and signaled that it was ready to resume talks on its nuclear program with the United States, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany that stalled in January. The economic downturn in Iran gives the 5+1 parties some moderate leverage, especially since Iran’s military threats are not credible. Yet the Kim-Qaddafi case studies demonstrate why it’s likely that Iran will stomach the sanctions and keep the centrifuges running.

These 5+1 countries should make a genuine diplomatic effort to get Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. Fuel-swap deals proposed by Brazil and Turkey that were lambasted in the West should be reconsidered.

If diplomacy fails, cost of containing a nuclear Iran, in both blood and gold, are minimal compared to war. The United States’ best chance to bring down the Iranian regime is to step back, and let the Ayatollahs’ (and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’) mismanagement and repressive policies bring themselves down.

Iran has been a loser from the Arab Spring. There is little enthusiasm for the Iranian model in North Africa or the Levant. The massive anti-regime protests by the Green Movement in 2009 had nothing to do with sanctions or US pressure. If the United States and the Western powers are patient, the winds of change might just blow further East. Until then, sanction will prove counterproductive, despite being infinitely preferable to war. The Catch-22 with Iran is that Western efforts towards regime change fall into step with the regime’s narrative and make the Ayatollahs stronger.

Discussing the recent NATO attack in Pakistan that killed more than 20 Pakistani soldiers, Foued, a student from the American Corner in Tunis says, “This just proves that the United States doesn’t care about people living in the Muslim world. The US is just pursuing its own self-interest and doesn’t care if people die.”

“Of course the US has its own interests, and its foreign policy is sometimes irresponsible, but the US does care about human rights in the rest of the world,” responds Ashley, an American student from Iona University in New York.  “The United States gives out more humanitarian aid than any other country. And NATO is an alliance of many different countries, not just the United States.

Foued and Ashley are participants in the Soliya Connect program, an online course that brings together students from the West and the Muslim world to discuss the nature of the relationship between the two civilizations. The students meet in an online chat room once a week, fully equipped with video conferencing, personal and group chat boxes, and a variety of topics to debate. Over the course of the eight-week program, the students discuss the role of religion in their societies, the role of the media in the civilizational rift, family life, cultural stereotypes and foreign policy. The groups are comprised of participants from the United States, Europe, and the Muslim world— from Morocco to Pakistan.

“I think that all media outlets have some kind of a bias. Everyone has their own agenda,” says Mario, from California State University at Monterrey Bay.

“The American media never portrays things from the perspective of the Muslim world, which is affected by the Americans’ actions. There is a hidden agenda behind the media, which promotes taking advantage of the Muslim world for money and oil,” claims Foued, passionately.

“The media’s coverage leading up to the Iraq War misled the public,” concedes Ashley. “Many of the sources that the American media relied on in their stories about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq came from the government. These sources weren’t objective and turned out to be wrong. Ashley went on to reveal to the group that she protested the war in Washington, D.C., impressing the Muslim students who still feel frustrated and violated by the invasion eight years later.

 “Media in the Arab world is biased too,” says Abrar, a student at Qatar University. “Al Jazeera has been important in covering the revolutions in the Arab world, but they cover certain revolutions much more than others. The Qatari royal family promotes revolution in Tunisia and Egypt much more than in Bahrain, its next door neighbor, fearing the instability it will create next-door.

Soliya, an organization based in New York and Cairo not only facilitates these disagreements, but encourages them. The organization believes that “In a time when media plays an increasingly powerful role in shaping peoples’ viewpoints on political issues, Soliya provides students with the opportunity, skills, and tools to shape and articulate their own viewpoints on some of the most pressing global issues facing their generation.” Soliya aspires to allow students to challenge the viewpoints held by those on the other side of the world. In an increasingly connected and globalized society, actions in the United States affect the Muslim world more than ever and vice versa. Students are encouraged to confront their own feelings about the other side and to ask questions of their fellow students, to supplement the information they receive from governments, media and their own societies.

The students represent just one group that evolves from the Connect program experience. Additionally, Soliya trains graduates of the program to facilitate and mediate the Connect discussions. The facilitators remain phlegmatic and objective, channeling the topics of discussion in an unobtrusive way while allowing the students to self-reflect and examine the processes and group dynamics at play in the chat room.

Far from perfect, the modern web-based conferencing technology that Soliya uses to bring all of the students into a virtual room together is occasionally the discussion’s biggest restriction. “It’s difficult to always keep the conversation moving when students’ headsets or mics aren’t working, or if someone’s internet connection is too slow,” says Anne, a facilitator from Germany who is currently living and working in Jerusalem. “It’s difficult to mediate the discussion and keep track of the debate while also checking in on students’ tech situations.”

Given the platform’s heavy reliance on technology, the Soliya tech-support staff may have the most burdensome and hectic task, Skyping with students and facilitators on the side to make sure that the students can always be seen and heard. Moreover, the tech support staff brings even more experience and diversity to the greater Soliya network.

One such member of the tech staff, who gives his name as Alaa, is a computer engineer based in Cairo. Alaa oversees Foued, Ashley and Anne’s group and has developed a rapport with his co-workers. The connections that Soliya fosters are maintained outside of scheduled sessions, and provide the program’s facilitators and participants with a set of global contacts. When a facilitator was curious about the renewed protests in Cairo ahead of Monday’s Egyptian elections, he asked Alaa, who had just returned from Tahrir Square.

“Nothing’s new, the police [are] still throwing tear gas and nerve gas bombs and some snipers are doing their job while protestors trying to hold them back from Tahrir square by throwing stones! A lot of injuries, a lot of dead people! I was there from 10PM till 3AM yesterday, and the ambulance cars didn’t stop…This is taking our revolution back! The SCAF will not do what the revolution was done for!”

When asked what she’s enjoyed most about the course thus far, Abrar, the student from Qatar commented that it was empowering “to hear Americans criticize their government. I didn’t realize there were Americans who cared about what was going on here. It’s great to see that we’re not so different.”

The Israeli Knesset (parliament) in session

One of the most common justifications for the special relationship between the United States and Israel, usually taken prima facie, is that Israel is a rare bastion of democratic values in the Middle East. Yet the Israeli government’s actions over the past several years, as well as recent legislation that has been passed by the Israeli Knesset (parliament) raise questions about the liberal democratic character that the State purports to embody.

Two bills in particular, which are on the docket for the opening of the winter seat of the 18^th Knesset this week, aim to erode the influence of left-wing and human rights NGOs in Israel and the foreign governments and organizations which fund them.

A bill drafted by MK Ofir Akunis of Binyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party would limit the amount of foreign funds to political associations in Israel to donations of 20,000 shekels per year, an amount of about 5,500 dollars or 4,000 euros. The justification for the measure, as written in the document itself, is that the “bill is meant to ban associations in Israel from receiving donations from foreign governments or international bodies such as the United Nations or the European Union, in view of the inciting activities of many organizations that operate under the guise of ‘human rights organizations’ and intend to impact on the political discourse in, nature, and policy of the State of Israel.”

A disparate but related bill drafted by MK Fania Kirshenbaum of Yisrael Beitainu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s far right-wing party and a powerful coalition member, would subject all foreign donations to political associations in Israel to a tax rate of 45%. This would ensure that any donation by a foreign government to an Israeli political organization, seeking to check and balance the authority of the Israeli state particularly in the Occupied Territories, would be mitigated by an equal “donation” to the Israeli government itself. MK Kirshenbaum writes: “Several organizations that operate in Israel aim at defaming the State of Israel in the eyes of the world and encourage the persecution of IDF officers and soldiers while harming their reputation. These organizations, which often refer to themselves as ‘human rights organizations’, are funded by states and other obscure sources that only intend to harm and alter Israel’s political discourse from within.” It’s never a good sign when human rights is written in quotation marks.

Both bills are supported by Prime Minister Netanyahu.

The wording of the bills and their questioning of the loyalty of domestic left-wing organizations is reminiscent of McCarthyism in the United States. The bills’ references to “foreign entities” evoke the tautologies of Arab autocrats, most recently Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who issue accusations of foreign meddling as justification for repressing their own people.

The organizations that would likely be effected engage in a wide variety of initiatives, like bringing together Israeli and Palestinian professionals in dialogue and documenting the condition of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. It is the role of civil society to report on the costs incurred by the Palestinians as a result of the separation wall, Palestinian freedom of movement and Bedouin land dispossession, topics that are taboo and whose mere mention are an effrontery to the State. Without any funding from the Israeli government, organizations like the School for Peace, Btselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Israeli Palestinian Center for Research and Information, Tayush and Ir Amin rely almost exclusively on exterior support, for the most part from governments allied to Israel.

These Israeli organizations, which critique Israeli government policy non-violently and aim to provide alternative information about the political situation in the country independent of government orthodoxy, are viewed by the right-wing as “enemies from within” and “treasonous.” Repeatedly, Lieberman has referred to leftist NGOs as “terror-aiding organizations.”

Civil society plays an important role in fostering a vibrant and healthy democracy, especially in a country like Israel, whose security concerns often lead the government and its citizens to limit civil liberties. Human rights organizations are vital precisely because they fill the vacuum that the government cannot or will not fill in Israeli society.

Israelis and Palestinians are thoroughly segregated in Israel and often civil society organizations form the only link between the two peoples. Gershon Bakin, the head of IPCRI and the only person who both Hamas and the Israeli government were willing to talk to, was crucial in negotiating the release of Gilad Shalit for 1027 Palestinian prisoners in October.

Btselem, an Israeli human rights organization, reports on casualties in the Occupied Territories at the hands of Israeli security forces, cases of Arab Bedouins being relocated from their ancestral homes by the Israeli government and violent acts committed by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the West Bank.

The School for Peace at Neve Shalom~Wahat al-Salam, a village which is equally inhabited by Jews and Arabs, is an educational institution which conducts encounter groups for Israelis and Palestinians. These facilitation groups enable participants to meet the ‘other,’ dispel stereotypes, and find common ground.

Israeli human rights organizations would have to be much more austere in their activities, if not dissolve entirely, if the Akunis and Kirshenbaum bills become law.

Israel is entitled to protect its sovereignty, and is concerned that these organizations delegitimize the actions of the state and its military. However, legislation like this, as well as the occupation of the Palestinian territories against international law, has already been eroding the legitimacy of Israeli democracy and liberalism in the eyes of the international community.

This anti-leftist legislation is a continuation of the inclination toward undemocratic legislation is Israel in recent years, exemplified by laws banning boycotts against Israel and commemoration of the Nakba, or the Catastrophe, the Palestinian apellation for the events of 1948 which created 700,000 refugees.

In a statement by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, its Executive Director, Hagai El-Ad, said “Once again we see biased legislation, whose real purpose is to harm Israeli organizations that are inconvenient to the current government. However, in a democracy, freedom of expression, protest, and assembly must be afforded to the entire spectrum of opinions and positions, not only to those that are approved by the government.”

Two of the biggest donors to Israeli human rights organizations, the United States Agency for International Development and the European Union, have made it clear that these pieces of legislation would harm Israel’s democratic reputation. According to the above article in Haaretz, an Israeli daily, the British ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, said that  “Britain supports the promotion of human rights in a large number of countries in an effort to advance universal values, and that the funding is not directed against the Israeli government.”

What these bills represent is the latest manifestation of a strange feature of Israeli democracy. Israel is a democracy, as defined as holding free and fair elections for all of its citizens (the one obvious problem being that the 4 million Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are not citizens). Using this definition of democracy, Israel is a democracy, albeit it an increasingly illiberal one, in which an increasing majority uses its votes to advocate for undemocratic policies. Ultra-orthodox Jews have the highest birthrates in Israel, immigrants from the Soviet Union are extremely right-wing, and Israel continues to churn out tens of thousands of army veterans, who tend to vote right. This eradictation of democratic values has come through democratic means, that is, it’s being supported by a majority of Israeli citizens.

One can blame Prime Minister Netanyahu, but he is more popular in his country than Barack Obama or Angela Merkel is in theirs. This isn’t even to mention Nicolas Sarkozy’s dismal approval ratings in France. In a recent poll, Americans even found Bibi more favorable than Obama. Much of the blame for Israel’s lack of liberalism rests with the often extremist and fearmongering government. However, the government is an accurate mirror of Israeli society, which deserves much of the the blame for Israel’s descent toward ethnocracy.

This post isn’t about the Middle East, or even politics, but I think it could have salient implications for both. I was talking with another volunteer in the village here in Neve Shalom Wahat al-Salam the other day (sadly, she’s left the village to return ‘home’ since. I’ll explain what I mean by ‘home’ in the post). The girl, a few years younger than me was extremely sweet and helped get me aquainted to the village and my new surroundings in the first few hours I was here. She said she was from Switzerland, and spoke in German with the other volunteers, who are from Stuttgart and Hamburg respectively.

As we got more comfortable with each other, and continued to talk, I asked her what she was doing after she left the village. She said that she was going to Switzerland for just a day before taking off for Romania to go backpacking with her boyfriend. I told her that I was jealous—I love to travel and earlier she’d disclosed that before she came to the village she spent a couple weeks in Ireland. She revealed that she spoke Romanian too, and had a lot of family there. In fact, her family was not originally from Switzerland, and her ancestry is Romanian and Serbian. As an American I’d have never known the difference. She said she was Swiss and I considered her truly Swiss.

As we discussed this further, she said that she felt essentially ‘homeless.’ Despite being born in Switzerland and speaking perfect Swiss-German, she said that most of her peers were 12th or 13th generation Swiss citizens. It’s extremely commonplace, she said, to start a conversation in with someone in her community in which they’d stop after short time and say, “Wait, you’re not really Swiss. Where are you actually from?” In Romania she’s not Romanian enough. In Serbia she’s not Serbian enough. Her American relatives bring cleaning supplies and toilet paper when they visit her in Switzerland because they think that America is the only advanced civilization on earth (but that’s another story).

What I’m getting at is that European nationalism, and the conception of the nation-state, is now subject to significant friction as globalization has brought freer cross-cultural movement and immigration. What I mean by a nation-state, which since 1648 has been the building block of the international system, is a country where the State (the borders of France and its government, for instance) completely coincide with the nation (the French people, the French language, French culture, ‘Frenchness’). In this system, someone who is originally not from France (or from Britain, or from Germany or from Switzerland) can never be truly ‘French,’ even if they were born there and have spoken French their whole lives.

It’s not that the United States doesn’t have problems with xenophobia, racism and immigration. America certainly does. Yet for all its shortcomings, an ‘American’ does not fit nearly as narrow a conception as a ‘Swiss.’ America has integrated Irish, Chinese, Indian, Italian, and German immigrants over the years. (Hopefully someday African-Americans and Hispanics will enjoy the equal status that these once hated immigrant populations enjoy today).

Europe needs to look to the future. It’s conceptions of nationalism, identity and inclusion are downright feudal at times. There is a new reality that right-wing Europe needs to deal with—people don’t stay still anymore, and not everyone who lives within French, or British, German or Swiss borders is going to be a 13th generation citizen. Europe needs to integrate these people into the State and accept them, while still holding onto the the linguistic and cultural practices that make the state the state. In fact, the state’s cultural practices can be exapnded, given a new layer, by accepting new customs and integrating them into the fabric of their society. Chinese food has become an integral part of American cuisine. There’s no reason Switzerland can’t still be Switzerland if a Swiss born, Swiss-German speaker of Romanian-Serb descent was judged on equal footing as somone whose great great great grandparents were Swiss.

This isn’t about Anders Breivik, but the normal, everyday, soft judgements that nationalist Europeans place on people who “aren’t from here” that cultivate the ridiculous environment in which my new friend can’t feel at home in Switzerland despite being born there, studying there, speaking the language, and living as a Swiss would all her life.