Twilight in Tehran
‘They say time changes things, but actually you have to change them yourself,” said Andy Warhol.
The pop artist’s famous paintings of Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles were actually criticized for their celebration of conformity, but his insight about change, whether cultural, social or political, sure was right: It never comes by itself.
That certainly goes for revolutionary Iran, where everyone except its oligarchy has been awaiting change for the past 42 years – in vain.
Now, as its seventh president prepares to succeed the sixth, the questions are what Iranian voters just said, where their country is headed, and what the Jewish state should do. And the answers are that the people are bitter, their country is in the doldrums, and Israel should let it change by itself.
Iranian elections have never been free, but what happened last week was different even by the Khomeini Revolution’s standards.
Yes, non-Islamist candidates could never even dream of being allowed to run, nor could anyone otherwise disagreeable to the regime, and also the entire female population.
Even so, the regime used to try to create an impression of democracy by choreographing presidential contests between hardliners and pragmatists. That is how Mohammad Khatami became president back in 1997, while advocating free speech, market reforms and a cultural thaw with the West.
That gospel was crushed in 2009, when the regime robbed reformist candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi of his electoral victory and placed him under house arrest, where he continues to languish.
Still, the democratic masquerade continued. When Hassan Rouhani ran in 2013, he faced seven opponents, including a former commander of the Revolutionary Guards and a former commander of the air force.
Now even that veneer was shed. The clerics had one candidate and pushed aside anyone who might threaten his victory, even the notorious Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, for whom they stole the 2009 election.
With nearly 600 candidates disqualified, and with three of the seven who were green-lighted somehow dropping out, the clerics made way for their man, Ebrahim Raisi. The man, and the process that crowned him, speak volumes of the regime’s growing fear of, and loss of eye contact with, the people they purport to represent.
RAISI IS no version of Hassan Rouhani or Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who earned academic degrees in Britain and the US, or of Mohammad Khatami, who lived in Germany and speaks four languages. Raisi, by contrast, is not known to have even finished high school.
What is not unknown is Raisi’s record as a prosecutor, which is harrowing. As a member of the forum that in 1988 sent to the gallows an estimated 5,000 untried prisoners, he is a slaughterer of his own people. (See Amnesty International, “Bloodsoaked secrets: Why Iran’s 1988 Prison Massacres are Ongoing Crimes
Against Humanity,” 2018.)
A regime that imposes on the citizens a man who mass-murdered innocent citizens says it is scared. And the regime is scared with good reason.
As the ayatollahs lose eye contact with the people, Israel’s task is to fight the regime and its plots without provoking the people and their pride
With the population more than double its size when the Islamists took over; with industry held hostage by the Revolutionary Guards, whose chieftains win tenders unfairly and then prize cronies and sideline professionals; with negligent planning resulting in dried lakes, rivers and faucets; and with the government fearful of corporate freedom and monetary discipline, the steadily shrinking economy is an inversion of the shah’s era, when jobs were abundant and annual growth rates exceeded 10%.
On the eve of the coronavirus pandemic, unemployment in greater Tehran reportedly reached 41%. In some regions, youth joblessness has been higher than 60%, and university-educated women’s unemployment exceeded 80%. The dollar, which in Khatami’s time cost less than 9,000 rials, now costs more than 230,000.
The pandemic further debilitated the country, having plagued – according to statistical Website Worldometer – at least 3.11 million and killed at least 83,000.
Is it any wonder, then, that more than half the public didn’t bother voting? Life stinks, they effectively said, and the unelected clerics who run the show now want to hand the wheel over to the murderer of our kith and kin. How much lower can we sink?
That, in brief, is where Iran’s political degeneration has arrived. Now, as its most violent leader since Ayatollah Khomeini approaches its helm, some might feel circumstances demand an extravagant Israeli attack on Iran. Nothing could be more wrong.
THE IRANIAN people’s abuse can only last so long. Ultimately, the people will respond.
Waiting for that day’s arrival demands much patience and poise, but that is what we must muster.
Millions throughout Iran know the truth. They know Israel has never been their enemy and has taken nothing from them. Many of them also know that the Jewish nation actually recalls fondly the Persian Empire that restored Jerusalem’s leveled temple and returned the Land of Israel to the Jews.
Millions of Iranians also know that until the Islamist takeover, Israeli-Iranian trade was brisk, and that it will resume in earnest the day the fundamentalists will be removed.
And yes, Israelis know Iran’s nuclear program is intolerable and that sabotaging it is imperative. Even so, this should be done in a way that will not make average Iranians feel that Israel humiliated them.
Israel should initiate and also preempt, but only tactically; derail whatever it is the mullahs are plotting about us, bomb their Syrian outposts, sting their nuclear operation, but avoid the grand attack.
That attack should come not from without, but from within, and not from the air, but from below, and it should be waged not by foreigners, but by the great Persian people whom the ayatollahs have so thoroughly disempowered, dispossessed and dishonored, and now so justly fear.
Amotz Asa-El’s bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019) is a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s leadership from antiquity to modernity.