The Soleimani threat brought Israel and Sunni states closer
V DURING THE last decade of his life, Qassem Soleimani emerged from the shadows and was promoted as a noble and self-effacing warrior, an Iranian Napoleon who would recreate a new Persian empire — a Shia crescent from Mashad near Turkmenistan to the Mediterranean in Lebanon.
Soleimani’s story was that he was recognised as a military entrepreneur when he led Iranian forces during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s which cost the lives of a million people.
What is less well known is that Israel strongly supported Iran and supplied the ayatollahs’ regime with abundant arms in an attempt to prevent a victorious Saddam Hussein’s army — four times as big as the IDF — from turning its guns on Tel Aviv. It is perfectly possible that Soleimani and his successor, Esmail Ghani, fought with Israeli arms to resist the Iraqi aggressor.
All this was taking place as Iranian luminaries vowed to wipe “the little Satan” off the face of the earth and said that Israel was a poisonous weed, planted on holy Islamic soil.
Even before the outbreak of the war in September 1980, the son of Grand Ayatollah Kastani reportedly visited Israel to discuss arms sales in the midst of the American hostage crisis. President Carter was furious with Menahem Begin’s government and the breaking of the arms embargo on sales to Iran. The export of US military spare parts to Israel was halted, but Tehran did permit the exodus of thousands of Iranian Jews at Begin’s insistence.
Israel’s attack on the Osirak nuclear facility in 1981 eliminated Saddam’s plans to develop a nuclear capability and thereby helped the Iranians in their conflict. Moreover, Ayatollah Khomeini crucially did not join an all-Arab front during Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Israelis and Iranians met quietly in Zurich and concluded an arms agreement, worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Despite all the screaming headlines in the Iranian press, there was no mention of “the Iranian threat” in government circles in Israel. Cargo ships, registered in Denmark and Liberia, were reported to be regularly transporting arms from Eilat to Bandar Abbas in Iran.
Israel’s backchannel to the Iranians was useful to the White House which wished to secure the release of Americans held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. US missiles were passed to Israel which in turn passed them on to Iran. However, only a few hostages secured their freedom. The Iranian-American commentator, Trita Parsi, remarks in his book, Treacherous Alliance: “Not only had they shipped the wrong missiles, but the ones they had sent had the Star of David stamped on them”. The Iranians were not amused and the release of Americans stopped.
With the end of the war with Iraq and the death of Khomeini, President Rafsanjani wished to adopt a more pragmatic policy towards the West. However the absence of a common enemy, the collapse of the USSR and Saddam’s occupation of Kuwait suggested that the unofficial alignment between Israel and Iran now no longer existed.
Tehran embarked on the development of long-range missiles and restarted the Shah’s nuclear energy programme. Moreover, Iran was not invited to the Madrid peace conference in 1991, which was arranged to secure a rapprochement between the Arab world and Israel.
In response, Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Khameini, initiated a conference of hardline Palestinian rejectionists, including Hamas, which had supported Saddam Hussein during the conflict with Iran. The Oslo Accord with Arafat’s PLO was subsequently regarded as treasonous by Tehran. By 1995, Israelis believed that Iran was training Islamist suicide bombers in the black arts of killing civilians.
Tehran saw Israel’s sudden rapprochement with the Arab world after Oslo as a move away from the common cause of two non-Arab states in a hostile neighbourhood.
Hezbollah continued to be a problem for Israel. Its assassination of the Hezbollah leader, Abbas Mussawi, was viewed by many as the cause for the bombing of the community centre in Buenos Aires with the killing of 86 people and the injuring of hundreds.
Hezbollah continued to stockpile huge numbers of Iranian missiles — the firing of which effectively depopulated northern Israel during the Second Lebanon War in 2006.
Israel’s approach towards the Gulf states began to evolve out of its periphery doctrine, first formulated in the 1950s, in which states on the edge of the Arab world such as Ethiopia and Turkey, as well as embattled minorities such as the Kurds
Fear of ayatollahs: Bin Salman and South Sudanese, would prove to be trustworthy allies.
British withdrawal east of Suez in the 1960s essentially forced independence on these states. All were sandwiched in between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran with initially little possibility of forging their own destiny. They felt pressured to join the Saudi-led oil boycott following Israel’s victory in the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
However it was the fear of the ayatollahs’ seizure of power in Iran in 1979 that led to the formation of the Gulf Cooperation Council two years later. Saudi Arabia funded the Iraqi purchase of arms to be used in the war against Iran while Israel funnelled arms to Tehran. While the Gulf region maintained strong support for the Palestinians, its own worries about Iran took pole position in its policies. In contrast to Tehran, the Oslo Accords of 1993 unblocked relations with many Arab states. There was an official Israeli delegation to Bahrain to discuss environmental cooperation and a trade mission to Qatar. Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres met Sheikh Qaboos of Oman in Muscat in 1994.
Relations however plunged with the demise of the peace process and the dominance of Palestinian Islamism during the al-Aqsa intifada. When there were conflicts such as Operation Cast Lead in 2009 with large numbers of Palestinian dead, relations with Israel were placed in cold storage.
However what united Benjamin Netanyahu with the monarchies of the Gulf States was the expansion of Iranian influence under Soleimani’s guidance.
In part, this was due to the vacuum left by the US debacle in Iraq, but also to the profound fear of Iran’s developing nuclear ability. Indeed Oman kept channels open to Tehran, such that Sheikh Qaboos’s intervention averted a possible Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2011 — and this in turn led to quiet mediation between the Americans and the Iranians.
The Omani backchannel led to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) of
Israeli-Iranian relations collapsed with the end of Tehran’s war with Iraq