pic: www.washingtontimes.com: Iran on the move.
HOWARD EPSTEIN – THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK – WHERE IRAN IS COMING FROM
Israel made its first “documented” appearance on the Merneptah Stele, circa 1200 BCE. Discovered by Flinders Petrie, a British Egyptologist, in 1896 at Thebes in Upper Egypt, the Stele now resides at the Egyptian Museum, Cairo. Opinions vary but many scholars translate the hieroglyphics on the 27th row of the Stele as referring to an “Israel” associated with “the Torah”.
As we know, in biblical times the two kingdoms of the Promised and Holy Land were the Kingdom of Israel (Samaria) in the north, and the Kingdom of Judah in the south. The expulsions by the Babylonians and the Romans followed but, subject to the claims of those known today as “the Palestinians”, we who celebrate life in modern-day Israel do so in a space roughly similar to the lands of Judah and Samaria (plus the Negev and the Aravah). That is our historical claim to our land. There have been others.
Until Allenby conquered Jerusalem in 1917, ushering in the 30 year British Mandate, the Turkish, Ottoman Empire occupied Palestine for five hundred years. The Turks had (mal‑)treated the area as a backwater of their empire, abandoned and forlorn. Mark Twain (the American author and humorist, Samuel Langhorne Clemens) who visited in 1867, described the Holy Land as “[sitting] in sackcloth and ashes…. desolate and unlovely.” Fast-forward 140 years and another American, George Gilder, is seen writing in the June 2011 edition of the American Spectator, with no doubt about who effected the volte face here:-
After initial failures and retreats, Petah Tikva became “the first settlement to conquer the deadly foe of malaria,” by “planting Eucalyptus [locally known as ‘Jew trees’] in the swamps to absorb the moisture,” draining other swamps, importing large quantities of quinine, and developing rich agriculture and citriculture. By the time of Lowdermilk’s visit, Petah Tikva had become the largest of the Jewish rural settlements,” supporting 20,000 people “where there were only 400 fever-ridden fellaheen sixty years ago.”
Praising the work of Walter Clay Lowdermilk[1], he goes on to explain:-
“If not for Jewish settlers, there would be no Palestine and no economic progress for the region’s Arab population.”
In the Lowdermilk/Gilder view, Petach Tikvah became the model on which the Land of Israel was made sufficiently fertile to support the millions of Jews and Arabs who have arrived here since the late 19th century.
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The Land of Israel lies at the conjunction of three continents: Africa, Asia and Europe,
which succinctly explains its geo-political importance. Amongst the several forces and dynasties that understood that was the Persian Empire. Actually, a succession of empires, the first established by Cyrus the Great around 550 BCE, it waxed and waned in extent. It was arguably at its zenith around 500 CE, when it stretched from India and Afghanistan in the east to the shores of the Mediterranean in the West, and down into Egypt, thus dominating the tri-continental convergence.
Succeeding dynasties preserved the perception of a single, multi-epoch Persian Empire. By the twentieth century, the Pahlavis were on their way to becoming the last of those dynasties and Persia was bordered in the west not by the sea but by Turkey, Syria and Iraq.
In modern times, the Persians/Iranians have had long-standing reasons for resenting the West (of which Israel is perceived as an integral part). Back in 1901, the British secured from the government of Persia, the right to exploit whatever oil resources they might find. In 1908, oil was indeed discovered in the south-east of Persia, and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was founded. The majority shareholding in that company was acquired by the British government in 1914, thereby giving them a monopoly over Persian oil resources. In 1933, the British extended their monopoly by an agreement pursuant to which a flat royalty would payable to the Persians on all oil exports for the following sixty years. Persia was renamed Iran in 1935.
In 1951, something occurred that should have warmed Western hearts. Intellectual and liberal thinker, Mohammad Mossadeq, was democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. He energetically set about introducing a whole raft of western-style social and political initiatives. By then, however, popular pressure to change the status quo vis-à-vis the British was overwhelming, and Mossadeq’s next step was to nationalize the Iranian oil industry.
Mossadeq’s initiative over oil greatly enhanced his standing with the Iranian people but it was to prove his undoing. To the everlasting disgrace of the British who inspired it, and the Americans who brought it about (through the CIA), in 1953 the Mossadeq government was replaced in a coup d’état and a western-puppet administration installed.
In 1954, a new agreement was entered into between the British and the newly-installed Iranian government, by which Iran finally got to enjoy a substantial part of the value of its oil exports — 50% — an arrangement that was renewed for a further 20 years in 1973. All that changed with the arrival of Khomeini from Paris in 1979.
By then, the Pahlavis, they of the final Persian dynasty, had been seen off by a combination of the zeal of the Islamic students and the incompetence of Jimmy Carter in 1979, who repeatedly praised the unpopular Shah and admitted him to the USA for medical treatment after his flight. It was this that led to the American Embassy hostage crisis, the students perceiving that a counter-coup would be organized from there. A bruising trauma for the Americans followed, and even the JCPOA (see below), some 35 years on, appears not to have reduced Iranian resentment of the West.
Today’s Iran of the Mullahs has many strengths: vast oil reserves; a large and young population; the world’s last ideology, Islam; years of experience at destabilising all parts of the world with terrorism; a vast and well-armed (with reportedly over a hundred thousand missiles) proxy army in Hezbollah, now the de facto rulers of Lebanon on the Mediterranean; the windfall conferred on them this year by Obama’s JCPOA of well over $100 billion of liquidity; and a clear route to becoming an atomic power. Indeed, their disdain for the small obstacles that prevent immediate nuclear break-out was demonstrated in the past week with a banned missile-test going ahead – so far with impunity from an insouciant Obama, apparently more taken with golf and dinner parties than the vacuum he has left in our region.
Along with that list of strengths, certainly unequaled in the region, Iran has one ambition: to revert to total domination over the lands that stretch down to the sea that laps the shores of the three continents. With a presence in what used to be Syria and in Lebanon, only one thing stands in the way of the return of the Persian Empire: Israel. Consider: if you were an Iranian mullah, how relaxed would you be about that?
Israel is a tiny country, especially in comparison to Iran, with a population less than one tenth of the Iranians. How difficult can it be to remove it from the face of the earth? This question, expressed as a wish almost daily in Tehran, was reportedly painted in Hebrew on the rocket that last week defied the small print of Wendy Sherman’s JCPOA. It was a bad week for Wendy, what with that and the North Koreans asserting their ability to hit any part of the USA with nuclear – perhaps thermo-nuclear – weapons, notwithstanding her treaty-triumph over them. Be that as it may, the end‑game of the mullahs’ ambitions, to re-establish the Persian Empire in all its geographical glory, can only be over our dead bodies! And theirs. That is their problem and they are keenly aware of it.
Israel’s problem with the current Intifada – the name of which changes almost weekly – is that, as with all terrorism, the warfare that it represents is asymmetric. That means that even the world’s eighth most powerful nation (see last week’s blog) can be assailed and hurt (by the death of even a single citizen) by a kid with a steak-knife. Yet asymmetric warfare works in an other way, too. How has Israel survived for nearly seventy years against enemies that outnumbered it many times over? Only by the deployment of first technology and latterly hi-technology. And how will Israel deter the Iranians, even or perhaps especially when they become a nuclear power? In the same way, cutting-edge satellite technology, SIGINT[2] equaled only by the USA and the UK, world-leading drone capabilities and five German-built submarines, with missiles appropriately armed giving Israel a second-strike capability – all that will deter the most Empire-hungry mullah. No point in passing GO and collecting $100 billion if you risk committing national suicide and pass up forever the re-establishment of the Persian Empire.
Accordingly, we may have achieved a stalemate with the Iranians; but we need to be cleverer than that. At the very pinnacle of the British Empire, the world’s most powerful foreign secretary, Lord Palmerston made himself eminently quotable thus:-
“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”
We could do worse than to bear those words in mind. So could the Iranians.
One can only negotiate from a position of strength and we start from such a position, militarily and economically (see previous blogs). Impossible as it may seem at this point, we need to reach out to the Mullahs (doubtless through intermediaries), and demonstrate that they risk everything by courting war with us. We should make it clear that we know that their ambition is to re-establish the Persian Empire but, unjust though it may appear to them that a tiny country of less than eight million souls should be able to stand in their way, asymmetrics confer that ability on us. Failure to accept that reality could mean no Empire and no Mullocracy. If, on the other hand, the Mullahs want to re-establish the Persian Empire with a Mediterranean seaboard limited to that of Lebanon, huge benefits in technology-sharing could come their way. Win-win as opposed to losing all. It even might tempt those awaiting the return of the Twelfth Imam. Failing that, they will have to ask themselves how long they can threaten to destroy the Jewish State, and not actually do so, without losing their credibility.
Howard Epstein, LLB, is an English commercial lawyer of some 45 years’ standing. He still practices international commercial litigation on several continents. As such, he is articulate and voluble. Howard is also a staunch Zionist, having achieved aliyah in September 2005, after a lifetime as “an armchair Zionist”. His parents met at a Habonim function and he was raised with Zionism on a daily basis. He is well-read, knowledgeable and opinionated about Jewish and Israeli history and current affairs.
[1] Space does not permit here the further examination of this agricultural and water-management colossus.
[2] Signals intelligence.
HOWARD EPSTEIN – THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK – WHERE IRAN IS COMING FROM
