A rare indirect exchange between an Iranian official and an Israeli scholar took place last week. Mohammad Javad Zarif, a high-ranking diplomat and former foreign minister and vice president, responded to Thamar E. Gindin, an expert on Iran, following a video she published in Persian.
Gindin’s video was a response to claims made by Zarif during a speech to Iranian students in February. He had accused Israel of forging an enmity with Iran to “make up for the peace signed with Arabs” as part of the Oslo Accords.
“During the 1990s, when the Zionist regime began negotiating with the Arab world, they needed to change the narrative of enmity,” Zarif said in his speech. “They had made up a narrative in which Arabs were the enemies, and suddenly Iran became the enemy.”
“Since Israel needed an enemy, they had to invent an enemy somewhere else,” he said, adding that prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was quoted as saying Iran was the substitute to the Arabs.
Zarif also said Israel was harnessing a “false biblical narrative” from the Book of Esther to propagate the narrative of Iranians who were trying to kill the Jews, while “it was in fact the other way around.”
Following the speech, Gindin recorded a video addressing Zarif directly. She responded to his claims and challenged him to present proof for his quotes of Rabin.
To the surprise of many, Zarif directly referred to Gindin’s video in an interview with Iranian host Mohammad Fazali – a rare instance of acknowledgment, referring to the Israeli scholar as “a Persian-speaking Israeli lady.”
In his new interview, Zarif doubled down on his claims. He quoted an entry from Columbia University’s Encyclopaedia Iranica in 1993, which claimed the same about Rabin’s intentions.
Zarif also maintained that Israel’s enmity toward Iran in the 1990s was the first time when Iran was “free to breathe” after a decade of war. He accused Gindin of continuing the line of bashing Iran’s image, “even with a lovely tone.”
‘A regime lobbyist writing up an encyclopedia entry’
The entry “Israeli Relations With Iran” in Encyclopaedia Iranica reads: “Israel’s vision of the new Middle East order came at the expense of Iran since Yitzhak Rabin believed that the Israeli population would be unlikely to accept peace with the Arabs unless a greater and more ominous threat, namely Iran and Islamic fundamentalism, was looming in the horizon.
Moreover, the Arab states would be more inclined to make peace with Israel if they felt more threatened by Iran’s fundamentalist ideology than by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land and its nuclear arsenal.”
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Gindin said she was surprised by Zarif’s direct acknowledgment of her video. “I went on to read the said article Zarif was referring to,” she said.
“When you ask yourself who this mind-reading writer is, that wrote up this article, you find that this section was authored by none other than Trita Parsi, the founder of the National American Iranian Council, perceived as the pro-Islamic Republic lobby in the US,” Gindin said.
“It strikes me as ironic that a lobbyist for the most anti-Israel regime was chosen to write up an entry regarding Iranian-Israeli relations,” she said. “Besides, the entry itself has no real references to Rabin ever mentioning such a goal.”
The encyclopedia entry cites an accusation made by Israeli scholar Ephraim Inbar, who claimed that former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was “playing [the Iranian threat] more than it was deserved in order to sell the peace process,” Gindin said.
Otherwise, no tangible source was brought to attribute such a quote to Rabin, she said, adding that contrary evidence from Dr. Haim Assa, a close adviser to Rabin, quoted him as dismissing the Iranian threat and deeming it “an American issue.”
“In any case, I am very excited to have had this exchange with Zarif, whom I see as an intelligent persona, as opposed to the regime’s loud mouthpieces,” Gindin said. “I just wish he would stop telling lies about Israel, and remember that it was [former supreme leader Ruhollah] Khomeini who first called for the destruction of the Jewish State, and Israel was the one who mirrored this call, as the entry correctly states.”