US Climate Envoy and former secretary of state John Kerry is an easy punching bag.
His statement that Arab states will never make peace with Israel unless a two-state solution becomes a reality made the rounds and attracted mockery after Israel made peace with the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan last year.
He was a difficult secretary of state, to put it mildly, when it came to Israel. Former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon’s remark that Kerry had a “messianic” zeal for trying to push an agreement onto Israel and the Palestinians comes up whenever Kerry talks about the region.
And, of course, Kerry was instrumental in bringing about the 2015 Iran deal, which the Israeli defense establishment and government strongly opposed and continues to view as extremely dangerous.
It’s understandable why many people who support Israel and oppose the Iran deal, especially those who are already primed to dislike Democrats, would be quick to jump on an accusation that Kerry gave Israeli secrets to Iran.
But this time, even if you don’t usually like Kerry, give him a break.
Here’s what we know: A tape of Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif recounting his years on the job for archival purposes made its way to Iran International TV, a London-based Persian news station that calls attention to the ayatollah-led regime’s abuses. They shared the tape with The New York Times, which reported on it. On that tape, Zarif lamented that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps keeps him out of the loop.
“John Kerry informed me that Israel attacked [Iranian positions] 200 times in Syria,” Zarif said.
“You didn’t know?” the interviewer asked.
“No. No,” Zarif responded.
Zarif’s claim spread, with major US news sites picking it up and prominent Republicans like former ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley tweeting: “This is disgusting on many levels. Biden and Kerry have to answer for why Kerry would be tipping off Iran, the number one sponsor of terror, while stabbing one of our greatest partners, Israel, in the back.”
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) even accused Kerry of treason.
Kerry responded overnight Monday, saying: “This story and these allegations are unequivocally false.”
“This never happened – either when I was secretary of state or since,” he tweeted.
When considering this story, one should keep in mind good advice for any news consumer: Consider the source of the news, and consider the facts you already knew going in.
First, the source. If there’s one message that emerges from the leaked Zarif tapes, it’s that Iran’s foreign minister is a liar. The major theme of the tapes is that Zarif has little actual control over the country’s foreign policy, the IRGC is really in charge, and they don’t keep him informed, even when their actions harm efforts Zarif has made to improve Iran’s international relations.
This is not really surprising to anyone who knows anything about Iran. The ayatollah is in charge, not the president or his like-minded foreign minister.
But it also means that either Zarif has been lying to the world when he claims to be representing the Islamic Republic’s policies in nuclear negotiations in Vienna over the past few weeks, to give a pertinent example, or that he is lying on the tape and he really is in the know.
It is possible that the tape itself is a manipulation to try to get the West to strengthen supposed “moderates” in Iran – i.e., Zarif – by going soft on Tehran in nuclear talks.
Seth Frantzman looks more extensively into the possibilities of what the tape means in a recent analysis in The Jerusalem Post. But the bottom line is, whether one takes the tapes at face value or not, Zarif is an unreliable narrator.
To their credit, Republican Senators Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) and Mitt Romney (Utah) both said they don’t know if the Zarif tape is trustworthy, but the matter should be looked into further.
Of course, that does not mean this specific claim about Kerry is false, per se. It is within the realm of possibility that Zarif is telling the truth and Kerry is not. After all, Kerry admitted to having met with Zarif several times in late 2018.
This is where prior knowledge comes in.
On September 12, 2018, Kerry told radio host Hugh Hewitt he had met with Zarif “three or four times” since leaving office in January 2017, including at the Munich Security Conference, the World Economic Forum and “at a conference in Norway.”
Kerry said he “tried to elicit from [Zarif] what Iran might be willing to do in order to change the dynamic in the Middle East for the better... I’ve been very blunt to Foreign Minister Zarif and told him, ‘Look, you guys need to recognize that the world does not appreciate what’s happening with missiles, what’s happening with Hezbollah, what’s happening with Yemen.’”
Eight days before that interview, Finance Minister Israel Katz said at the Herzliya Conference: “Israel has taken military action more than 200 times within Syria itself.”
More than a year before that, the IAF commander at the time, Amir Eshel, talked about close to 100 Israeli strikes in Syria in an interview with Haaretz.
It may very well be that when Kerry told Zarif that “the world does not appreciate what’s happening with missiles, what’s happening with Hezbollah,” the hundreds of Israeli strikes in Syria came up in the conversation.
But that doesn’t mean Kerry is “tipping off Iran” or “stabbing Israel in the back,” as Haley put it, because this was publicly available information.
Zarif does not actually say when Kerry told him about the Israeli strikes in Syria. But he moves on to events that occurred in 2020, so it is likely that he’s speaking about something fairly recent.
But even if he’s referring to a conversation with Kerry that happened prior to 2018, Eshel said the strikes on Syria began in 2012, and there have been media reports on them ever since, even if Israel did not publicly acknowledge them for the first few years.
As such, it strains credulity to think that Zarif would not have any idea that Israel struck Syria many times. Iran blames Israel for so many of its own and the world’s problems. Why would this be the one time where Zarif is baffled as to where to point fingers?
So, go ahead, make fun of Kerry for not being able to predict the Abraham Accords. Be furious with him for pushing the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the nuclear deal between Iran and world powers that gives Iran a path to a nuclear weapon. That’s a real reason to criticize him.
But he probably doesn’t deserve the wrath he’s attracting over this Zarif quote. It’s Zarif and his smooth-talking to cover for Iran’s genocidal regime that deserves our ire.