There are so many podcasts out there it often feels impossible to know which to bother with. But when it comes to the Middle East, Israel and Jewish issues I make a point of listening to Ask Haviv Anything, by the Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur. I learn more from this than most books.
In an episode at the start of Iran operation, for example, Haviv outlined the real purpose of the war as being like two chessboards. There's a regional chess board on which Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar play. Then there's a global chess board on which US and China play, along with secondary characters like Russia. As he put it:
“The Iran strikes overlap, but they overlap into completely different wars, completely different confrontations. Iran matters to both, but in very different ways. And that's the bottom line.”
For the US, this war is about China – destroying those areas in which Iran directly aids China such as its navy (it was not an accident that led to the US sinking the Iranian frigate Dena off the coast of Sri Lanka), its missile production facilities and ports – and by extension broader support such as oil.
The notion that the US has been somehow dragged into the war by a scheming Benjamin Netanyahu utterly misunderstands what’s going on. “This is an American war for American interests… Israel is just taking advantage of a very beneficial moment that happens to open a window for what Israel wants to achieve in this region.”
Last week’s guest was the Israeli public intellectual Micah Goodman. And that’s how I came to think about what’s happening in Iran in a way that simply hadn’t occurred to me before. Goodman had an observation which struck me as so brilliant and, potentially, world changing, that it stopped me in my tracks. I was driving when I was listening and had to pull over to refocus.
The discussion centred on why some societies decline while others thrive, which encompassed the ideological roots of modern Islamism – an ideology which has proved disastrous to Iran as a nation and Iranians as individuals (other, of course, than the beneficiaries of the IRGC’s state-level corruption).
Goodman pointed to the impact of the “powerful, charismatic, organising idea” of pan-Arabism under Nasser, which aimed at uniting the Middle East and eradicating Israel. One of its most alluring features was that it ignored religious divides within Islam; this was unity not of religion per se but of a shared language and culture: Arabism. This gave pan-Arabism great appeal and led, eventually and inexorably, to the Six Day War.
The other side of that coin is that when Israel won the Six Day War it didn’t only defeat three armies – what Goodman calls the “kinetic” victory, when the Egyptian air force was destroyed in a few hours. It also destroyed an idea: pan-Arabism. In one fell swoop the lure was shattered.
Arab countries then had a choice, exemplified by what happened in 1979. They could decide that every Arab nation needs to succeed and prosper on its own – the path Egypt took in 1979 in signing a peace treaty with Israel and which has been followed through their economic development by the likes of the Emiratis and the Saudis. Or they could go down the Islamist path set out through the 1979 Iranian revolution: the pan-Islamist approach which has proved so malign and internally damaging in Iran, let alone the damage it is caused elsewhere.
The big question which we obviously can’t yet answer is whether the current war against the Tehran regime will be the equivalent of the impact of the Six Day War which ended pan-Arabism. In other words, will this war end pan-Islamism? If it does, it’s not just a huge – and potentially wonderful – development for the Middle East. It’s a huge development for the rest of us, given the malign impact of Iran and Islamism elsewhere.
One bubble has already been burst. The Iranian "Ring of Fire” surrounding Israel – its network of proxy terrorist groups – was supposed to destroy Israel and stop it attacking Iran. It was, in reality, Hassan Nasrallah's "spider's web" theory in reverse. Nasrallah’s strategy was based on the idea that for all of Israel's military and nuclear capabilities, it is internally weak and fragile; like a spider's web. Touch it and it collapses. Except that’s what has happened to the Ring of Fire and the Iranian military. Its air force was destroyed before its planes had even left the ground. It turns out it wasn’t Israel, after all, which was fundamentally weak – and Nasrallah not being around anymore to learn that lesson is a demonstration of it.
From a British perspective, it will be fascinating (to put it mildly) to see what impact this has on Islamism here. The Greens’ embrace of the Iranian agenda, the pro-regime demonstrations, and the more long-standing support for Islamism have all been fuelled by the supposed strength of Iran and the ideas it has exported globally. If pan-Islamism collapses in the Middle East, the impact here will also be profound. That remains, of course, the big ‘if’.
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