PEOPLE ARE STRANGE, WHEN YOU’RE A STRANGER
by Matt Barganier
Antiwar.com, CA
May 23 2006
Living in Iran ain’t exactly a picnic for anybody, especially women,
gays, political dissidents, or those accused of breaking one of the
trillion laws issued weekly by the Islamic Republic. But is life
particularly hard for the native Jewish population? Yes, according to
the major organs of neocon propaganda, who (along with their useful
idiots) have lately been spreading rumors of an incipient Holocaust
in Persia.
Superficially, it seems plausible enough, given the Western media’s
coverage of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statements about
Israel and the Holocaust – coverage that is brought into question by
their initially uncritical acceptance of the yellow badges story. But
the world, as Jim Henley notes, is stranger than we know, and the
status of Jews in Iran is not necessarily as awful as our prejudices
might lead us to assume.
An examination of Internet resources on Iranian Jews yields
complicated, and sometimes contradictory, data. The Jewish Virtual
Library (JVL) takes a generally negative view, though its reliability
is somewhat undercut by its lowballing of the Iranian Jewish population
(they say 10,000, while virtually every other source I have seen
says 25,000 or more). Nonetheless, it provides a useful, though very
condensed, historical sweep of Jews in Iran going back to the 6th
century BC. It notes that pre-Islamic Persians had good relations
with Jews, and though things apparently changed for the worse after
Persia’s Islamization in the 7th century AD, the entry mentions no
major incidents of persecution until the 19th century.
The reign of the Pahlavis is depicted as a sort of golden age that
ended with the revolution of 1979, after which tens of thousands of
Jews fled the country. The entry goes on to document various ways
in which Jews are treated differently than Muslims (suspicions of
disloyalty, special restrictions on travel, etc.), but they strike
me as pretty standard police-state stuff, which in all likelihood
applies in varying degrees to all Iranians.
Perhaps the most telling evidence of persecution from the JVL entry
is the following (emphasis mine):
On the eve of Passover in 1999, 13 Jews from Shiran and Isfahan in
southern Iran were arrested and accused of spying for Israel and the
United States. Those arrested include a rabbi, a ritual slaughterer
and teachers. In September 2000, an Iranian appeals court upheld a
decision to imprison ten of the thirteen Jews accused of spying for
Israel. In the appeals court, ten of the accused were found guilty
of cooperating with Israel and were given prison terms ranging from
two to nine years. Three of the accused were found innocent in the
first trial. In March 2001, one of the imprisoned Jews was released,
a second was freed in January 2002, the remaining eight were set
free in late October 2002. The last five apparently were released on
furlough for an indefinite period, leaving them vulnerable to future
arrest. Three others were reportedly pardoned by Iran’s Supreme Leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
I’m sorry, but this doesn’t sound like the Third Reich to me. First,
to paraphrase Woody Allen, even paranoid tyrants get spied on. I’m sure
that Israel, for perfectly understandable reasons, has plenty of spies
and other operatives in Iran. I’m equally sure that these particular
fellows were railroaded, given the fact that they were released so
quickly. But that’s the amazing part – three were acquitted right off
the bat, and all had been released, three under direct pardon from the
Aya-freaking-tollah, within a few years of their arrest. The entry
does go on to say that 13 Jews were executed between 1979 and 1998,
but again, a lot of people are executed in Iran for a lot of reasons,
and 13 isn’t genocide.
Now perhaps things have gotten much worse for Iranian Jews since that
1998 entry was written, but the JVL hasn’t felt the need to update
it in the intervening years, which might tell us something. A more
balanced report from that same year appeared in the Christian Science
Monitor, headlined “Jews in Iran Describe a Life of Freedom Despite
Anti-Israel Actions by Tehran.” The whole thing’s worth reading,
but here are some key parts:
One of the most striking of many murals in Iran’s capital, Tehran,
is a towering portrait of Fathi Shkaki, a leader of the militant
Palestinian group, Islamic Jihad. He was assassinated by Israeli agents
in 1995 after he masterminded a series of suicide bombings against
Jewish civilians. A slogan beneath his face hails him as a hero of
the Islamic revolution in Palestine. Yet, stroll a little farther
along Palestine Street and you come to the Abrishami Synagogue,
the biggest of 23 synagogues in Tehran. It is regularly attended
by some 1,000 worshippers. It comes as a surprise to many visitors
to discover that Iran, a country so hostile to Israel and with a
reputation for intolerance, is home to a small but vibrant Jewish
community that is an officially recognized religious minority under
Iran’s 1979 Islamic Constitution. “[Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini
didn’t mix up our community with Israel and Zionism – he saw us as
Iranians,” says Haroun Yashyaei, a film producer and chairman of the
Central Jewish Community in Iran. Like Iran’s Armenian Christians,
Jews are tolerated as “people of the book” and allowed to practice
their religion freely, provided they do not proselytize.
They elect their own deputy to the 270-seat Parliament and enjoy
certain rights of self-administration. Jewish burial and divorce laws
are accepted by Islamic courts. Jews are conscripted into the Army.
“We are one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world,” Mr.
Yashyaei says. “When Muslims came to Iran, we had already been here
for centuries.” “Take it from me, the Jewish community here faces no
difficulties. If some people left after the revolution, maybe it’s
because they were scared,” says Farangis Hassidim, a forceful but
good-humored woman who is charge of the only Jewish hospital in Iran.
She adds: “Our position here is not as bad as people abroad may
think. We practice our religion freely, we have all our festivals,
we have our own schools and kindergartens.” For her, the well-equipped
hospital in central Tehran is a model of religious harmony. “We have
about 200 staff, 30 percent of them Jewish,” she says. “These days,
I’d say about 5 percent of our patients are Jewish, the rest are
Muslims.” A sign outside the hospital reads in Hebrew: “Love thy
neighbor as thyself.” …
Privately, there are grumbles about discrimination, much of it of a
social or bureaucratic nature. Some complain it is impossible for
Jews to get senior positions in Iran Air, the national airline,
or in the national oil company. A woman teacher says she has been
passed by for promotion several times because she is Jewish and now
hopes to emigrate to Los Angeles. A car-parts dealer says Jews have
to wait much longer for travel documents and exit visas. The most
pressing complaint is that, despite many petitions to parliament,
Jewish schools must open on Saturdays, the Jewish Sabbath. …
Why leave? At an antiques shop in central Tehran, Isaac, the elderly
owner, says many Jews who once owned shops along the broad, bustling
avenue have left in the past 20 years. He has not seen his sister
since she emigrated to Israel 16 years ago, but he has no plans
to leave. “The Jewish community has been here for centuries, and
this shop has been in the family for more than 50 years,” he says,
reeling off the famous customers who have visited. “Gen. [Charles]
de Gaulle was here.”
“But look at this,” he adds, brandishing an old black-and-white
photograph of himself with his arm around curvaceous 1950s film star
Gina Lollobrigida, who sports a beehive hairdo. “Really, it’s OK here,
and it’s home,” he says.
Yes, this piece is several years old, but whenever the U.S. government
and media go into a frenzy about how horrible some place or another is,
it’s helpful to read accounts that predate the frenzy and aren’t so
swayed – consciously or unconsciously – by the professionally crafted
propaganda behind it.
A more recent report, from September 2001, provides deeper historical
background than either of the previous pieces, including specific
hardships faced by Iranian Jews over the centuries. I encourage you
to read it, as well as this overview from the Foundation for the
Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture. Some choice bits from
the latter:
It is one of the many paradoxes of the Islamic Republic of Iran that
this most virulent anti-Israeli country supports by far the largest
Jewish population of any Muslim country. …
Iran’s Jewish community is confronted by contradictions. Many of
the prayers uttered in synagogue, for instance, refer to the desire
to see Jerusalem again. Yet there is no postal service or telephone
contact with Israel, and any Iranian who dares travel to Israel faces
imprisonment and passport confiscation. “We are Jews, not Zionists.
We are a religious community, not a political one,” [Parvis]
Yashaya said.
Before the revolution, Jews were well-represented among Iran’s business
elite, holding key posts in the oil industry, banking and law, as well
as in the traditional bazaar. The wave of anti-Israeli sentiment that
swept Iran during the revolution, as well as large-scale confiscations
of private wealth, sent thousands of the more affluent Jews fleeing to
the United States or Israel. Those remaining lived in fear of pogroms,
or massacres.
But Khomeini met with the Jewish community upon his return from
exile in Paris and issued a “fatwa” decreeing that the Jews were
to be protected. Similar edicts also protect Iran’s tiny Christian
minority. …
Jewish women, like Muslim women, are required by law to keep their
heads covered, although most eschew the chador for a simple scarf.
But Jews, unlike Muslims, can keep small flasks of home-brewed wine
or arrack to drink within the privacy of their homes – in theory,
for religious purposes. Some Hebrew schools are coed, and men and
women dance with each other at weddings, practices strictly forbidden
for Muslims.
“Sometimes I think they are kinder to the Jews than they are to
themselves. … If we are gathered in a house, and the family is
having a ceremony with wine or the music is playing too loud, if they
find out we are Jews, they don’t bother us so much,” [Nahit] Eliyason
said. “Everywhere in the world there are people who don’t like Jews.
In England, they draw swastikas on Jewish graves. I don’t think that
Iran is more dangerous for Jews than other places.” …
Not everyone in the Jewish community favors liberalization of
Iranian society. Arizel Levihim, 20, a prospective Hebrew teacher,
said Judaism has fared better within the confines of Iran’s strictly
religious society. “I believe it is good for women to keep their
head covered. I think it is good to restrict relations between boys
and girls,” Levihim said. “I agree with the ideals of the Islamic
republic. These are Jewish values too.”
Yep, the world is far more inscrutable than the New York Post or Fox
News would have you believe. After all, it was crazy fundamentalist
misogynist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who recently pushed (unsuccessfully)
to allow women to attend soccer games. Go figure. And I know I’m
going out on a limb here, but isn’t it just possible that, however
hard their lot, Iran’s Jews prefer the status quo to being bombed
into freedom by the U.S. or Israel?