George Will asks a very good question—just how far does the anti-semitism of the Iranian republic go?
Yale University historian Timothy Snyder is indebted to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who recently made Snyder’s new book even more newsworthy than his extraordinary scholarship deserves to be. And Netanyahu is indebted to Snyder, whose theory of Hitler’s anti-Semitism is germane to two questions: Is the Iranian regime’s anti-Semitism rooted, as Hitler’s was, in a theory of history that demands genocide? If so, when Iran becomes a nuclear power, can it be deterred from its announced determination to destroy Israel?
I don’t know the answer to his question but I think it’s a legitimate one. I have my doubts that what Iran has been expressing is opportunistic anti-Zionism. At the time of the Iranian revolution Iran had a Jewish population that went back for millennia. In 1979 there were about 60,000 Jews in Iran. There are fewer than 9,000 now. Jews haven’t fled every country during the post-war period. There were 4.5 million Jews in the United States in 1950. There are nearly 7 million today. They’ve left the countries where they were being persecuted or had good reasons to fear they would be.
Most people aren’t aware of it but Iran is a sort of rump empire. About 50% of its people are ethnic Iranians. In addition to Iranians there are Kurds, Balochis, Arabs, Turkmen, and many other smallish ethnic groups.
I don’t trust Snyder’s judgments. There are probably two main issues with Iran. One is that it has a long-standing Imperial identity, confounded by ethnic isolation. The other is that it is a nation of Shi’i, which gives it a well-developed sense of persecution that encourages persecution of scapegoats.
These are not new issues, they precede the ’79 revolution and go back centuries. I think scapegoating, not genocide, though Iran’s desires to expand its influence will leed it to support other revisionist powers in the Middle East that will be responsible for a lot of chaos and deaths under the protection of a perceived nuclear capability.
See this, How Iran’s Jews Survive in Mullahs’ World. interesting.
I found this eye-opening:
Iran’s Jewish population was pretty stable under the Shah. It wasn’t until after the revolution that it dropped precipitously. One generally does not forbid actions that aren’t taking place.