We need to understand Iran and Hezbollah
JVL Introduction
This fascinating interview provides us with information about Hezbollah and Iran that is missing from western media coverage. This is not about supporting Iran and Hezbollah but to get beyond “they are terrorists” or “they support terrorists” or even to apply some version of “they are the enemy of my enemy and so they must be my friends”. Israeli expert, Ori Goldberg does not fall into either trap and as the risks of war spreading further in the region escalate each day, it is important and certainly interesting to be have a more nuanced perspective. He argues that better understanding is important but is anyone in Israel willing to listen?
LL
This article was originally published by +972 magazine on Fri 20 Sep 2024. Read the original here.
What Israelis don’t want to hear about Iran and Hezbollah
For years, Israeli expert Ori Goldberg has tried to challenge commonly-held assumptions about the Islamic Republic and its allies. Will anyone listen?
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There is no marl equivalence between Palestinian initiatives and those of Israeli Zionists. Zionists claim 2000 years of absentee “ownership” of Palestine. And a brief look at the actions taken by Zionists since 1947 proves what started the situation in the first place. It’s not complicated. Have you read the Belfour declaration? Zionists have no legal claim to that land. The Palestinians are in the right. It was their home that was invaded and robbed, not to mention the murder and torture of innocent Palestinians. And Zionists are simply perplexed, cannot understand why Palestinians would oppose being robbed and slaughtered with impunity. The unjustified, Zionist position is sick, unconscionable genocide. Fascism by any other name….
I first got involved around the edges of Iranian politics via nothing to do with Israel at all but because for several years I supported the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (they have an excellent website) and attended a number of meetings. I felt very strongly about the oppression of women, about both freedom of religion and freedom *from* religion. From there I got interested in HOPOI (they also have a website) – Hands Off the People of Iran, which was started by some Iranian exile organisations. They had a slogan then, Neither Tehran nor Washington. Moshé Machover is on the steering committee.
Their Statement starts with ‘No to imperialist war! No to sanctions! No to the theocratic regime!’
I think it can be quite easy to let one’s feelings about the theocratic regime’s
horrific mistreatment of women and gays slip over, wrongly, into some kind of symmetrical parallel to what can happen to critics of Israel. The challenge in the one case is not to become Islamophobic and in the other, antisemitic.
That brings to mind an old saying, that religion makes good people better and makes bad people worse. Fundamental Islamic-to-Islamist doctrine in the one case, Messianic political Judaism in the other.
Hezbollah and Hamas are right to resist Israeli aggression – and Iran is NOT the enemy. Zionism is.
What does Reed Kinney mean “the Palestinians are in the right” ? Palestinians, who are basically just Arabs, invaded the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, and Zionism is the movement to liberate our land. In fact, its Zionism thats anti-colonial, not Palestinian nationalism, which is actually more linked to nazism. Moses was actually one of the first Zionists, so this idea of it being a European invention is completely rubbish.