After his election victory in May 1997, an American journalist asked Iranian President Mohammed Khatami what he thought of the Oslo Accords and the Arab-Israeli peace process His reply was brief, but unambiguous: “Though we have some reservations about the Oslo Accords, because it does not provide the necessary basis for securing the full rights of the Palestinian people, we will not take any action to impede the peace process, and we support and respect the choices of the Palestinian people, including the choice of peace.”
Thus, from a euphoric Tehran (optimistic that freedom and progress were defeating the forces of backwardness and repression), Khatami sent a clear message to all concerned that Iran would not stand in the way of peace and would accept whatever terms the Palestinians and the Arab states do.
Yet five years on, Khatami has been playing host to the leaders of the Palestinian organizations most hostile to the peace process and least amenable to the Palestinian Authority’s choices.
The rise to power of Ariel Sharon and his relentless and ongoing persecution of the Palestinians is the main reason why Khatami did not maintain his early stance.
But there are also other reasons for the pro-peace reformist president’s alignment with the hard-line anti-Israel camp. The most important is that from the day he took office, Israel adopted a hostile posture toward him, in both word and deed.
Israeli policymakers were alarmed that Khatami, with his moderate and accommodating foreign policy and domestic reforms, might manage to transform Iran’s relations with the Arab world, Europe and chiefly the US.
That was perceptible from the surprising line taken by Israel Radio’s Farsi service, which has a big audience in Iran and among Iranian expatriates. In contrast to the world media and all other foreign Persian-language broadcasters, it voiced no enthusiasm for Khatami’s reforms, the emergence of a free press, or the relaxation of the political climate in Iran. Rather, it made a habit of playing up news stories that discredited Khatami and the reformists, and running scathing commentaries questioning their credibility.
When Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah paid his landmark visit to Tehran in December 1997, Israel Radio rubbished the rapprochement and highlighted claims that Iran was behind the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. While the media were proclaiming the start of a Saudi-Iranian honeymoon the radio was broadcasting reminders of past tensions: clashes during the Hajj, Saudi support for Iraq during its 1980-1988 war with Iran, and Iranian backing for Shiite activists in the kingdom.
When dissident Darioush Foruhar, his wife Parvaneh and four prominent intellectuals were murdered in November 1998, Israel Radio was alone in attributing the killings to the Iranian authorities, even though Khatami had himself revealed that rogue elements in the Intelligence Ministry were responsible, and took firm action to ensure that it was purged of them and of the legacy of hard-line former ministers Ali Fallahian and Qorbanali Dorri-Najafabadi. Israeli broadcasts accused the regime as a whole, deliberately blurring the distinction between the group behind the killers and the reformist government that acted against them.
It is also striking how much coverage the radio gives to the Iraqi-based Mujahideen-e-Khalq organization, its attacks in Iran, and the statements and speeches of its leaders Massoud and Maryam Rajavi, in addition to other offshore opposition groups committed to overthrowing the regime, from minor far-left groups hostile to Khatami to royalist spokesmen. This goes beyond normal coverage of opposition activities. It reflects the specific political guidance to which Israel Radio’s broadcasts are subject ­ reputedly by Uri Lubrani, the spook who used to coordinate Israel’s activities in Lebanon and one of its top experts on Iran.
But it is not only on the airwaves that Israel’s anti-Khatami attitude is obvious.
After Khatami addressed the American people in his interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in December 1997, he received encouraging messages from figures close to Bill Clinton’s administration. His aides responded with proposals that could have set the stage for a direct dialogue between the two presidents.
But the American side proceeded to take a number of surprise steps that perplexed Tehran ­ such as extending the D’Amato law and fingerprinting Iranian visitors to the US. It commissioned a US research organization headed by an Iranian academic to investigate why the Clinton administration abandoned its policy of reaching out to Iran and extending moral support to Khatami. Neither he nor his aides were surprised when it attributed cessation of the normalization process between Tehran and Washington to pressure on Clinton and members of Congress from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
For five years, Israel has remained an obstacle to the restoration of relations between Tehran and Washington, and hard-line domestic opponents of Khatami and his reform program have benefited greatly from Israel’s propaganda. It has enabled them to discredit and persecute members of the reformist camp who have advocated a pragmatic attitude to Israel, support for the Palestinian pro-peace line, the abandonment of slogans about destroying Israel, and an end to Iranian backing for Palestinian and Lebanese groups opposed to the peace process. They include former Interior Minister Abdollah Nouri (currently behind bars in Evin Prison), journalist Ahmed Zeidabadi, and Mohammad Reza Tajik, Khatami’s adviser on strategic affairs.
The reason the Israelis are so disapproving of Khatami and the reformists, according to Dr. Mohammad Ali of the Tehran International Studies and Research Institute, is that “they always need a monster to play the role of devourer of the Jews.”
Ever since Israel was created, he says, its propaganda machinery has singled out specific Arab or Muslim leaders to cast in that role. “For years, Gamal Abdel-Nasser was portrayed as the monster who wanted to throw the Jews into the sea and destroy Israel. Then they shifted to Hafez Assad … though he never said anything they could quote to support the image. Yasser Arafat, Hizbullah, Imam Khomeini and Saddam Hussein had their turns, and today it is Iran’s, regardless who is in power.”
If Iran were to establish normal relations with Washington, and support the pursuit of peace, Sadek argues, Israel could not depict itself as facing an existential threat. “It needs an Iran that is a rogue in the new world order, and which rejects peace. An Iran which opens its arms to (Islamic Jihad leader) Ramadan Shallah and (PFLP-GC chief) Ahmed Jibril is the Iran that Israel wants.”
Thanks to former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s remarks two months ago about nuking Israel, the Jewish state managed to foil efforts that were under way to open a dialogue between the Khatami and Bush administrations. Now, thanks to the visit to Tehran by Palestinian rejectionist leaders, Israel has another chance to thwart the drive by some American legislators and independent figures to open a small breach in the wall separating Iran and America.

_{Ali Nourizadeh, one-time political editor of the Tehran daily Ettelaat, is an Iranian researcher at the London-based Center for Arab-Iranian Studies and the editor of its Arabic-language newsletter Al-Mujes An-Iran. He wrote this commentary for The Daily Star}

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