Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Nahid Siamdoust and Ori Goldberg
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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While the hostility between Israel and Iran has been plain to see for decades, the recent war was nonetheless seen inside Iran as a “shocking war of betrayal,” academic Nahid Siamdoust tells New Lines’ Faisal Al Yafai on this week’s episode of Global Insights on The Lede.
“If you look at the statements that the [U.S. President Donald] Trump government had made all the way leading up to this, in fact many Iranians were surprised that the Trump government seemed so eager on negotiations [on Iran’s nuclear program]. And then all of a sudden, a day or two before the negotiations were supposed to proceed on Sunday, Israel attacked Friday night. … It’s been a serious whiplash for Iranians,” Siamdoust says.
“There were no well-defined goals for this war, and when you don’t have well-defined goals, you can’t have well-defined achievements.”
Israel and its allies had hoped to capitalize on anti-government movements within the country, which Siamdoust sees as a fundamental misconception. “Yes, they want a more democratic system, but that does not mean that they support the bombardment of their country by foreign forces, that does not mean that they support a criminal Israeli government that has been killing and starving tens of thousands of Palestinians for close to two years,” she adds.
In the long term, however, Siamdoust thinks the status quo cannot continue. “The Islamic Republic either needs to have a drastic rethink of how it governs, or it’s going to be facing more of what it’s already faced in the last decades of more dissent and more uprisings,” she says.
Despite its terrible violence, the conflict was readily accepted by a majority of Israelis, political analyst Ori Goldberg tells Al Yafai from Tel Aviv. “Under [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, a generation of Israelis and their parents, an entire country, grew up on the notion that Iran was Israel’s existential enemy. … So the general thought was that inevitably we will go to war with Iran at some point.”
Indeed, the war galvanized an otherwise fractured society, Goldberg says. “There’s been a sense that Israeli society is fragmenting and nothing unites Jewish Israelis like a good war. It reinvigorates us, gets the blood flowing in the veins, and it gives us a sense of purpose.”
Nevertheless, Goldberg also feels that the status quo is unlikely to continue. “I think Israel is going to start a slow process of political implosion,” he says. “Israel can kill and destroy, but that’s all Israel can do. This war in Iran exposed that very clearly. If the international community, and perhaps an unlikely alliance of the Global North and the Global South, can come together on this and reign Israel in, I don’t think Israel can do anything to resist that.”
Further reading:
“Bombarded by Propaganda, the Iranian People Are Uniting Behind an Anti-War Message” by Nahid Siamdoust
“What Did Israel Achieve With Its 12-Day War Against Iran?” by Ori Goldberg