'Iranophobia' in Israel ...

Via Friday-Lunch-Club

CSM/ here

"...... “We are making them stronger than they are,” says David Menashri, the director of the Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University. “To refer to Iran as an ‘existential threat’ – I refuse to use this term – you give Iran greater credit than they deserve.... What signal does it send to our own people, that the day Iran should have nuclear weapons you should leave the country, because your existence is threatened?”

Dr. Menashri says Israeli politicians should “speak less” about Iran, and not make exaggerated historical comparisons. He points to a conference in 2006, at which then-opposition leader and current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned repeatedly: “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany. And Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs.”

Menashri says the analogy is a mistake. “Because if Ahmadinejad is Hitler, if Nasser was Hitler, Saddam was Hitler, Arafat was Hitler – what can I tell my children about the unique character of the Holocaust? If I want to keep the memory, I am downgrading the historical significance of the Holocaust by repeating that every crazy thing is Hitler.”

Still, for politicians in Israel there are few downsides to demonizing Iran, whose leaders for 31 years have described the Jewish state as a “cancerous tumor” which will one day “vanish from the face of time” – or in one rendering of those remarks, be “wiped from the map.”

“For Israelis, [being] anti-Iran is a consensus. You don’t have to be a neoconservative to wish for the destruction of Iran,” says Haggai Ram, of the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, in an interview in Tel Aviv.

In his recent book “Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession,” Dr. Ram wrote that “there’s something utterly irrational and exceedingly disproportionate in Israeli understandings of the Iranian threat –even if that threat is, in certain respects, very real.”,..... " (more)

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