All right. Good afternoon and welcome, everybody. I'm honoured to present our speaker this afternoon, Dr. Jonathan Leslie,
who received his Ph.D. from Soares, University of London, in politics and international relations.
Jonathan's thesis examines the relationship between Israel and Iran, focusing on Israeli perceptions of Iran as a security threat.
He receives his master's degree in international relations and international econom economics from
johns hopkins school of Advanced International Studies in washington and his bachelor from princeton.
And he the title of his talk today is Fear and Insecurity Competing Narratives of Iran Israel Relationship.
Thank you for coming. Thank you for having me. It's really nice to be here and I'm so excited that all of you turned out today.
You're hearing the first edition of this talk. I got of Dimension, but I just got my Ph.D. like five months ago.
So is is is is new for me.
I'm very excited to share it with you. And as of now, I think three people have read the thesis.
So hopefully that will change. I actually know for my mom read it too, but I don't think my dad did.
But well, I hopefully are going to change that when the book gets published.
So yeah. So I think just in terms of starting off here, it's helpful to sort of explain how I came to this subject.
I think that will also help illuminate why I find it so interesting and what's so unique about it.
My background in sort of Iranian studies begins in my master's program, which I started in 2010.
Prior to that, I had focussed mainly on on Arab Middle East studies.
That was mostly what I worked on in my undergrad, and I spent some time living in abroad in Jordan and Syria, obviously, before the war.
And I happened to start taking Persian language when I started my masters.
Rather than Arabic, I was just looking for a change. And I think that really sparked this this interest in in Iran.
And that interest eventually grew into this thesis.
It also helped that when I graduated from my master's program two years in 12, there was a government sequester and I couldn't find a job.
So, you know, did what anyone does in that situation and go back to school again.
So I started this study of this specific topic and sort of 2013 when I was applying and then I started my my program in 2014.
And I know that feels like ages ago for all of us, but, you know, the world really was a different place back then.
To put it bluntly, I mean, it really didn't feel like a total disaster.
Things seem to be getting better at the time. We were in the midst of, at least in terms of Iran, relationship relationships.
Iran was really re-engaging with the West in that period.
Rouhani had just been elected president in 2013.
We are in the beginning stages of negotiations between Iran and the United States, along with the rest of the the P5 plus one.
And, you know, I don't think Brexit or certainly Trump, we're not part of our sort of political lexicon back then.
I mean, Trump is was just a, you know, a right wing conspiracy theorist back then.
It mostly confined to birtherism. This general populist wave, you know, wasn't a thing that we talked about much at that time.
Certainly, Netanyahu was still was prime minister at that point.
And he was a right wing leader and a far right leader might you might even say.
But he wasn't part of it wasn't thought of as part of a broader populist movement.
That's the sense that I got.
And you know, especially in terms of Iran, you know, the beginnings of the negotiations provided a lot of reasons for optimism.
And I think I felt like it was an interesting subject because even as Iran seemed to be reconciling it,
the West, its tensions with Israel seem to be worsening.
Despite this this optimistic period. There was, of course, a lot of opposition to these negotiations.
Certainly like the Republican Party in the United States, opposed everything that that Obama attempted, including this.
But to me, at least in terms of thinking about an interesting project, it was less obvious,
at least at first glance, why there was such fierce opposition to even the idea of negotiations in Israel.
You know,
Iran was at least ostensibly making a play towards placing strict limits on its on its nuclear program for swearing its attempts to get a bomb.
And I would just add a disclaimer front that I think from a technical standpoint,
it was always unclear to the extent to which Iran was ever fully committed to developing a nuclear weapon despite its nuclear development program.
But in terms of thinking about a potential topic for further research,
the opposition in Israel and certainly the fear of Iran seems outsized to the nature of the threat that they faced.
There wasn't a lot of considerable strategic overlap between Iran and Israel in terms of actual strategic interests.
Iran did support Hezbollah and it made feints towards Palestinian groups in the past,
but was certainly at the time more concerned with its interests in Syria than it was in Israel.
And add to that the fact that Iranian society in this period, 2013, 2014 seemed to be in a much more post-revolutionary phase.
And I think there's a lot of research that was coming out and being done around this period that supported that idea.
Its interest in exporting the Islamic revolution seemed to have waned,
especially with the election of Rouhani sort of indicating a broader willingness to engage with the world.
And this image of Iran in particular, has seemed to clash with the image that was being portrayed by Israelis who were detractors of the deal.
You know, certainly post-revolutionary Iran society was fine and divided.
But the the appetite for war or if not worse, genocide didn't seem to be there.
But the idea of negotiations had really sparked an intense backlash cross from across the political spectrum in Israel.
And there was this real obsession with the idea of an Iranian bomb and the fear of the
possibility of a nuclear conflict had really come to dominate Israeli foreign policy concerns.
And. And even going a step further.
There was widespread agreement, I think,
in Israel that the reconciliation with Iran in the West and its re-entry into the global community represented a really terrible step.
And I think the real irony of this entire situation was that in comparing the two,
Israel was a country that possessed the weapon that it professed to fear.
Even if it didn't admit it. So. A lot of that that into my curiosity is sort of how this disparity and in fear had developed between the two
nations or you know Israel in all its wars and conflict had never actually directly engaged militarily with Iran.
But the way in which Israelis were expressing that fear was also interesting to me.
There is this concern about the continued existence of the country and description of the conflict in real apocalyptic terms.
And I didn't think that there was a real rational explanation for this,
certainly in terms of the casualties that had taken place in previous conflicts.
You know, Israel had done more damage to Iranian interests in Hezbollah and Lebanon than Iran had done to Israel,
either directly or through indirect means. And add to that that in terms of a real strategic comparison, Israel seemed to hold most of the advantages.
So that led me to think about. A project that examined sort of how this came about, how this situation occurred.
And I think, you know, there's a lot to cover.
And I you know, I could talk about this all day, but I'm going to just try to boil it down to sort of three distinct elements.
So I talk a bit about the sort of theoretical foundations for this conflict and the way I approach this subject.
I mean, I go through the history very briefly of the Iranian Israeli relationship,
and then I'll talk a bit at the end about sort of the modern situation and how
this conflict has intensified under under Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister.
So in terms of theoretical foundations, one thing I heard a lot in my research was when I especially when I was in Israel doing field research,
was this oft repeated devotion to realism.
And especially when you talk to academic types in Israel, a lot of thing,
you always hear this sort of refrain that Israel is extremely a very realist country and
that they're just being realistic about the threats that they face and what surrounds them.
And that sort of dictates their response to to strategic concerns.
But especially when you think about it in terms of Iran and I mentioned this just a moment ago.
You know, with the exception of physical size, Israel enjoys a lot of actual military and relative power advantages to Iran.
I mean, it possesses a much more modern and sophisticated military.
It spends more on its military both in absolute and certainly in per capita terms.
And it enjoys the backing of the most powerful military in the world, the United States, whereas Iran has no real patrons.
And as I said before, Israel possesses a nuclear deterrent, even if it's not fully admitted.
Everyone knows that it exists and is there.
So it really begs the question, if this realist element doesn't fully explain why Israel is so fear Iran, then what does?
And in sort of starting my research,
I began to think a lot about the narrative of the conflict and how it's been portrayed by Israeli politicians and political elites.
And I think narrative has become something of a now omnipresent term recently, and you hear it a lot,
especially I sort of oddly from like sort of far right thinkers talk a lot about dominating the narrative these days.
But I sort of got into it more from an academic angle.
And I do think that these things matter and like the political narratives and sort of within that, within political narratives,
foreign policy narratives do dictate the way that, you know, we as individuals but also as polities, think about strategic problems.
So if we're broadly speaking, you know, narratives or stories that political leaders tell,
tell their their citizens to get them to understand the world.
But if we also think about it in that way, it's there's a meaning to this and a message.
And these messages are designed to sort of push support for certain policy objectives.
And if we're saying sort of hypothetically, this is a story about what we've experienced as a people,
where we're going and what we need to do to prepare.
And within political and foreign policy narratives, there's a very specific type of narrative, which is the national security narrative.
And I think these these stories are often portrayed in good and evil terms.
I mean, there's there's the good guys, there's the villains.
And they're always framed in how they the society forms a response to the so-called political other.
But I wanted to think about it, not necessarily in those terms, but more in the difference between historical narratives and threat narratives.
I think there is a distinct difference between the way historical narratives are written normally by academics or other trained historians,
and threat narratives where they, which have a much more political objective historical narrative,
certainly can inform threat narratives and vice versa, but they have different purposes.
The historical narrative, for example, seeks to inform or illuminate and the threat narrative.
Meanwhile, the goal is to inspire some kind of fear or insecurity.
And fear in this case may be a purpose in and of itself.
In that sense, the threat narrative is extremely anti academic or sorry, anti diplomatic and actually,
you know, a good sort of modern example of where this comes into play in a.
Rare instance, I think, of someone admitting to the fact that they think about this is if you're familiar with Ben Rhodes,
who is Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser, he was very involved in crafting the Iran deal under Obama.
And in the aftermath of that, I think right after he left office, he might have been I mean, he was a former fiction writer,
so he didn't really have the formal training in foreign policy that a lot of the people who would have previously had his job would have had.
And, you know, you may have heard they often the Obama administration often referred to the American foreign policy establishment as the blob.
And and Rhodes, I think when he was talking about sort of in the aftermath of the Iran deal,
what inspired what inspired them to or what sort of shaped their their selling of this,
not only to the American people, but to other politicians, was the idea that the narrative on Iran had to change.
And he he said as much openly, which I thought was really I mean, it's unique.
You don't hear that a lot, I think, from political actors and that the U.S. had been trapped in this sort of narrative of animosity with Iran.
And he saw and the Obama administration saw the Rouhani administration as a chance to really shift that into something more more positive.
And that was his goal in selling the deal to, well, not the Republicans,
because they never would have accepted it, but to Democrats and other Obama's Obama's supporters.
And of course, he faced a lot of backlash for this because it was considered misleading to think about it in those terms,
to think only about the narrative. But of course, this was really what ended up shaping how the deal was accepted.
And the idea that Iran had changed that fundamentally changed and that they could be trusted to enact the agreement that they concluded.
So I wanted to think about in this in this project, sort of what shapes the narratives in Israel.
I mean, what shapes the historical narrative of the Iran Israel relationship, but also what shapes the Israeli threat narrative of Iran.
And these are obviously two separate things.
And at some point I think there's a divergence that takes place and that helps explain both
where the conflict originates and how it's come to arrive at the point it currently is that.
So I'll also say as an aside, say that when I started the day itself, as apparently you need to,
if you're at source or any British university, you need to spend a lot of time thinking about political theory.
That's not something you do a lot of in the United States anymore. In politics in particular, you know, it's a very quantitative subject matter now,
and everything needs to be to be measured and, you know, you have to use statistically significant results.
And so this was all relatively new for me as well,
just getting into the idea of thinking about sort of what the what theories are going to shape the way I approach this.
So having not had that real long academic background in that regard, I did what any good entrepreneur does and I just made something up.
So I started by sort of searching around for a for a theory that would help sort of help me understand the basic contours of the conflict.
And I landed on securitisation theory, which is kind of a subset of constructivism,
and I focussed mainly on the work of the Copenhagen School and their,
their innovation was sort of thinking about how issues, political issues in particular become securitised,
meaning moving from this realm of politics where sort of ordinary rules of political procedure,
governance that govern policymaking to this other extraordinary round in which sort of a threat narrative dominates.
And they thought about it really clinical terms and who's the they they define it as the various parts,
as the referent object or the thing that is threatened,
the securitising actor or the person or political actor who's actually doing the securitising of the of the threat and of course, the threat itself.
And I thought this was really relevant for the Iran Israel conflict because you
could see sort of the the means through which Iran became securitised in Israel.
And then obviously it helps that it gives you a language to discuss how this process takes place even in the absence of direct military conflict.
So I started there and as I said, like the world changed quite a bit as I was doing this research and.
I mentioned before sort of the populist wave that took place between 2015 and 2016.
And it got me thinking at that point, I was in the middle of my field research,
which is a perfect time to change your theoretical approach, but also a very typical one, I think, for most PhD students.
And they got me thinking about how how populism might affect this conflict.
I know that's sort of like the thing. It's really in vogue now to just apply populism and everything.
But trust me when I say I did it correctly so.
But yeah, I think one thing that I thought was interesting because I was in Israel when this was when this was taking place.
And as I said, you know, the first discussion of populism was mainly about Brexit and Trump.
And then in in Europe, you know, Le Pen and Viktor Orban and like this, this it was very centred on, you know, the United States and Europe.
But Netanyahu really wasn't part of that discussion, at least initially.
And I thought that actually a lot about the way that he governed Israel could actually be seen through a populist lens.
And actually, before I get into that, let me just say that when I use the word populist, I you know, I think it's overused today,
especially because of the frequency with which, you know, it's discussed both in regular media and academia, I think.
Harold, Harold, I recently read Harold Meyerson called it the sloppiest word in American journalism, which I think is probably accurate.
When I when I talk about populism, I'm talking about a very distinct variety of populism.
And that's defined by John Warner, Moore's version of populism, which he helpfully wrote a book in 2016 called What Is Populism?
And he he defines populism and with sort of three distinct features.
And it's a type of political practice that is involves the wall, one, the moralistic imagination of pop of politics,
two, the fostering of constant crisis, and three, the selective application of law.
And I think all three of these really do fit within Netanyahu as a domestic political leader in Israel.
Certainly the. The level of corruption involved was not quite clear at that time, although now he's he embodies that as well.
And I think since Trump's election, Netanyahu is growing closer to Trump both in style and substance,
which I don't know if necessarily was true before. Before that, the terrorism 16 American election,
but led me to examine the possibility of thinking about how populists not only conduct themselves internally,
but also how they engage in foreign policy.
And I thought that, you know, given these three tendencies, one or more defines them, there might also be an application through securitisation.
And let me to sort of create a hybrid theory that I think really helps explain this conflict well,
that I called populist securitisation so very novel.
But for me, there are three tenants to this and this is obviously the moral imagination of the threat.
So how Israeli leaders construct the Iran threat, not necessarily on straight strategic terms,
but on moral terms, the and then to the creation and perpetuation of a crisis atmosphere.
So something that is not necessarily fact based but activates the emotions of fear and keeps
them keeps them at a high level regardless of what's happening within the conflict itself.
And then third is the the use of the conflict to justify decisions that challenge the conventional norms of government and international procedure.
And I thought that the Iran conflict is really a useful example to see how Netanyahu
used populist tropes not only to discredit critics and promote his own leadership,
but to really vilify Iran and build an international coalition against them.
In the process, he used a number of specific procedures.
He twisted historical visions to fit his own version of events.
He ignored typical rules of conduct to promote and build his his people, which in that I mean, in terms of like the populist people.
So his supporters and really establishes a manichaean struggle in which are, you know,
there it's a very Bush war on terror, if you will, like you're either with us or against us.
So these are sort of the the basic rules that I establish when I approach this issue and thought about it in terms of theoretical terms.
So having sort of discussed probably the theoretical outline,
I think it's useful to go through the history a little bit to get a sense of sort of how this conflict developed and where it came from.
And to do that, I need to start sort of way back with ancient history, since that does form the basis for this conflict.
And really there's two events that if you read any any history on Iran and Israel that always it always begins here.
And that's Cyrus is liberation of the Jews from Babylon 538 BCE and the story of Purim.
So for those of you unfamiliar with the with the latter, the story of Purim involves Queen Esther,
who's a Jewish woman who marries a Persian king but does not reveal to him that he's Jewish.
And when the king's when the king is viceroy, I think of him and plots to murder all the Jews in the Persian Kingdom.
Esther, along with her Uncle Mordechai, attempts to stop him.
She reveals to the king that she is Jewish, and the king subsequently allows the Jewish people to take up arms to defend themselves.
And Heyman and his evil forces are destroyed. And these two story is the liberation of the Jews from Babylon and the Purim story.
Actually inform a lot of what happens in different ways from from the from then on out.
Jews actually have a place in the Persian Empire from from Cyrus's liberation.
Many of them choose to stay with him rather than return today to the Holy Land.
But there's a there's a presence in Iran from that point forward of of the Jewish people.
And I'm actually going to go ahead and just stop from antiquity and skip right
up until 1948 just because it's too much to go through the varying relations.
But other than to say, you know, they retain this presence and there's you know,
they have varying relations with with the various Persian shores up until the modern era.
And really the next stage of this is the founding of the state of Israel in 1948,
presents a major disruption of the Middle East, and particularly for the Shah at that point.
Who was Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last shah, and is faced with a dilemma.
I mean, he's the ruler of a muslim majority country in the Middle East, but he's also an ethnic outlier, is a Persian nation amongst Arabs.
Iran votes against the creation of the Jewish state in the U.N.,
but very soon after begins thinking in terms of involvement, begins an alliance, a relationship with the state of Israel.
And this was actually the brainchild of one of Israel's founding fathers, David Ben-Gurion,
who established the Periphery Alliance, or what was also known as the Alliance of the Periphery,
which was a theory for for Israel that as a tiny state surrounded by Arab populations,
that they could form a not necessarily counterbalancing, but some sort of strategic alliance with the non Arab states in the Middle East.
So this included Iran, Turkey and Ethiopia, which I mean, whether that's in the Middle East or not, is up for debate.
But really, Iran was the the foundational element of this.
And in his overtures to the Persian to the Persian monarch and also in the Shah's response to David Ben-Gurion, they cited these stories,
these biblical stories as the as the inspiration for this ancient relate as for this modern relationship or what it could be.
Eventually, the relationship grew and the alliance strengthened. I think.
Not so much in terms of cultural or even ideological terms, but I think a lot of that was Cold War based, at least at first.
Both nations were allied with the U.S. Meanwhile, the Arabs were moving more towards the Soviets,
and that sort of gave an excuse for the two to form more cooperative engagements, both militarily and economically.
Iran sold Israel oil and in return, Israel provided Iran with sort of technical expertise,
but importantly, they also provided Iran with military expertise.
There was a lot of cross military exchange between Iran and Israel and infamously Israeli operatives who helped train the Shah's secret police,
the SAVAK, which had an impact, I think, on everyday Iranian society.
I mean, this was not necessarily a well publicised relationship, but it was one that was widely known.
There weren't any official diplomatic ties, but they maintained embassies.
It was possible to visit between the two.
And I think as these details leaked out, especially in the run up to the revolution, this helped fuel Khomeini's argument against the Shah.
The revolution actually in 1979 changes, obviously the balance of of well, changes the outlook of Iran towards Israel, no doubt.
But it doesn't necessarily end the relationship. You're probably all familiar with Iran-Contra and the Israeli involvement in
selling weapons to to to the Islamic Republic and to finance its war with Iraq.
I don't really want to get too in the weeds about the details of Iran Contra, which is its its own mass.
But suffice to say, Israel continued receiving oil from Iran during this period,
and only when it was discovered in the late 1980s did the relationship sort of formally end.
But there was another important element to this to this exchange at the time, and that was within Israel.
In the early years following the revolution, there was a sense that the Islamic revolution wasn't representative of the real Iran
and an Israeli academic eventually coin called this this feeling periphery nostalgia.
And there was the idea that within Iran there was going to be some sort of counter-revolution at some point,
and that this Islamic government that had been established was not necessarily representative of of the actual Iran.
So. I think.
The relationship takes a turn in in the 1990s.
And I think this is really when securitisation starts to take place in this conflict.
And if there's a sort of beginning moment for this, a patient zero, if you will.
Labour minister named Efraim Snell begins the the sort of securitisation process with Iran when he gives a speech on the subject in Parliament.
And he's the first one to really define Iran as an existential threat.
And he says that Iran has three things that that define its its danger to Israel, its ideology,
its effort to spread influence regionally and globally, and its desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
And this is the first time that any sort of Israeli official had spoken so directly and so publicly on what made Iran specifically a threat to Israel.
And it was a departure from the late eighties, especially for Rabin, who was prime minister at the time,
who had argued that Iran really did impose anything of a of a threat to Israel and actually was a natural ally.
But this really represented the end of periphery nostalgia in Israel.
It securitised the issue in the sense that it defined, at least for this government,
that Iran was a threat, but it didn't really capture the public attention, the public's attention.
I mean, I think a lot of other politicians and security officials were still more focussed on Arab threats,
in particular in Iraq, and it didn't gain that sort of traction within Israeli society that it would later and over the years,
that following that, there's sort of a steady trickle of news leaks that slowly begin to gain purchase in Israel,
particularly with regard to Iran's nuclear program. But even still,
it's a backwater issue for a very long time that changes sort of in the mid-to-late 2000 with three
things that really bring this from a backwater security issue to the primary challenge that it is today.
And I'm going a little bit longer than I anticipated.
So I'm going to try to speed up a little bit. But the the first of these is in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is elected president of Iran.
And it's interesting because, you know, for those of you who aren't familiar with Ahmadinejad,
he was a sort of a political new newcomer in a lot of ways.
He was Trump before Trump. But in the Iranian version, he had been the mayor of Tehran previously.
He was an IRGC hardliner, but he didn't possess the same sort of political pedigree that had dominated Iranian electoral politics before his arrival.
Certainly he was a reaction to the reformist president who preceded him, Mohammad Khatami.
And but most important for Israel's purposes was just how he conducted himself.
I mean, he was a very bombastic and enthusiastic leader who really revelled in the spotlight and controversy that he created.
He was extremely anti-Semitic. He held this Holocaust denier conference in Iran shortly after he became president,
which included a fellow Louisiana and David Duke, who was a white supremacist figure in the United States.
I'm from New Orleans, so I actually remember when I was a kid, like handing out flyers against David Duke's governor campaign where he won,
he got like 46% of the vote or something, so so in the early 1990s.
So yeah, I think a lot of people since Trump have sort of pointed to that as like a bellwether moment.
But anyway, Ahmadinejad,
he was really the first Iranian elected official that behaved in the way that Israeli politicians expected Iranians to behave.
And he was really a symbol for for Israeli leaders to point to and say, this is the irrational Iran that we've been fighting against.
And also his penchant for for promoting and sort of aggressively pushing Iran's nuclear program was very important as well,
because previous Iranian leaders had had made gestures towards the nuclear program,
but not in the same way Ahmadinejad promoted and boasted about it on the international stage.
It wasn't difficult, therefore, after that to sort of think about Iran as an existential threat.
I mean, he is the perfect image of the person that you don't want to have his finger on the nuclear button.
Whether or not he ever would have if Iran had developed a nuclear weapon is debateable.
But that was really the first moment I think a lot of Israelis started to think critically about what Iran means for that and following that.
The following year is the sort of second major event, and that's the 26th Lebanon War.
And in the summer of 2006, Israel fights this sloppy five week war with with Hezbollah.
And I think I think in most people would say the war ended in a stalemate.
If you go by Israel's definition of its objectives, they probably would consider it a defeat.
I mean, they wanted to root out Hezbollah from southern Lebanon and weren't able to.
But in the post-mortem of that,
there was a real reckoning in Israel about what what had caused their defeat and what it would have prevented them from defeating Hezbollah.
There's also a bit of surprised at how sophisticated Hezbollah was,
and I think a lot of the conclusions pointed towards Iranian sponsorship of Hezbollah as the reason for for Israel's inability to root them out.
And it led to the publication of an influential book by Israeli investigative journalist Ronen Bergman called Israel's Secret War with Iran,
which sold 750,000 copies, I think in Israel, which is a huge number for a small country,
and it really provided some legitimacy to the Iranian threat and pointed directly towards Iran, not only as the the root cause for the defeat in 2006,
but also reframed sort of Israeli military history as this long conflict with or
with Iran that had gone back decades to the founding of the Islamic Republic.
Also significant in this period was the debut of Israel Hayom, which was a free excuse me,
a free newspaper founded by Sheldon Adelson that quickly became the most widely read publication in Israel.
And it was extremely right wing. So this well, I actually, you know, since I am an American quantitative at heart, I did a bit of my research,
did a bit of sort of lexicon analysis or corpus analysis on and try to slide it over here, because actually I should have done this differently.
But you can really see, I mean, at least graphically, where the the press interest in Iran picks up.
And this is just a simple word search within the news bank archives.
This is only the Jerusalem Post is only sort of a long running archive that they have access to.
But yeah, I mean, in 2006 and then beyond is when the Israeli media really starts paying attention to the Iranian threat
and the number of articles spike and this is true both of sort of overall articles and see if this.
Can't know how to go forward here. Yeah.
I don't want to waste time with that, but it's true of opinion articles as well.
And if you look at sort of the usage of terminology that goes alongside Iran,
it also spikes with words like Holocaust and Nazi comparisons really pick up during this period as well.
So the third major event and this is really sort of the crux of the populist part is the election of Netanyahu in 2009.
Iran doesn't necessarily play a huge role in his election campaign.
He does campaign as the security candidate. But once in power, he's quick to define Iran as the primary strategic and security challenge to Israel.
Notably, he does so in English with his first interview as prime minister with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic.
And he lays out sort of this is this this vision of Iran as this omnipresent and omnipotent enemy for Israel.
And it really it really serves a purpose in that.
It establishes, like his his his priorities that he's going to he's going to be tackling Iran more than anything else.
And I think, given what actually followed it, it was helpful in distracting from the the the problems with the Palestinians as well.
So as Prime Minister Netanyahu built on sort of three rhetorical tropes, and this is really where I get into the populist angle of it.
And so if we think about how how he defines the conflict, he does so in very moralistic terms.
He defines Iran is this or he calls them, I think, in that interview, a messianic apocalyptic cult and asks rhetorically,
you know, people say they'll behave like any other nuclear power, but can you take the risk?
Can you assume that it started this Iranian exceptionalism?
But it's Iran as exceptionally evil.
And I think if you're thinking about this in terms of populist politics and this is very useful from from Netanyahu's perspective,
because in a in a moralistic universe, negotiation with the enemy becomes impossible.
There's no way to actually engage with them on a human level because they're morally inferior
and therefore cannot be trusted to live up to anything that they promise in negotiations.
So second the second trope he builds on is the idea of perpetual crisis.
And for Netanyahu, I mean, it's they're the best example of this, I think, is sort of the idea of nuclear timelines.
Iran is always in this world about 6 to 12 months away from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and they have been for about 20 years.
And this idea that, you know, disaster is just around the corner is useful not only from, you know, a strategic element, but also as a as a populist.
It creates this sense of fear in the population and bolsters his leadership credentials.
And I think also you can see that even as negotiations are taking place,
the shifting of the theme that that Iran is not a nuclear threat so much as a terrorist
threat adds to the idea that Iran's going to be dangerous no matter what negotiation,
what conclusion takes place. And finally,
there's sort of the claim to leadership and the idea that the disregarding of norms and procedures and I think for Netanyahu in particular,
his willingness to sort of break the protocols of international relations, I mean, his speech to Congress in 2015 is sort of the perfect example of,
say, accepts and ignores Barack Obama in, you know,
speaking out forcefully against the deal in front of Congress and really defines himself as not just the leader of of Israel on the Israeli interest,
but tries to position himself as a as an international defender of the Jewish people.
And he's standing up to Iran's destabilising elements, not just in the region, but also globally as well.
And so I think it's a lot more I could talk about, but I really do want to get to some questions and answers.
I'll just end with a sort of a brief anecdote.
So in the course of my research, I came to discover a book by an Iranian intellectual named Jalali Ahmed, which I don't know some of you made from.
They may be familiar with this if you follow him at all. He was the author of a book called Kabza Diggy.
So West Talks of Vacation, which sort of formed the one of the intellectual motivations for Khomeini during the Islamic Revolution.
But he actually went on a on a trip to Israel in 1961, and this text they wrote a travelogue for was not widely known, I think, at least in Iran.
I'm not sure it's widely known anywhere. But it he interestingly, on this trip, it was his propaganda trip.
I think he was invited by the Israeli government. But he was really he admired Israeli society, admired what he saw.
And he was really interested in this sort of socialistic, you know, marriage of socialist values and religious principles.
And he actually saw Israel as the ideal religious society, which, I mean, given his role as an intellectual inspiration for the Islamic revolution.
SEMI Ironic.
But he was also extremely concerned about the way Israel approached the Arab population and the fear that they're engendering in their citizens.
And he probably kind of seen it at the time.
But yeah, a lot of the way he he worried about the way that Israel was going about its relationship with the Arabs,
ended up being applied to Iran well after his death.
And it was interesting because I thought this really represented a different path that they could have,
that Israel and Iran could have gone, and that they really did have a lot in common, but they obviously diverged along the way.
And, you know, I conclude my project sort of in 2015, 2016.
So it ends on a well reasonably optimistic note.
I'm not sure how optimistic I am anymore, but I think at least for now.
And well, we'll see what happens next year. So anyway, with that said, open up to questions or.