Nevertheless, the Foreign Minister’s statement did not stand out in an empty void. In May 2018, an official Bahraini delegation participated in the Giro D’Italia bicycle race, which was held in Israel, and last December an interfaith group of from Bahrain arrived in Israel to promote a dialogue for coexistence and religious tolerance. But, of the events and declarations betweenIsrael and Bahrain in the past year, perhaps the most important was the declaration made by the King of Bahrain in September 2017 at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa condemned the Arab boycott of Israel and announced that Bahraini citizens are now allowed to visit Israel.

In the background of the latest visit of the Israeli delegation to the UNESCO conference, the Israeli media rushed to publish a quote from a “senior Bahraini official” who claimed that “the kingdom will be the first of the Gulf states to establish formal diplomatic relations with Israel”. With this announcement, it appeared that the Israeli excitement over the warming of ties between the two countries had reached a new peak. However, this enthusiasm, like many others in the past, reflects to a great extent more of a wishful thinking than an actual rapprochement. In that case, the foreign minister of Bahrain hastened to shatter the illusion of normalization by issuing an official declaration of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that categorically denied the senior official’s claim.

In light of developments described in the relations between the two countries recently, the question asked is why Bahrain took a step back to the traditional position of the Gulf states reasserting its “commitment to the Arab Peace Initiative.” The key issue for understanding that dualist attitude lies in the level of openness on the one hand, and the sensitivity on the other, which characterizes the relations between Israel and Bahrain, and to a large extent, Israel’s relations with other Arab countries. Bahrain’s unique openness towards Israel stems from a combination of security interests, as well as political and social-religious issues.

First, both Bahrain and Israel are against Iran’s armament in nuclear weapons and supported Trump’s pulling out from the nuclear deal. Following the civil protests that broke out in Bahrain during the Arab Spring (2011), Iran criticized the legitimacy of the Sunni regime in Bahrain and supported the political struggle of the Shiite population in the country. As a small country with about two-thirds of its population being Shiite, Bahrain feels threatened by Iran and could use any ally in its diplomatic efforts against Iran’s nuclearization and a strong coalition in a scenario of military confrontation. The location of the US’ Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain is not coincidental in this context, nor is the recent hesitant rapprochement with Israel.

Beyond the political and security implications of such converging interests, the shared interests and allegedly common enemy had led in general to a less hostile dialog between the countries in the formal channels, as well as between citizens over the social media platforms. Although difficult to measure, the general atmosphere rising from these exchanges seems to shift from the automatically anti-Israel approach to a more focused criticism in the context of the Palestinian issue, despite the diverse circumstances of events. One of the interesting manifestations of that was in the various comments to the Bahraini foreign minister’s tweet about Israel’s right to defend itself. Along with many sympathetic responses, there were also some negative reactions, but most of them called for advocating the same rights for the Palestinian people and did not reflect the usual narrative of delegitimizing Israel.

Second, Bahrain’s interest in promoting interfaith cooperation can also be associated with its growing openness towards Israel. This track has shaped a unique relationship between the two countries. As a regime that is being criticized for representing the minority Sunni community in Bahrain, the king seeks to advance a pluralistic policy to meet with the needs of the various sectarian and religious groups living in the country. Among them is a small Jewish community of about 100 people that emigrated to the region from Baghdad at the beginning of the 20th century. The partnership between the political and religious leadership of Bahrain with the Jewish Wiesenthal Center led to a natural linkage with Israel; however, its importance is manifested in the moderate, tolerant, and multicultural message that the regime wishes to express internally – addressing the various communities at home.

Thirdly, Bahrain is known for its self-confident, active political mentality relative to its regional power. Bahrain was the first country in the Gulf to host an Israeli minister (Yossi Sarid in 1994) and the first country in the region to declare Hezbollah’s military and political arms terrorist organizations. Bahrain regularly appeals to NATO against organizations affiliated with the Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Bahrain represents a moderate pro-Western line that promotes women’s rights and rights for the many expatriates living in the country. Thus, Bahrain is a convenient ally for Israel, both politically and morally. However, Bahrain also has a political responsibility to maintain the fundamentals of the regional policies under which it operates, particularly those of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and therefore it will not rush to establish official diplomatic relations with Israel before the greater powers of the GCC, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates do so.

Carmel Shama-Hacohen, Israel’s ambassador to the OECD and UNESCO, who was supposed to head the Israeli delegation at the conference in Bahrain, said in a radio interview that he would not attend the conference for political and security considerations. These reasons are also indicative of the great sensitivity in these relations as well as the great distance that Israel faces from achieving normalization with the Arab states, even with the moderate and less hostile ones. Eventually, Israel was represented by Deputy Israeli Ambassador to UNESCO and another Israeli diplomat on behalf of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The delegation’s participation is an example of a move that can be interpreted as a rapprochement between the two countries, but the far-reaching announcements voiced in the Israeli media hinder the small and measured steps being taken in this direction. In fact, not only did the report cause uneasiness among the Bahraini government, it also threatened the continued cautious rapprochement between the two countries.

Moran Zaga is a Policy Fellow at the Mitvim Institute and a Research Fellow at the Ezri Center for Persian Gulf Studies, Haifa University.

(originally published in the Jerusalem Post)

הפוסט Are Ties between Israel and Bahrain Warming? הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

But Israel – or the “Little Satan” – plays no less central a role. Thanks to tensions surrounding Iran’s nuclear aspirations and its proxy war involvement in Syria close to Israel’s northern border, for the first time, Iran and Israel’s relationship is showing signs of evolving from a cold war to a hot war.

Despite this, Iranians and Israelis are, surprisingly, communicating with one another more now than they have since the days of the Shah. And it is during this period of geopolitical uncertainty that civil society actors on both sides should buck the trend and encourage and participate in a new narrative of understanding and goodwill.

Every year, at the state ceremony marking Holocaust Memorial Day, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu draws parallels between the murderous plans of the Nazis and the inflammatory rhetoric of the Islamic Republic. And like their premier, most Israelis see Iran as an existential threat.

Iran’s decades-long propagation of Holocaust denial, as well as arming of Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, reinforces this ingrained perception. When Iran test fires ballistic missiles decorated with Hebrew writing that calls for Israel’s destruction, it reaffirms popular opinion on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. According to a poll conducted in early May, 44 percent of Israelis support a unilateral strike in order to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

The prospects of military confrontation between Israel and Iran have increased over Syria. Israel established two red lines on Iran’s entrenchment and transfers of advanced weaponry to Hezbollah, and has responded to Iranian disregard for these red lines with a series of airstrikes on Iranian facilities in Syria. But Israel does not seek an expansion of this conflict, and is using two soft-power tactics in the hopes of forcing Iran’s hand.

The first tactic is diplomacy with Russia. While successfully lobbying the Trump administration to walk away from the JCPOA and reinstitute economic sanctions on Iran, Netanyahu has simultaneously prioritized his relationship with President Vladimir Putin.

Israel doesn’t have much choice. After Russia installed its S-300 air defense systems in Syria, Israel was compelled to develop a de-conflicting mechanism so that its planes could continue to overfly Syrian airspace without interfering with Moscow’s interests. Negotiations between Jerusalem and the Kremlin over an Iranian withdrawal from southern Syria are ongoing and according to reports, received a boost during Trump and Putin’s Helsinki summit and other recent high-level meetings.

The second Israeli strategy – and one that turns more heads – is a direct courtship of the Iranian people. In a series of videos published on YouTube aimed at the Iranian public, Netanyahu describes the travails of the imaginary 15-year old Iranian teen girl Fatehmeh; he longs for the day when Israeli and Iranian national soccer teams can compete against one another, asks Iranians to consider using Israeli agricultural technology to minimize the effects of drought, and congratulates Iranian protesters for questioning the allocution of state funds to military campaigns in the Middle East.

Israel may be executing this new approach in tandem with the U.S., which over the last year has frequently engaged Iranians and the Iranian government with different messages. Israel’s government seems to have accepted the notion that it can pressure Tehran’s ruling class by addressing the Iranian public. The game plan is simple: force the regime to justify its war-mongering policies to its own people, and force Iranians to ask what price they are willing to pay in order to pursue this ideological end-goal, to query whether the call for the destruction of Israel resonates beyond the Iranian leadership and Revolutionary Guards cadre.

No Israeli leader has ever adopted this approach before, and Netanyahu knows full well that he is touching a nerve. The timing is no coincidence. Not only is Tehran under international pressure to rethink its regional agenda, but, domestically, anger over the regime’s disconnected foreign and economic policies is also growing. Slogans such as “Leave Palestine be, think about us [Iran]” and “Palestine, Syria are reasons for our misery” are now commonly used in protests taking place across Iran.

Netanyahu’s message is accurate, but there could not be a worse messenger. Rather than ceding the platform to Netanyahu – an unpopular figure in Iran – Israelis must seize this opportunity and develop their own dialogue with the Iranian people. Similarly, Iranians need to be ready to respond to their Israeli counterparts, and engage in a serious conversation about their vision for the future.

Creating successful mechanisms for Israeli-Iranian dialogue was the central question raised by a group of U.S.-based Israeli and Iranian policy analysts and scholars (including the authors of this piece) in Washington, D.C. in late 2017. While participants agreed that Israeli and Iranian officials would not be conducting direct negotiations to reduce bilateral tensions anytime soon, many felt that the Iran nuclear deal, to which at the time the U.S. was still a signatory, presented an opening for some limited people-to-people dialogue, especially if executed in coordination with Israeli and Iranian diaspora communities. Despite Trump’s withdrawal from the deal, the discussion about how this people-to-people dialogue might develop is as relevant as ever.

Iranians at the meetings explained that, while their countrymen are protesting their government’s adventurism abroad, this should not lead Israelis to assume that anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiments in Iran are merely skin-deep. Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians over the last decades have strengthened negative Iranian attitudes towards the Jewish state. Moderate voices in Iran who recognize that hostility towards Israel does not serve their country’s interests do exist, however they lack clear incentives to advocate for a moderate approach.

Emphasizing cultural bonds between the two peoples won’t bridge political differences between the two governments, but they deserve more attention. As our meetings revealed, there are no shortage of stories from older generations who recall the once warm relationship between Tehran and Jerusalem. In a similar vein, the 2015 Israeli film “Baba Joon” was well-received by Iranian audiences because of its touching depiction of how an immigrant family from Iran retained their Persian identity despite relocating to Israel. Unsurprisingly, many Persian Israelis root for “Team Melli” during the World Cup.

A similar emphasis should be placed on social media initiatives. The 2012 “Israel Loves Iran” and corresponding “Iran Loves Israel” campaigns attracted the support of thousands to an anti-war message and revealed how many Israelis and Iranians refuse to accept their respective government’s worldview. These campaigns were particularly successful in targeting younger audiences, and breaking taboos – particularly in Iran, where until several years ago the media would never refer to Israel by name.

Above all, Israelis and Iranians need to be realistic about what a military conflict would mean and the role their governments play in perpetuating this antagonism. So long as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is in charge, an Iranian U-turn on Israel isn’t in the cards. And it is even less likely that Iran will halt its support for other regional actors, such as Hezbollah, in the years to come. Top-down changes within Israel should not be anticipated either. Rather than wait for political elites to make rational choices, Israeli and Iranian citizens must be the ones to engage one another in dialogue, voice their concerns to their respective leaders, and explore every alternative to war.

The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the JCPOA damaged the ability of third parties to effectively deescalate tensions between Israel and Iran. Russian efforts to establish a buffer zone in Syria should be applauded, but the results may only serve a stopgap before the next chapter of hostilities. Despite this pessimism, the channels of communication have never been more accessible. People-to-people initiatives may not be able to reverse the narrative of conflict that pervades the Israeli-Iranian relationship, but it may thwart a descent into chaos.

Gabriel Mitchell is policy fellow at the Mitvim Institute for Regional Foreign Policies and a PhD candidate at Virginia Tech. Alex Vatanka is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute.

(originally published in Haaretz)

הפוסט Netanyahu Is Actively Courting the Iranian People, but There Could Not Be a Worse Messenger הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.

However, any significant change to the agreement is bound to affect another front: the already strained Israeli-Iranian relationship. Indeed, the current debate around the JCPOA unfolds during the tensest period ever in Israeli-Iranian bilateral relations. On April 20, Hussein Salami, Vice Head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), stated that “hands are on the trigger and missiles are ready […] north and west of Israel are at the intersection of fire.” Directly addressing Israelis, he further stated, “You will not escape. You live in the dragon’s mouth.” On the same day, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded: “We hear the threats from Iran, and the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] and security forces are prepared for every possible Iranian move…we will not shy away from action against those who threaten our security. They will pay a heavy price.” On April 26, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman was even more specific when he suggested that if Iran attacks Tel Aviv, “we will strike Tehran.”

It seems that Israeli forces are indeed on alert. In April, Israel went so far as to cancel the participation of some its war-planes in a joint US exercise in Alaska. Earlier in the month, on April 9, Israel attacked Iranian targets at the Syrian T-4 airbase, killing seven Iranian military advisors. Perhaps as justification for the attack, Israel revealed that an Iranian drone shot down on February 10 within its northeastern border was armed and on an attack mission.

Israel and Iran have viewed each other as a significant threat for decades. However, only recently has this hostility manifested in intentional, direct, and open military exchanges. As the Syrian civil war appears to enter its terminal phase, heightened tensions are partially the result of Israeli concerns over a continuing Iranian military presence in Syria. Seen from Jerusalem, victory for the Syria-Iran-Hezbollah axis will create a “Shia corridor” from Tehran to Israel’s northern border. Israeli strategists see Tehran’s ability to project power so close to Israel’s borders as a significant threat; a “noose of terror around our neck,” in the words of Netanyahu. This led some in Israel to explore the possibility a pre-emptive strike against the Iranian build-up. In short, Israelis are concerned by the possible evolution of Iran’s direct military challenge, which would represent an escalation within the framework of traditional regional power politics.

The reintroduction of a nuclear element into Iranian-Israeli competition could heighten the potential for escalation. If the JCPOA collapses and Iran resumes the military aspects of its nuclear program, the chances of Iranian-Israeli military confrontation will be much higher. Israel’s current political leadership has discussed a possible Iranian nuclear threat in almost apocalyptic terms. Netanyahu and others have interpreted the project through the lens of Jewish history and made repeated references to the Holocaust. Israel’s security establishment, on the other hand, has not shared Netanyahu’s view. According to multiple reports, an alliance of the heads of three services – the military, the foreign intelligence agency (Mossad), and the internal intelligence agency (Shabak) – blocked the prime minister’s plan to attack Iranian nuclear facilities in 2010. Politicians saw a Holocaust in the making, while the top brass sent a less alarmist message.

Now, when the generals look north, they can see an additional, conventional Iranian threat. They are concerned and, as in the case of the T-4 airbase attack, are willing to use force. Unlike the past civil-military rift over Iran’s nuclear project, both Israeli politicians and soldiers are equally concerned about Iran. An Israeli attack on Iran previously was prevented by a lack of a consensus on the nature of the threat. Today’s emerging consensus could lead to war. Though the consensus is focused at present on the immediate Iranian build-up along Israel’s northern border, it could easily expand to include Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. This is especially true if Tehran resumes the military aspects of its nuclear program. Moreover, if a direct confrontation starts, it will be challenging to keep it confined to the Lebanese or Syrian arenas. Netanyahu already stated back in February that Israel could act against Iran, and not just against its allies.

The Israeli internal balance that prevented an attack last time around has been further disrupted: the prime minister’s chair is shaking under the pressure of four separate corruption investigations, and Netanyahu might actually benefit from tension with Iran. It could allow him to deflect the investigations by reminding the Israeli public of his essential role in times of great external danger. Additionally, the security establishment has likely recalculated the costs and the benefits of an attack. It is probably less concerned with American opposition to a confrontation than it was from 2009-2014, particularly with the recent appointments of a hawkish national security advisor and secretary of state. Moreover, the head of the Mossad is perceived, unlike his predecessors, as a close Netanyahu ally. The chief of staff of the military, a traditional check on the prime minister’s more hawkish impulses, is expected to retire on December 31, 2018, thus allowing the prime minister the opportunity to select a new chief that might be more amenable to Netanyahu’s approach.

Regional dynamics might also encourage Israel to act. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states are as concerned as Israel by the prospect of an Iranian military nuclear capability. In an interview to a Saudi paper, Israel’s defense minister hinted on April 26 that Israel is in the process of securing some Arab support for a confrontation with Iran. An Iranian-Israeli war is not a forgone conclusion. Iran must be aware that Israel is far stronger, at least in the Syrian arena. Iran’s main local proxy, Hezbollah, might prefer calm, at least before the May 6 parliamentary elections in Lebanon. Moreover, Netanyahu talks baldly, but a close look at his record shows that he has always been careful in using his country’s big stick.

Finally, the merging of the Iranian conventional and nuclear threats could offer an opportunity, one that comes from Washington. A deal-making president, after all, could conclude that now, with both nuclear and conventional chips on the table, there could be even greater space for a deal. President Donald Trump already has taken the first moves toward an unexpected deal with North Korea; might he attempt to use renewed Israeli concerns to push for a new deal in the Middle East?

Dr. Ehud Eiran is an Assistant Professor at the University of Haifa, Israel, and a Board Member at the Mitvim Institute.

(originally published in the Atlantic Council) 

הפוסט The JCPOA Crisis and Israeli-Iranian Relations הופיע לראשונה ב-Mitvim.