Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

We noted last week that Israel is drawing predictable and obvious conclusions from the nuclear sabre-rattling by North Korea.  Now, in the past week, there seems to have been a concerted effort by Israel to re-establish the credibility of a unilateral Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear programme.

Last week we drew attention, inter alia, to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s comments on 4 April, when he said: “Today it is more clear than ever before that we simply cannot allow a situation in which a regime that calls for our annihilation obtains the weapons of annihilation.  This must be prevented at all costs.”

There have been two important interventions on the same subject in the past week.  On 16 April Israel’s Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon told an Air Force gathering that Iran was unimpressed by sanctions, that Iran’s nuclear programme was “the most significant” threat not only to Israel but to the entire Middle East and the modern world, and that Israel must prepare to strike against Iran on its own.

The second intervention was from Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, who said: “The IDF has the capability of attacking the nuclear installations [in Iran] by itself.”

Then, also on 16 April, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee adopted a resolution in which it reaffirmed “the United States support for Israel’s right to self-defence”.  It urged that “if Israel is compelled to take military action in self-defence, the United States will stand with Israel and provide diplomatic, military, and economic support in its defence of its territory, people, and existence”.  It also stated that it is US policy to halt Iran’s nuclear programme.

NOTE: Discussing the future of relations with Cairo, Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast admitted on 14 April that Iran needed to be patient.  He said: “It must be considered that the situation in Egypt is not fully stable and the country cannot be controlled and managed.  The people of Egypt are seeking to create a situation in which their country can be ruled democratically…If we want Iranian-Egyptian relations to be official and reach the desired level – which the people of the two countries expect – we have to wait, and this is natural.”

The trouble for Iran is that the barriers to a full rapprochement with Egypt are deeper than Mehmanparast suggests.  It is not just the lack of political stability that is holding back a reconciliation.  There are six main impediments to an Iran-Egypt rapprochement.  They are:

1.  History.  Egypt gave asylum to Iran’s Shah Reza Pahlavi after he was deposed in the 1979 revolution, and he is buried in Cairo.  Iran reciprocated by naming a street after the Islamist who assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981. 

2.  The opposition of Egypt’s Sunni seat of learning, Al-Azhar.  When Ahmadinejad visited Egypt in February, the imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmed al-Tayyeb, issued a statement opposing the “spread of Shiism in Sunni lands”.

3.  The presence of a strong salafist tendency in Egypt.  The salafist are strongly opposed to the ‘evils’ of Shiism.

4.  The alliance between Egypt and the United States, which although strained since the coming to power of the Muslim Brotherhood remains important to Cairo because of the $1.3bn in annual aid it entails.

5.  The strong opposition of the Sunni Gulf Arab states to any rapprochement between Egypt and Iran.

6.  Finally there is Syria, over which Egypt and Iran find themselves on opposing sides.

Iran, of course, knows all this, which is why, under the ayatollahs, it has always felt the need to be the most vociferous supporter of Palestinian rights and the most anti-Israel state in the Middle East.  This has been seen as the way to overcome the disadvantages of being non-Arab and Shia, and to court popularity on the Arab street, if not in the chancelleries.  This has been one of the few constants in the Middle East since the outbreak of the Arab Spring in December 2010.