We Don't Deny the Holocaust, We Do Accept Israel's Rights

We Don't Deny the Holocaust, We Do Accept Israel's Rights

CNN has an interview with an Iranian student in Teheran. His opinions are anecdotal - there's no way of knowing how representative he is - but his description of how the demonstrations are organized is less anecdotal; he tells that they're being organized by a leadership council, and people like himself go when and where the leaders tell them.

The anecdotal part is of course encouraging, were it to be widely accepted:

For about three decades our nation has been humiliated and insulted by this regime. Now Iranians are united again one more time after 1979 Revolution. We are a peaceful nation. We don’t hate anybody. We want to be an active member of the international community. We don’t want to be isolated. Is this much of a demand for a country with more than 2,500 years of civilization? We don’t deny the Holocaust. We do accept Israel’s rights. And actually, we want — we want severe reform on this structure. This structure is not going to be tolerated by the majority of Iranians. We need severe reform, as much as possible.

It occurs to me that if Israelis ever manage to talk to Iranians again, they won't be confronted by the Palestinian narative about how the European Jews colonized the Palestinians land and invented a false history. The Iranians have a long memory, apparently, so we can appeal to the mutual parts of it, which go back a very long time. Cyrus, for example, the Persian emperor who granted the Jews the right to return from Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE: that's quite a while ago, isn't it, and the Palestinian insistence on denying it denies one of his most famous acts, too, doesn't it?

takenfrom : Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations