Iran and Israel are not on the brink of warfare and should focus on their own domestic issues, an author said Monday.
Meir Javedanfar, an Israeli-Iranian Middle-East analyst, discussed the Israeli-Iranian conflict and the factors that influence Middle Eastern attitudes toward nuclear weapons in a presentation titled “Iran and Israel: Heading for War?” at the Kenmore Conference Room before about 60 attendees.
Javedanfar, author of “The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran,” prefaced his lecture by saying that he was going to look at the situation from both perspectives.
“I am 100 percent Iranian and 100 percent Israeli,” he said.
He compared the conflict to a “Rubik’s cube,” explaining that there was no direct solution to the Middle Eastern clash.
He then described the impact of Israel’s nuclear umbrella by sharing an anecdote in which an Iranian childhood friend told his mother that Israel would never drop a bomb on Tehran because Javedanfar, an Israeli, lived nearby, and Israel would not strike one of its own.
Although Israelis have nuclear weapons, they are fearful of the possibility of Iranian possession, he said.
However, he suggested that Israeli politicians should not single-mindedly focus on exterior threats, such as the West Bank Settlement, but rather deal with poverty and substandard living conditions within their own borders.
He held up a newspaper with the headline, “530, 280,” which he said is the number of Israeli children who went to sleep hungry on the eve of Rosh Hashanah.
“Aren’t these people Israeli too?” he asked the audience.
Moving on to Iran, Javedanfar spoke about the unpopularity of President Ahmadinejad, who is widely criticized in the West for his assertion that the Holocaust is a myth, he said.
Javedanfar said that the president has stopped giving speeches in Iran because Iranians don’t attend them, which results in embarrassment for the president.
“One day, if this regime falls, you can track back the biggest reason to being the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on June 12, 2009,” he said.
He spoke about Iran’s regional alliance building policies, which include its recent pledge of $100 million to Pakistan and its implementation of health and education systems for the poor in Lebanon, in countries where Ahmadinejad enjoys the popularity he does not experience in his own country.
He warned audience members to safeguard their data against potential cyber attacks following the attack on an Iranian nuclear plant.
“I seriously advise everybody here to back up their data more and more, because there could be a cyber war starting on both sides,” he said.
Attendees said they appreciated Javedanfar’s unbiased presentation of the Israeli-Iranian conflict.
“It was hard to tell where his loyalties lie, with Iranians or Israelis,” said College of Arts and Sciences graduate student Brett Sidelinger.
“He really has both opinions at heart,” said College of General Studies freshman Jade Cass. “It was a very unique perspective and it made it more valid.”
“The biggest shock I had was how little support Mahmoud Ahmadinejad enjoys in his own country and it’s probably very similar to the support Bush had in America at the end of his administration,” said CAS junior Anthony Cirino.
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