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June 18th, 2013 
Peter Nolan
Mr Peres was speaking before the surprise election as Iran’s new president of Hassan
Rowhani – a comparatively moderate cleric who has vowed to lower tensions
with the outside world.
Mr Rowhani’s landslide win has bred hope in Western capitals of a diplomatic
thaw after relations were cast into deep freeze during the presidency of
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who raised antagonisms by repeatedly forecasting
Israel’s demise and denying the Holocaust.
Iranian president-elect Hassan Rowhani (AFP/Getty Images)
It has been less warmly received in Israel, where Benjamin Netanyahu, the
prime minister, urged the West to avoid “wishful thinking” over
Iran’s nuclear programme and described Mr Rowhani as a man who “defines
the State of Israel as ‘the great Zionist Satan’ “.
At his first post-election press conference on Monday, Mr Rowhani mentioned
Israel just once – saying it was the only country benefiting from the
sanctions imposed to punish Iran’s nuclear activities. Even calling Israel
by its name marked a departure from Mr Ahmadinejad, who exclusively used the
term “Zionist regime” in reference to the Jewish state.
The prospect of talks between Israel and Iran is less far-fetched than it
seems. The two nations were close regional allies during the reign of the
last Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the pro-western monarch toppled in the
1979 Iranian revolution.
The Islamic theocracy that replaced him refused to recognise Israel and
severed formal ties but there have been periodic covert contacts –
principally during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s when Israeli technicians
are believed to have serviced Iranian war planes.
Interviewed in the president’s official residence in Jerusalem, Mr Peres was
unsparing in his appraisal of the current Iranian regime, led by Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader and pivotal political figure.
“Iran is a menace to the world,” he said. “Why should Iran
menace, tell me? What for? They are the centre of terror, they send arms,
they hang people, they kill people, they provoke terror, they build a
nuclear bomb. And they say that they want to bring an end to Israel.
“It’s the only case today where one nation says they are going to destroy
another nation for no reason. Give me one reason why Iran should attack us.
Nobody is threatening Iran. Iran is the only country that threatens another
people.
“Who is threatening them? What are they worried about? They could have
entered a new world, a new age. They have able people [but] a small group
[says] some irrational things, like a Mahdi that passed away two or three
hundred years ago [sic] is going to come back. To our rational education, it
doesn’t appeal very much.”
Mr Peres mocked the views of Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary, who
recently wrote in The Daily Telegraph that it would not be worth going to
war even if Iran built a nuclear bomb. “I know Jack Straw. He is a fine
gentleman. I wish he would be the foreign minister of Iran and I would
really feel very well,” he said.
U.S. Secretary of State Kerry shaking hands with Israeli President Peres
and Palestinian President Abbas at the King Hussein Convention Centre.
(REUTERS)
Nevertheless, Mr Peres – a three-time former prime minister whose role as
president is mainly ceremonial – appeared to all but rule out the prospect
of a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “I don’t
think this is the policy of Israel,” he said. “The policy of
Israel is to support the line that was taken by President [Barack] Obama and
supported by Europe [of harsh economic sanctions backed by threats of
military action].”
The Israeli head of state – who today hosts an international gathering
including Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev at his annual
president’s conference – also countered arguments that Israel’s interests
would be served by the survival of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in
Syria’s civil war.
“We were never admirers of terror, of dictators, and of bloodshed,”
he said. “[Assad] is a brutal dictator who kills youngsters and
children and innocent people. To tell you that I would like to see dictators
remain and create a bloody situation, no. But I must also admit the
limitations. We cannot go into it. We are not going to intervene.”
Mr Peres, who turns 90 in August, confidently forecast that he would live to
see a conclusive peace deal with the Palestinians based on the 1993 Oslo
Accords – which envisaged a two-state solution and for which he won a Nobel
Prize along with Yitzhak Rabin, the then Israeli prime minister, and Yasser
Arafat, the late Palestinian leader.
Calling Mahmoud Abbas, the current Palestinian leader, Israel’s best-ever
partner for peace, he predicted that Mr Netanyahu’s recently-formed
government – which contains many Right-wingers opposed to a Palestinian
state – would be driven to pursue a peace deal by prevailing realities in
the Middle East.
The government would turn its attention towards the peace process after the
state budget was concluded at the end of next month, he said.
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