The Iranian leadership could barely wait to see the back of former president Hassan Rouhani. Officially, the new president, cleric and prosecutor Ebrahim Raisi, was supposed to inaugurated on Thursday but Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei signed the decree appointing him on Tuesday and by Wednesday he was already chairing the cabinet of his predecessor’s ministers, most of whom are not expected to remain in their posts.
Mr Raisi also made his inauguration speech early, speaking of his desire to remove the “oppressive” American sanctions which have crippled Iran’s economy, but vowing that he would “not tie the nation’s standard of living to the will of foreigners.”
Most observers and analysts had expected that over the past six months, between the inauguration of the Biden administration in the United States and the departure of Mr Rouhani, the two countries would have found a way to broker America’s rejoining of the Iran nuclear agreement, with the necessary compromises on the Iranian side blamed on the outgoing president. But both sides have proved tougher than expected.
If anything, Israeli diplomats and intelligence officials have been surprised, pleasantly, by the Biden team. “They’ve been much more responsive to our concerns than we expected,” said one cabinet minister. “They’re really on our side. It’s helped of course that the Iranians have also been intransigent.” By “our side,” the minister meant on the side of the new Israeli government. Benjamin Netanyahu, he said, didn’t have that kind of rapport with Joe Biden.
A western diplomat with the rare resume of extensive experience in both Iran and Israel said that “Iran has seen that, despite the hardships, it can survive the sanctions and it will try and force the Americans to make more concessions. It will take longer for the Americans to rejoin the JCPOA, if at all.”
Meanwhile, the sides are still testing each other. The presidential transition in Tehran is coming after changes of the guard in Jerusalem and Washington. Israel also has a new Mossad chief, David Barnea, while the Iranians, a year and a half since the assassination of Qods Force commander Qassem Soleimani, have yet to reestablish under his successor Esmail Qaani the same level of control and coordination of its regional proxies.
Soleimani’s absence does not mean any weakening of Iran’s resolve to pursue its ambitions in the region; if anything, the way Raisi’s election was engineered is proof of the ailing Supreme Leader’s determination to concentrate power within his own hardline faction in preparation for the succession after his death, and to continue “exporting” the Islamic revolution. But they are finding it increasingly difficult to keep a handle on multiple fronts with the restive Shia militias in Iraq becoming too independent and Lebanon imploding.
droning on
l The drone attack carried out by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ airforce last Thursday on the oil tanker Mercer Street, off the coast of Oman, which killed the British captain and a Romanian seaman, should be seen in the context of this twilight period. The tanker is owned by London-based Israeli businessman Idan Ofer, but it hardly counts as an Israeli target and the IRGC is unlikely to have wanted to drag other countries into its shadow-war with Israel. Especially not Britain, which is also a signatory to the JCPOA.
One senior Israeli official said that the Iranian attack was “just an Iranian attempt to save some face and score PR points with their public after losing the battle at sea,” referring to the secret campaign over the last few years in which Iranian tankers, trying to evade sanctions and ships carrying weapons for Hezbollah, were mysteriously sabotaged.
In recent months Iran has retaliated at least twice with limpet mines against Israeli-owned ships. The last attack was an escalation, which may have gone too far. But the IRGC seem keen to keep up the pressure on Israel and its western allies, as the still unclear incident on Tuesday, during which more ships came under attack in the Gulf, proves.
Iran’s drone capabilities have indeed improved greatly, as could be seen by the way they have been used by the Houthis in Yemen to attack Saudi targets. On Wednesday morning, when rockets were launched from Lebanon towards Kiryat Shmona in the Galilee, the initial fear was that they were a diversion for a possible drone attack. That didn’t happen and the IDF has ascribed the rockets to “Palestinian factions”. But they are either being directed, or allowed to operate, by the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. While it inaugurates its own new president, Iran is continuing to probe Israel’s defences, testing the new Israeli government and American administration. This time round, it risks drawing in Britain as well, whose military chiefs have held a number of conversations with their Israeli counterparts this week.
loosening grip
l The two chief rabbis of Israel, Yitzhak Yossef and David Lau, are deeply unhappy. One of them has even told journalists that he’s considering resigning. There’s no risk of that happening. They both have two years of their ten-year terms left and they’re not going to give up their salaries and exalted positions. Who knows, if one of them goes, perhaps Israelis could even get used to the idea of having just one chief rabbi, instead of the Ashkenazi-Sephardi duopoly. Or perhaps even no chief rabbi. It’s not as if Israel lacks for rabbis.
But a number of moves by the new government threaten to limit their authority. The “kashrut reform” which is part of the new state budget authorised by the government on Monday (it still has to pass in the Knesset) will allow private organisations not beholden to the rabbinate to supervise and award kashrut certificates. One of the Rabbinate Council’s senior members, Safed’s chief rabbi Shmuel Eliahu, even announced “a rebellion” against the reform.
Another of their fiefdoms is under threat now the coalition has succeeded in passing the “Dayanim law,” changing the makeup of the Rabbinical Courts Appointment Committee, adding a third cabinet minister and a female rabbinical advocate to the committee which appoints new members to the Beth Din religious courts, which deal mainly with divorce cases. If that wasn’t bad enough, in a secret ballot on Wednesday the Knesset appointed its own representatives to the committee — two female MKs. For the first time the ultra-Orthodox parties have no members on the committee, leaving the chief rabbis’ faction in a minority.
These developments hardly amount to a revolution. The Charedi community remains a large enough sector of the market for most supermarket chains and food suppliers to choose the rabbinate and other strictly-Orthodox-dominated organisations as their kashrut supervisors, rather than losing its custom. The kashrut reform, if it passes, will help smaller businesses, mainly restaurants and hotels not reliant on Charedi customers, who will be free to work with the more open-minded rabbinical groups. It won’t be enough to break the kashrut cartel.
And neither will the appointments of non-Charedi Orthodox dayanim make a huge change in the regional and national beth dins, which will still be dominated by veteran strictly-Orthodox rabbis who have little understanding of the lives of the men and women who come before them. But the chief rabbis and the Charedi establishment that controls them are worried not just that the tide may be temporarily turning against them. They see a much larger threat to their monopoly on the horizon.
The Olympic success in Tokyo of Ukraine-born gymnast Artem Dolgopyat didn’t just yield Israel’s second-ever gold medal. It also renewed the Israeli media’s focus on the large number of citizens, estimated to be over 400,000, or about five percent of the population, whose Jewish ancestry made them eligible to emigrate to Israel under the Law of Return but wasn’t enough to make them halachically Jewish in the eyes of the rabbinate. As a result, Mr Dolgopyat can win a gold medal for Israel but he can’t get married there.
The new government has yet to propose a civil marriage law but at least four out of its eight parties favour doing so. And if this government gets used to being free of the pressures of the Charedi parties and rolling back the power of the rabbinate, it may even find a way to let those citizens currently classified as “without religion” to get hitched at home. And if they get it, many secular Israelis who don’t feel the need for a rabbi at their wedding will want it as well.
That would be a revolution in the “status quo” that since the days of the British mandate, has only allowed the officially-approved clergy to perform weddings.
