What do last week’s Iranian demonstrations mean?

Last Friday marked what could be a key moment in Iran – anti-government demonstrators took a day set aside to protest Israel and the plight of the Palestinians and used it to protest what they now consider to be an illegitimate regime. As the New York Times reported:

[Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] used the annual rally for Jerusalem Day, also known as Quds Day, to deliver a fiery anti-Israeli speech in which he called the Holocaust “a lie” and impugned the West again for its criticisms of Iran’s disputed June 12 presidential election.

But his efforts to recapture the stage were largely drowned out by a tumultuous day of street rallies, in which the three main opposition leaders marched with their followers for the first time in months. Flouting the official government message of support for Palestinian militants, they chanted, “No to Gaza and Lebanon, I will give my life for Iran.” …

When government men shouted “Death to Israel” through loudspeakers, protesters derisively chanted “Death to Russia” in response. Many opposition supporters are angry about Russia’s quick acceptance of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s electoral victory.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center noted the demonstration’s importance in a press release this week:

Rabbi Cooper noted that the Iranian people continue to signal the world they are not in lockstep with Ahmadinejad’s anti- American rants and genocidal threats against Israel. He pointed out a dramatic development last Friday, as Ahmadinejad publicly repeated his Holocaust denial and once again threatened Israel on Quds (Jerusalem) Day. “Thousands of people shouted not ‘Death to America and Israel’ but ‘Death to the Dictator’,” Cooper said, adding that would be “the equivalent to thousands of Germans attending massive Nazi rallies in the 1930s chanting ‘Death to the Fuehrer’. President Obama needs to find ways to openly acknowledge and nurture those forces in Iran who want peace and democracy.”

Iranian experts agreed that the development was significant.

The way demonstrators chanted slogan placing Iranian nationalism and interests above the foreign policy priorities of the regime was “very striking," said Shaul Bakhash, an Iranian-born professor of Middle East history at George Mason University.

There is a “huge amount” of “resentment” among the Iranian people about the money the government spends on Hezbollah and in Gaza in a country with problems at home, said Bakhash.

While demonstrators pressed this theme last week, Bakhash noted that opposition leaders, such as presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi have not yet joined in and explicitly spoken out on the issue of Iranian foreign intervention since the elections. Bakhash speculated that “what we might see” from them is statements stressing that Iranian “internal requirements must take priority” over getting involved in the Arab-Israeli dispute.

Patrick Clawson, an Iran expert and deputy director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said that Ahmadinejad had pulled a “marvelous trick” — by making both the nuclear issue and the Palestinian issue “his issues,” those opposed to him “now hate his stance on those issues.”

“Many Iranians are really, really angry” that the Iranian government “has acted not as a national government but as leaders of the Islamic world,” said Mehdi Khaliji, a senior fellow and Iran experts also at the Washington Institute. “They expect their government to give to the national interest first and then other Muslims,” he said, and after Iran didn’t do anything to prevent a crackdown on Chinese Muslims, it “proved to Iranians” that their govenrment is “not honest about being supporters of Muslims.”

Both Clawson and Khalaji believe that tougher economic sanctions from the world community will work to the benefit of the opposition, showing Iranians the folly of the current regime’s foreign policy. Bakhash said it would be hard to predict whether it would bolster or harm the government’s standing, but said he leaned toward the latter view as well.

One Iranian dissident said he hoped to see “hard sanctions” placed on Iran by the world community.

At Thursday’s “Stand for Freedom from Iranian Threats” rally organized by the Jewish community in Washington, D.C., Amir Abbas Fakhravar, who spent five years in an Iranian prison for writing critically about the government and now is secretary-general of the Confederation of Iranian Students, told JTA that sanctions are only “going to hurt the mullahs’ pockets” and not the Iranian people.

He also questioned how the United States could meet with a government that is considered illegitimate by so many Iranian citizens, and said that if anti-government protestors succeed in toppling the mullahs, he said the new government might not look fondly on a United States government that didn’t back them.

Fakhravar, who said his organization has 4,000 members inside and outside of Iran, did say that he believed many Iranians share his view of Israel: “We want to be friends.”