"The latest product in the flourishing bash-Israel literature is Iranophobia. The book debunks Israeli and Western anxieties about the Iranian dangers. The author, Prof. Haggai Ram of Ben-Gurion University, argues that Israeli anti-Iran phobias are largely projections of perceived domestic threats to the prevailing Israeli ethnocratic order. In plain language, he holds that Israel has to demonize Iran so as to identify the Islamic Republic with its suppressed minorities in Israel: the Mizrahi and the haredi communities. Iran, on this theory, is the hated "role model" with which these suppressed minorities can be associated: "the production of Iran as a radical external other in Israeli imagination is to be understood in relation to the emergence of ("Iran-like") ethnic and religious internal others that violated the Jewish state's self-image as 'the West.'"

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?id=169540

Bash Israel (and your brain)

By AMNON RUBENSTEIN
24/02/2010

Prestigious university presses have waived all academic criteria.

The latest product in the flourishing bash-Israel literature is Iranophobia. The book debunks Israeli and Western anxieties about the Iranian dangers. The author, Prof. Haggai Ram of Ben-Gurion University, argues that Israeli anti-Iran phobias are largely projections of perceived domestic threats to the prevailing Israeli ethnocratic order. In plain language, he holds that Israel has to demonize Iran so as to identify the Islamic Republic with its suppressed minorities in Israel: the Mizrahi and the haredi communities. Iran, on this theory, is the hated "role model" with which these suppressed minorities can be associated: "the production of Iran as a radical external other in Israeli imagination is to be understood in relation to the emergence of ("Iran-like") ethnic and religious internal others that violated the Jewish state's self-image as 'the West.'"

And these internal others are, of course the haredi and the Mizrahi communities.

As is common in bash-Israel literature, the author adduces no real evidence for these allegations. He relies heavily - surprise, surprise! - on Yossi Sarid and other spokesmen of the Zionist Left who attack the settlers in the occupied territories by comparing them to the Khomeini phenomenon. He also relies on attacks against Shas as supporting his claim that Israel invented Iranophobia in order to respond to its "contamination" by the "haredi-Mizrahi values of Shas."

The launching of this book was accompanied by a longish interview with the author on a CBS coast-to-coast newscast, in which he pooh-poohed the Iranian danger and stated that the real