Iranian political elite and Israel; a study of Iranian political discourse on Israel and Zionism, 1948-2008

This dissertation studies, through a discourse analysis, how the perspectives of several Iranian political thinkers have been shaped towards Israel and Zionism since 1948, and why Israel has constituted an issue in the Iranian foreign policy discourse. This research first discusses the uneasy coexistence between a historical sense of superiority over neighbors and a sense of inferiority caused by a series of humiliations coming from the grat powers in Iran's dealings with the foreign world. It concludes that Israel has become a central feature in Iranian political discourse because all Iranian political thikers shared two fundamental beliefs that Israel was created by the West and that Israel was fundamentally hostile to Arabs. Friendship or hostility with Israel has thus become "instrumentalized" as a tool of policy for Iranians to cultivate or antagonize Western powers while maintain the regional hegemony in the Middle East