US sanctions on Iran and the messaging battle

On this week’s The Listening Post: After months of ratcheting rhetoric, the US re-imposes sanctions on Iran. Plus, historical revisionism in Israel’s archives.

‘Sanctions are coming’: Trump, Iran and the messaging battle

President Donald Trump dropped the word on Twitter with a Game of Thrones-inspired tagline: ‘Sanctions Are Coming, November 5th’.

The retaliatory tweet from Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei was no less confrontational, declaring that Trump’s ‘every decision is opposed by the world’.

Back in 2015, when former President Barack Obama signed the multilateral deal designed to monitor and limit Iran’s nuclear programme, few would have predicted that his successor would not only pull out of the agreement but elect to re-impose sanctions.

Tehran has put on a brave face, trying to convince Iranians it can weather the storm and making its own case, moral and political, to a global audience. We examine the messaging battle being waged by both countries.

Contributors

Mohammad Ali Shabani – Iran Pulse editor at Al-Monitor
Trita Parsi – founder, National American Iranian Council
Narges Bajoghli – assistant professor, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies
Barbara Slavin – director, Future of Iran Initiative, Atlantic Council

History suppressed: Censorship in Israel’s archives

Historical documents that would shed further light on Israel’s treatment of Palestinians have, for years, sat under lock and key inside Israel’s State and Military Archives.

Under the pretext of “security” or “privacy”, more than 98 percent of those files are classified under a form of censorship that even the former chief archivist of Israel has criticised.

For Palestinians, it’s part of a wider trend of cultural erasure and historical denial that has gone hand-in-hand with the decades-long theft not just of their land, but of their story.

The Listening Post’s Tariq Nafi reports on the silencing of Palestinian history in Israel’s archives.

Contributors

Sherene Seikaly – associate professor, UC Santa Barbara
Rona Sela – researcher on visual history and lecturer
Mahmoud Yazbak – professor, University of Haifa