A Gaza genocide sideshow: Watching ‘Lolita’ in Tel Aviv

These days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu takes time from his busy schedule slaughtering Palestinian women, their children, and the rest of their families to send messages of love and solidarity to Iranian women.

The beleaguered war criminal kindly assures them how much he and his entire settler colony support their struggles for liberation.

The messages sound surreal. But they are real.

The international fugitive charged with the crime of genocide – wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity – has even learnt a few words in Persian.

He sports the slogan of “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom) to assure Iranian women he wishes for nothing more than to see them liberated from the yokes of their mandatory hijabs, wearing their jeans and t-shirts and waving the Israeli flag in Azadi square.

But why, at a time when, according to Oxfam, “more women and children are killed in Gaza by Israeli military than any other recent conflict in a single year”, should Israel suddenly care about the fate of Iranian women?

As I write these words, outgoing US President Joe Biden and President-elect Donald Trump are cockfighting over credit for an alleged “ceasefire” they say they brokered between Israel and Hamas, even as Israeli forces continue to slaughter more Palestinians without pause.

Netanyahu, once again, appears to be collaborating with his American allies to stage a false disagreement, using it as a cover for further mass atrocities against innocent Palestinians. What “ceasefire” are they talking about exactly?

And amid this ongoing carnage, Israelis are expressing concern about women’s rights in Iran?

The mere assumption is beyond absurd.

Why would a garrison state, a settler colony, a proxy military base advancing the American and European imperial designs and war machine suddenly care about the fate of Iranian women and whether or not they like to wear their headscarves?

Bizarre – or is it?  

‘Hasbara-modelled propaganda’

In his broadcast messages to Iranian women, the mass murdering Israeli chieftain is now actively aided and abetted by the one and only Azar Nafisi, the author of the fake and fictitious memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran.

In 2003, the book became a global sensation thanks to the concerted efforts of her friend Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy secretary of defence under President George W Bush and to whom the book was dedicated, and other infamous neoconservative operatives.

It was promoted as part of an active Iranophobic and Islamophobic propaganda campaign to demonise Iran and Iranians to justify all military operations against them.

This was the singular achievement of Nafisi: vilifying her own country at a time that would have aided and abetted US and Israeli plots against an entire nation.

She did against Iran what the Iraqi Kanan Makiya and the Lebanese Fouad Ajami did against Iraq and the entire Arab world put together.

Nafisi and her memoir became the Iranian version of the Nayirah testimony, the infamous case of Nayirah al-Sabah, the 15-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, who in October 1990 gave false testimony in US Congress to instigate the US war against Iraq.

When the book was first published, a number of leading Iranian literary scholars wrote scathing critiques of this nasty piece of Hasbara-modelled propaganda.

Chief among them was the leading scholar of Persian literature, Fatemeh Keshavarz, who in 2007 wrote an entire book, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran, dismantling the false and fraudulent claims mentioned in the book. 

Now, more than two decades later, lo and behold, Israelis have decided to turn Reading Lolita in Tehran into a movie.

The film is directed by the veteran Israeli director Eran Riklis.

But far more important than the director is who financed this film: “Follow the money”, as the wise proverb goes.

Equally crucial is timing: at a time when the entire world is aghast and nauseated at the Israeli savagery in Gaza and the rest of Palestine, and as the Israeli army – fully funded and equipped by the US, UK, and Germany – is acting like a mad beast attacking Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, with repeated provocations against Iran, why would Israel turn to Nafisi and how she assembled, as she claims, a few young Iranian women to read Vladimir Nabokov’s pornographic novel with them?

From Tehran to Tel Aviv

Some basic facts: the production of the film version of Reading Lolita in Tehran was funded by an Israeli “state-supported foundation”.

Justifying this blatant act of Israeli state propaganda, the film’s director said: “From the Israeli point of view – a good story is a good story… We come from a place where if you think you have something to tell, you’re going to find the finance for it.” Well, ain’t that cute!

What exactly is this foundation financing a propaganda stunt against Iran? 

We need to dig a little further: “The Yehoshua Rabinovich Foundation for the Arts, Tel Aviv, was founded in 1970…Funds for the Foundation are provided by revenues on its basic capital, budgeting from the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality, and support from the Ministry of Culture and Sport, the Israeli Film Council, Mifal HaPayis [Israel’s government-owned lottery company], and other sources.”

In short, this propaganda piece is now integral to the Israeli intelligence and military campaign against Iran and Iranians.

The way the book and the film are being ticketed now reads straight out of the Hasbara jukebox: “Set in post-revolution Iran as extremism took hold, Nafisi’s book tells the autobiographical story of a fearless teacher who secretly gathered seven of her female students to read forbidden western classics.”

The director of the film continues to wax poetic: “I knew that my approach to storytelling, one of respect, emotion, dignity, love and responsibility, will always win and overcome any obstacles. Azar’s world has now become part of my world and I strongly believe that her story must be told, now more than ever.”

All of this makes perfect sense, especially at a time when Israel is globally recognised for the murderous genocidal machine that it is.

A joint US-Israeli production

As for the lead actor playing Nafisi herself, there could scarcely be a better fit than the one and only Golshifteh Farahani, yet another talentless mannequin whose screen presence is the best argument for the fact that the best of Iranian cinema (directors Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jafar Panahi, among others) opted to dispense with all professional actors and only work with ordinary people in their films.  

Truth, however, can be found elsewhere: during a ceremony praising the status of women, Soha Qamarian, a University of Tehran student wearing a headscarf, delivered a bold and brilliant speech against mandatory hijab right in front of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and his daughter, interrupted only by the enthusiastic applause from the audience.

With perfect poise, patience, and eloquent diction, Qamarian complained that university security forces abuse female students because of their hijabs while sexual harassment on the university campus is rampant and tolerated.

She further criticised the denial of continued employment and opportunity to pregnant women. She spoke of glass ceilings built around the professional progress of women. She spoke of gender imbalance among the faculty and administration. 

In no uncertain terms, she warned the president that women would have no choice but to leave Iran if they had professional aspirations. The camera would regularly cut to the president taking notes, his daughter joining scores of others in the audience applauding Qamarian.  

Does a young woman like Qamarian, her friends and classmates, their parents and teachers, and millions of others like them need Nafisi for their courage and convictions?

Has anyone in Washington, DC, where Nafisi is enjoying the fruits of her bestselling fiction, even heard of Qamarian and countless other Iranian women boldly fighting for their rights or pouring into the streets to demand their liberties? 

But these American operatives have all heard of Nafisi and own a copy of Reading Lolita in Tehran.  

Such con artists have placed themselves at the service of Zionist propaganda to invade and destroy Iran on the model of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen so that the Israeli settler colony can succeed in turning the entire region around it into a scorched earth with only Israel standing tall as “a villa in a jungle”, as one of their violent kingpins once put it.   

That magnificent jungle, however, will grow only stronger as those villas see their foundations crumble.