INSTEX was already dead in the water, but this week it took another blow when the German ambassador tapped to oversee its implementation suddenly resigned. INSTEX, which stands for Instrument Supporting Trade Exchanges, is the financial special purpose vehicle the European Union set up to help facilitate trade with Iran outside the scope of U.S. sanctions.
Bernd Erbel, Germany’s former ambassador to Iran, resigned from his position following the publication of an explosive report from the German tabloid Bild. The article quoted past statements Erbel made about Iran while appearing on an internet radio show hosted by a Holocaust denier.
Erbel’s statements consisted mostly of boilerplate leftist critiques of Israel’s origins. For example, Erbel observed that the Jewish State was founded “at the expense of another people,” i.e., the Palestinians, and that those people lost their homes as a result of Israel’s creation. He went on to say that the Palestinians “are the victims of our [Germany’s] victims.”
Erbel dipped into slightly more troubled waters with other statements, including one in which he called Israel a “foreign body” in the Middle East. He also made several comments about Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel, observing that Hezbollah’s ability to resist the Israeli invasion was an important psychological development for the region because it demonstrated that there are forces capable of opposing Israel militarily. Hezbollah is not considered a terrorist organization in Germany, and its political wing operates openly there.
It’s likely that most of the outrage surrounding Erbel’s interview stems from the show’s host, Ken Jebsen. Bild describes Jebsen as an anti-Semite and conspiracy theorist, which, judging by some of his past comments, is a fair characterization. In 2011, the Jerusalem Post reported on a long, rambling email authored by Jebsen in which he questioned the veracity of the Holocaust, writing, “I know who invented the Holocaust as PR.” He also made comments alluding to a conspiracy theory that posits the September 11, 2001 attack was an inside job, calling the destruction of the Twin Towers a “warm demolition.” Jebsen was fired from his position in public broadcasting shortly after these comments came to light.
The purpose of this post is not to debate whether or not Erbel deserved to lose his job. Both his words and his choices indicate at the very least a strong anti-Israel bias. He’s clearly anti-Zionist, although whether or not he has crossed the line into anti-Semitism would likely depend on one’s interpretations of the term. We’ll never know whether his views would have affected his ability to run INSTEX, but this is a question that ultimately doesn’t require an answer. Erbel is out, and he won’t be coming back.
More interesting than the scandal itself is how certain factions in Israel and Iran have reacted to it, or, more accurately in this case, how they haven’t.
On the surface, the details of this story seem to fit neatly within the paranoid molds of the Israeli right-wing and Iranian hardliner worldviews. Despite their opposing views on virtually every subject, there are two things on which these groups can agree: First, they both despise the Iran Deal. And second, there is always some sort of international conspiracy or cabal working clandestinely to undermine their agenda.
I’ll come back to the first point in a minute, but first, let’s consider how hypothetically each could have exploited the Erbel resignation to score a few cheap political points.
On the Israeli side, right-wing politicians and Iran hawks could have portrayed Erbel-Gate as yet another example of a European politician harboring virulently anti-Israel views. On the Iranian side, hardliners might have interpreted Erbel’s dismissal as a validation of their long-held belief that Israel secretly controls Western Iran policy.
Somewhat surprisingly, however, this is not what happened. This story hasn’t made much of an impact in either Iranian or Israeli media. Other than a few smaller matter-of-fact news items (several different outlets published the same short dispatch in the Persian papers), there hasn’t been much discussion or debate about the incident. It has not produced the levels of scandalous outrage and hysteria-inducing headlines that one might have expected, and prominent politicians have mostly been silent on the matter.
Which brings us back to the Iran Deal. One way to interpret the relative quiet is that both the Israeli right and the Iranian hardliners no longer feel politically threatened by INSTEX as a mechanism for producing the types of economic benefits promised to Iran under the JCPOA. If they did, there would likely be have been a much more vociferous outcry in response to last week’s events. Instead, Europe’s continuous failure to live up to its lofty promises to neutralize American sanctions and provide meaningful sanctions relief has gone on for so long now that the Iranian and Israeli factions that oppose the deal no longer see the value in continuing to highlight its setbacks.
INSTEX will surely receive a new figurehead in the coming weeks who will take up the banner of its implementation. This micro-scandal probably won’t even register as a footnote when the final history of the JCPOA gets written, but it’s precisely this apathy, rather than anger, that signals the JCPOA’s demise may be near.
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