Author: Helena

Theo-bureaucracy in action: Israel

And while so many of us are watching the workings of a powerful theobureaucracy so dramatically exposed in Tehran, let’s not forget this…
Israel’s perennial debate over ‘Who is a Jew’ took another nasty turn this week when a judge on the High Rabbinical Court, Rabbi Avraham Sherman, reportedly said that new immigrants to Israel who want to be accepted as Jews according to Orthdox Jewish religious law, “halakha”, are “in the vast majority gentiles who want to convert out of self-interest.”
Sherman also accused the Orthodox rabbis who want to convert these immigrants of suffering from a “false and distorted perspective, a lack of understanding of halakha.”
This was the lead item in a report by Yair Ettinger in today’s Haaretz.
The question of “Who is a Jew” may seem to outsiders to be one for individuals and their congregations to decide. But that’s not so in Israel, a country founded on the idea that people duly recognized to be “Jewish” have a whole range of privileges not accorded to those who aren’t. For example, any person duly recognized as Jewish has the right to immigrate and gain citizenship, no further questions asked.
Important questions of allocation of resources within the state also hang on whether a person is Jewish or not. For example, the “Israel Land Administration” controls over 90% of the land in Israel, and though the country’s High Court has ruled that non-Jewish citizens should have the same rights of access and usage of these lands as Jewish people, in practice the bodies that administer the lands continue to practice systematic discrimination against people, including Israeli citizens, who are not Jewish. Further details available on the Adalah website, including here.
(Moreover, many of those lands and properties are lands that were owned by Palestinians before 1948, from which they were expelled that year. The state of Israel has prevented those Palestinian refugees– now numbering more than six million– from returning to their families’ properties ever since. See “right to immigrate” above.)
So when discussing the question of “Who is a Jew”, Israel’s state and religious authorities are decidedly not talking “only” about a matter of an individual’s conscience, belief, or religious practice. They are talking about significant questions of access to resources and other benefits accorded by the state.
“Duly recognized as Jewish” is thus obviously, in Israel, an important category. But who has the power to grant this “recognition”? This has been a particularly acute issue regarding the half million or so formerly-Soviet immigrants who poured into Israel in the 1990s whose Jewishness was open at the time to significant question.
Ettinger gives us these additional details about the event at which Rabbi Sherman was speaking. It was the Eternal Jewish Family International (EJFI)’s second Jerusalem Conference on Universal Conversion Standards in Intermarriage, that ended Wednesday in Jerusalem:

    Most of the participants were ultra-Orthodox communal rabbis from around the world, many of whom work in outreach programs.
    For three days [at the conference] the state’s conversion programs were attacked by rabbis, including civil servants here – religious court judges (dayanim) and chief municipal rabbis – and by the visiting participants.
    Sherman spoke at the conference at length on the ultra-Orthodox view on hundreds of thousands of Israelis who are not considered Jewish according to halakha. He believes they should not be converted, and certainly not in the special conversion courts set up under the auspices of the Prime Minister’s Office, headed by Rabbi Haim Druckman.
    “There is no logic to telling tens of thousands of goyim [non-Jews] who grew up on heresy, hate of religion, liberalism, communism, socialism, that suddenly they can undergo a revolution deep in their souls. There is no such reality,” said Sherman. His ruling, he said, was based on the writings of the greatest of ultra-Orthodox rabbis, Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv. “A large percentage [of the converts] did not intend on accepting the mitzvot when they accepted conversion,” he said in his address to the conference.
    Rabbi Yosef Sheinin, the chief rabbi of Ashdod, told the conference on Tuesday about immigrants from the former Soviet Union: “When they want to marry, they will do everything possibly to deceive. They are to be assumed to be cheaters.”
    The conference also dealt with fighting Jewish assimilation, but the crisis sparked by Sherman’s annulling the conversions of Rabbi Druckman’s conversion courts took a central role. Druckman is a leading religious-Zionist rabbi.

So it seems there are still a lot of sharp differences between Sherman and the hierarchy he represents, on one side, and the “special conversion courts” set up by the PM’s office, on the other. Even Israel’s High Court has been brought in to try to rule on the dispute.
So long as Israelis want their country to be centrally defined by its status as “a Jewish state”, such disputes seem likely to continue.
My views are that theocracy (and the theobureaucracy that accompanies it) are everywhere enemies of the free exercise of conscience, and that theobureaucratic considerations should never, in any state, be allowed to undermine the important principle of the equality of all citizens under the law.
Israel’s citizens– all of them, including that large minority who are ethnic Palestinians or who for other reasons are not “duly recognized as Jewish”– need to sort out this question among themselves at some point. And preferably in a forum that is quite free of the intervention of powerful theobureaucracies that may not even in any significant sense be considered Israeli.
As a US citizen, I must say I’m still not sure why my tax dollars should go to support a state that practices such a deeply engrained form of theobureaucratically enforced discrimination.

Nathan Brown weighs in on Fateh

    I sent the piece on Fateh that I posted here yesterday to Nathan Brown, a longtime Palestinian-affairs analyst who teaches at George Washington University here in DC, and he was kind enough to send me the following reaction, for publication.
    You should read this in conjunction with the contribution that Mouin Rabbani sent in to the discussion yesterday. It is all, really, one continuing forum so I’m sorry in a way that I’ve broken it up this way, though I wanted to give Nathan’s views due prominence and attention. ~HC.

By Nathan Brown.
I couldn’t agree with you more on the shape that Fatah is in. And you’re absolutely right that I had little to say on the subject in my recent commentary. But that’s not because I don’t see the problem of Fatah decay as important; it’s just because I got tired of saying it. (See “Vain Hope Number 3” in this paper, published in January by the Carnegie Endowment.) )
There are two places where my thinking may be slightly different from yours. First, I think there is—or at least there was—a potentially strong international contribution to Fatah reform. I actually think that the US could have made a difference in 2006 had it delivered the message to Abu Mazin that Fatah revival was a priority. That pressure, plus the shock of losing the election, might have made a difference. I got the impression then that there were middle level cadres in Fatah who were looking for that kind of effort. But it didn’t take place, with the US focusing instead on undermining Hamas right away and then in 2007 on Fayyad and security reform. The result was that Fatah came to resemble—I wrote somewhere else—a group of passengers squabbling over seats at the Captain’s table on the Titanic. I worry that now it might be too late to undertake such an effort.
Second, regarding your idea of an international conference with well-reputed non-partisan Palestinians—this is a promising idea I don’t think I’ve heard recently. But I am not sure I would see it as an alternative to Fatah-Hamas reconciliation. I wonder if such leaders would have the political space to operate unless supported (or at least tacitly accepted) by some kind of national consensus. Without that, there is a strong danger that any progress they made diplomatically would get them sucked in to the same discrediting process that happened with the first Fayyad government. So I am not sure it would work if Fatah and Hamas both set out to undermine it. But it’s an idea that is worth discussing.
—-
Okay, now my response to that:
First, I think it’s incredibly hard to imagine that the US could ever have made a constructive contribution to internal reform inside Fateh, or any other Palestinian movement. At any time at all, given the US’s highly anomalous position as the main backer of Israel in the region and in the Israeli-Palestinian arena. But more especially so during the era of ideological arrogance and know-nothingism known as the Bush presidency. (I.e, including 2006.)
And I’m not sure at all that it would be possible even today, under Obama.
Secondly, you’re right that people of good faith need to do some more brainstorming about the proposal I suggested, that we might, for brevity, call “the Dr. Haidar move.” Its success and relevance would depend on there being evident forward movement in the push for a final peace agreement. And certainly it could not be done in the absence of some form of effective support for it from Hamas and most of the other factions including whatever remains of Fateh.
So it would run in parallel, if you like, with ongoing efforts to resolve the Palestinians’ internal political problems rather than replacing them. (And it could add urgency and a sense of realism to those efforts, if the peacemaking really is moving forward.)
But at least doing the Dr. Haidar move means people don’t all need to get hung up on getting a solid intra-Palestinian reconciliation prior to, and as a precondition for, the peacemaking…

Contested elections, human welfare, world peace

I have two big concerns regarding the situation in Iran. The first is for the wellbeing of the 65 million Iranians and the health and integrity of their society, and the second is for the avoidance of hostilities between my country and theirs.
Regarding the wellbeing of Iranians and the health of their society, it is heart-wrenching to see the violence being deployed there, most of which is, I believe, being used by supporters of Mr. Ahmadinejad. But it is also heart-wrenching to see the depth of the social and fissures within Iranian society that are revealed by the street scenes.
Here in the U.S. we had a deeply contested election back in 2000– one that I still think was “stolen” by the Supreme Court on behalf of George W. Bush… On that occasion, our country became deeply divided, and there were scenes of heated wrangling around those Florida vote-counting halls and courthouses.
But thank G-d neither side was deploying baseej thugs to intimidate and beat up the other side. And finally, after many weeks of that wrangling, the Supreme Court ruled and those of us who wanted a different outcome all went home.
We also had some deep social/political fissures over the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. I remember how lonely it was in the early months of the war, standing on the street corner in Charlottesville, VA, with our little band of pro-peace demonstrators, and getting yelled at by non-trivial numbers of passers-by. But again, no-one was actually beating us up there… And the consensus of national opinion slowly swung around to our viewpoint on the war, which we could witness directly in the gathering amounts of support we got as we stood on the corner week after week after week.
In both those cases, underlying the sharp political differences among our country’s citizens were differences in social outlook that were often equally as sharp, if not sharper.
So how is it now in Iran, and how will it be in the weeks ahead? Can the two sides there– and the heavy-duty political forces that stand behind each of them– find a way to get through their present differences, including by building, as necessary, a new form of internal social compact?
The news from Tehran that Supreme Leader Ali Khamene’i is calling a meeting of all the presidential candidates and that Guardianship Council is ready to undertake a partial recount of the votes suggests that some such resolution may be possible, though the time-frame for it is still extremely unclear.
I deeply hope this comes about– for the sake of Iran’s people, and for the sake of world peace, too. A prolonged and worsening political stand-off in Iran could tempt opportunists in Israel or elsewhere to start suggesting something along the lines of “Great! Now is the time to move in for a swift bout of regime change”, using all kinds of provocateurs or other special-ops type people, or even a bombing of suspected nuclear sites.
I sincerely hope that no such plan is launched. Sure, under some circumstances it might “succeed” in the short run. But then what? We’ve already seen most graphically in Iraq that removing a regime you disagree strongly with is only one, very easy first step… And then, what do you do afterwards?
The same with “taking out” a nuclear facility or two. (An action that would swiftly rebound, of course, against the US forces strung out in very vulnerable positions along the whole Gulf.)
Prolonged political instability and uncertainty in Iran could tempt malevolent outsiders to undertake many different kinds of mischief. But our country needs Iran’s cooperation more than ever right now– in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
Recently, Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett reminded us that Obama has actually been continuing with some of the plans the Bush administration had put in place that were designed to destabilize the Iranian regime from various angles.
In the present circumstances those plans need to be stopped immediately.
Americans and our government should be quite forthright in urging de-escalation of the violence inside Iran. Part of that stance also involves urging Iranians (inasmuch as any of them are listening to us) to work speedily and creatively with each other to find a resolution to their current crisis that is both fair and sustainable. What we should not do is try to “call” their election for them, or otherwise interfere in their affairs.
Also, of course, as a footnote here, our country’s credibility in calling for de-escalation anywhere in the world– but especially in that region– is considerably dented given Washington’s own massive use of violence in the recent past in Iraq and its continuing recourse to violence and escalation in Afghanistan. So maybe we ought to think harder about our government’s behavior, too?

Rabbani comments on the Fateh post

Here are the comments Mouin Rabbani made on what I posted here today:

    On the whole I agree with you – particularly your debunking of the five myths.
    Some additional points:
    – I think a sixth “myth” you could have added is that Abbas is Fatah and Fatah is Abbas. I think people have a tendency to overlook the extent of the separation between Abbas and his entourage on the one hand and Fatah (however defined) on the other. It is all but complete. If previously people could vote for Hamas in PA elections to protest the failures of Fatah, it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say that today a vote for Fatah is a vote against the PA. The top echelons of the PA, the security forces, even to an extent the PLO have been massively de-Fatahised since 2005. I’ve always believed that upon assuming office Abbas saw his main obstacle as not Hamas, but Fatah, and has worked assiduously since to incapacitate (what is left of) it. While there were various compelling reasons for him to seek the political integration of Hamas into the Palestinian political system in 2005-2006, I remain convinced that using it to cut Fatah down to size was one of his primary calculations (this backfired disastrously, of course, but then again has he done anything that hasn’t?).
    – I disagree with you that inviting independents is a viable option. Who selects them? In 1991 they were appointed by the PLO. Today there is no legitimate Palestinian leadership that could fulfill a similar role. I therefore remain convinced that for Palestinians achieving consensus on a new leadership and joint political program remains an absolute priority. This is, I hope, shorthand for the rejuvenation of the PLO. For what it’s worth I am also convinced that reconciliation (particularly between Fatah and Hamas) cannot be achieved so long as Abbas remains in a position of power, and that his removal from office is a precondition for this to succeed.

Thanks for the contribution there. And definitely thanks for adding ‘Myth #6’, a significant addition to the list.
On how a negotiating “team” of political independents might be constituted in the current circumstances, I certainly agree that Dr. Haidar and Co., back in 1991, were named from PLO-Tunis. (Though Arafat never did wholly trust or empower them– or anyone else. Hence, in their case, his interest in the whole Oslo gambit, as devised by… Mahmoud Abbas.) I guess this time around, if one could find honest and smart Palestinian independents who could get enough of a popular mandate just by virtue of who they are and considerable prior coordination with Hamas and all the factions, then to a large degree it would be up to them to continue to build their own mandate from there on…
In several of the decolonization processes the Brits participated in in the 1950s and 1960s this was the approach used… I guess we’d need to think through the issues a bunch more.
But anyway, Mouin, thanks for adding your wisdom in here. And since I trust your judgment so much I feel really good that you apparently agreed with my basic thesis that the crisis inside Fateh is a real problem for everyone involved in the peacemaking venture– including, at this point, Hamas.

Fateh’s woes an obstacle to diplomacy

Many Israelis and their supporters just love to argue that they “have no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side. (And therefore that, with “deep regret”, an Israeli government that wants nothing more to make peace, currently finds itself unable to do so… Cue the violins.)
I have generally given these pleadings short shrift. I mean, if an Israeli government came forward and put a good-faith and reasonable offer to make peace on the table, then there would certainly be a Palestinian party on the other side of the table ready and willing to negotiate.
Now, however, I think there is a non-trivial problem on the other side of the table. And no, at this point this is not mainly– as many people argue– Hamas, with its well-known obduracy on the “three preconditions” that’s the obstacle, but rather Fateh.
(Regarding Hamas, Paul Scham and Osama Abu-Irshaid have a fascinating report, PDF, that came out recently that probes the evident political/diplomatic flexibility that coexists with ideological rigidity in its practice. I too shall be writing about this in the days ahead.)
Fateh’s “problem”, from the peacemaker’s viewpoint, is not its ideological obduracy but rather its now near-total lack of any internal structure or ability to make decisions.
Fateh has never, really, had any ideology beyond a vague general commitment to “national liberation.” And all of that commitment became rapidly wasted away after the majority of the movement’s leaders skipped ahead of the queue of the other waiting Palestinian refugees and “returned”– to Ramallah and Gaza– in 1994. (I’m just now reading Sara Roy’s brilliant 2007 book Failing Peace, in which she describes in exquisite and painful detail how that worked out in post-1994 Gaza.)

Continue reading “Fateh’s woes an obstacle to diplomacy”

Carter in Gaza: Meets Haniyyeh

Here’s the Ma’an version:

    De facto Palestinian Prime Minister Isma’il Haniyeh said on Tuesday he would support any real proposal to establish an independent and sovereign Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with Jerusalem as its capital.
    Haniyeh’s comments came during a joint press conference in Gaza City with former US president Jimmy Carter. “I will exert pressures towards realizing this dream,” said Haniyeh.
    Meanwhile, he said that his government in cooperation with other Palestinian factions to maintain ceasefire, yet border crossing should be opened to guarantee continuation of ceasefire.

On the Shalit issue, one interesting development has been that Dr. Mahmoud Zahhar, the “De facto foreign minister” (as Ma’an would probably put it– I would be more likely to say “foreign minister in the elected Hamas government”), has given an interview directly to Israel Radio on the topic.
Ma’an tells us this:

    Mahmoud Az-Zahhar said in an interview with Radio Israel that Hamas will consider the possibility of delivering the message [from Shalit’s father] to Shalit.
    He said that if Israel is interested in putting an end to the Shalit issue, they have to release Palestinian prisoners especially those demanded by Hamas. He said Israel is less interested in a prisoner swap as much as they are interested in knowing Shalit’s location in order to free him in a military raid.

Carter in Gaza

Jimmy Carter has been in Gaza today, having crossed from Israel through the horrendous concrete processing-point at Erez. He is due to meet with elected Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haneyya of Hamas, and to pass on to him a letter for longtime Israeli POW Gilad Shalit, that he was given by Shalit’s father in Israel.
It’s been a busy trip for the 84-year-old former president. He started in Lebanon where he monitored the (very well-run) June 7 elections. Then he went to Syria, where he met the Syrian president and the overall head of the Hamas movement, Khaled Meshaal. In Israel, he met prime minister Netanyahu, other government leaders, some settlers from the West Bank, and Noam Shalit. In Ramallah he met US-backed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas and the few elected Hamas parliamentarians who are not currently in Israeli prisons on terms of imprisonment without trial…
And now he’s in Gaza.
During the trip Carter is almost certainly following up on the efforts he made last year to help Hamas and the Israelis find a way to– indirectly– negotiate a robust ceasefire along the Gaza front. He has also urged the Palestinians to end the lengthy feud between Hamas and Abbas’s Fateh movement. (The Bush administration, by contrast, did a lot to fuel that feud.)
In Gaza today, Carter has already visited the sites of some of the buildings destroyed by the IDF during the recent war, including the “American International School” in northern Gaza. He denounced the treatment of the Strip’s 1.5 million people, who have been subjected to a tight Israeli siege for the 41 months since Hamas won free and fair Palestinian parliamentary elections in January 2006.
After the latest round of intense fighting came to a halt January 18, Israel– with cooperation from Egypt– tightened the siege yet further, blocking the entry into Gaza even of basic materials needed to rebuild homes.
Carter called for an end to the siege:

    “Tragically, the international community too often ignores the cries for help and the citizens of Palestine are treated more like animals than like human beings,” he said as he toured the war-torn, blockaded Gaza Strip.
    “The starving of 1.5 million human beings of the necessities of life — never before in history has a large community like this been savaged by bombs and missiles and then denied the means to repair itself.”
    … The US and Europe “must try to do all that is necessary to convince Israel and Egypt to allow basic goods into Gaza,” he said. “At same time, there must be no more rockets” from Gaza into Israel.
    “Palestinian statehood cannot come at the expense of Israel’s security, just as Israel’s security cannot come at the expense of Palestinian statehood.”

Carter has been closely concerned with Israeli-Palestinian issues continuously since the time of his presidency. His 2007 book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid was controversial in much of the United States– but it was also a runaway best-seller. With the book and with his many public appearances around it, he opened up considerable new space in the American public discourse in which people could start to think about and discuss the Palestine question in new and much more realistic ways.
(Carter was always at pains to clarify that when he talked about “apartheid” he was referring to the emerging situation in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, not in Israel itself.)
In addition, working with Robert Pastor and other leading staffers at the Atlanta-based Carter Center, the former president has made several very helpful contributions to Israeli-Palestinian peacebuilding. The Carter Center has monitored all the Palestinian elections that have been held under the terms of the 1993 Oslo agreement– including that 2006 parliamentary election, in which Hamas competed for the first time and won 74 of the 128 seats.
In early 2008, Carter and Pastor worked hard, and generally behind the scenes, to help nail down the terms on which Israel and Hamas would enter into a six-month ceasefire along the Gaza front. That ceasefire went into operation June 19, 2008 and led to a near-total end of hostilities between the two sides that lasted until, on November 4. On that day, Israel committed a serious violation by undertaking a big ground operation into Gaza that killed five or six Hamas fighters. (Most Americans were focused on other issues that day.)
The November 4 operation led to a progressive breakdown of the June ceasefire. As the ceasefire’s endpoint approached in December, the parties were unable to reach agreement on renewing it… and that set the stage for Israel’s launch, on December 27, of its big assault against Gaza.
On January 18 Hamas and Israel each, separately, announced a decision to cease military operations against the other. That completely un-negotiated brace of ceasefires is inherently unstable and could lead to a new explosion at any point. Meantime, Israel’s tight maintenance of its siege imposes a harsh and continuing collective punishment on Gaza’s people. Egypt is a junior partner in maintaining the siege– partly because of its responsibilities under the terms of its 1979 peace treaty with Israel, and partly for the Egyptian government’s own reasons.
Untangling all these complex issues– as well as the ever-thorny questions of Israel’s settlements in the West Bank, Jerusalem, the Palestinian refugees, etc– is a big challenge for Sen. George Mitchell’s peacemaking mission. And Mitchell is for political reasons currently quite unable to meet directly with Meshaal, Haneyya, or any other leaders in Hamas, a movement that has a strong following among Palestinians, as has been proven at the ballot box.
Earlier this month I interviewed Meshaal in Damascus. He expressed great readiness to meet with Mitchell, and asked, “Why is Obama ready to deal with Iran without preconditions, but not us?”
He and I both knew that is unlikely to happen in the near future. But at least Mitchell and Obama can benefit from having former President Carter’s eyes, ears, and and considerable talents as a peacemaker brought to bear on the situation.

Ross, moving on– to where?

When a high-level US official dealing with Middle East affairs gets “reassigned”, why I am not surprised that the story gets broken in Israel before any murmur of it emerges in the US media?
Haaretz’s Barak Ravid wrote a couple hours ago (HT: Bill the spouse) that,

    Dennis Ross, who most recently served as a special State Department envoy to Iran, will abruptly be relieved of his duties, sources in Washington told Haaretz. An official announcement is expected in the coming days.
    The Obama administration will announce that Ross has been reassigned to another position in the White House. In his new post, the former Mideast peace envoy under President Bill Clinton will deal primarily with regional issues related to the peace process.

Attentive readers of JWN, e.g. here most recently, should not be surprised to learn that I am, by and large, delighted with this development.
My only concern is the fuzziness over where Ross is heading.
Good that he’s off the Iran case. But is it really true that he will “will deal primarily with regional issues related to the peace process”? H’mm. Only firmly under the leadership and control of presidential peace envoy Sen. George Mitchell, I hope.
Ravid and, guess who, Marty Peretz, are both raising the irrelevant and deceptive question of “Is Ross’s ouster because he’s a Jew?”
No, Barak and Marty, the two reasons it’s good and appropriate that Dennis Ross is being removed (I hope) from any position of importance on Middle East issues are

(Okay, also 3: During 12 years as chief US peace-processor he succeeded only in prolonging the process, not securing the much-needed peace.)
So enough already with this raising the canard of anti-Semitism.
Yes, I know anti-Semitism exists, and can be literally lethal– as, too sadly, it proved to be in Washington DC last week. But that fact does not give everyone of the Jewish faith/nationality a free pass to ward off any criticisms of their actions.
(Last note to Barak Ravid: When you quote “a diplomatic source in Jerusalem” as speculating that “perhaps Ross preferred to work for the National Security Agency, which answers directly to President Barack Obama”, it is very unclear indeed what this source– or you– are referring to. The NSA is a quite technical agency, that under Bush/Cheney listened to my phone calls and everyone else’s that it wanted to. The National Security Council is the body that reports directly to the Prez, though through Gen. Jim Jones. I doubt if he’d want Dennis on his staff, but let’s see.)

The contest that counted in Iran

Millions of Iranians turned out Friday to cast ballots in their presidential “election”. But the real contest there involved only two people: Supreme Guide Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i and former president Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Khamene’i won.
He had apparently decided long before Friday’s vote to throw his weight behind incumbent candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Friday evening he moved quite inappropriately fast to declare Ahmadinejad the winner.
Rafsanjani, who runs a number of well-funded business institutions and has often been accused of large-scale corruption, was backing Mir Husain Mousavi, who was declared a loser.
In the two weeks before the “election”, the candidates were able to engage in robust debate, including during televised sessions that by all accounts got pretty feisty. (I didn’t watch them, but some of my friends who did said that A-N did pretty well in them.) Khamene’i even intervened at one point to urge all the candidates to behave more decorously. But I guess he and the group of revolution-guarding “conservatives” around him became increasingly worried at the signs that Mousavi’s supporters were becoming ever bolder in their campaign activities.
We will probably never know the exact count of the millions of votes cast on Friday. It is possible that A-N won the “election” fair and square, as this recent opinion poll had indicated he would. It is possible he didn’t. But Khamene’i rapidly made clear that he didn’t really care how many voters put their X in which box.
My main prediction now is that Khamene’i and A-N will start some large attacks against the bases of Rafsanjani’s business empire, under the rubric of a “move against corruption.” They may well have been planning this campaign all along, and were hoping to gain a strong popular mandate for it from the presidential “election.”
Well, Khamene’i and A-N do have a lot of support in the country. But the country’s social liberals and that other (quite possibly overlapping) group of people who are participants/beneficiaries in Rafsanjani’s business empire so far seem pretty determined to fight back.
The regime has used a quite unacceptable level of violence to quell the recent demonstrations. Those demonstrations have not, themselves, been wholly nonviolent, though Mousavi has called for his supporters to remain nonviolent and it’s possible some of the green-masked individuals seen tossing rocks at the police have been agents provocateurs.
All that violence should stop.
The whole internal struggle over these issues inside Iran is considerably complicated by the fact that the US government has, even under Obama, been continuing the Bush-initiated program of giving support to dissidents and members of national minorities. That program should stop.
Today’s WaPo has, for once, a generally pretty sensible editorial on Iran. It says,

    [A]s a first step, the Obama administration should take care not to signal more respect for [the “election”‘s] results than they merit. Administration officials are right to be responding cautiously and to let the process play out. But there are principles that the administration could be defending even now, squarely supporting the rule of law and democratic expression in Iran…
    President Obama has said, rightly, … that the West should explore all diplomatic possibilities before setting down a path of tightening sanctions or military action. That will remain true: The United States should be willing to talk about arms control and other areas of national interest with Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and whoever else can speak for the nation’s foreign policy.

For those of us who are Americans, that last point is the main one we should focus on.
Update, 10:44 a.m.: A good Pepe Escobar explanation of what’s happening– from Tehran– is here. He also centers of the importance of the election debates, but says that A-N looked “deranged” in the one against Mousavi.
Added 2:22 p.m.:Very sensible words from the Leveretts: “Ahmadinejad won. Get over it.”
They mention the Mousavi’s “Rafsanjani problem”, and they include this important point:

    Ahmadinejad’s criticism that Mousavi’s reformist supporters, including Khatami, had been willing to suspend Iran’s uranium enrichment program and had won nothing from the West for doing so tapped into popular support for the program — and had the added advantage of being true.

A must-read.