Israeli Press
Bar'el reads Iran's security shake-up as a fight over succession
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The Newsdesk gathers reporting from wire services and primary sources and rewrites every story in-house before publication. How our journalism is made →
Iran replaced the secretary of its Supreme National Security Council this week, five months after appointing him: Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr is out, Mohsen Rezaei is in. In the Israeli daily Haaretz, the Middle East analyst Zvi Bar'el argues the move is less about negotiating tactics than about who runs Iran the day after.
Zolghadr was installed after Israel assassinated Ali Larijani in March, and was read in Israel and the West as a Revolutionary Guard watchdog over the negotiators. In fact, Bar'el writes, citing Iranian media, he had lined up behind the negotiating bloc of parliament speaker Ghalibaf, President Pezeshkian and Foreign Minister Araghchi, against the hardliners.
What changed, in his telling, is the arbiter. Ali Khamenei no longer commands the authority to impose a decision, his son Mojtaba is absent from the stage, and policy now emerges from collective bargaining while every faction recruits allies with an eye on the succession. Zolghadr leaves with a consolation post: adviser to Mojtaba Khamenei.
Rezaei, 72, a former Revolutionary Guards commander with an economics doctorate and four failed presidential runs, inherits the trap Bar'el says holds Tehran and Washington alike. The closed Strait of Hormuz is Iran's last lever and the noose on its own economy: reopening it could bring in some four billion dollars a month, and would also spend the only card Iran holds.
Economic war alone will not break the regime, Bar'el concludes — Saddam's Iraq, the Taliban and Cuba all outlasted their sanctions, and Iran has spent decades building the workarounds.
