This four-word phrase has been entering my dreams during the nights and my thoughts during the day, sticking there like a piece of bone stuck between two teeth – and it refuses to move. The recurring phrase has been annoying but also suggestive. On the one hand it is a wordplay, “inlaw” versus “outlaw”. The proper meaning of “inlaw” is a relative – someone related to us, whereas “outlaw” is not so much a stranger as someone evil and rejected. When this wordplay is applied to Israel and Iran, it creates images and ideas of good and evil in the context of political geography. But the wordplay also suggests that, unlike Israel, Iran is outside of legal boundaries.
I have played with the contrast and the double meanings of “inlaw”, which for Israel calls up “home country” and “family”. In current political contexts the juxtaposition of “inlaw and “outlaw” suggests “friendly insider” and “inimical outsider”. Thus “Israel inlaw – Iran outlaw” implies current political realities. “Israel inlaw” suggests the interests of the West, whereas “Iran outlaw” here implies “anti-West” or “enemy of Western civilization”. This is not to imply that Muslim values and outlook are irrelevant or harmful, but merely that they are rooted in and address different meanings out of a cultural world. As a matter of fact, the Islamic Republic of Iran is the first and only country that has made the denial of the Holocaust the centre of its foreign policy. It has done so with competitions using caricatures, with international conferences, with exhibitions, with public announcements and, when an Iranian delegation visited the city of Weimar, it avoided viewing the memorials to the thousands murdered in the Holocaust.
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