John F. Kennedy once said, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” JFK was speaking about Latin America in the wake of the Cuban revolution in the early 1960s, but the broader point he made – that disallowing non-violent political and social change ultimately undermines those who seek to prevent it – still stands today. Roger Cohen’s indefatigable reporting from Tehran over the last several days makes it clear that no matter how the current unrest pans out, the regime’s days are numbered: “All the fudge that allowed a modern society to coexist with a society inspired by an imam occulted in the 9th century has been swept away, leaving two Irans at war.”

Up until now, the regime has been able to survive so long because of its relative flexibility. Khomeini continued the slaughter of the Iran-Iraq war for six years beyond the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Iran, but agreed to a UN cease-fire after becoming convinced the United States was about to intervene more directly after the accidental shoot-down of an Iranian airliner in 1988. He ruefully called his acceptance of the cease-fire resolution “more deadly than taking poison.” His successor, the current Supreme Leader Khamenei, allowed a reformist, Mohammad Khatami, to win the presidency twice, but undermined his efforts toward liberalizing Iranian society and politics whenever he and the conservative establishment could.

Apparently Khamenei couldn’t face the prospect of another reformer winning power, no matter how moderate and committed to the system, and decided to fix the election. But he didn’t count on hundreds of thousands of average Iranians wanting their votes to mean something and demonstrating in the streets of major cities to make sure they did. Even then, though, the regime could have showed flexibility and maintained the general contours of the system. After all, the main challenger, Mir Hussein Mousavi, has solid credentials as a member of that system, and the framed his objections to the rigged vote in the context of fidelity to the 1979 revolution’s ideals.

Mousavi’s framing and the recent bloody crackdown have probably done deep damage to the regime’s legitimacy. Khamenei prevented President Khatami from making any real changes to the Iranian system when he was in power from 1997 to 2005, and prevented Mousavi, a committed disciple of the revolution, from winning the presidency by the system’s own rules. And when Iranians then protested peacefully and framed their demands in accordance with the system, Khamenei denounced them and then sicced the state’s security forces on them. What the Supreme Leader and his allies have done is made peaceful change within the regime’s system impossible. Read more

Our guest blogger is Brian Katulis, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

As I’ve written on the Center’s website and posted on Foreign Policy.com, I’ve been on a trip to Israel, the West Bank, and Jerusalem for the past week and a half, and yesterday afternoon I had a dizzying experience in the span of a few hours. The second part of my trip is with a delegation organized by Academic Exchange, in partnership with the Milken Institute and the Yitzhak Rabin Center, and we have had an excellent set of meetings.

Thursday afternoon, we went from the controversial Israeli settlement Ofra to meetings just a few miles down the road in Ramallah with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Saeb Erekat, a chief Palestinian negotiator for years. Then we headed back into Jerusalem, where we got stuck in traffic due to heavy security for a gay pride parade, which, unlike previous years, fortunately was held without any violence.

Our afternoon started out in Ofra with a discussion by Israel Harel, a leading Israeli settler and columnist in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. With about 3,000 residents, Ofra is a settlement northeast of Ramallah in the West Bank — it was one of the first settlements set up by the Gush Emunim movement in the 1970s. It is currently at the center of a legal and political battle inside of Israel over certain parcels of land and housing units — at a time when the United States and other countries have placed a higher priority on the settlement question.

This article outlines the issues at play in the most recent legal case involving Ofra. Israel’s Ministry of Justice confirmed land that the World Zionist Organization, acting as an agent for the Israeli government, leased to a family in Ofra, even though the leased land was actually Palestinian private property. The case is still pending in Israel’s Supreme Court, and it has several complicated wrinkles, like many other similar cases. And this is just one case — some Israeli groups have raised broader questions about the legality of other parts of Ofra, which is distant from the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel and is connected to Jerusalem by a road built for Israeli settlers.

As Harel gave us a tour of the settlement, he had some strong words to say about the Obama administration’s recent push to get a settlement freeze, which he strongly opposed (no big surprise there). Harel said he was worried that Obama was spending so much time learning the names of things like a small settlement outpost that Obama mentioned in a recent public statement. In his view, with the situation in Afghanistan and threats like a nuclear Pakistan, he thought the American president’s focus on small settlement outposts was misplaced. Read more