Iran reacts to death of Israel’s founding father
As news of the death of Israeli founding father and prominent politician Shimon Peres broke, Iranian media outlets wasted no time in commenting on his legacy, and their various obituaries tell the story of a long and complex relationship between the two countries.
The passing of Israel’s former prime minister and president on Sept. 28 sparked strong reactions all over the world, and Iran was no exception. At the age of 93, Shimon Peres died at a hospital in Tel Aviv after having suffered a stroke weeks earlier.
As of this writing, no reactions from any Iranian officials have been reported. However, the news of Peres’ death was widely covered in the official news outlets and the rhetoric across the articles and obituaries varied substantially.
An obituary published by Fars News on Sept. 28, "The death of the 'Qana executioner' after a two-week coma," stressed Peres’ support of Israeli settlers in the occupied Palestinian areas along with his military actions including the shelling of a Lebanese village near Qana. It did not mention the Oslo peace process. Fars News is a media outlet with ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Kayhan, a conspicuously hard-line newspaper in Iran that stands in outright opposition to Iran’s current government, published its own obituary Sept. 29, "The Qana executioner and the architect behind the green sedition went to hell." “Green Sedition” — or simply, "the sedition" — is commonly used among political hard-line factions to describe the protests in the aftermath of the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, demonstrations that were harshly suppressed and resulted in many arrests and deaths of protesters.
