many of iran's top religious political
and military leaders
joined for the funeral of the country's
top nuclear
scientists today believed to be the
father of the
islamic republic's military nuclear
program
molson vanquishade was assassinated last
week in a hell of gunfire and explosives
iran has blamed israel and an exiled
iranian group
the government in tehran has said that
it will seek revenge
for farizade's death in due
time iran says it will not be provoked
into
retaliating but can the regime in tehran
strike back
on an equal level analysts say it's
very very unlikely but i think that iran
has not the capability
to answer proportionally to this act
like this the same happened with hassam
suleimani killings it was very difficult
for iran to kill a u.s general and this
time is very difficult for iran to kill
israeli representative of the israeli
nuclear
military program so it's very difficult
to answer at the same level
so they will try maybe to answer
another way but the timing once again
is not the best time and for more now
i'm joined by trinida parsi he's
executive
vice president of the quincy institute
for responsible
state craft it's good to see you again
trade i i want to just throw this to you
um iran says that the the murder weapon
or murder technology
that was used was made in israel
so how realistic is a retaliation
by iran against israel how realistic
is that at this point
as the previous analyst mentioned the
iranians most likely do not have the
capacity of being able to
uh respond proportionately meaning that
they would target
uh an israeli nuclear scientist inside
of israel for instance
the broader problem though is that any
retaliation by iran
proportionate or not proportionate
iranians would have great difficulty
doing something that would not
escalate into a broader conflict and
it's quite clear that for the last two
three years the iranian has been very
careful
not to give the trump administration or
the netanyahu government
a pretext for a broader war but
it does not mean that they cannot
retaliate in indirect ways and we've
seen that in the past that the iranians
have found
asymmetric ways of exacting a price on
israel when it does assassinate
iranian scientists or conducts other
types of attacks against iran
i'm wondering what this assassination
means for
u.s president-elect joe biden's hopes of
reviving the iran
nuclear deal
it certainly is not helpful and in fact
uh the consensus is increasingly that
this is something that the netanyahu
government did
precisely because it wanted to undermine
netanyahu
biden's ability to be able to re-enter
the nuclear deal and restart
negotiations with iran
i think it's important for the viewers
to keep in mind that at the end of the
day
the real worry that netanyahu has is not
that iran would have a pathway to a
nuclear weapon
it's that iran would have a pathway to
washington and that's what this
assassination is aimed at preventing
and what about the role of
israel in this there there has been talk
over the weekend
by some analysts saying that israel
maybe
forced this assassination in order to
force the hand
of the next president joe biden
how do you see that yeah i believe
certainly i mean the the israelis are
trying to create as many obstacles as
possible for the
administration to be able to restart
negotiations with iran
and we have seen in the past that
assassinations of this kind tended to
take place
at sensitive moments where there was a
likelihood of some form of a diplomatic
breakthrough
they did not happen at moments in which
an assassination of this kind would have
really set back
the nuclear program and i think another
aspect that comes through all of this is
that
it's very unlikely that the trump
administration was not
either giving a green light or some
support for this but netanyahu must also
have calculated
that biden does not have the political
will to
punish netanyahu for sabotaging his
prospects for diplomacy
that's a perception that danielle seems
to have only buy they can change that
perception
yeah it's interesting the perception is
is key here
what about tehran um waiting out
and holding its tongue and waiting until
joe biden
is the us president do you think that
the
the will the force of will is in tehran
to wait until january 20th
uh it's going to be tremendously
difficult because from their perspective
they've already shown a tremendous
amount of restraint in regards to other
attacks that already have taken place in
iran
most likely conducted by the israelis so
you can definitely sense that there's an
increased
anger there in which the argument of
those who are
arguing against restraint is that it's
precisely because of iran's restraint
that these attacks have continued
restraint has begotten more
assassinations
whereas if the iranians were to respond
really harshly to this
uh the the calculation in israel would
be changing but the problem is if they
do that
then the region would likely be at the
brink of war
trita parsi with the quincy institute
for responsible
statecraft trendy it's good to see you
again we appreciate your time and your
insights tonight thank you
thank you so much for having me