Iran Passes Law Banning Use of Israeli Technology

“When a man schemes against another and kills him treacherously, you shall take him from My very mizbayach to be put to death.”Exodus 21:14 (The Israel Bible™)

Last week, the Iranian parliament passed legislation prohibiting the use of Israeli-made goods and on Tuesday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani approved the law. Fars News Agency reported that the ban includes technology, such as computer hardware and software.

“Based on the first article of the bill, all Iranian bodies are required to use the country’s regional and international capacities to confront the Zionist regime’s measures, especially its warmongering and terrorist moves, siege (of Gaza), settlement construction, displacing the Palestinian people and occupation of countries’ lands, including Golan,” Rapporteur of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Seyed Hossein Naqavi Hosseini told Fars on Saturday.

The new lawn also underlines support for Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital and the Palestinian people. Another article of the plan requires the foreign ministry to pursue the referendum in Judea and Samaria as well.

The new bill also bans transferring the goods produced by the Israeli companies via the Iranian territories as well as the participation of Israeli citizens and firms in the exhibitions held inside Iran.

The Iranian interior, intelligence, foreign and defense ministries as well as the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) and the Judiciary are tasked with enforcing and implementing the law.

“Based on the first article of the bill, all Iranian bodies are required to use the country’s regional and international capacities to confront the Zionist regime’s measures,” an Iranian parliamentary spokesman, Seyed Hossein Naqavi Hosseini, said last week.

Fars reported that according to the new law, any cooperation with “the Zionist regime” is to be considered “equal to enmity towards God and corruption on earth,” and “activities of the Israeli software platforms in Iran and using its hardware and software products are forbidden.”

In March, the Iranian cleric Grand Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi said it would be permissible to use a future vaccine against the coronavirus developed by Israel if “there is no substitute.”

In an interview with Times of Israel about the new law, Saul Singer, co-author of the book “Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle,” the law, if fully implemented, would set Iran back at least half a century, with computers, the internet and smartphones off-limits, exports hobbled and healthcare ravaged. An Iran without “Israel inside,” Singer told The Times of Israel last week, “would make North Korea look advanced and cosmopolitan. Essentially, Iran would go back to the world of 50 years ago, maybe more. It would look like a huge Amish colony in Muslim garb.”

“It’s endless,” Singer added “when considering the impact the Majlis ban on all things Israeli would have. “If you count all the Fortune 500 companies that have critical development centers in Israel — including Siemens, an Iranian favorite, IBM, GE… — there’s not much left. I guess they would have to go back to pen and paper, horses, and home visits by doctors with stethoscopes and World War II-era hospitals.”

If the law is scrupulously enforced, Iranians will be jailed for using Pampers diapers, Teva Pharmaceuticals, Hewlett Packard (HP), Intel products, Motorola products including cell phones, universities in the US, medical technology of which Israel is a leader, USB flash drives, Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP), Mobileye advanced driver-assistance systems, Waze, drip irrigation systems, among many other products and scientific developments. Of course, Israel is also a leader in military technology though with such an aggressively anti-Zionist attitude, it may be that Iran will be introduced to these products in the future.