Iran’s Foreign Minister Discusses Twitter, Netanyahu and Kerry on State Television

While restrictions on the use of social networks by Iranians remain in place, the country’s new foreign minister openly discussed the “Happy Rosh Hashanah” message he posted on his official Twitter account last month on state television Saturday.

As if to underscore that a segment of Iran’s new leadership is determined to make aggressive use of social networks in public diplomacy, video of the foreign minister’s remarks, with English subtitles, was uploaded to YouTube and promoted on Twitter in a retweet by @HassanRouhani, an account apparently run by the new president’s aides in his name.

In the two-minute interview excerpt, Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif described Iran’s 40,000 Jews as a respected minority, but also took aim at Israelis for “playing the victim.” He also cited approvingly recent criticism of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s belligerent tone on Iran from Roger Cohen, a New York Times Op-Ed columnist.

Near the end of the clip, Mr. Zarif smiled as he described what he called an illustration of how Mr. Netanyahu’s anti-Iranian rhetoric had left him “isolated” at the United Nations General Assembly. Unlike in previous years, Mr. Zarif said, “No one would have accompanied the Israeli delegation if it had walked out of the room” during the address by Iran’s president. “This is why the Israelis didn’t enter the hall in the first place. They did so because they didn’t want to leave in protest alone.”

In a second clip uploaded to the same YouTube channel, Mr. Zarif explained that he writes in English on Twitter because “Persian is a language of poetry. English is a more precise language. You can thus do something with 140 characters. It’s very difficult to say something in Persian with only 140 characters.” He added that he enjoyed the direct interaction with people on Twitter. “I get energy from people, from their kindness,” he said.

Mr. Zarif’s best-known exchange on the social network to date came last month, when he engaged in a conversation about Holocaust denial with Representative Nancy Pelosi’s daughter Christine, whose husband is Jewish.

In another subtitled excerpt from the interview, also posted on a YouTube channel associated with Iran’s foreign ministry and promoted through the president’s Twitter account, Mr. Zarif was asked about his private meeting in New York with Secretary of State John Kerry. He said they had a frank discussion about the “mutual feeling of distrust” that would have to be overcome in any negotiation. “I mean, there was a conversation that for as long as 34 years our two countries have not trusted each other. And this distrust still persists,” Mr. Zarif said.

Pressed as to whether he got the sense that his American counterpart was serious about wanting to negotiate a solution to the impasse over Iran’s nuclear program, Mr. Zarif replied, “My take from Mr. Kerry’s remarks, both in the private meeting and in public meetings, was that at least he would like that this situation in regards to the nuclear case and maybe some other issues will improve and go toward a resolution acceptable by the Islamic Republic.”

Speaking to his interviewer, but perhaps also to the Iranian people, Mr. Zarif added:

The U.S. government is not monolithic, just like U.S. society. From this perspective, it’s very similar to Iranian society, which is a multivoice society too. Even inside the establishment, there may be different viewpoints towards issues. We are not a society in which a decision should be implemented linearly. The same is true about them.

And I feel that inside the U.S. government there are probably figures or tendencies opposing the views of Mr. Kerry and those of Mr. Obama. And we could see part of the impact of this in the remarks made by Mr. Obama after meeting with Netanyahu.

Mr. Zarif followed those remarks with another reference to comments posted on his Twitter account — namely, his criticism of President Obama for hawkish comments he made about Iran while sitting with Mr. Netanyahu, just days after the American president’s historic telephone conversation with Mr. Rouhani.

While Mr. Zarif uses his English-language Twitter account to reach out to the West, his Facebook updates, written in Persian, are clearly directed at a domestic audience. As my colleague Thomas Erdbrink reports from Tehran, on Tuesday Mr. Zarif used Facebook to lash out at the hardline newspaper Kayhan for printing what he called private comments about engagement with the United States and distorting their meaning by taking them out of context.

According to a translation from the American Enterprise Institute’s Iran Tracker, an article in Kayhan contended that Mr. Zarif said during a meeting on Sunday with members of Iran’s Parliament, “Rouhani’s conversation with Obama and my lengthy meeting with John Kerry were improper.” Given his frank account of that meeting on state television the previous day, the self-criticism in Kayhan’s front-page report was strange, to say the least.

The editorial line of Kayhan, whose director is personally appointed by Iran’s ruling cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is usually taken to be a reflection of the leader’s views. In this case, the Iranian-American researcher Reza H. Akbari suggested, the report undermining Mr. Zarif’s United Nations diplomacy could be read as a sign of just the kind of divided opinion in the upper reaches of Iran’s government the foreign minister hinted at in his interview.

In his Facebook update, Mr. Zarif explained that he suffered a severe muscle spasm brought on by stress after seeing his words misquoted on the front page of Kayhan, requiring a visit to the hospital. As Bahman Kalbasi of BBC Persian reported, the foreign minister blamed conservative lawmakers for leaking and distorting his remarks and said he would speak to them only in public from now on as a result.