Iran Scores Breakthrough Meeting With Lawmakers as Diplomatic Thaw Builds

Icebreaker: Iran Foreign Minister Javad Zarif met with a group of Congressional leaders this weekend. Image by getty images
Israel and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee are not alone in seeking to influence Congress’s response to the Obama administration’s unprecedented diplomatic engagement with Iran. On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif met with a delegation of Congress members from both parties for three hours at the home of Iran’s UN Ambassador.
“There were a lot of members present,” said Marshall Breger, a former senior official in the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, who was there. “And they included people normally considered hawkish.”
Breger declined to divulge how many members attended the meeting or their identities. The decision was made, he said, to let each attendee decide what to say — if anything — about his or her own attendance. But he recounted that “the meeting was positive.”
A call to Iran’s UN mission seeking further information about the meeting was not returned.
Zarif’s meeting with the Congress members comes as AIPAC is supporting legislation that would broaden existing economic and commercial sanctions against Iran unless it dismantles its nuclear program. The United States, Israel and other Western countries maintain the program’s aim is to develop nuclear weapons, but Iran denies this.
In a Washington Post opinion piece published on Friday, Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina dismissed the import of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s recent appearance before the UN, his groundbreaking phone call with President Obama and an accompanying initial meeting between Zarif and foreign ministers from countries charged with negotiating a resolution to the bitter dispute.
In a press conference on Friday, Rouhani was upbeat about the foreign ministers’ initial discussion, describing them as “completely different from those in the past.”
But in their opinion piece, Menendez and Graham wrote, “We will be outspoken in our support for furthering sanctions against Iran, requiring countries to again reduce their purchases of Iranian petroleum and imposing further prohibitions on strategic sectors of the Iranian economy.” The House passed a bill last July along the same lines.
Critics of the legislation warn that responding to Iran’s diplomatic opening with legislative threats at this juncture will merely poison the chances of achieving a diplomatic resolution as the talks begin. During their visit to New York, Rouhani and Zarif said they would be offering unspecified moves in those talks to increase international access to Iran’s nuclear operations to boost confidence that they are not being used to develop nuclear weapons. In exchange Iran will be seeking a lifting of international sanctions. The talks will resume in Geneva on October 15.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
2X match on all Passover gifts!
Most Popular
- 1
News A Jewish Republican and Muslim Democrat are suddenly in a tight race for a special seat in Congress
- 2
Fast Forward The NCAA men’s Final Four has 3 Jewish coaches
- 3
Film & TV What Gal Gadot has said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
- 4
Fast Forward Cory Booker proclaims, ‘Hineni’ — I am here — 19 hours into anti-Trump Senate speech
In Case You Missed It
-
News Who would protect New York Jews better? Cuomo and Lander trade attacks on the campaign trail
-
News Rabbis revolt over LGBTQ+ club, exposing fight over queer acceptance at Yeshiva University
-
Opinion In Qatargate fiasco, Netanyahu’s ‘witch hunt’ narrative takes cues from Trump
-
Yiddish די הגדה ווי אַ לעבעדיקער דענקמאָל פֿון אַשכּנזישער פּאָעזיעThe Haggadah as a living monument to Ashkenazi poetry
אַמאָל זענען די פּייטנים, מיסטישע דיכטער־וויזיאָנערן, געווען אויבן־אָן בײַ די פֿראַנצויזישע און דײַטשישע ייִדן.
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.