Iran, the Jewish People and Israel, Scott Abramson
August 2, 2024
Contradiction has been a theme in Iran’s relationship with the Jewish people, for nowhere else in the Muslim world have Jews both suffered so grievously and flourished so thoroughly. Nor is the contradictory relationship between Iranians and Jews, heirs to two of the world’s oldest civilizations and among antiquity’s few surviving peoples, merely a thing of the distant past. In 2024, Iran’s government is the Middle East’s most antisemitic, but Iran’s people, according to a 2014 ADL survey, are the region’s least. And while revolutionary Iran is Israel’s most threatening enemy, royal Iran was Israel’s closest regional friend until 1979.
This pendulous 2,500-year-old relationship, swinging between the extremes of cooperation and conflict, is personified in the Hebrew Bible in the contrast between two ancient Iranian leaders: Cyrus, a liberator of the Jews, and Haman, a would-be liquidator of them. It was King Cyrus, founder of the Persian Empire, who inaugurated Iran’s relationship with the Jewish people when he freed them from captivity in Babylon and restored them to the Land of Israel. Whereas Cyrus is the most celebrated non-Jew in the Hebrew Bible, Haman is his mirror image. As chief minister to one of Cyrus’ successors on the Persian throne, Haman plotted the extermination of the empire’s Jewish subjects. In the end, though, Haman himself, not his plan, was executed.
Throughout Iran’s relationship with the Jewish people, which half of this split personality has been dominant has followed a predictable pattern. In general, the measure of an Iranian government’s tolerance toward Jews corresponds to the closeness of the clergy to power (whether Zoroastrian priests or Muslim scholars). The greater the separation between the throne and the fire altar in Zoroastrian Iran and between the crown and the turban in Muslim Iran, the better the Jews have fared. Although this has been true of the Jewish-Iranian relationship since the late third century C.E., the contrast in the past century is especially striking.
For the past hundred years, Iran has been both a secular kingdom and an Islamic theocracy, and in their respective postures toward the Jewish people and Israel, they are a study in contrasts. The Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979) sidelined the clergy for the first time in 400 years, granted Iranian Jews full civil equality, and provided for their security. Commenting on this new secular Iranian order, Iranian-Jewish writer Gina Nihai describes Jewish sentiment toward the dynasty’s founder in her novel Cry of the Peacock: “He freed the Jews [and] he became the mullahs’ greatest enemy and every Jew’s champion.” Under the rule of “every Jew’s champion” and his son and successor (known simply as the Shah, “king”), Iranian Jews experienced a golden age unlike any they had ever known in their 2,500-year history.
Just as the Jewish people benefitted from the Shah’s rule, so did the Jewish state. As the Shah told Ben-Gurion in 1958, “The memory of Cyrus’ policy regarding your people is precious to me, and I strive to continue in the path set by this ancient tradition.” Ben-Gurion told the Knesset two years later that Israel and Iran enjoyed “friendly, if unofficial and hidden, relations … built on mutual benefit … [and] cooperation.” Ben-Gurion’s brief description captured the three defining features of the Shah’s relations with Israel: secrecy, common interests and cooperation.
1) Secrecy:For the Shah, Arab hostility to Israel made secrecy imperative. To this end, Iran recognized Israel de facto in March 1950, becoming the second Muslim country to do so, but it refrained from recognizing Israel de jure (by law). At Iran’s insistence, Israel’s diplomatic representative in Iran did not carry the rank of “ambassador,” nor the Israeli mission the designation of an “embassy.” Nevertheless, the head of the Israeli mission in Tehran was an ambassador in all but name, and the Israeli legation in Tehran, housed in a building with no plaque or flag announcing what was inside, was an embassy in all but name. For all this discretion, though, few were fooled, least of all the two countries’ enemies. For three decades, the extensive relations between Israel and the Shah’s Iran were one of the Middle East’s worst-kept secrets.
2) Common interests:Both countries were connected to the United States, opposed by the Soviet Union, and hated by Arab nationalists and Islamic extremists. Accordingly, both countries had the same vision for the Middle East — one in which Arab nationalism and Soviet influence were limited and alignment with the United States was the norm. Both countries also opposed the PLO. As the Shah said to Moshe Dayan, “They should not be given even the fringe of a state” because it would be “a base for anti-Israel terrorism and destruction.”
3) Cooperation: With common interests and common enemies, Israel and Iran made common cause. In 1958, they established an intelligence-sharing framework called Trident. Under this mechanism, their intelligence communities, along with Turkey’s, coordinated policies and exchanged information, meeting in intelligence summits twice a year but communicating with each other almost daily. While their intelligence agencies cooperated, Iran and Israel partnered with each other to support regional actors targeted by Arab nationalists: Camile Chamoun’s government in the Lebanese Civil War (1958), the Omani government in its suppression of an insurgency (1965-1976) and the Kurdish rebellion against Baghdad (1963-1975). After the September 1975 Egyptian-Israel Agreement, where Israel returned Sinai oil fields to Egypt, Iran supplied Israel with 70 percent of its oil needs. In 1977, Iran and Israel launched Project Flower to develop missile systems. Iran and Israel cooperated not only in warfare, but in peacemaking too, as the Shah was instrumental in encouraging peace between Israel and Egypt. Yitzhak Rabin was emboldened to agree to the 1975 disengagement agreement with Egypt after assurance from the Shah: Iran would offset the oil deficit Israel would incur after returning oil fields to Egypt. Then, in 1977, the Shah helped Egypt and Israel along their path to peace, passing messages between the countries and pressing them to reach an agreement. Trade relations between Iran and Israel were likewise extensive. So brisk was Israeli-Iranian trade that, on the eve of the Islamic Revolution, it was valued at $300 million a year. From Iran, Israel received 70 percent of its oil, and from Israel, Iran received imports so abundant that the Jewish state was Iran’s 10th-largest import partner.
But then came the Iranian Revolution in 1979 and, with it, the transfer of the reins of power from the Shah, whom many Jews had hailed as a new Cyrus, to Ayatollah Khomeini, whom many saw as the reincarnation of Haman. Perhaps nothing symbolized that a new era was dawning more vividly than the turnover to the PLO of the building in Tehran that had housed Israel’s diplomatic mission. PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, the first foreign leader to visit revolutionary Iran, was on hand to receive the keys to the premises. The revolutionary government further honored the Palestinians by changing the name of the thoroughfare where the PLO “embassy” was located to Palestine Street and by creating a quasi-religious holiday in support of the Palestinians, Jerusalem Day (the last Friday of Ramadan). Yet Arafat repaid the generosity of his Persian hosts the following year by throwing his full support behind Saddam Hussein in the war Iraq unleashed on Iran.
In the Islamic Republic, hating Israel is not a political position; it is religious obligation, a sacred duty. Iran sees Palestine as the eternal possession of Muslims, and Palestinian Muslims are its trustees. The rule of Palestine by non-Muslims and by the despised Jews — is an insult to Islam and a perversion of God’s will. Thus, it is incumbent on Iran, the self-appointed leader of the Muslim world, to revolutionary Iran’s most notorious slogans: “Israel must be wiped off the map.”
For Iranian Jews, no less than for Israel, the Islamic Republic has been a scourge. The very element in Iranian society that had tormented the Jews for centuries was now not merely close to power; it was in power. Within 10 months of the Islamic Republic’s founding, seven Jews (including some of the community’s most prominent members) were executed. Meanwhile, Jewish professionals were purged from the civil service, Jewish litigants were discriminated against in the judiciary, and Jewish students were barred from learning Hebrew and forced to attend school on the Sabbath. Within the first 10 years of the Islamic Republic, the Jewish community lost 75 percent of its members and, within the first two years, about a billion dollars of its wealth (partly through asset seizures).
Iranian Jewish Population
| 1873-74 | 22,000 | David Yeroushalmi, The Jews of Iran: Chapters in Their History and Cultural Heritage |
| 1890s | 45,000 | David Yeroushalmi, The Jews of Iran: Chapters in Their History and Cultural Heritag |
| 1948 | 100,000 | Haim Sadok, Yahadut Iran bi-Tekufat ha-Shoshelet ha-Pahlavit |
| 1978 | 100,000 | Avi Davidi, “Zionist Activities in Twentieth-Century Iran,” in Esther’s Children |
| 1989 | 25,000 | Amnon Netzer, Paydavand |
| 2024 | 8,000 | Anjoman Kalimiyan Tehran (Iran’s main Jewish umbrella organization) in 2022, Iranian census 2016, Homayoun Sameyah (Iranian Jewry’s Majlis representative) |
The Islamic Republic’s war against the Jewish people extends beyond Iran and Israel. Tehran has targeted Jews and Jewish institutions in places as far afield as Latin America and Europe. Among the most notorious Iranian attacks against Diaspora Jewry were the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires and the 2012 bombing of a bus of Israeli passengers at Burgas Airport in Bulgaria. Iran has also hosted Holocaust denial conferences and sponsored cartoon competitions mocking the Holocaust.
Iran’s war against the Jewish state rests on a slow-bleed strategy that aims to bring about Israel’s death by a thousand cuts, not with a single blow. Moreover, instead of fighting Israel directly — the only instance of which was Iran’s missile attack against Israel in April 2024 — Iran deputizes clients and proxies to fight on its behalf. Accordingly, Iran has encircled Israel–on or near its borders–with surrogates it finances, trains, and arms: the Syrian regime, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon, various militias in Iraq, and the Houthis in Yemen.
Of these terrorist groups, none is as important to Iran as Hezbollah. Whereas Hamas is an Iranian client in that it’s supported by but independent of Iran, Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy because it’s not just supported by Tehran, but subordinate to it. Iran has dreamed of being a Mediterranean power — a distinction it hasn’t boasted since 628 — and through its Hezbollah proxy in Lebanon it has, in a sense, recovered this lost glory. Iran founded Hezbollah in 1982 when it dispatched 2,500 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to Lebanon to raise a militia against the Israeli army in Lebanon. Since then, southern Lebanon has been a forward operating base for Iran, and Iranian supremacy over Hezbollah — and, in turn, over Lebanon — has been total.
Although Hezbollah’s members are Lebanese, and Lebanon is its base of operations, it is as much an Iranian organization as a Lebanese one. In the organization’s early years, it even operated under a longer and more telling name: “Party of the Islamic Republic in Lebanon.” Similarly, Hezbollah’s original manifesto lauds the Iranian system of government as a model for Lebanon and swears allegiance to Iran’s supreme leader at the time, Ayatollah Khomeini: “We obey the orders of one leader, wise and just, that of our tutor and jurist who fulfills all the necessary conditions: Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini.”
Hezbollah has indeed lived up to that vow. Even when it comes to its internal decision-making, the word of the supreme leader carries the day. For instance, the supreme leader breaks any deadlock on Hezbollah’s Shura Council, the group’s highest decision-making body. Similarly, when Hezbollah began contesting elections in Lebanon 1992, becoming a political party in addition to a terrorist militia, Iranian approval made it possible.
Since its founding by Iran more than 40 years ago, Hezbollah has terrorized Israel unremittingly, inflicting hundreds of casualties both in Israel’s former security zone in southern Lebanon and in its border communities. In 2006, Hezbollah made full-scale war on Israel, staging a cross-border raid that ignited a 34-day confrontation. The memory of the devastation that Israel visited on Lebanon went a long way in deterring Hezbollah, and, apart from occasional skirmishes and attacks, the border was generally quiet until October 8, 2023, a day after another group linked to Iran, Hamas, carried out the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Hezbollah has rained rockets down on Israel, rendering parts of northern Israel uninhabitable. In summer 2024, the clashes between Hezbollah and Israel escalated in their frequency and lethality, threatening to plunge the region into full-scale war.
Besides its proxies and clients, an even more terrifying threat Iran poses to Israel is its development of nuclear weapons. Since 1987, Iran has pursued a nuclear weapons program, all the while insisting to the rest of the world that it was doing nothing of the sort. This decades-long deception has been exposed time and again by Israeli and Western intelligence agencies and by the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency. Sometimes Iranian officials, in less guarded moments, have revealed the true intention behind their nuclear program. Such was the case in 2001 when former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani declared, “If one day the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything.”
For its part, Israel has done more than any other country to expose and to thwart Iran’s nuclearization. It was Israel that blew the lid off the Iranian nuclear program in 2002 when an exiled Iranian opposition group announced, with intelligence supplied by Israel, that Iran was enriching uranium at a military installation in central Iran. To subvert the Iranian nuclear program, Israel has waged a campaign of assassinations, sabotage and cyberwarfare the past two decades. The U.S. and Israel have often coordinated their efforts to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program.
One fruit of this cooperation was Stuxnet, a malicious computer worm jointly developed by Israel and America. Stuxnet was infiltrated into the industrial computers that operate Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, incapacitating the devices. Although Israel never claimed credit for Stuxnet, the virus code left little doubt as to its Israeli authorship: 05091979. Far from being a random cipher, this numerical sequence corresponds to May 9, 1979, the day on which the Islamic Republic executed Iran’s richest Jew, Habib Elghanian, for the crime of Zionism.
But if America and Israel have conspired against Iran’s nuclear program, they have also clashed over it. During Barack Obama’s presidency, in particular, disagreements over how to respond to Iran’s nuclear weaponeering were a chronic irritant in relations between Washington and Jerusalem. These tensions reached their apex in 2015 when Obama concluded an agreement with Iran to restrict its nuclear program. While Obama considered the nuclear agreement his signature foreign policy achievement, Israel considered it a betrayal — an act of appeasement that threatened its national security. Israel denounced the American-led agreement, insisting that Iran was not to be trusted, that the restrictions the agreement imposed were inadequate, and that Iran would use the billions of dollars the agreement bestowed on it to bankroll its regional aggression. To make Israel’s case, in March 2015, Prime Minister Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress and pleaded with lawmakers to impose fresh sanctions on Iran.
Iran’s conduct after the 2015 agreement vindicated Israeli fears. Flush with cash, Iran, as belligerent as ever, lavished funds on its proxies and clients throughout the Middle East. Meanwhile, Iran stonewalled inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, refusing to answer for the “possible military dimensions” of its nuclear program. In 2018, Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, fulfilled a campaign promise to withdraw from the nuclear accord.
The October 7 massacre marked the culmination of the Islamic Republic’s 45-year war against Israel and a partnership with Hamas that dates back to November 1989. The relationship has known many ups and downs because of the two groups’ religious and, consequently, political disagreements, but they have been willing to set aside their disputes for a shared objective: the destruction of Israel. With Iranian support, Hamas unleashed a wave of terror attacks in Israel
With Iranian support, Hamas carried out suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism during the Oslo Accords, which Iran sought to sabotage, as well as during the Second Intifada. After the 1993 Oslo Accords were signed, Israeli Prime Minister Rabin acknowledged that he recognized the PLO in order to support a secular Palestinian leadership, specifically fearing Iran’s support of Hamas and its fierce theological commitments which he believed to be a greater danger to Israel’s future than the PLO.
In the decade leading up to October 7, Iran furnished Hamas more than $200 million and all manner of munitions, rocketry in particular. This generosity did not go unappreciated by Hamas’ leadership. Its preeminent leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, has paid tribute to Iran in many speeches over the years. Typical was his declaration in May 2021 hailing Iran’s patronage: “Our complete gratitude is extended to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has spared us and the other Palestinian resistance factions nothing in recent years. They have provided us with money, weapons and expertise. They have supported us in everything, with the grace of Allah. They deserve huge credit. They weren’t with us on the ground, but they were with us through those capabilities, with which we crushed and rocked the enemy.”
The October 7 attack was carried out by Hamas. Likewise, it was an Iranian initiative. Months before the massacre, Iran trained 500 Hamas terrorists on Iranian soil. Iran even appointed the day for the attack. On that dark day, Iran’s clients, as if under orders from Haman, enacted a passage from the Book of Esther as they strove “to destroy, to slay and to cause to perish all Jews, both young and old, little children and women, in one day.”
But while Iran’s clients were killing Jews in Israel, Iranian non-Jews throughout the world (including the Shah’s son and leading dissident Masih Alinejad) wasted no time registering their support for Israel. Even in Iran, despite the perils of denouncing the Palestinians and defending Israel, expressions of sympathy for Israel were far from unusual. Particularly striking was a scene that unfolded at a soccer match in Tehran on October 8. When a Palestinian flag was brought onto the field, a furor erupted among the thousands of spectators, and exclamations of support for Israel were voiced in defiance.
The Land of Israel has thrice known Iranian rule (539 BCE-330 BCE, 40 BCE-37 BCE, 614-628 CE), and at the outset of each of the three periods, the Jews greeted the Iranian conquerors as liberators. Likewise, Jews in the Land of Israel today, along with millions of Iranians like the brave soccer spectators, would hail the overthrowers of the Islamic Republic as liberators. It is only with the fall of the Islamic Republic, a regime sustained not by popular support, but by its oil wealth and its security apparatus, can there be any hope that the Iran of Cyrus will once again triumph over the Iran of Haman.