ISRAEL AND IRAN: A TALE OF LOVE AND HATE -- AND FATE

The Long History of a Relationship Gone Bad

Bibi finally got his war.

For three decades, more than half of which he has been Israel’s Prime Minister, Netanyahu has relentlessly AND successfully demonized and proselytized for war against the Islamic Republic of Iran. And now he finally has what he wished for.

Tel Aviv apartment building after Iranian retaliatory missile strike, © Ohad Zwiegenberg AP

As usual with Netanyahu, starting a fight with one of Israel’s enemies comes at a time when he is politically weak. Just prior to Friday’s early morning attack he had been frantically maneuvering to keep his governing coalition together to avoid another election (it would be the sixth election in the last seven years).

At the same time the messianic Jewish supremacists who have become the face of this, his sixth coalition government, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, had just been sanctioned by a swathe of Israel’s allies including the UK. The sanctions follow their campaign of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, building new settlements, giving an excuse that West Bank Palestinians could be a source of more terrorism.

European nations’ opinions really don’t matter much to Israelis — the default setting in the country and much of the American Jewish diaspora is Europe is where the Shoah took place, you have nothing to say to us about how we deal with our security.

More important to Netanyahu was internal Israeli opinion: a significant minority are tired of the war in Gaza and want to get the remaining hostages back — finally. (How many are still alive? Who knows for sure. Maybe a few dozen).

Israeli society which is never less than volatile (I could also write neurotic) was beginning to get restive. For the last few weeks Netanyahu has been trying to change the subject to Iran. The difference between Iran talk and the Gaza and West Bank reality was called out by Ehud Olmert, Bibi’s predecessor as the leader of the Likud party and Prime Minister, in a New York Times op-ed podcast interview the day before Israel attacked Iran¹:

“ … on the one side [people] say Israel, if we need to destroy Iran, we will do it. So powerful, so capable that Iran, which is a regional superpower, one of the richest countries in the world with enormous technological achievements that can’t be ignored. No problem. We can destroy them. And on the other hand, a few thousand terrorists from the other side of the border is a threat to the very existence of the state of Israel. Is this the basis of the strength of the country that boasts all the time that we can destroy all our enemies, which we can, by the way. We did. We did. After October, we destroyed the military power of Hezbollah, O.K. And Syria collapsed. And the Hamas is almost completely eradicated.

And even when Iran attacked us with ballistic missiles, we intercepted almost all of them, hundreds of them in one of the most unbelievable attacks in modern history, hundreds of ballistic missiles with 1,000 kilos of warheads that were shot at Israel, and 95 percent of them were intercepted with the assistance of America and Great Britain and France, but largely because of us. So to say that there is an imminent danger to the very existence of Israel from a few thousand terrorists is ridiculous.”

It is not likely that what Olmert told the Times will have much resonance in Israel. You can’t relentlessly tell Israelis for 30 years that Iran is your worst enemy and it is trying to develop a nuclear bomb and a missile system to deliver it to wipe Israel off the face of the earth and expect that people won’t believe it and be happy to endorse a massive pre-emptive attack on the country.

If you point out to an Israeli that the threat of nuclear attack may be overblown. If you remind them that nuclear attacks are the most indiscriminate form of warfare, and that it is unlikely Iran, which claims to be the defender of the Palestinians and wishes to liberate Jerusalem from the Zionists, would use a weapon that would kill as many Palestinians as Jews, destroy the Muslim Holy Places of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount, and make the land uninhabitable for a century, Israelis will give you the look they reserve for Diaspora Jews who think they know something Israelis don’t: a look that is equal parts condescension and utter disdain.

1200 miles across the air space of Jordan and Iraq, in Iran, the population has been equally propagandized. In October 2001, I spent several weeks in Iran making a radio documentary called “Revolutionary Islam: Inside Out”. It was just after 9/11, the US was going to war next door to Iran in Aghanistan. The Iranian government at the time was in the hands of “reformers” who were providing a certain amount of logistical and intelligence support to the US effort to overthrow the Taliban. Journalist visas were easy to come by and our safety was not in question.

Iranian society was modern and much more complicated than the propagandists would allow. The cities I visited were populated by people living lives that in many ways would be completely recognizeable to Americans and Europeans. It is the restriction of women by chador and other modesty laws, and the suppression of Persian pleasures like alcohol and dancing that catch the Western press’s attention but I’ve reported from most countries in the Muslim Middle East and the country that was most like the US, and for that matter Israel, was Iran. This is true right down to the kind of social problems Iran has. I set part of the documentary in a drug treatment center in the Holy city of Mashhad in the northeast of the country.

Imam Reza Shrine in Mashhad

I met with Maurice Motamed, the Jewish representative in the Majlis, the country’s parliament, who spoke openly about the discrimination Iran’s small remaining Jewish population faced (it is currently around 9,000, 25 years ago when I visited it was probably double that). I also saw the massive anti-Israel and anti-Semitic graffiti around Tehran. There was much less of it in provincial cities like Mashhad.

But I had a direct encounter with state anti-Semitism which is closely linked with anti-Americanism and its effect on ordinary Iranians at an exhibition in the former American Embassy, the same building where for 444 days American diplomats were held hostage just after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Even after nearly a quarter of a century this brief extract is worth a listen. These are authentic voices of ordinary, young people:

Familiarity that falls short of real knowledge of one another is the way to look at the contemporary history of Israel and Iran.

On Saturday,, as the smoke was still hovering over the nuclear sites Israel attacked, Netanyahu recorded a message in English and posted it to Youtube. Among other things he said,

“The nation of Iran and the nation of Israel have been true friends since the time of Cyrus the Great.”

Bibi is not far off the truth in the Biblical sense. Ezra, Chapter 6, mentions Cyrus’s decree that the exiled Jews living in Babylon should return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple.

In the modern sense, from the 1950s through the mid 1970s Israel and Iran under the Shah were allies — very, very close allies.

Ten years ago I interviewed the legendary “Geizi” Tsafrir, the last Mossad station chief in Kurdistan. He told me how the Shah had facilitated the arming of Kurdish peshmerga, fighting for their independence from Iraq. He also explained how, as the Shah’s hold on power began to erode and anti-Zionist feeling grew at street level in Iran he did a volte face. In 1975 he made a pact with Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government at a meeting in Algiers and betrayed the peshmerga. Tsafrir barely managed to escape from the mountains as Iraqi troops overran peshmerga positions. He was then reassigned to Tehran and was responsible for evacuating 13,000 Israelis living and working in Iran when the Shah’ was overthrown by the Islamic revolution.

In 1979 13,000 Israelis was not a small number in a nominally Muslim country. The connections across Iranian society left a trace. So when Iraq went to war with Iran in 1981, Israel became an important source of weapons’ resupply. Iranian jets were kept in the air by spare parts provided by Israel.

Throughout the war Ayatollah Khomeini’s rhetoric remained harshly anti-Zionist but there was a certain amount of unpublicized realism about doing business with the Middle East’s only other non-Arab power.

These last decades though, since the end of the Cold War through the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin which led to the death of the Oslo process and rise of Netanyahu, and the overthrow of Saddam, has led to a glacial freezing of the geo-politics in the Middle East. Nothing much changed.

Iran slowly armed and fortified a network of proxies on Israel’s borders. There were occasional popular uprisings against the Ayatollah’s regime in Iran: the Green Revolution, which really wasn’t a revolution, in 2009. The Women, Life, Freedom protests of 2022. Nothing stopped the work of the regime building up its allies.

In Israel, there were periodic confrontations with Iran’s proxies: Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza but nothing decisive. The Israelis called these periodic confrontations, “mowing the grass.”

The Hamas atrocity on October 7th blew up the whole situation. Israel destroyed Hamas, then decapitated the leadership of Hizbollah via pager. Without Hizbollah to rely on, Bashar al Assad’s regime in Syria was overthrown. Iran’s entire network of allies on Israel’s borders disappeared.

Netanyahu was presented with a set of circumstances he could not have imagined on October 6th 2023. Throw in the political crisis that perpetually swirls around him and Bibi decided to play his ace and attack Iran, bucking the wishes of the President of the United States to do so.

In his address to the Iranian people Netanyahu urged them to rise up and overthrow the regime. He added:

“Israel’s fight is not with you, the brave people of Iran who we respect and admire. Our fight is with our common enemy a murderous regime that both oppresses you and impoverishes you.

…

“And when that happens, the great friendship between our two ancient peoples will flourish once again.”

It’s rare that the Israeli Prime Minister speaks much truth but he is right to describe the ayatollahs’ regime as murderous and oppressive. And based on the time I spent reporting in Iran, he is correct that there really is the space for reclaiming the ancient friendship between the two peoples. If they can eventually overcome the decades of hatred and fear their respective propaganda machines have pumped out about each other and if a just solution to the Palestinian situation can be found.

But despite speaking truth, it seems unlikely that Netanyahu’s words will lead to an uprising in the Islamic Republic. People in Iran hate the regime but they hate the Zionist entity more. And there is no example in modern history of a nation that has been attacked by an enemy rising up against its leaders at that enemy’s request.

1. Transcript of Olmert NY Times interview, long but worth a read:

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000010212694/ehud-olmert-on-israels-catastrophic-war-in-gaza.html