The Shallow Roots of Iran’s War With Israel

In early April, the cold war between Iran and Israel suddenly turned hot. A dramatic Israeli air attack in Damascus that killed seven senior commanders in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps put Iranian leaders in a bind. If they launched a commensurate military response, they risked an escalation that could destabilize the very foundations of their regime. If they did not, they faced a credibility crisis among their own hard-liners and allies in Iran’s axis of resistance, a network that includes Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and various Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, several of which were already chafing at Iran’s restraint in responding to the war in Gaza.

In the end, through a mixture of telegraphing and technical incompetence, Iran’s leaders managed to produce a Goldilocks outcome. On April 13, they launched a massive aerial assault on Israel with more than 300 missiles and drones. But sound Western intelligence and the advanced warning technology and air defenses deployed by Israel and its allies ensured that there was little damage. Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, proclaimed that it was the attack itself and not the “hitting of the target” that mattered. Israel was encouraged to “take the win” and, after a restrained retaliation of its own, the status quo between the two sworn enemies was restored with surprising alacrity.

In the weeks since Israel and Iran came perilously close to war, other developments have for the moment pushed the episode into the background. Since the deaths of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian in a helicopter crash on May 19, international attention has returned to the regime’s stability and the looming issue of who will succeed Khamenei. Similarly, the events of early April and their unexpectedly speedy resolution raise significant questions about the regime and the ways in which the Islamic Republic’s strident antagonism toward the Jewish state has often been tempered by its increasingly fractious domestic politics.

For one thing, ordinary Iranians have shown relatively little interest in the war in Gaza. Although Iran is Hamas’s chief backer, it is the one Muslim country in the Middle East whose government has struggled to generate enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause, which is notable even when taking into account the regime’s anxiety about allowing excitable crowds to gather in the streets. Indeed, in stark contrast to the large-scale protests against Israel that have gripped Western and Arab capitals, the largest such gathering in Tehran since the war began involved a paltry 3,000 people.

The Iranian government has struggled to generate enthusiasm for the Palestinian cause.

There are some obvious political reasons for this, starting with general dissatisfaction among Iranians with the leadership in Tehran and with Islamism in general. Many Iranians see a win for Hamas as a win for the repressive clerical regime that rules over them. Moreover, Iranians tend to be focused on their own problems, including high unemployment and a declining quality of life. When they do stage protests, it is common to hear the chant, “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!” Fighting for rights in their own country that many in the West take for granted, they are at once bewildered and horrified by the pro-Hamas commentary coming from university campuses in the United States.

But Iranian ambivalence about the war also has deeper social and cultural roots. Beneath the regime’s long-dominant rhetoric about a “Zionist occupying state” lies a more complex dynamic with Israel. In the pre-Islamic era in particular, successive Persian states enjoyed a surprisingly intimate connection to the Jewish people. For several decades of the twentieth century, Iran and Israel seemed to have more in common with each other than either country did with the Arab world. Nor did this affinity entirely end with the Islamic Revolution in 1979. One of the most important thinkers behind the revolution wrote a laudatory account of the young Jewish state, and until the early years of this century, Iranian leaders at times showed a surprisingly nuanced view of Israel’s role in the Middle East.

Today, this legacy is submerged by hard-liners on both sides, and the proxy conflict between Iran and Israel could still erupt into a catastrophic direct war. Yet the long history of Persian and Jewish coexistence suggests that the current geostrategic rivalry may be considerably more contingent than it appears. However great the enmity between the region’s arch-antagonists, their shared history offers alternatives that could, under different circumstances, be tapped in the future.

ISRAEL THE MOTHER, IRAN THE FATHER

A visitor to Jerusalem may be surprised to find that one of the streets is named in honor of a Persian king. During his reign in the sixth century BC, Cyrus the Great—Kourosh in Persian, Koresh in Hebrew—was famous for having liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity. As a result of his decision to allow them to return to their homeland and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, Jews developed a sympathy for the Iranians that lasted through much of the ancient period. (Many Jews did not return to Jerusalem and were content to settle into life at the heart of the Persian Empire in Babylon, where theological developments in what is known as the “Babylonian” Talmud reflected their Persian environment.) On the two other occasions that Iranian armies found themselves at the gates of Jerusalem—under the Parthians in 40 BC and the Sassanians six and a half centuries later—the Jews welcomed them as liberators.

In fact, this political relationship was in many ways secondary to even deeper cultural and religious ties. With his predilection for ideology over history, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has used the book of Esther to argue that Persia has always sought the destruction of the Jews. But the biblical narrative actually portrays Esther as a queen of Persia, who warns her king, Ahasuerus—thought to be Xerxes, the grandson of Cyrus—of a plot against her people by his evil vizier, Haman. In the end, Ahasuerus, in a fury, has Haman hanged “for scheming against the Jews” and gives Haman’s property to Esther. In other words, it was once again a Persian king who saved the Jews. Underscoring the importance of these biblical connections are the holy sites of Esther’s and her cousin Mordecai’s tombs in Hamadan in western Iran—a pilgrimage site for Jews to this day—and that of the Prophet Daniel in Susa in southwestern Iran.

With the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh century, an Islamic caliphate was established, and the Jews became protected People of the Book within the wider Islamic community. Judeo-Persian traditions nevertheless continued. Some of the earliest surviving examples of the New Persian language, emerging in the aftermath, were written in Hebrew characters. Over the centuries that followed, both Iranian and Jewish thinkers strove to preserve the distinctive legacy of Persia’s pre-Islamic past. In the fourteenth century, Shahin Shirazi, a Jewish writer, wrote the Ardashir Nameh, a Persian epic poem based on the life of the biblical Esther; it conjures a son named Cyrus, born—quite ahistorically—of the union of the Jewish Esther and the Persian Ahasuerus (Ardashir). Steeped in such legend, it is unsurprising that Iranian Jews sometimes talk of Israel as the mother and Iran as the father.

After the Safavid dynasty established Shiism as the official religion of Iran in the sixteenth century, Jews were more tolerated than embraced. Although they rarely suffered the more brutal persecutions faced by other religious minorities, such as the Zoroastrians, and from the nineteenth century onward, the Bahais, their fortunes fluctuated according to the inclinations of particular rulers. Shah Abbas the Great, for example, invited them to settle in his capital, Isfahan, in the late sixteenth century, whereas his great-grandson Abbas II sought to convert Jews to Islam by force, a stricture that was later modified to the requirement that they adopt distinctive clothing.

By the time of Iran’s 1906 Constitutional Revolution, the movement that led to the establishment of the region’s first parliamentary system, the Jewish community, estimated at around 35,000, had become a protected minority and was soon granted its own representative in the new parliament. Like other religious minorities, Jews joined in the nationalist mood, assuming that the emergence of a secular Iranian national identity could only enhance their general position. Despite routine prejudice, their situation gradually improved.

CYRUS AND THE ZIONISTS

In Iran, unlike the Arab states, the founding of the state of Israel in 1948 did not force a reckoning for its Jewish community. In contrast to the anti-Jewish violence that swept across Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, there were no pogroms and no mass exodus to the Promised Land. Much like their forebears at the time of Cyrus, many Iranian Jews were happy to stay where they were: although perhaps 60,000 emigrated to Israel between 1948 and 1978, a significant number, about 85,000, remained, comprising by some estimates the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside Israel.

Where Arab leaders saw the new Jewish state as a dispossessor of Arab land and a threat to Arab unity, Iranian politicians tended to view it as a potentially ally. This was especially true of the monarch Mohammad Reza (Shah) Pahlavi, who acceded to the throne in 1941. Following in his father’s footsteps, he set out to establish a modern, pro-Western secular monarchy, and his fascination with Cyrus the Great drew the enthusiastic endorsement of Israeli politicians. To the shah, Israel represented another non-Arab state in the Middle East with a shared ancient pedigree. 

Although he refrained from officially recognizing Israel to avoid antagonizing Arab governments and his own domestic religious constituency, the shah quietly cultivated close relations, notably in economic development and cooperation on intelligence. There may have been no official Israeli embassy in Tehran during his reign, but everyone knew where the informal embassy was located and who the Israeli “ambassador” was, and Iran maintained an office in Tel Aviv. El Al, the Israeli airline, flew twice a week to Tehran.

But it wasn’t merely the monarchy that endorsed Israel. Iranian dissidents and revolutionary thinkers also found much to admire in the fledgling Jewish state. Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a prolific dissident writer who later wrote one of the canonical texts of the Islamic Revolution, visited Israel in 1963 and was highly impressed by what he found. In a travelogue titled Safar beh Velayat-e Israel (Journey to the Land of Israel), he lauded the pioneering spirit and collectivist ethos of Zionism of that time, which he saw as a template for an anticapitalist social democratic future.

Iranian opinion began to cool after the 1967 war, which ended in Israel’s conquest and occupation of Arab territory. Al-e Ahmad complained that the Zionists were beginning to emulate the colonial powers they had defined themselves against. But the shah continued to see Israel as a friend and an ally. Notably, Iran did not join the Arab oil embargo imposed in response to the Nixon administration’s support for Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War—although it helped engineer and profited hugely from the rise in oil prices by the end of that year. The shah also remained scrupulously impartial in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Three years later, when he was asked on the television news program 60 Minutes about the “Jewish lobby” in the United States, he complained darkly that it “controlled many things” and was having a counterproductive influence. Nonetheless, astute observers noted that his criticism did not extend to the state of Israel itself.

By the late 1970s, however, the autocratic Iranian regime was beset with high inflation and volatile unrest. Engulfed by protests from both leftists and Islamists, it became increasingly paranoid, and the casual anti-Semitism that the shah had voiced in 1976 began to surface with growing regularity. His advisers did not help. Struggling to comprehend what was happening and unwilling to admit that the Iranians had become disaffected or that Islamists might be capable of autonomous organization, aides suggested that he “apologize” to various people he might have offended and who were clearly now taking their revenge—specifically the “Jewish lobby” and the British. (The shah had made some critical remarks about the British work ethic in an interview in 1974). That such fears extended to the United Kingdom suggests that this had more to do with his regime’s obsession with foreign interference than with anti-Semitism per se.

HANGOVERS AND HARD-LINERS

When the regime finally succumbed to the Islamic Revolution, however, all the old geopolitical understandings were cast aside. Following his triumphant return to Iran in February 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was unsparing in his criticism of the shah and his American and Zionist allies, although he made little distinction between Zionists and Jews in general. The Islamists’ revenge on the monarchical state was swift and brutal, and soon included overrunning the U.S. embassy and taking more than 50 American hostages. Because Iranian Jews were viewed as enthusiastic royalists, they, too, faced the wrath of the new order. During the revolution, Habib Elghanian, the businessman who led Tehran’s Jewish community, was executed on charges of corruption and “links” with Israel—an event that spurred rapid Jewish emigration to Israel and the United States. Soon the flourishing community had dwindled to around 20,000 people.

As with its relationship with Washington, Iran’s approach to Israel had definitively changed, with the Islamic Republic pivoting to an ideology of uncompromising hostility. The country’s new leaders swiftly turned Israel’s unofficial diplomatic facilities in Tehran over to the Palestine Liberation Organization, in whose hands they remain today. Regionally, they also began to rally opinion and mobilize proxy forces against Israel. 

But Iran’s war with Iraq, which began in September 1980, proved more difficult than the revolutionary leadership had anticipated. As it progressed, Iran found itself increasingly isolated: Arab states had backed the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from the outset, and the PLO chairman, Yasir Arafat, who had been the first foreign dignitary to visit the new Islamic Republic, decided to switch his organization’s support to Iraq—much to Iran’s surprise and indignation. By the mid-1980s, the regime was also short of spare parts for the American-made military hardware it had inherited from the shah. It then decided to quietly begin procuring arms from an unlikely source in the episode that became known as the Iran-contra scandal.

Rafsanjani viewed Israel through more of a political than an ideological lens.

Using the services of an Iranian Jewish arms dealer named Manuchehr Ghorbanifar, the Reagan administration and the Israeli government decided on an elaborate strategy: they would secretly approach Tehran with an offer of much-needed arms in exchange for the possibility of détente. The belief was that once the revolutionary dust had settled, the geopolitical reality of Iran’s encirclement by potentially hostile Arab states would reassert itself. Much of this was wishful thinking born of a hangover from the pre-revolutionary days, but what was perhaps most remarkable was that Tehran considered the arms deal at all. When the secret negotiations were disclosed in a Lebanese newspaper, the Iranians were quick to shut them down, going so far as to execute the reported source of the leak.

Notably, the official who was thought to have been Tehran’s chief interlocutor in the Iran-contra deal was the wily speaker of the Iranian parliament, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who became president in 1989 in the aftermath of Khomeini’s death. Widely regarded as a pragmatist, he was less concerned with the export of the revolution than many of his co-revolutionaries, and this meant he viewed Israel through more of a political than an ideological lens. Above all, for Rafsanjani, it was the presidency and the republic that mattered, rather than the revolutionary and religious organs of power that gathered around the new supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Rafsanjani’s outlook proved to be optimistic. He was widely mocked for trying to impose an imperial presidency on the country and was soon outgunned by the increasingly powerful office of the supreme leader. In establishing his own authority, Khamenei was keen to distance himself from Rafsanjani’s policies and began to draw around him a circle of hard-liners who took a far more inflexible view of the revolution and its ambitions. Ceding ground on revolutionary principles was not an option.

RETURN OF THE PURITANS

Just as Rafsanjani had to negotiate and compromise with the revolutionary elite at home, he soon found himself outmaneuvered abroad, as well. When the Oslo peace process became public in 1993, Iranian government officials publicly opposed it, claiming it would deprive Palestinians of their rights. Privately, they wanted to know why they had not been invited to the negotiations. One of the reasons they weren’t, of course, was because the circle around Khamenei were determined to pursue ideological purity. In any case, after Hezbollah, and ultimately Iran, was blamed for a series of international terrorist attacks—namely the deadly suicide bombings of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and the city’s Jewish Center in 1994—any notion of bringing Iran in from the cold had been laid to rest.

Israel for its part, moved away from the kind of wishful thinking about Iran that had fed the Iran-contra plan. In line with Israel’s budding rapprochement with the Arab world—it had signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994—it switched its strategic perspective from one that cast Iran as a balancer to one that saw Iran as the enemy. Henceforth, the United States would be encouraged to ostracize and isolate the Islamic Republic, and the Clinton administration was only too willing to oblige. When Rafsanjani offered the U.S. oil company Conoco a $1 billion contract to develop an oilfield in Iran in 1995—a remarkable act of expediency over ideology that would have ended years of economic isolation from the West—the deal was summarily blocked in Washington.

Iran could not be more Palestinian than the Palestinians.

The tension between pragmatism and purity continued under President Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005), a reformist. On the question of Israel, Khatami sought to moderate Iran’s approach, even allowing the name “Israel” to be used in government circles in place of the usual “Zionist entity.” His general view was that Iran could not be more Palestinian than the Palestinians, and that if the Palestinians wanted to pursue what many Iranian hard-liners perceived to be an unjust peace, that was their choice. As one official in the Khatami administration told me at the time, “Israel is a reality, we have to deal with it.”

The high tide of Khatami’s conciliatory approach came in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with the realization that the hijackers had been Sunni and not Shiite. This presented an inconvenient truth to those who saw Iran as the source of all evil but also a rare opportunity for détente with the United States. But throughout this period, Khatami’s hard-line opponents in Tehran did everything they could to undercut his policies. Moreover, the window that had briefly opened after 9/11 closed precipitously with the Israeli discovery of an apparent arms shipment from Iran to the Palestinians and the Bush administration’s fateful decision in January 2002 to label Iran as part of an “axis of evil.”

The final turning point came the following year, when a somewhat opaque last-ditch Iranian attempt at a “grand bargain” was unceremoniously dismissed by the United States. With the Bush administration now consumed by its war in Iraq, it had little bandwidth to engage constructively with its neighbor. In any case, Washington’s focus was now shifting toward Iran’s clandestine nuclear program. Meanwhile, hard-liners in Tehran used Khatami’s failures at home and abroad to consolidate their position. Their triumph came in 2005 with the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the firebrand who breathed new life into the regime’s most extreme anti-Israel tendencies.

MORE HISTORY, LESS HATE

By asserting that “Israel would be wiped from the pages of history,” Ahmadinejad claimed to be reverting to the basic truths espoused by Khomeini. But his inflammatory restatement, along with his denial of the Holocaust, provided an unwelcome clarity. To this hateful message, Ahmadinejad added a healthy dose of radical leftist ideology according to which Israel was the keystone of an unjust Western capitalist hegemony constructed after World War II. To anyone who took this as mere rhetoric, Iranian missiles draped with flags announcing Israel’s demise should have removed any doubt. By denouncing what he called the “myth” of the Holocaust, the Iranian president was seeking to undermine the moral justification for the Israeli state.

Ahmadinejad’s extreme stance soon began to color Iran’s official pronouncements. The supposedly imminent collapse of Israel was envisaged as a precursor to the general decline of the capitalist West and the long-awaited return of the Hidden Imam, the occulted 12th imam, who according to Shiite belief will return at the end of time. Now, he was to herald a new world order that was unashamedly Iranian Shiite. Among other absurdities to emerge in this period, Ahmadinejad told horrified German officials that he understood their pain over the unjust “peace settlement” imposed on their country in 1945 and that all would soon be resolved.

Many ordinary Iranians were distressed by these developments and particularly embarrassed by the government’s decision to host a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran in 2006—leaving aside its effect on the country’s remaining Jews. Similarly, although occasions might still arise in which Iranians and Israelis found themselves attending the same international meeting, the Iranians diligently avoided the gaze of their counterparts, refusing to shake their hands. The Israelis, who craved normalization with the major states of the Middle East, had no such qualms.

Although Ahmadinejad’s vulgarity was unusual, the ideological currents behind it ran deep. His successor, Hassan Rouhani, tried to soften the rhetoric as he focused on securing a nuclear deal with the Obama administration that was supposed to end Iran’s economic isolation. But even if Rouhani’s loquacious foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, harked back to the old pragmatism, there was no going back to the cultivated ambiguity and ambivalence of the Rafsanjani-Khatami years. The elimination of the state of Israel had now emphatically become state ideology: the regime faithful defined themselves from the rest through their adherence to it, and they doubled down. Needless to say, this in turn fed anti-Iranian narratives among Israel’s own hard-liners, creating a mutual feedback loop that deepened the animosity. If Rouhani had sought to tone down the oratory, Raisi, who succeeded him in 2021, reinforced it, and there is little indication that this will change with Raisi’s successor.

A greater tragedy is that most of the Iranian public recognizes the ideology for what it is: a test of loyalty for a revolutionary elite that believes the new world order “goes through Jerusalem”—thereby requiring the defeat of Israel. They want no part of it. Like many Israelis, they simply crave a normal existence within the region and the wider world. For those seeking a resolution or even a mere cooling off of the conflict between their countries, the challenges are obvious. How to create a dialogue between the two sides when one does not recognize the other’s right to exist and is agitating for its demise, and the other indulges in wild historical illiteracy? One route, of course, is to play to the ancient connections between Jews and Iranians, an approach that Israeli officials have been attempting to some extent by distinguishing between the Tehran government and broader Iranian society.

More boldly, Western and international powers could invite Iran to participate in any post-Gaza peace talks that involve a two-state solution in return for normalization. There is of course little chance that any such offer would yield a positive result, but it might provide some moral clarity to a situation that sorely needs it. The increasingly inescapable lesson of the Islamic Republic’s relations with Israel and with the wider Jewish community is that there is too much politics in the history and not enough history in the politics. Until that imbalance can be addressed, the opportunities for meaningful progress are slight.