Iran & Israel: Allies to Enemies
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Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm recording this introduction on Friday the 13th of June 2025. We are all digesting the news that last night waves of Israeli strikes hit targets across Iran. Israel says that the targets were nuclear sites but it also made targeted strikes on senior military personnel.

The Islamic Republic of Iran say this is a gross violation of their sovereignty and tantamount to a declaration of war. They seem to have launched 100 or so drones today as a counter-strike and the Israeli Defence Forces claim to have intercepted nearly all of these.

This follows months, well, years of tension and some open violence. In April last year, an airstrike hit the Iranian consulate in Damascus, the capital of Syria. It killed around a dozen people, and among them was a brigadier general in Iran's elite unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. His name was Mohammed Reza. That's now widely understood to have been carried out by an Israeli F-35 aircraft,

And for the Iranians, this crossed a line. Israel and Iran have long been swapping blows, long been striking each other, but up to that point through proxies. Iran has attacked Israel using groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad. Israel, for its part, has struck back at Iran by attacking these proxy organizations. Israel is widely regarded to have carried out operations

inside Iran targeted the assassination of military officials and people connected with the nuclear program. But up until that strike on Damascus in 2024, there was a sense that those actions were carefully managed, choreographed to ensure that the conventional armed forces of Israel and Iran were not involved in direct conflict. That changed in April 2024 with the attack on the Iranian consulate.

The Iranians judged at that point that Israel had crossed the line, and so following it on the 13th of April, Iran launched Operation True Promise, an astonishingly ambitious, large-scale, direct assault by the Iranian military on Israel itself. The first of its kind between the two countries. We're talking 300 drones and missiles. They were launched at targets across Israel.

Nearly all of them were shot down by Israel's Iron Dome and other defensive systems, and indeed the air forces and naval forces of nations like the US, the UK, France, and Jordan. Tehran afterwards claimed some operational success. It claimed that extensive damage had been done to Israel's military facilities.

But Israel, more believably, stated the opposite. A few days after that, Israel launched retaliatory strikes on a few different sites, including a nuclear research site in Isfahan. It was not an all-out attack. Much of the world, and indeed the Iranian government, I think seems to have hoped that that was the matter, closed. But this week, in June 2025, just hours after the UN nuclear watchdog formally found that Iran is not complying with its nuclear obligations...

the first time it's found Iran formally in breach in 20 years.

an Israeli offensive was launched on Iran. This time the attacks were on a much larger scale. We're still trying to piece together the impact of those strikes. What does this latest round of attacks mean, this escalation? What is going on between Israel and Iran? We're going to be talking all about that on this podcast. The main body of the podcast is the repeat of an interview we conducted last year in the aftermath of that initial round of tit-for-tat strikes. But we've seen a massive surge in

in people searching for this podcast. We wanted to re-release it with a new introduction, bring everyone up to speed. How did we get here? Why are we in such a precarious position when it comes to Israel and Iran? And what have relations traditionally been like between those two countries? They haven't always been this bad. Far from it. Extraordinarily, as you'll hear in this podcast, Iran was once one of Israel's closest partners.

And that cooperation lasted a lot longer than many of you might think. Back in the 1950s, Iran was one of the first Muslim-majority countries to recognize Israel. Iran was on very good terms with Israel. There was a sizable Jewish population within Iran. There were direct flights between Tehran and Tel Aviv. And as we'll hear, those remained even after the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979.

The Israelis went on to support Iran in many ways. They supplied weapons to Iran to fight Iraq. Both of them regarded Saddam Hussein as the biggest threat to them in the region. During that time, the Israelis even lobbied in Washington on behalf of the Iranians. The Israelis certainly seemed to have harbored hopes of a rapprochement between the two countries. And really, it was only in the 1990s that two became unambiguously implacable enemies.

To tell us about this remarkable story, I've got the Iranian Canadian journalist, Iye Bahari. He was born and raised in Iran. While reporting on the 2009 Iranian elections for Newsweek and Channel 4, he was arrested without charge and detained for over 100 days. He's produced and directed numerous documentary films on Israel and Iran, including From Cyrus to Ahmadinejad. He's also founder of the news website Iran Wire, and he has the distinction of being the first Iranian, in fact, the first Muslim to make a film about the Holocaust.

It's called The Voyage of St. Louis. I'm very grateful to him joining me on the podcast to talk about this intriguing history, the relationship between the Jewish state and the Islamic Republic. A relationship that is far more complicated and entwined than the violence, the strikes of the present would have us believe.

Mazir, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Nice to be here. I want to start by looking at the overlooked, but it's a hugely important history of the

of the Jewish community in Iran, in Persia, stretching way back. I mean, Persia traditionally was one of the great centers of Jewish life. Yeah, Jewish settlers in Iran are among some of the oldest communities in the country. Before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, up to 100,000 Jewish people lived in Iran.

And right now, Iran may have the second or the third largest Jewish community in the Middle East, maybe after Turkey. I'm not sure how many Jews live in Turkey, but there are at least 20,000 Jews live in Iran. They have a member of the parliament. They have a big community in Tehran, the capital, and also in the city of Shiraz.

Unfortunately, I can say that the Jews in Iran, like other religious minorities, are second-class citizens. They are barred, according to the Constitution, to have certain rights, including certain positions in the government. They cannot be judges. They cannot study certain subjects. So while there is a Jewish community in Iran and they are barred,

safe to a certain extent. They are subjected to constant propaganda against Israel, of course, but also there are Holocaust denial in Iran and there is anti-Semitic propaganda in Iranian state TV, television and other kind of cultural products. I was very struck in a documentary that you made, it was brilliant, about Rita, one of Israel's biggest pop stars, biggest singers, and

hugely successful, and she releases albums in Persian. She is part of this Jewish-Persian tradition. Did Jews leave Iran in the revolution, or did Jews start to leave Iran much earlier, around the founding of the State of Israel? What's the story of that community? So when you go to Israel, you see two different kind of Jewish Iranians.

There are older generation of Jewish Iranians who are mostly from more impoverished, poorer communities.

So when Jewish Agency in the 1940s was gathering immigrants from different countries in the Middle East to migrate to Palestine and eventually Israel, many poor Iranian Jews, many of them from poor areas of Tehran and Mashhad, they went to Palestine, they settled there.

and they were so poor and very different from many other settlers in the country that they were even made fun of in Israel itself. So right now, when someone calls you a Farsi in Israel, it means that you are someone who is somehow poor and uneducated. And even in the 1950s, there was a genre of

Israeli films called the Farsi films, and they were making fun of these recent immigrants from Iran who had a thick Persian accent, and they were not very cultured, they were very poor. So those are the older generation of Iranians in Israel, and there are many of them still there. Of course, the new generation, they have changed. And then you have the more recent immigrants.

So the Jewish community in Iran between 1946, 47 until 1979, the Islamic Revolution, it really thrived. There were many Jewish industrialists. There were many Jewish doctors, professionals, business people. And I have a very good friend who is a brilliant philosopher.

fertility specialist in Orange County, California, and he studied in the Tehran University in the late 1960s. And according to him, out of the 30 students in his class, there were 15 Jews. So the Jewish community really had certain rights, and they really thrived during the time of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

What is interesting about Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran between 1941 to 1979, is that he tried to emulate what his father, Reza Shah, did. And Reza Shah ruled Iran between 1925 to 1941. And Reza Shah tried to resurrect the old Persian Empire.

in which many different nationalities, many different communities, many people from different religions live harmoniously together, and they had equal rights in order to contribute to the nation as a whole.

So Reza Shah had many obstacles, mainly by the Mullahs, who are ruling the country right now, and they didn't want the Jews to have similar rights as the Muslims. So Reza Shah had real struggle with them, and in some instances he had to compromise. And then Mohammad Reza Shah, especially after 1953, when he consolidated his power, he managed to really...

from the services of the Jewish community who lived a very good life in Iran until 1979. And unfortunately, many Jews, as I said, there were 100,000 Jews by 1979. They had to migrate and they mostly went to the U.S. in Long Island, especially in Great Neck, Long Island, but also to L.A., to different parts of the U.S.,

And many of them went to Israel as well. And that's inside Iran. That was true. And in its external relationships, Iran was one of the first Muslim majority countries to recognize Israel as a sovereign state. Was that in the early 50s? So, yeah. So Iran recognized Israel and they had a consulate in Jerusalem. That was during the time of Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was a nationalist prime minister in

And what Iran did, what the government of Iran did, was objected by the mullahs, by the clergy who were supporting the Palestinian rights. And then Iran closed that consulate. They didn't say that they were going to basically cut their relationship with Israel. They said that it was because of the budgetary reasons that they cut it.

And then after 1953, after the 1953 coup, which was held by the Americans and the British and the Shah consolidated his power, Iran started a very good de facto relationship with Israel. Even though there were many Israeli advisors to Iran, even though there were direct flights between Tehran and Tel Aviv at that time,

Iran never had a de jure embassy in Tel Aviv, and the Israelis, they never had an embassy in Iran. Actually, when I was a kid, I was living not very far from the Israeli mission in Iran, and everyone knew that it was an Israeli embassy, but it was never called an embassy. And it was the same situation in Tel Aviv as well.

Right, so take me through Iranian policy now from the 1953 coup that really established the Shah as the primary decision maker, all the way up to the revolution of 1979.

So between 1953 and 1979, the Shah had one of the most, maybe I would say, brilliant foreign policies that any Iranian government has had in its history. While it was an American ally, it had very good relations with Soviet Union. While he was suppressing communists domestically, it was cultivating relationship with Soviet

Soviet Union. So in the same way, while the Shah had very good relationship with Israelis, it also tried to have a good relationship with the Arab neighbors as well. So the Shah was providing financial help mostly to Israel and the Jewish community, and it was receiving arms from Israel and

Basically, Iran was a very good market for the Israeli art suppliers. And Iran was able to supply Israel with oil and other support during the 60s and 70s, during its period of great struggle against its Arab neighbors. The Shah was always giving lip service to the Arabs and to the Palestinians and condemning Israeli actions and

and Israeli suppression of Palestinians. But at the same time, Iran was supplying oil despite all the sanctions by OPEC and by the Arab countries to Israel in the 1960s and 1970s.

And that somehow mobilized the Islamists against the Shah. And not only the Islamists, but also the nationalists, the communists, everyone who sympathized with the Palestinian flight was against the Shah's friendship with Israel. But the other thing that I think we have to...

acknowledge is that the Shah was prone to accepting conspiracy theories. The Shah thought that the United States was run by the Jews and

And that is mentioned in several interviews and several conversations that he had with people like Henry Kissinger. And he thought that the Jews are running the American media, American finances, etc.

And for whatever reason, maybe part of his help to the Israelis was because of the fact that he was thinking that that would endear him to the Jewish community in the U.S. as well. So he was a very complicated man. But what we can say right now with the benefit of hindsight is that the Shah had a

very good foreign policy between 1953 until 1979. And he tried to help the Israelis as much as he could. And at the same time, he tried to provide support for many Lebanese Shias, many Palestinian refugees, and

Many of the revolutionaries actually who came back to Iran in 1979, trained in Lebanon, they were supported by the Shah. They were financially supported by the Shah. He built mosques, etc. So yeah, he was a very complicated man, but he had a very good foreign policy. To what extent was his support for or his stance towards Israel part of the reason that he was swept aside in the revolution? Or was it largely domestic issues?

It was mostly domestic issues. It was mostly economic issues and it was mostly cultural issues. But his support for Israel was used by the mullahs and the communists as well as nationalists in order to mobilize part of the population against the Shah. Listen to Dan Snow's history at more on Iran and Israel coming up.

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Apple Pay is a service provided by Apple Payment Services LLC, a subsidiary of Apple Inc. Any card used in Apple Pay is offered by the card issuer. Terms apply. And so when the mullahs swept the Shah aside in 1979, the Iranian revolution, presumably as well as affecting every aspect of life in Iran, it transformed the Iranian stance towards Israel.

After the 1979 revolution, people started to chant "Death to Israel." Many people did, maybe majority of people did, but it really did not have any meaning. And during the Iran-Iraq war, the Israelis were supporting Iran with arms. The Israelis

were telling the Americans who witnessed their diplomats being hostages of Iranian students in 1979, the Israelis were telling the Americans that these people will change and they will become our allies. And I've seen at least one letter from Ariel Sharon, who was the Israeli Minister of Defense, telling Caspar Weinberger, who was American Secretary of Defense, that

These people, they are patriots, they are fighting for their country, and they will become our allies. So the Israelis were supporting Iran in the 1980s, not because of the goodness of their heart, but because the Iranians were fighting against Saddam Hussein's Iraq, who was the main enemy of Israel at that time. So the Israelis, they knew that between

Saddam Hussein and Khomeini, they had to support Khomeini. But Iran at the same time was cultivating its proxies in Lebanon, especially Hezbollah, and inside the Palestinian territories. So the Israelis, they wanted to weaken both Iran and Iraq. But if they had a choice, Saddam Hussein was the main enemy.

And then in the 1990s, the first mention of the Iranian nuclear program in Israeli media is around 1991, 1992. They started to talk about the fact that Iran was building a nuclear program and saying,

It was partially based on facts, partially it was exaggerated, partially it was based on fact because there are revolutionary guards in Iran, especially towards the end of the Iran-Iraq war, which finished in 1988. They were talking about Iran's need for a nuclear program.

So the Israelis, they started their secret operations against the Iranian nuclear program, let's say in the middle of 1990s. But of course, it became more intense around 2003, between 2003 until now.

So the Israelis, they changed their stance from helping Khomeini against Saddam Hussein to regarding Iran as their main enemy, as their main regional enemy in the early 1990s, mainly because of Iran's policy of cultivating proxies in Lebanon, Palestinian territories, and other countries in the region.

but also because of the fact that Iran was developing a nuclear program. So Iran, you've got to be agile. You've got to be nimble to be a historian or a political scientist in the Middle East, right? So Iran was buying Israeli arms to fight Saddam Hussein, cheering Israeli air forces that they struck Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities,

And at the same time, cultivating proxies. I mean, what were those proxies initially? Hezbollah in Lebanon. Were they just ways of extending Iranian influence or were they always aimed at Israel?

They had different purposes. So Iran's policy was somehow mirroring Israel's policies because after the establishment of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion supported the idea of periphery states, meaning that Israel has to cultivate periphery.

better relationship with periphery states, the states that have a border with Israel. And Iran and Ethiopia, they were the main states.

So Iran, in order to move the enemy from its borders, tried to take the war closer to the Israeli borders. So it helped Hezbollah, which is basically part of the Revolutionary Guards. Part of Hezbollah is part of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

And also with some of the Palestinian factions, not PLO, never with PLO because Yasser Arafat, after he came to Iran in 1979 and did not manage to get any financial support from Khomeini, joined Saddam Hussein's war after the start of the Iraq war and PLO was supporting Saddam Hussein throughout the 1988 war.

So Iran has been cultivating proxies for different reasons in the region. And the main thing is that Iran wants to keep the enemy away from its border. And it has been somehow successful up to now that Iran and Israel, until last week, did not have a direct confrontation.

And I suppose sponsoring Hezbollah and Hamas allowed Iran to claim some kind of regional leadership. It established itself as the main, after the end of conventional wars against Israel in 73, you know, the Syrian, the Egyptian attempts to actually drive Israel out of occupied land. If the game moves to organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, if Iran is seen as their sponsor, there's a kind of regional prestige to that, presumably.

So I think we have to separate Iran's support of Hezbollah from Iran's support of other groups. Hezbollah is a Shiite Lebanese organization. As such, they are part of the Shiite family. There are many Iranian officials in the government right now who have fantasized

family in Lebanon. Some of the leaders of Hezbollah, their daughters, their sons, their sisters, brothers are married to Iranian officials. So Hezbollah is essentially an Iranian organization in Lebanon.

Of course, they have other members who don't have that much of dedication to Iran as the leadership of Hezbollah. But the leader of Hezbollah is really part of the Iranian family.

The other groups that Iran supports in the Middle East, including Hamas, they are Sunni Muslims. They do not believe in the brand of Islam that Iranian leadership believes. And this support and their relationship and the friendship is a friendship of convenience.

So, for example, during the Iran-Iraq war, the Sunni Arabs, including people who eventually joined Hamas, they were supporting Saddam Hussein. So the people from Hamas and Islamic Jihad and other groups, they do not have any kind of ideological...

belonging to what the Iranians represent, unlike Hezbollah, which is part of this Shiite family. Hamas is enjoying the support of Iran because it needs the support of Iran. But tomorrow, if someone else supports Hamas more than Iran, they would just go back to them.

But at the same time, I think what the prominence of Iran in the region is a result of the mistakes that the different powers have made. First of all, Iran's main enemy in the region was Saddam Hussein.

And after Saddam Hussein was toppled in 2003 by the U.S. and its allies, Iran became prominent and Iran had a lot of influence in Iraq. Why? Because there were many Iraqi leaders who were living in Iran for many, many years, for 30 years.

They went back to Iraq from Iran and they started, they had their own political parties. And even some of them who were not supporting Iran at that time, like Muqtada al-Sadr, they enjoyed the support of Iran eventually because they were also Shias and they had strategic alliances with Iran. And in recent months,

I think because of the Israeli actions in Gaza and the Iranian stance against Israel, it has enjoyed a lot of support in Arab countries, not by the leaders of those countries, by the people on the street.

I've talked to many people in different countries, in Egypt, Jordan, even Kuwait. And Saudi Arabia will say that many people support Iran because of the actions of Israel in Gaza. More Iran-Israel conflict coming up after this.

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We talk so much about Israel and the Arabs. There are Arabs in Iran, but Iran is not a majority Arab state. What do the streets, what do the people, in as far as we can judge, in Iran make of Israel, make of its wars against its Arab neighbors? Is there as close a kinship between the people of Iran and the people of Palestine as there might be in Jordan, in Syria? Iranians, the majority of Iranians are Shias. The Palestinians are Sunnis.

Iran has no border with Israel whatsoever. So Iranians essentially have no beef with Israel.

It's not like Egyptians or Jordanians or Syrians or others who have lost territory to Israelis or who have family members in the Palestinian areas. So there is no real issue between Iran and Israel.

And Iran and Israel are hated by many people, ordinary people, even in the Middle East, because they are non-Arabs and in mostly Arab region. But...

The Iranian clerics, before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, they used the issue of Israel and the suppression of Palestinians in order to mobilize their supporters against the Shah, who had very good relationship with Israel.

And after the 1979 revolution, death to Israel became a slogan or maybe became one of the official slogans of the Islamic Republic. But...

In the 1980s, when the Americans, they were helping Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, the Israelis were helping Iranians because they knew that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a bigger threat against Israel than Iran was. After the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1989, and especially since the early 1990s,

Iran increased its help to its proxies, mainly Hezbollah, which was basically created by Iran in the early 1980s. And Iran also tried to cultivate relationship with different Palestinian factions in different parts of the region. So let's come back to Israel and Iran itself and their head-to-head competition from the 1990s, as you say.

they start to see each other unambiguously as a threat. And you get this remarkable shadow war, don't you? And whether it's assassinations of the leaders of Islamic Jihad, who's associated with Iran in the 90s. Tell me about some of the other actions that Israel has managed to take against Iran to try and strike back. The famous Stuxnet virus, which seems to me the plot for every action film that's followed. When was that?

An Iranian opposition group based outside of Iran that was in Iraq at some point, and now they are in Albania. They revealed the secrets of Iran's nuclear program. Some say that it was given to them by the Israelis. I don't know, but it was revealed around 2001, 2002.

And so the whole world knew that Iran has a nuclear program and they have ambitions to build a bomb.

We don't know much about the actions of the Israeli government before 2006, 2007 against Iran's nuclear program. But we know from 2006 to 2007 on that the Israelis, they assassinated several Iranian nuclear scientists, several people who were involved in Iran's nuclear program, and

They've had surreptitious actions against Iran's nuclear program. You mentioned Stuxnet, which was a virus that was put into nuclear power.

radiator in Iran. I think it was through a flash card, a USB card. In recent years, they've had several attacks, which Iranians did not talk about. The Israelis did not claim responsibility for them against Iranian targets inside Iran.

Israelis, they managed to steal a truckload of documents from Iran that was paraded very proudly by Prime Minister Netanyahu a few years ago. And they've had several surreptitious activities.

One of the most audacious attacks that the Israelis had was the assassination of Mossef Akhrizadeh, who was the man in charge of the Revolutionary Guard's nuclear program. They just assassinated him in daylight and they killed him and several people who were with him. The basic idea that I think we have to talk about is that Iran does not believe that Israel should exist.

And Israel, of course, wants to exist. Iran has proxies who are fighting against Israel. Iran is building a nuclear weapon that must be used somehow, most probably against its presumed enemies.

So we have a situation that we have a government in Iran that does not believe in the state of Israel and wants to destroy Israel, destroy Israel as a Jewish state one way or another. And we have, on the other hand, a Jewish state who wants to survive.

So this is the essence of the struggle between Iran and Israel. And both governments are resorting to illegal means to attack and to defend themselves against

So whatever I think we talk about Israel and Iran, we have to think about that basic concept. I'm really worried about the future of this because I cannot see the coexistence of Israel and the Islamic Republic in the Middle East at the same time.

Okay, that's a sobering place to end. Not that happy thought. It's just really, really worrying. As I said, I was with these people who were blinded and maimed during the 2022 protests in Iran.

And this little girl who was with them, the daughter of one of them, she was really, really worried about her father, her uncle, her cousins. And it's just a very, very desperate situation. People of Iran really think that they are taken hostage by this government. Whatever the revolutionary guards want to do, they have to suffer the consequences. So, yeah, it's a very desperate situation.

Thank you, Mazir. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Okay, Dan. Take care. Thank you. Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before you go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube.

We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube. And you can see me. You can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or even a TV, or even a giant cinema movie screen if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.

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