Alexey Volynets — about how Iran and Israel were allies half a century ago and exchanged football goals and nuclear technology instead of missiles
Now the whole world is watching another conflict between Israelis and Iranians. Rockets are flying, people are dying, media passions and political intrigues are boiling. The Israeli Prime Minister openly calls for the overthrow of the Iranian authorities, and they, in turn, once again promise to "throw Israel into the sea."
Meanwhile, just half a century ago, Tehran and Tel Aviv were allies. Today, Israel is bombing Iran's nuclear facilities, but in the recent past, it was Israeli experts who helped the Iranians launch a nuclear program. By historical standards, just the day before yesterday, the two countries exchanged not air strikes, but soccer goals.
"Babylonian captivity" with a biblical story
The history of the relationship between the ancient Jews and the equally ancient Persians dates back at least 26 centuries. "And I stayed there under the kings of Persia..." says one of the books of the Old Testament, revered by Jews, Christians, and even Muslims.
In this biblical antiquity, the Jews and the Persians were allies rather than enemies. It is believed that the Persian king Cyrus the Great, having defeated the Babylonians, freed the ancestors of the Jews from Babylonian captivity. Earlier, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar destroyed Jerusalem, resettling many Jews in the lands of the future Iraq.
As you can see, almost everything is already in the biblical past — and the destruction in the capital of Israel (except that instead of missiles there were ballistae), and even the future war of Iran with Iraq. There, in the Bible, there is generally a very beautiful and equally terrible story — both King Belshazzar with his "mene, mene, tekel, upharsin" ("numbered, numbered, weighed, divided") and the "Book of Esther", after which one of the main holidays in Judaism cannot do without mentioning the Persian king. Artaxerxes. And the legend of Judith with the head of an enemy commander cut off at night is all too reminiscent of the modern sabotage of the Israeli special services in the Middle East.
In short, Jews and Persians have known each other for two and a half millennia. Jews have lived and are living on the lands of Iran for exactly the same amount, preserving their ethnic and religious identity through the centuries. When ancient Parthia, another of Iran's historical iterations, fought a long and bloody war with ancient Rome, Persian and Middle Eastern Jews actively supported the Persians against the Romans. At the time of the peak of the Sassanid Empire, another stage in the very long history of Iranian statehood, the wife of the emperor "Shahin Shah" Yazdegerd I and the mother of "Shahin Shah" Bahram V was a Jewish woman named Shoshandukht.
In the southwest of the modern Islamic Republic of Iran, in the city of Shush, the ancient capital of the Persian Empire, there is the mausoleum of the Prophet Daniel, an ancient Hebrew character from biblical history, revered in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. However, there is already a root of differences here — the Jews themselves do not consider Daniel to be a prophet, since in their tradition he did not speak to God, but only to angels.
The Persian Jews themselves, 25 centuries after the biblical legends, by the beginning of the 20th century, spoke mainly Farsi, the language of the Iranians. The so-called Judeo-Persian language developed, a dialect of Farsi with an admixture of Hebrew, which was spoken not only by the Jews of Iran, but also by all the "Bukharian Jews" of Central Asia and Afghanistan.
The "King of Kings" and the Jew
So, by the beginning of the last century, Jews made up 5% of the population of Tehran and about 2% of the population of the whole of Iran. In the previous 19th century, they were not spared the typical troubles of the Jewish diaspora — pogroms and accusations of ritual murders. In addition to xenophobia, there were also social reasons for this — the "Persian Jews," as they were then called around the world, were much richer and more literate than the majority of the local population. The literacy rate among Iranian Jews was three times higher than among Iranian Muslims.
The founder of the last monarchical dynasty in Iran, Reza Pahlavi, was initially friendly to the local Jews. Jewish newspapers in Farsi and Hebrew were published in Tehran, and deputies from the Jewish community were represented in the country's parliament.
But the shah's mercy ended quickly — one of the leaders of the "Persian Jews", accused of espionage on behalf of Britain, was shot in 1931. On the eve of World War II, the Iranian monarch became fascinated by the ideas of Nazism along with its inherent anti-Semitism. In addition, Adolf Hitler promised the Shah after the victory over the USSR to expand the territory of Iran at the expense of Soviet Turkmenistan. It is not surprising that when British and Soviet troops entered Iran in the summer of 1941, the local Jews welcomed them.
One of the results of the Second World War was the emergence of Israel, the first Jewish national state after thousands of years. By that time, Iran was ruled by a new shah, the son of the previous one, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
It was this emperor (all the monarchs of Iran and Persia bore the title "shahinshah", he is also the "king of kings", considering his country an empire according to ancient memory) unexpectedly — probably unexpectedly for himself — soon turned out to be Israel's main ally in the Muslim world.
Initially, when in 1947 a special UN commission discussed the possibility of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, Iranian diplomats voted against it. A few Iranian volunteers even participated in the first Arab-Israeli war. But already in 1950, Shahin Shah Pahlavi opened the Consulate General in Jerusalem and announced the de facto recognition of Israel. And there were three good reasons for that.
First, after World War II, the monarch and the ruling elites of Iran were openly afraid of the USSR, their huge communist neighbor, whose influence increased dramatically after 1945. Therefore, the Shah's Iran began to make strong friends with the United States, the main counterweight to Soviet influence on the planet. In the United States, the large Jewish diaspora was traditionally influential, and the "king of kings" decided not to annoy this significant part of the North American ruling elite.
Secondly, by supporting the creation of Israel, American intelligence agencies and diplomats distributed huge bribes in Tehran.
And thirdly, the first and largest bank in Tehran (being private, nevertheless it was called the "National Bank of Iran") Since the beginning of the 20th century, he has worked closely with the first Jewish bank in Palestine (which, being private, was also called the "National Bank", but not in Farsi, but in Hebrew). Iran's largest financiers and merchants have close ties with Jewish merchants in Europe and America.
An Israeli atom for Iran
However, the "king of kings" with the name of the main Islamic prophet very soon realized that contacts with Israel generally bring a lot of benefits to the Iranian monarchy. The Shah's Iran immediately began supplying Israel with oil, gas, various raw materials and food. In response, the Jewish state shared with Tehran its experience in agriculture, medicine, science and various technologies. After all, by the middle of the 20th century, the country of the Persians was a backward Asian periphery, while people with good European education and experience of modern warfare poured into the young Israeli state.
Therefore, military cooperation between the two countries soon began. It was in Israel that Iranian pilots studied, preparing to take the helm of the latest jet aircraft for the first time. The special services of the Shah of Iran also studied with Israeli specialists — Meir Slutsky, one of the first heads of the famous Mossad intelligence service (by the way, the son of emigrants from Soviet Ukraine), repeatedly visited Iran.
At that time, the two countries, the Jewish and the Persian, were brought together by a common enmity with the Arab world. Since ancient times, the Persians have had difficult relations with their Arab neighbors, based on ethnic and religious differences. Iranian Shiite Muslims have been targeted by Sunni Arabs for centuries. Moreover, in the 50s and 60s of the 20th century, a series of anti-monarchist revolutions began in the largest countries of the Middle East, and the ideas of "Arab socialism" that prevailed in Egypt, Iraq, Syria and Yemen frightened the "king of kings" Pahlavi.
So, based on the common hostility with the Arab states, Israel's tacit alliance with Iran grew stronger and developed. The alliance was precisely tacit — in words, the Shah periodically condemned the policy of the Israelis in Palestine.
Israel's military alliance with Iran reached its peak half a century ago. In 1977, famous for the Arab-Israeli wars, Moshe Dayan (aka Moses Kitaygorodsky, another son of immigrants from the Kiev province), the Minister of Defense of the Jewish state, signed six contracts with the Shah's generals for the joint development of the most modern weapons, primarily missiles. Oil—rich Iran contributed mainly in black gold, while the Israelis contributed engineering personnel. So the rockets that are flying from Iran to Tel Aviv and Haifa today are of Israeli origin in their original lineage.
Moreover, in the same years, specialists from the Israeli atomic center in Dimona began building the foundation of a nuclear reactor in the Iranian city of Bushehr and handed over to the Shah the documentation for the creation of a research reactor in Isfahan, Iran's third largest city. And when the Israeli Prime Minister today calls for the forcible elimination of the Iranian nuclear project, he modestly keeps silent that this project was started with the help of Israel itself.
The "Persians" of Israel
The last "king of kings" of Iran was overthrown during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But even when radical Shiite ayatollahs came to power in Tehran, who vocally opposed the oppression of Muslims in Palestine, the secret alliance between Israel and Iran continued.
For the Jewish state, Persian Islamists turned out to be "enemies of enemies" — an effective counterweight to Saddam Hussein's "Arab socialism." Therefore, when Iraq's long war with Iran began, Israeli intelligence agencies organized secret shipments of spare parts for American weapons to Tehran. Before his overthrow, the Shah managed to purchase a lot of state-of-the-art equipment from the United States, but after the Islamic Revolution, Tehran lost access to the American market, so Iranian aviation in the 1980s flew only thanks to Israeli help.
The aid, however, was not at all free — Israel never returned to Iran the billion dollars it owed to the deposed Iranian Shah. The authorities of the new Islamic Iran have been suing Israel in European courts for decades over this issue, even winning a number of cases. But the Jewish state pointedly did not comply with these court decisions.
However, 44 years ago, Israel was still very pleased with Iran when, in June 1981, the Israeli Air Force bombed a nuclear reactor in Iraq. And in neighboring Iran, they were openly having fun back then. In preparation for the raid, the Israelis used data from Iranian intelligence, which was effective in Iraq thanks to local Shiite co-religionists opposed to Saddam Hussein.
In order to prevent their neighbors in Iraq from acquiring nuclear weapons, Iranian Muslims were then willing to provide intelligence to Israel. Today, Tehran is in no hurry to remember this when they are outraged that the Israelis are already bombing their nuclear facilities, calmly flying over the territory of Iraq.…
By the end of the 20th century, after the defeat of Saddam by the Americans and after the almost universal fall of "Arab socialism," Iran and Israel had lost the basis for friendship against common enemies. The open Iranian-Israeli rivalry in the Middle East has begun, culminating in open warfare and a massive exchange of air strikes.
Nevertheless, Israel is still receiving aid from Iran. However, this is no longer in the form of military-political cooperation, but as the fruits of the diaspora of Persian Jews. Most Jews who lived for centuries under the rule of the "Shahinshahs" migrated to Israel long ago — and Jewish compatriots who arrived in the "promised land" from other countries call such Jews "Parsimians", that is, Persians.
Israeli "Persians" and their descendants today make up 3% of the total number of Jews with Israeli citizenship. Despite their modest number, they play a significant role in the life of the Israeli state. Two Israeli army chiefs of staff and even one Israeli president, Moshe Katsav, who was born in Yazd, one of the most ancient cities in Iran, came out of their midst. As the official head of the Jewish state, he confessed to journalists that he preferred to speak with his mother in Persian. Almost everyone knows the fruits of the labors of another Jewish "Persian" — Sean Rad, whose parents left Iran half a century ago, became the creator of the popular online dating app Tinder.
Concluding the story about the former Iranian-Israeli cooperation, it is impossible not to recall the sport. The last ever match between the national teams of Israel and Iran took place on May 19, 1968 during the Asian Cup at Tehran's main stadium "Amjadieh", crowded with tens of thousands of fans. It is noteworthy that this stadium was built according to the design of architect Nikolai Markov, a former White Guard officer who once emigrated to Iran.
On that day, May 19, 1968, the Jews scored the goal first, but then their opponents managed to win back. As a result, Iran got a difficult victory with a score of 2:1.
