While the mullahs’ rhetoric is clearly anti-Israeli, relations between the two countries are far more complex than one might think. There are in fact two opposing groups in Iran, one intent on doing business by all means with the rest of the world, while the other aims to liberate peoples from colonization. The former has never stopped doing business with Israel, while the latter fights against it, just as it fights against the imperialism of the United Kingdom and the United States.
The conflict between Israel and Iran is distinct from that between the Arab population of Palestine and Jewish immigrants. Contrary to popular belief, the Persians have never been the enemy of the Jews. In fact, in ancient times, it was Cyrus the Great who enabled the Jews to escape from Babylon, where they had been held in slavery.
After the Second World War, when the United States seized the remnants of the British Empire, US President Dwight Eisenhower reorganized the Middle East. To dominate it, he appointed two regional powers to represent him: Iran and Israel. The two countries were both friends and rivals.
Eisenhower sent his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles (brother of CIA Director Alan Dulles), to Syria to organize an Iranian-Syrian alliance to contain Israeli ambitions. A mutual defense treaty was signed between Damascus and Teheran on May 24, 1953. At the time, the Syrian president, General Adil Chicakli, was pro-British and anti-French. This treaty still exists today [1].
At the same time, the UK came into conflict with Shah Reza Pahlevi’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who wanted to nationalize oil production. With the help of the United States, London organized a coloured revolution ("Operation Ajax" [2]). MI6 and the CIA paid thousands of people to demonstrate and overthrow Mossadegh. Responding to the "call" of his people, the sovereign changed his Prime Minister to Nazi general Fazlollah Zahedi [3].
Cooperation between the Shah’s autocratic regime and Israel began in 1956 with the construction of the Elian-Ashkelon pipeline. Above all, in 1957, Mossad sent a team of "revisionist Zionists" [4], led by Yitzak Shamir, to set up the dreaded SAVAK political police [5].
In 1956, to seize the Suez Canal, which Egypt wanted to nationalize, the declining colonial powers, the United Kingdom and France, enlisted the help of the colonial state of Israel. After this operation, the France of socialist Guy Mollet thanked Israel by secretly sharing its atomic research with it. This research continued unbeknownst to the United States.
However, when the U.S. became convinced that Tel Aviv was heading for the bomb, it made sure to give it to Iran too. In 1974, French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing brought Iran into the Eurodif consortium. It undertook to supply it with enriched uranium and to train its scientists. Two years later, US President Gerald Ford authorized Iran to pursue its own bomb.
In 1978, the United States took a dim view of Shah Reza Pahlevi’s military ambitions, which threatened Israeli power, and decided to impose a new Prime Minister with a new policy. Zbigniew Brzeziński, President Jimmy Carter’s security advisor, decided to rely on the Shiite clergy, some of whose assets had just been nationalized by the Shah (the "White Revolution"). In his view, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, whose preaching was circulated on audiocassettes throughout the country, had the authority to become the monarch’s Prime Minister. Despite the opposition of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, he organized his exile to the Paris region, where he stayed for four months before being flown to Tehran by Air France on a special plane. The United States had persuaded the Shah that they were in control of the situation, and only intended to fight his opposition. They had even asked the Savak to assassinate the philosopher Ali Shariati (a personal friend of Frantz Fannon and Jean-Paul Sartre) in London, so that his ant colonialist ideas would not interfere with their scenario. The Shah had agreed to take a leave of absence while Washington sorted out the problem at home.
However, on the day of his return, February 1, 1979, a crowd of one million people acclaimed the Ayatollah. From the airport, he made his way to the cemetery where 800 Iranian victims of political repression had just been buried. To the astonishment of Westerners, he delivered a violently anti-imperialist speech. There was no longer any question of a revolution within the Persian Empire, but of the establishment of an Islamic Republic.
Israel immediately seized the Iranian half of the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline. A long dispute ensued, which was only secretly settled much later.
Khomeini questioned the recognition of Israel as a colonial state, had the premises of its embassy seized and handed them over to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
In 1985, Robert McFarlane, Security Advisor to US President Ronald Reagan, planned to deliver arms to Nicaragua’s counter-revolutionaries, the Contras, without the knowledge of Congress. To this end, he first approached Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. The two men agreed that it was not possible to involve a revolutionary Arab state like Libya, but perhaps Iran. Through the intermediary of MP Hassan Rohani (future President of Iran), they contacted the President of the Iranian Assembly, the hodjatoleslam Hashemi Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani agreed to buy weapons to fight the Iraqi aggression, and to transfer some of them to the Contras. Thanks to this deal, Rafsanjani, already a large landowner, became the richest man in his country [6].
In 1988, Iraq used chemical weapons of mass destruction against the Iranian army and population. The result was a huge number of cripples. Even today, the threshold of tolerance to air pollution is very low in Iran. Often, the state issues an alert and the city of Teheran has to be evacuated for several days. I remember my friend, the great journalist Nader Talebzadeh, who, interviewing me on television, suddenly left the set, coughed up his lungs and was hospitalized. Responding to the suffering of his people, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini declared weapons of mass destruction in general to be contrary to his vision of Islam. Since then, Iran has ceased its nuclear, biological and chemical military research. This ethical decision made the war last a little longer.
In 1992, Hashemi Rafsanjani, now a professional arms dealer and President of Iran, organized secret exchanges with President Carlos Menem’s Argentina. Now publicly collaborating with the United States, he sent troops to fight under NATO orders in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He also supplied Argentine arms to the Bosnians. Officially, he did not question Khomeini’s anti-colonialist vision of the world, but supported the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović. Israeli military personnel also took part in the operations.
The Iran-Argentina arms trade was interrupted by Israel, which organized the attack on its own embassy in Buenos-Aires (1992), followed by the attack on AMIA (1994) [
login
who are we?
contact us
qosheapp
Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Belen Fernandez
Rami G Khouri
Mort Laitner
Rachel Marsden
Bradley Blankenship
Tarik Cyril Amar
Michael Kwet
visit website
