The history of now: Israel and Iran

• After conquering Babylon in 539BC, the Persian king Cyrus the Great ended the exile of the Jews and ordered the temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem. For this, he is the only non-Jew referred to as “Messiah”.
• Work was temporarily halted under subsequent rulers but was restarted at the request of Darius (ruling from 522-486BC), who commanded leaders in Syria and Lebanon to send cedar trees for the temple’s reconstruction.
• Under the Sasanian Empire (AD224 to 651) Jews were granted religious freedom and their intellectual tradition flourished, producing the Babylonian Talmud, the cornerstone text of Jewish law.

• In AD614 thousands of Jewish rebels helped the Persian Sasanians capture Jerusalem from the Byzantines, who had stifled Judaism.
• After the creation of Israel in 1948, Iranian Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi did not join Arab countries’ attack on the nascent Jewish state. Nor did he follow them in expelling his sizeable Jewish minority.
• In fact, the Shah, a close American ally, came to see Israel as a useful regional counterweight to growing Arab nationalism. Israel trained Iranian pilots and sent military equipment in return for oil, helping Israel survive a crippling boycott by Arab producers.

• The pair also jointly ran a pipeline to sell Iranian oil to Europe.

• This discrete alliance was ruptured by Iran’s 1979 revolution and the ascent of the ayatollahs. Israel closed its embassy in Tehran and many Jews fled.
• Religious-infused opposition to the Jewish state quickly became central to the identity of the clerical regime, which took up the Palestinian cause and denounced Israel as the “Little Satan” alongside the US, the “Great Satan”. “Death to Israel” became a popular slogan, chanted on Jerusalem Day.
• Israeli-Iranian collaboration did not entirely end there, however. In the 1980s Israel sent secret arms shipments worth billions to Iran during its war with Iraq, to counter Saddam Hussein.
• Israel also became the conduit for American military equipment sent to Iran in during the Iran-Contra affair.
• At the same time Iran nurtured Hezbollah in Lebanon, which emerged in response to Israel’s 1982 invasion. In 1994, on Iranian orders, Hezbollah bombed a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. It also bombed Israel’s embassy in Argentina in 1992.

• Throughout the 1990s and 2000s Iran backed an array of Palestinian Islamic groups including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a fundamentalist paramilitary group whose ideology was moulded by Iran’s Islamic revolution.
• The election of Iranian hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 marked a nadir in relations. The next year, Ahmadinejad hosted a Holocaust denial conference in Tehran.
• During the 2006 Lebanon W war, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (IRG) orchestrated Hezbollah’s resistance to Israel. The IRG’s head was in Lebanon throughout the conflict, narrowly surviving an Israeli strike targeting Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah.
• Israel launched an advanced cyber attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2010, damaging a fifth of its centrifuges by causing them to spin out of control.
• In the 2010s Israel’s Mossad intelligence service sought to derail Iran’s nuclear programme through an assassination campaign of car bombings and shootings of nuclear scientists.
• Throughout this decade, Iran took advantage of the turbulence unleashed by the Arab Spring to form an “Axis of Resistance” incorporating the Houthis in Yemen and the Assad regime in Syria.

• Iran claimed Hamas gave it no prior warning of the October 2023 attacks, when gunmen slaughtered killed 1,200 Israelis and took over 250 hostages, despite a history of close Iranian support for Hamas including supplying it with rockets to strike Israel.
• Iran and Israel’s first direct clash came in April 2024. On 1 April, Israel struck Iran’s consulate in Damascus, killing 13 16 people. In response, Iran launched hundreds of drones at Israel.
• Tensions flared again last October when Iran fired 200 missiles at Israel. The strike was made in retaliation for Israel’s killing of Hezbollah’s Nasrallah in Beirut and the death of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, killed in an explosion in Tehran that Iranian officials blamed on Israel.
• The April and October 2024 strikes were heavily telegraphed beforehand and largely symbolic. By contrast, this month, Israel struck without warning, aiming to wipe out Iran’s military capabilities and its nuclear programme but risking all-out war.

Photographs from top: Sepah News/AFP/Getty; Chris Hellier/Cobis, Getty; Keystone