Tehran, Iran – Iran has become one of the most vocal voices against Israel’s brutal bombardment of Gaza. And this is consistent with his decidedly anti-Israeli foreign policy. The two Middle Eastern nations are often described as sworn enemies.
The Palestinian issue has been at the center of hostilities for decades, and Tehran has warned Israel and its closest ally, the United States, that the war with Hamas could expand as Tel Aviv escalates its attacks beyond Gaza. Israel has bombed positions in Lebanon and Syria, two countries where Tehran exercises considerable influence.
Here is a quick overview of the history of Iran-Israel relations and the current situation.
How did relations between today’s Iran and Israel begin?
Under the Pahlavi dynasty, which ruled from 1925 until its overthrow in the 1979 revolution, relations between Iran and Israel were anything but hostile. Iran is actually the second Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel after its founding in 1948.
Iran was one of 11 members of the special United Nations committee formed in 1947 to find a solution for Palestine after the end of British control over the territory. It was one of three countries to vote against the UN’s plan to partition Palestine, driven by fears it would worsen violence in the region for generations to come.
“Iran, alongside India and Yugoslavia, proposed an alternative plan, a federative solution which consisted of keeping Palestine as a single state with a parliament but divided into Arab and Jewish cantons,” he told Al Jazeera Oxford University historian Eirik Kvindesland.
“This was Iran’s compromise in trying to maintain positive relations with a pro-Zionist West and the Zionist movement itself, as well as with its neighboring Arab and Muslim countries.”
But two years after Israel managed to conquer more territory than the UN approved after the start of the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, Iran – then under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the second king or shah Pahlavi – became the second Muslim-majority nation. after Turkey to officially recognize Israel. Before the creation of Israel in 1948, more than 700,000 Palestinians were ethnically expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. Palestinians call their forced displacement and dispossession the Nakba, an Arabic word meaning catastrophe.
Kvindesland said Tehran’s move was mainly aimed at managing Iranian assets in Palestine, as around 2,000 Iranians lived there and their properties were confiscated by the Israeli army during the war.
But it also happened in the context of Israel’s so-called “periphery doctrine.”
“To end his isolation in the Middle East, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion pursued relations with non-Arab states on the ‘edges’ of the Middle East, in what would later be known as of doctrine of the periphery. This also included Ethiopia, but Iran and Turkey were by far the most successful approaches,” Kvindesland said.
Things changed after Mohammad Mosaddegh became Iran’s prime minister in 1951, when he led the nationalization of the country’s oil industry, monopolized by Britain. Mosaddegh severed ties with Israel, which he saw as serving Western interests in the region.
According to Kvindesland, the efforts of Mosaddegh and his political organization, the National Front, to nationalize oil, expel British colonial power and weaken the monarchy were Iran’s main issue at the time. His ties to Israel constitute “collateral damage,” he says.
“There was a certain anti-Zionist mobilization in Iran. There was (an influential Shiite cleric) Navvab Safavi, one of the most famous figures who spoke out strongly against Zionism and the establishment of Israel. But for Mosaddegh, the main goal was to gain support from neighboring Arab states to fight British control over the oil industry,” Kvindesland told Al Jazeera.
Zionism emerged as a political ideology in the late 19th century that called for the creation of a homeland for Jewish victims of atrocities in Europe.
Things changed dramatically when Mosaddegh’s government was overthrown in a coup d’état organized by the intelligence services of the United Kingdom and the United States in 1953. The coup restored the Shah, who has become a staunch ally of the West in the region.
Israel established a de facto embassy in Tehran, and the two eventually exchanged ambassadors in the 1970s. Trade relations grew and Iran quickly became a major supplier of oil to Israel, with both countries establishing a pipeline aimed at transporting Iranian oil to Israel, then to Europe.
Tehran and Tel Aviv also have extensive military and security cooperation, but this has remained largely secret to avoid provoking Arab countries in the region.
“Israel needed Iran more than Iran needed Israel. Israel has always been the proactive party, but the Shah also wanted a way to improve its (Iran’s) relations with the United States, and at the time Israel was seen as a good way to achieve that goal. said Kvindesland.
“There was also the prospect of strengthening the security apparatus, and the (Iranian security and intelligence service) SAVAK was partly formed by Mossad. These were things that Iran could get elsewhere, but Israel was keen to provide them because it needed a partner in the Middle East who was otherwise quite anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli.
The historian said the Shah was primarily motivated by the need for alliances, security and trade, and “showed little concern for the Palestinians in his dealings with Israel.”
What happened after the Iranian revolution?
In 1979, the Shah was overthrown in a revolution and a new Islamic Republic of Iran was born.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the revolution, introduced a new worldview that primarily defended Islam and advocated standing up to “arrogant” global powers and their regional allies, who would oppress others – including the Palestinians – to serve their own interests.
This means that Israel has become known in Iran as the “Little Satan” compared to the “Big Satan” that is the United States.
Tehran has severed all ties with Israel; citizens could no longer travel and air routes were canceled; and the Israeli embassy in Tehran was transformed into a Palestinian embassy.
Khomeini also declared every last Friday of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan Quds Day, and since then large rallies have been held on that day in support of the Palestinians across Iran. Jerusalem is known as al-Quds in Arabic.
Trita Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told Al Jazeera that Khomeini opposed the Palestinian issue being seen as an Arab nationalist cause and sought to transform it into an Islamic cause in order to provide Iran has the capacity not only to defend the Palestinian cause but to lead it.
“To overcome both the Arab-Persian divide and the Sunni-Shiite divide, Iran has adopted a much more aggressive stance on the Palestinian issue to brandish its credentials as a leader in the Islamic world and to put Arab regimes United States allies on the defensive. ” he said.
Enmity grew over the decades as both sides sought to consolidate and increase their power and influence in the region.
Today, Iran supports an “Axis of Resistance” network of political and armed groups in several countries in the region, including Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen, which also support the cause Palestinian and consider Israel a major enemy.
Over the years, Israel has supported various groups violently opposed to the Iranian establishment. Tehran says these include a number of groups it describes as “terrorist” organizations. They include the Mujahideen Khalq (MEK), an organization based in Europe, Sunni organizations in Iran’s southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan, and Kurdish armed groups based in Iraqi Kurdistan.
How did they compete?
Tensions between Iran and Israel are not limited to ideologies or proxy groups.
The two men are said to be behind a long series of attacks against their respective interests, inside and outside their territory, which they publicly deny. This is what is called a “shadow war” and is increasingly coming into the open as hostilities intensify.
Iran’s nuclear program has been at the center of some of the most significant attacks. Israel – itself suspected of clandestinely possessing dozens of nuclear weapons – has vowed never to let Iran develop a nuclear bomb. Tehran has reaffirmed that its nuclear program is for civilian purposes.
It is widely believed that Israel and the United States are behind the Stuxnet malware that inflicted significant damage on Iran’s nuclear facilities in the 2000s.
Over the years, there have been numerous sabotage attacks against Iranian nuclear and military facilities, for which Tehran has blamed Israel. Iran also regularly releases reports that new sabotage attacks have been foiled.
The attacks also targeted personnel, including a number of high-level nuclear scientists. The most brazen assassination took place in 2020, when top nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was shot dead using a satellite-monitored, AI-controlled machine gun mounted on the back of a van that then exploded to destroy evidence.
On the other hand, Israel and its Western allies accuse Iran of being behind a series of attacks against Israeli interests, including several drone strikes against Israeli oil tankers and cyberattacks.
Could there ever be normalization?
Several Arab states in the region have opted to normalize relations with Israel as they seek more Western support.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, the region’s other power, restored diplomatic ties with Iran this year after a seven-year break following a China-brokered deal in March.
The United States is trying to broker a similar deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Any prospect of normalization between Tel Aviv and Riyadh has been suspended, at least for the moment, as Israel continues to bomb Gaza, having already caused a humanitarian nightmare and killed nearly 10,000 people, a third of them children.
But for the current Iranian establishment, any rapprochement with Israel is out of the question.
Parsi said the common security imperatives that in previous decades had led the two countries to become allies, including the threat from Arab nationalist states and the Soviet empire, had disappeared by the early 1990s.
Tehran opposes US hegemony in the Middle East while Israel consistently opposes any efforts by Washington to bring US troops home from the region. Groups linked to Iran regularly attack American bases in Iraq and Syria.
It is a “rivalry for dominance and power in the region, the two states have been involved in a low-intensity war for over a decade,” Parsi said.
There are no signs of this changing.