Walk through a diaspora protest in London, Los Angeles, or Toronto, and you will spot something that shatters decades of state propaganda. Right beside the ancient Persian Lion and Sun flag flies the Star of David. This isn’t a cheap political stunt. It’s a raw, spontaneous nod to a shared history stretching back thousands of years. The people holding those flags are entirely ignoring the modern borders and religious ideologies designed to keep them apart.
The numbers tell part of the story. Today, over 135,000 Israelis claim Iranian descent — and some count closer to a quarter-million if you include multigenerational families. Many, including former Israeli President Moshe Katsav (born in Yazd), still consider Iran their cultural home.
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To understand why, you have to go back to antiquity. In 539 BC, Cyrus the Great captured Babylon and inherited a population of Jewish exiles who had been held captive there for decades. Instead of enslaving the conquered, he freed them outright. The Cyrus Cylinder, a clay proclamation now sitting in the British Museum, records the policy: captive peoples sent home, their gods and temples restored. He let the Jews return to Jerusalem and helped fund the reconstruction of their Second Temple. The Book of Ezra credits him by name for the decree, and the Hebrew Bible calls him an anointed one — the only time that title is given to a non-Jewish ruler anywhere in the text. For centuries afterward, as Persian empires rose and fell, these two peoples shared a rough neighborhood and built an unspoken truce: stay alive, and leave each other alone.
That instinct resurfaced during World War II. Despite declaring neutrality, Iran quietly became a sanctuary. After Stalin’s amnesty for Polish deportees, well over a hundred thousand Polish refugees poured south into Iran, including close to a thousand Jewish orphans who became known as the “Tehran Children.” Iranian families took them in before many moved on to British Mandate Palestine. Meanwhile, in Nazi-occupied Paris, Iranian diplomat Abdolhossein Sardari — later called the “Iranian Schindler” — used legal arguments about Persian-Jewish linguistic kinship to convince German authorities that Persian-speaking Jews holding Iranian citizenship fell outside the Nuremberg race laws. He issued them passports by the thousands, pulling them straight out of the Holocaust’s path.
After the war, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi turned this quiet empathy into a strategy. The shah was a pragmatist boxed in on every side: the Soviet Union to the north, an increasingly radical Arab nationalist bloc to the west and south, and a volatile mix of Marxists and Islamists at home, he had to keep off balance. Israel, another non-Arab state surrounded by hostile neighbors, was the obvious quiet partner. Publicly, the shah talked up Palestinian rights and Islamic solidarity, and kept relations with Israel strictly “de facto” — no embassy, no ambassador — so his domestic enemies couldn’t use it against him. Behind the scenes, it was a different story entirely. El Al flew regularly into Tehran. Israeli agricultural and military advisers worked inside Iran for decades. SAVAK trained alongside Mossad. Iranian oil, quietly and in large volume, kept the Israeli economy running.
The clearest proof came in 1973. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, the Arab members of OPEC triggered an oil embargo that quadrupled prices and rattled the global economy. Every Arab producer joined it. The shah did not. He knew the math: If Israel fell to a hostile coalition, Iran would eventually face that same coalition alone, with no buffer left between Tehran and a triumphant pan-Arabism. So he kept the oil moving — by tanker down the Gulf and into the Israeli-built Eilat–Ashkelon pipeline, a project the two countries had jointly financed and kept quiet for over a decade. On top of that, Tehran and Jerusalem ran a classified joint program, “Project Flower,” to co-develop a missile system derived from Israel’s Jericho design. None of it was public. All of it would have been a scandal in both capitals if it had leaked at the time.
Then came 1979. The revolution tore the entire arrangement apart within months. The new regime severed ties with Israel, handed the old Israeli Embassy in Tehran to Yasser Arafat’s PLO, and turned exporting religious militancy into the state’s defining export.
That is the alliance the diaspora is trying to resurrect every time it raises the Lion and Sun beside the Star of David. The friendship didn’t end because either people changed their minds about the other. It ended because a despicable regime seized the state and changed the subject. Fifty years of official hostility is the anomaly here, not the norm — and it is a far shorter chapter than the one that came before it.
What now, after this trip down memory lane? The way forward seems clear. There is no intrinsic enmity between the Iranian and Israeli people. There is no historical enmity between the Iranian and Israeli peoples. There is not the slightest reason to expect any continuation of the enmity between the Iranian and Israeli people. Virtually the very opposite is the case. By some accident, their very names come close to each other in alphabetical order (an embarrassment for the present Iranian regime at international sports events).
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If this present murderous Iranian regime can be forced into unconditional surrender, an unexpected side benefit would be a close association between the two nations. They might well even become allies. This would truly be an unintended consequence of U.S. policy. President Donald Trump’s critics maintain, vociferously and unendingly, that he has no exit strategy for the present war. Of course he does. He said it over and over again until he got blue in the face: no nuclear weapons for the present regime, no more proxies attacking Israel, and the Hormuz to return to a free waterway.
The friendship between Iran and Israel would be the icing on the cake. This will not please Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and the rest of their so-called “democratic socialists,” but that would be a further benefit.
Walter E. Block, Ph.D., is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans. Hushang Manuchehri is an independent writer.
