With the US now in open warfare withIranin a long-heralded conflict triggered by fear for Israel’s existence, it is worth recalling the prescience of the Israeli spy in Tehran who saw it all coming.
As the Mossad station chief in Tehran in the late 1970s, Reuven Merhav was the Israeli foreign espionage agency’s man on the ground charged with safeguarding Israel’s sensitive intelligence relationship with its closest Middle East ally, Iran under the rule of its pro-western monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
In a scenario that throws the current state of warfare between the two nations into sharp relief,Israeland Iran had fostered close ties since the Jewish state’s founding in 1948.
But a March 1978 visit to the Persian Gulf island of Kish – then a hedonistic playground for Iran’s rich and well-connected – along with the Israeli ambassador, Uri Lubrani, convinced Merhav that the shah’s reign was crumbling and the precious strategic partnership imperiled.
With discontent rumbling and opposition protests gathering pace, the two men encountered a monarch and intelligence agents complacent and detached from the gathering storm.
The pair communicated their forebodings to their Mossad and foreign ministry bosses in Israel – only to be met by skepticism and disbelief, a feeling shared by the CIA in Washington when the same warnings were relayed to it.
Weeks later, as Merhav prepared to leave Tehran at the end of his tour of duty, he had some cautionary words for his successor.
“I’m worried that this friend of ours will soon be an enemy,” Merhav told him as described by Ronen Bergman in his 2008 book, The Secret War With Iran. “I’m giving you Iran with a time fuse.”
It was an eerily prescient forecast.
Within months, Iran was consumed with revolutionary fervor. Chaos and upheaval unfolded on the streets. As his power base quickly collapsed, the shah – so recently thought by western allies to be unassailable – fled abroad with his family in January 1979.
Weeks later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a radical Shia cleric, returned from Paris after years in exile, to take power and turn Iran into an Islamic state. He immediately severed all ties with Israel. With revolutionaries storming the Israeli embassy, the country’s remaining diplomats were forced to flee, lucky to escape Iran with their lives.
Thus began a deadly ideological enmity between two countries that had been allies, shared no common border and harbored no territorial claims against each other – and which has now spiralled into open war and, last night, dragged in the United States with consequences that may transform the geopolitical map, afterDonald Trumpannounced that the US had bombed three Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan.
With the US’s entry into the conflict on Israel’s side, Merhav’s gloomy forecast has now acquired graver dimensions than perhaps even he foresaw.
More than three decades after he first made them, I had an improbably serendipitous encounter with Merhav on a train from Hamburg in Germany to Prague, the Czech capital.
Having entered my compartment after getting on the train at Berlin, the elderly man sitting opposite noticed my reading material and asked if I was reading Arabic. I told him it was Farsi, which I was attempting to learn, in the hope that I might one day be allowed back into Iran.
I had been the Guardian’s correspondent in Tehran several years earlier, but had been forced to leave Iran in late 2007 after the authorities refused to renew my residence permit, apparently due to objections over my reporting. But the intensity of the experience had kept my interest in the country – and hopes of returning – alive.
The man replied that he spoke Farsi, in which we then attempted to converse, with limited success before reverting to English as it became clear that his fluency in the language far exceeded mine. He explained that he was Israeli and had worked in the embassy in Tehran before the revolution. He introduced himself as Reuven – at which my eyes widened in sudden recognition.
I had read Bergman’s vivid account of Merhav’s grim warnings and the subsequent evacuation of Israelis from Tehran months earlier. It left a lasting impression. Now I was in the company of the main protagonist. He sidestepped my question about the book’s description of him as Mossad’s man in Tehran, confirming only that he worked for Israel’s foreign ministry, but acknowledged knowing Bergman and his work. There was no doubt that the stranger on the train was Merhav, a fact confirmed by subsequent Google searches and one Israeli foreign ministry official I later asked.
The chance encounter added context and meaning to events I had witnessed first-hand as the Guardian’s correspondent. Much of what happened then explains why the two countries are locked in combat now. To be in Tehran then was to be a witness to what turns out to have been a long prelude to the current warfare – as tensions between Iran and Israel escalated.
Nearly every night during spring and summer, I could hear living proof of the enmity that Merhav had predicted from the balcony of my rented house in north Tehran as youthful chants ofmarg bar Israeel(death to Israel) andmarg bar Amrika(death to America) emanated from what seemed to be a nearby training camp for the Basij, a volunteer militia run by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Both slogans had been absorbed into the fabric of Iran’s revolutionary landscape. They could be seen emblazoned on buildings and were a staple chant at Friday prayers. “Death to Israel” was even graffitied in a section of Isfahan’s Naqsh-e Jahan Square, a Unesco world heritage site.
Israel and Iran had been locked in shadow hostilities for years – with Tehran suspected of masterminding deadly attacks on Israeli and Jewish installations in Argentina and backing Hezbollah in Lebanon – when I arrived in Iran in early 2005. But it was after the election ofMahmoud Ahmadinejadas president in June of that year that the ante was dramatically raised.
At a conference in Tehran in October, Ahmadinejad, a populist who promoted himself as a champion of the marginalized and underprivileged, stoked international outrage with a comment that was interpreted as calling for Israel “to be wiped off the map”, although other translations offered less incendiary forms of words.
Apparently revelling in the notoriety, the president followed up by calling the Holocaust “a myth”.
Worse followed. The following year, Iran’s biggest-selling newspaper, Hamshahri,staged the resultsof a cartoon contest to lampoon history’s worst genocide at Tehran’s Palestine Contemporary Art Museum.
The most egregious instance of Israel-baiting came in December 2006, when the Iranian foreign ministry staged what it called a “scientific” conference purporting to prove that the murder of 6 million Jews had not happened.
The event draw a rogue’s gallery of holocaust deniers and antisemites, among them David Duke, a former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and future supporter of Donald Trump, who praised Iran for allowing “free speech” and denounced Israel as “a terrorist state”.
It was, on many levels, a sickening spectacle, both for its unsavoury catalogue of attendees and the brazen assault on truth, with some exhibits purporting to show that allied forces, rather than the Nazis, were responsible for wartime atrocities.
“The biggest turning point was Ahmadinejad being elected and then denying the Holocaust,’ said Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian-born Israeli scholar, who teaches Iran studies at Reichman University, near Tel Aviv.
“Iranians lose their mind if somebody calls the Persian Gulf the Arabian Gulf. Yet they fail to understand what kind of emotions it creates in Israelis when somebody says the Holocaust is a myth.”
The insult was compounded by growing Israeli suspicions that Iran was trying to build an atomic bomb.
The existence of a hitherto secret Iranian nuclear project, in the form of a uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, had been disclosed by the opposition Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) movement in 2002. Enrichment activities were subsequently suspended by the then reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, as a confidence-building measure as western powers exerted pressure.
Ahmadinejad ordered the program’s resumption, stridently asserting Iran’s nuclear “rights” and sending international tensions soaring while elevating Israeli fears to fever pitch.
“You have somebody who denies the Holocaust, they’re developing nuclear program, they’re supporting Hezbollah – Iran took on a new form in terms of threats,” said Javedanfar.
Israel’s preoccupation with Iran’s nuclear activities underscored how dramatically the relationship between the two one-time allies had been transformed by the fall of the shah, historians say.
“One of Iran’s most important allies in the shah’s pursuit of a nuclear program in the last decade of his rule was Israel,” said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University and a biographer of the shah. “There are published reports of cooperation between Iran, Israel and South Africa in the last decade of his rule.”
The shah, said Milani, saw Israel as a “strategic ally”, a view enhanced by the two countries shared suspicions of Arab nationalism, as embodied by the Egyptian leader, Abdel Gamal Nasser.
“The shah was a realist. He realized Israel is there to stay and it controlled his enemies.”
Jews, meanwhile, felt relatively secure in Iran.
“Iran has had long history of very good relations with its own Jewish population,” said Milani. “It had largest Jewish population of any Muslim country at that time. There were maybe 150,000 at the time of the revolution.”
That, too, was transformed by the shah’s downfall. The onset of the Islamic regime – bringing with it a climate of fierce anti-Zionism – prompted a mass exodus of Iranian Jews, many of them eventually moving to Israel.
In the early 1980s, with Iran embroiled in a bitter attritional war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Israel attempted a rapprochement. Fearing a Saddam victory at least as much as Khomeini’s regime, it sent weapons to Iranian forces, helping them to stave off defeat.
The Iranians gladly accepted the weapons – but resisted any attempts at restoring the friendship.
“I’ve spoken to Israelis who served in Iran in the embassy before the revolution and afterwards dealt with Iran,” said Javedanfar. “They bent over backwards trying to reach out to the regime. They even lobbied the Americans” – who, under President Ronald Reagan, funneled their own weapons to Iran through Israel in an attempt to win the release of US hostages in Lebanon, an initiative that ended in the Iran-Contra scandal.
“It wasn’t just for the love of Iran. They had shared interests, but they really wanted to re-establish relations with this regime. But at the end, they found out that the weapons they were giving to Iran to fire at the Iraqis were being transferred to Hezbollah and being fired at Israelis.
“Iran did not want to have any rapprochement with Israel. It was impossible.”
Yet unwillingness to mend fences may not have devolved into deadly enmity without the obduracy ofAyatollah Ali Khamenei, who became supreme leader after Khomeini’s death in 1989
Khamenei exuded a greater commitment to Israel’s destruction than his predecessor, calling the country a “cancer” on the Middle East.
At a 1991 conference, organised at a time when Israelis and the Palestine Liberation Organisation were embarking on negotiations in Madrid, the supreme leader sided with factions opposed to a peace deal with Israel – a position at odds with Iran’s president at the time, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
The result was an intensification of a proxy war that Iran had previously waged haphazardly, through Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas. The latter group embarked on a spate of suicide bombings that killed scores of Israelis and contributed, in 1996, to the election of the hardlineBenjamin Netanyahuas Israel’s prime minister, as faith waned in the Oslo peace accords signed three years earlier.
There were domestic and foreign policy reasons for Khamenei’s anti-Israel crusade.
“After the fall of the Soviet Union, he saw an opening in the Middle East for a new kind of superpower, an Islamic one, so he wanted to take that chance,” Javedanfar said.
“But it also served the economic interests of his allies, because there’s billions of dollars to be made in keeping Iran isolated. That allows them complete monopoly over all sectors of Iran’s economy, from making tomato puree to cars. And one of the ways to make sure Iran always stayed isolated and western companies did not invest was to continue the anti-Israel line.”
Milani argues that Khamenei’s animus has even deeper roots in anti-Jewish prejudice, displayed in commentary he provided to In the Shade of the Qur’an, a book by the Egyptian revolutionary and Islamic Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb which he translated into Farsi.
“Many people, even within the regime itself, have asked why this is in the national interest, why do you think the destruction of the state of Israel is your responsibility?” he said. “The rhetoric and the reality of the policy of anti-Zionism is part of why Khamenei does it, but I think it is also an element of antisemitism.”
“Khamenei thinks Israel today is the same, or even worse than, those [Jews] who fought Muhammad at Medina. When you have that kind of antisemitic thinking guiding you, you can’t befriend Israel.”
It is a minority view among Iranians, most of whom do not view Israel as an existential enemy and would accept normalized relations, says Milani.
Soaring non-combatant casualties or massive damage to Iran’s civilian infrastructure resulting from prolonged Israeli bombardment could test such a rosy view, and instead deepen the enmity that Merhav foresaw nearly half a century ago.
For now, Milani puts the onus on Khamenei, whom he accuses of failing to live up to years of rhetorical bellicosity when it mattered.
“His devotion to the notion that ‘death to Israel’ must be part of every ritual of politics in Iran, then putting the country on the path of war, being absolutely unprepared for it when war is imminent is just criminal negligence,” he said. “To have all of this rhetoric and then to be so unprepared when Israel initially attacked – it’s just remarkable.”