Farhang Jahanpour, TFF Associate
June 5, 2026
Berkshire (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – After the massive US and Israeli attacks on Iran on 28 February 2026, the second attack in the middle of negotiations within a year, with his characteristic modesty, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “The war on Iran fulfils my 40-year dream”. Netanyahu has not only been dreaming of involving the United States in a war against Iran, but he has also been actively working and plotting to bring this about. US Senator Chris Van Hollen put it this way: ‘Netanyahu waited 40 years to find an American president “stupid enough and reckless enough” to start a war with Iran.’
To be fair to Netanyahu, he has not been the only Israeli prime minister to push for a war with Iran. The same policy was followed by most of his predecessors, especially Ariel Sharon, but he has been the most persistent and the most extreme proponent of this idea. Although it was under Netanyahu that the false allegation that Iran planned to develop nuclear weapons emerged as a prime military concern, his predecessors, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, also began to drum into the Israeli public, and internationally, the danger that Iran supposedly constituted. Rabin described the revolutionary Iranian government as a “dark, murderous regime.” In 1996, meanwhile, Peres called the Islamic regime “more dangerous than Hitler.”
This is a very unfortunate reversal of the relations between Iranians and Jews, whose contacts go back millennia.
The Jews have lived in Iran for over 2700 years, a continuous connection between Iranians and Jews not matched by any other nation. For most of that period, the relations between the Jews and Iranians have been fairly warm and friendly. According to the Book of Kings, in 722 BC, a group of Israelites was brought by King Shalmaneser of Assyria to Iran, and they “settled […] in the cities of the Medes.”
Continue reading this surprising history of warm Jewish-Iranian relations here.
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