Israel and Iran – A Wisp of Comity was Blowing in the Wind

The undercurrent of understanding bulldozed by the Mullahs and the Messianic “Visionaries”

By

David Gottfried

Marlene Dietrich was a refugee from Hitler, an anti-Nazi Activist, a leftist and a staunch supporter of Israel

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Iran and Israel are, once again, embroiled in a hot war. The rhetoric waxes towards the apocalyptical, and fevers mount toward a zenith of incandescent intensity that augers nuclear annihilation.

Pardon the hyperbolic rhetoric, but I think it is hard to exaggerate the lunacy. The mullahs genuflect before the 72 virgins and orgiastic ecstasy of the sexy death of Jihad. Bibi Netanyahu is intent on transforming Judaism into something akin to East Asian ancestor worship in which instead of worshipping G-d, we worship our relatives murdered for being Jewish. And Donald Trump careens back in time to the ancien regime, bejeweled with the grandest castles and the most titanic and terrifying dungeons.

I suppose many people will hold up their hands and say, “The middle east was always like that. The Jews and the Iranians always hated each other’s guts.” However, it was not always like that.

Iranians are not Arabs. Iranians are Persians. And the Jews and the Persians have not always hated one another.

Persian culture predated Arab culture by many centuries, and the ancient kingdom of Persia was advanced, beautiful, intellectually stellar – and it was a great ally of the Ancient Hebrews.

When King Cyrus of Persia vanquished Babylon, he ended the exile that Babylon had imposed on the Jews. Because of the intervention of King Cyrus, the Jews were able to return to Zion and rekindle the Jewish state. You can read this in standard secular histories, and you can read this in the Bible.

Also, Iran was somewhat supportive of Israel until Israel won the 1967 War. Israel became a state in 1948. Initially, Israel obtained its oil from just two states: the Soviet Union and Iran. (Because the British fought the Zionists in the Jewish war for Independence, the West gave very little aid to Israel when she was in her infancy and most needed aid.)

Also, the adage, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” brought the Iranians and Jews together as they both had troubled relationships with the Arabs. In the case of Iran, the fault line with the Arabs was not only ethnic (Iranians, as I said, were Persians, and Persians are not Arabs) but also religious (Persians subscribe to Shia Islam; Arabs for the most part are Sunni Muslims).

Therefore, the immense discord before Persia and Israel should not exist. I don’t want to sound emotional, but Persia and Israel really don’t have good reasons for hating one another’s guts. Although Persia has justifiable resentment toward the United States because, in the early 50’s, America toppled the revolution of Mossadegh, who wanted to transfer oil wealth from Western corporations to the Persian people, Israel had nothing to do with America’s coup against Mossadegh.

Israel could not have convinced the U.S. to oust Mossadegh from power even had it wanted to. At that time – the early 50’s -- Jewish influence in Washington was nil. America foreign policy in the Mid East excluded Israel as its pivot was the Baghdad Pact, an Arab Anglo-American Alliance against Communism. Indeed, Israeli influence in Washington was so meagre that President Eisenhower had put forth a peace plan, code named the Alpha Plan, which called for Israel to cede much of the Negev to Egypt. At that time, Israel had a 9-mile waist at her point of greatest population concentration, but the American State Department argued that Israel should be even smaller. Look at a map of the region. Before you can entertain any ideas regarding what Israel should or should not cede, you must have some idea at to where the boundaries are and whether a given boundary is defensible.

Why Persia was Renamed Iran – and this Reason, in a nutshell, underscores why the conflicts of the Middle East have all the coherence of a drunk in Bellevue demanding that he be restored to Versailles and be acknowledged as Louis the Fourteenth.

The name was changed from Persia to Iran only because the Shah in power, in the 30’s and/or 40’s, was wooed by Hitler to become an ally of Germany. To induce Persia to be his ally, Hitler told the Shah that the Persian people were a subset of the Aryan people (which demonstrates the utter stupidity of classical European racism because Persians – now called Iranians – are neither blond nor blue-eyed, the signal traits of European Aryans). Since the Farsi (the language spoken in Iran/Persia) word for Aryan was something close to the word Iran, Persia was renamed Iran.

If you did not understand the immediately preceding paragraph, read it again. This historical factoid underscores the truly demented nature of the region’s conflicts.

If the Mullahs of Iran want to have any credibility at all, they should rename their country Persia and stop imagining they are the blond and blue-eyed leaders of black and brown revolution against so-called “Zionist Imperialism.”