IRAN AND ISRAEL are two Middle-Eastern states that are openly hostile to one another, sharing a bloody rivalry that has at times threatened to boil over into outright war between the two regional powers. But it hasn’t always been this way.
Israel maintained friendly relations with Iran when it was a monarchy ruled by the Pahlavi Dynasty.
After Iran elected Prime Minister Mohamed Mosaddegh, who sought to nationalise the country’s oil reserves after coming to power in 1951, relations with the newly established Israel deteriorated.
Iran’s oil reserves were owned at the time by the British company now known as BP, in which the British government had a controlling stake. At the time it was called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and through a deal with the Iranian monarchy, took the majority of the profits.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, known in the English-speaking world as ‘The Shah’, was the last Iranian monarch and came to power through a coup against Mosaddegh, orchestrated by UK and US intelligence agencies in 1957. Under the Shah’s leadership, the country maintained positive relations with Israel once again.
In fact Mossad, Israel’s national security agency, helped to establish Savak, the Shah’s secret police force. And Iran recognised the State of Israel in 1960, becoming the second majority Muslim country to do so after Turkey.
It wasn’t until the Islamic Revolution in 1979 that chants of “Death to Israel” were heard on the streets of the capital Tehran. Relations have become more and more hostile since then.
The Cold War galvanised ties between Israel and the United States and since the 1970s, US support for Israel has been absolute, or as President Joe Biden put it, “Ironclad”.
For decades now, Iran’s leaders have openly called for the destruction of what they call the ‘Little Satan’ (Israel), as opposed to the ‘Great Satan’ (the United States of America), who they see as occupying powers in the Middle East who need to be expelled.
The ruling clerics of Iran see Israel as a foreign, colonial project that has stolen Middle Eastern land and is propped up by Western powers, particularly the US. As such, they find common cause with armed groups opposed to Israel, like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Iranian leaders most commonly refer to Israel as “the Zionist entity” or “Zionist regime” and often call for the state’s destruction.
Zionism is the international political movement that originally sought to establish a state for the Jewish people in Palestine and later focused on support for the state of Israel.
“The Zionist regime is a deadly, cancerous growth and a detriment to this region,” Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei said in a speech supporting Palestine in May 2020. “It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.”
Iran maintains ties with a constellation of armed groups and proxies across the region that it collectively calls the “Axis of Resistance”. They include Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine and Ansar Allah, or the Houthis, in Yemen, among others.
Israeli leaders cast Iran as their country’s greatest adversary and an existential threat to their allies in the West.
Israel has assassinated nuclear physicists, generals and Iranian allies over the last four decades or so.
“When we fight Iran, we’re fighting the most radical and murderous enemy of the United States of America,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a speech to the US Congress in July 2024. “We’re not only protecting ourselves. We’re protecting you… Our enemies are your enemy, our fight is your fight, and our victory will be your victory.”
Israel has been vociferous in encouraging its allies in Europe and North America to sanction Iran, stoking fears among Western political leaders of what the country could do with access to nuclear weapons.
Those concerns led US President Barack Obama, alongside the heads of a number of other countries, to sign an agreement with the Iranian government in 2015, which put limitations on the production of material that could be used to make atomic weapons in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.
Israel opposed the deal and Obama’s successor Donald Trump quickly reneged on it when he moved into the White House in 2016, meaning the sanctions returned.
Over the last few decades, Israel and Iran have traded tit-for-tat attacks in what has been described as a shadow war.
The two sides had resisted resorting to outright hostility between their armed forces until an Israeli airstrike killed senior Iranian military figures in an embassy in the Syrian capital of Damascus in April 2024, which prompted Iran to launch hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel, most of which were shot down.
In July 2024, Israel then assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, while he was visiting Tehran, stirring more fears of a full-scale war between the two regional powers that could involve the US, the UK, France and other Western states.
Those fears were exacerbated once again when Israel killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah – a close ally of Iran – last Friday, while the Israeli military was amassing tanks and troops along the Lebanon border ahead of an invasion.
Iran launched almost 200 rockets at Israel on Tuesday, for which Netanyahu said it would pay.
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