Israel – Iran: The Confrontation – The Israel-Iran Relations That Were Hidden From You

The confrontation between Israel and Iran does not at all correspond to the image presented by the media. Its roots lie in a period before the Islamic Republic and has no connection with the construction of a nuclear bomb. Its outbreak today is intended to conceal the misdeeds of the Argentinian Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Here we are: the confrontation between Israel and Persia has begun. Its origins lie not in the Islamic Republic, but in what preceded it. This war is expected to last until one of the adversaries is exhausted.

To understand what is happening and avoid falling prey to one of the two official narratives that mask the reality of the problem, several steps back in time are necessary.

IRAN’S ENEMIES IN THE 20TH CENTURY

All demonstrations in Iran against external enemies end with the inevitable “Death to the United Kingdom! Death to the United States! Death to Israel!” It is a cry that comes from the depths of the suffering of the Persians since the First World War.

• Indeed, while we in the West are unaware of it, Iran was the victim, in 1917-1919, of the largest genocide of the First World War [1]. 6 to 8 million people died of starvation out of a population of 18 to 20 million, or between a quarter and a third of Iranians. Iran, although neutral, was crushed by the British armies, against a backdrop of rivalry with the Bolsheviks and the Ottomans. This horror has left a traumatic memory that is still very present in Iran [2]. There is no doubt for an Iranian that the United Kingdom is his country’s primary enemy.

• The British, who had colonized Iran behind one of their officers, Reza Shah (1925-1941), overthrew him to place his son in power, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979). Behind these screens, they plundered the country’s oil. However, in 1951 the Shah chose Mohammad Mossadegh as Prime Minister. The latter nationalized the oil to the detriment of London. This ensued a quarrel during which the British made a bad faith assault and a color revolution that they organized with the help of the United States. This was “Operation Ajax” [3]. The new regime was no longer held by London, but by Washington. The United States Embassy, which installed the telephone, placed derivations of the lines of all the ministers to listen to them without their knowledge, live. This system was exposed during the 1978 revolution. Iranians therefore have no doubt that the United States is their second enemy.

• When Mossadegh was overthrown, the British imposed General Fazlollah Zahedi in his place. Zahedi was a Nazi they had imprisoned in Cairo, but London was counting on him to restore “order.” He therefore formed a secret police force modeled on the Gestapo. He recruited former Nazis to train it, and several hundred “revisionist Zionists” were sent by Yitzhak Shamir (then working for the Mossad) to supervise them. [4] The horrors of the SAVAK, the most terrible secret police in the world at the time, can still be seen in the museum dedicated to it in Tehran. [5] Iranians therefore have no doubt that Israel is their third enemy.

ISRAEL’S SOLE ENEMY IN THE 20TH CENTURY

Contrary to what the Israeli population believes after 25 years of “revisionist Zionist” propaganda, Iran—neither that of the Shah nor that of the Islamic Republic—never aimed to annihilate the Jewish population of occupied Palestine. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made clear, the goal was to destroy the State of Israel as Russia had destroyed the USSR. [6] No, the only enemy of the State of Israel is the one that, for 80 years, has sabotaged any attempt at peace between Jews and Arabs: the United Kingdom. As I have often explained, when the Foreign Office drafted its plan, The Future of Palestine, in 1915, it specified that a Jewish state should be created in Mandatory Palestine, but that it should under no circumstances be capable of ensuring its own security. It was only two years later that David Lloyd George’s government drafted the Balfour Declaration announcing the establishment of the Jewish National Home, and that the Woodrow Wilson administration committed itself to creating an independent state for the Jews of the Ottoman Empire.

The author of this text, Lord Herbert Samuel, became British High Commissioner to Palestine. True to form, he favored Jabotinsky’s “revisionist Zionists” on the one hand and, on the other, appointed the anti-Semite Mohammed Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

He was subsequently appointed Home Secretary in Archibald Sinclair’s government.
This policy continues unabated to the present day: the United Kingdom still supports the “revisionist Zionist” Benjamin Netanyahu on the one hand and the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch, on the other.

THE CONTINUATION OF THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE “REVISIONIST ZIONISTS” AND IRAN

Immediately after the Second World War, US President Dwight Eisenhower expressed concern that his Israeli counterpart, Chaim Weizmann, was creating a “Greater Israel,” that is, not the reconstitution of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (which was already largely included in the State of Israel), but of the ancient Assyrian Empire (i.e., from the Nile to the Euphrates). He asked his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, to organize an alliance between Syria and Iran to balance Israeli influence.

It was at Washington’s request that Syrian President Adib Shishakli (SSNP) (1953-1954) signed a military cooperation agreement with Iranian ruler Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on May 24, 1953. [7] It is therefore foolish today to denounce this same alliance (now called the “Axis of Resistance”) simply because both regimes have been decolonized.

Yet that is what we are doing. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter ousted the Shah of Iran and his claim to dominate the Middle East by acquiring an atomic bomb supplied by French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and his Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac. [8] To replace him, on the advice of his security advisor, Zbigniew Brzeziński, he moved Imam Ruhollah Khomeini from France to Tehran. Israel initially supported Iran against Iraq, supplying it with weapons as needed. Tel Aviv even organized the Iranian part of the Iran-Contra scandal. Then, it gradually changed its strategy [9] while retaining certain remnants of the Shah’s period. Thus, the EAPC-B consortium, half-owned by each of the two states, continues, even today, to operate the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, essential to the Israeli economy. In 2018, the Knesset adopted a law punishing any publication about the owners of this company with 15 years of imprisonment [10]. Since the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Iraq in 2003, allegedly because of its role in the September 11, 2001 attacks, London and Washington began spreading rumors about an alleged Iranian nuclear weapon, just as they had done about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction [11]. At the time, London and Washington hoped to force Iran to help them against Iraq.

These intoxications led to the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolutions 1737 (December 23, 2006) and 1747 (March 24, 2007) [12]. The leader of the Israeli opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu, then seized on this propaganda. For twenty-five years, he continued to denounce the “imminent” Iranian construction of an atomic bomb, even as Tehran tabled a proposed resolution at the United Nations creating “a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East” [13].

In any case, in 2013, William Burns (Joe Biden’s CIA director at the time) negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA) with Iran in Oman on behalf of President Barack Obama. This was staged at the 5+1 meetings (i.e., the five nuclear powers of the Security Council plus Germany) in Geneva. But it was not signed in Vienna until two years later, with the United States and Iran reserving a long suspension to conclude a secret additional annex.

In a very long interview [14], just before the end of his second term, Barack Obama explained that he refused, as a precaution, to prevent Iran from embarking on the race for an atomic bomb, but that he was ready to intervene if Tehran pursued a military nuclear program. His Security Advisor, Susan Rice, declared: “The Iran deal was never primarily about trying to open a new era of relations between the United States and Iran. It was much more pragmatic and minimalist. The goal was very simply to make a dangerous country considerably less dangerous. No one expected Iran to become a benevolent actor.” The United States’ position [15] has not changed. Certainly, during his first term, President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the JCPoA and the secret annex that Barack Obama had negotiated, but he only verbally refused to allow Iran to enrich uranium, not during negotiations.

During this period, Iran began mobilizing Shiite communities in the Middle East to ensure its security. Then, with General Qassem Soleimani, Tehran returned to the Khomeini doctrine of aid rather than instrumentalization. Iran already had no more “proxies” before Israel destroyed Hamas, Hezbollah, and many others. Each had become independent.

THE EVENTS THAT TRIGGERED THE CONFRONTATION

It so happens that, on June 7, Esmail Khatib, Iran’s Minister of Intelligence, made public an operation by his secret services. They succeeded in stealing confidential documents on Israel’s nuclear program, just as the Mossad had managed, in April 2018, to steal Iranian documents on its nuclear research [16].

On June 12, the IAEA Board of Governors—under the chairmanship of Rafael Grossi—adopted a resolution [17] in which it noted that “the Director General, as stated in document GOV/2025/25, cannot provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful.” It therefore considered that “Iran’s numerous failures since 2019 to comply with its obligations to cooperate fully and timely with the Agency regarding undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple undeclared locations in Iran, as detailed in document GOV/2025/25, constitute a breach of its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with the Agency within the meaning of Article XII.C of the Agency’s Statute;.” Accordingly, it referred the matter to the United Nations Security Council.

But while the Iranian documents seized by the Mossad revealed no military nuclear program [18], despite statements by Benjamin Netanyahu, the first Israeli documents seized by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry called into question the neutrality of Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an Argentinian. They revealed that he had transmitted observations from his organization to Israel, even though Israel is not a member. Among the IAEA governors, Russia, China, and Burkina Faso opposed this resolution.