Israel and Iran: The Extraordinary History of Mutual Support

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            In the spring of 1982, just over three years after Iran’s Islamic Revolution, I was invited by Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon to his sheep ranch in the Negev Desert to hear his surprising arguments about Iran. As we sat in his spacious house, he made a strong case that Washington should work to repair relations with Tehran—in the strategic interests of both the United States and Israel.

            This was not a complete break from decades of Israeli policy toward Iran, which had traded oil for weapons. Yet at that moment, Sharon was voicing a bold and counterintuitive position for his country, which was the target of anti-Zionist hatred from the government of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. And the timing was off, for it came when American emotions remained high, little more than a year after the release of American diplomatic personnel who had been held for 444 days after the US Embassy was overrun.

Sharon wanted his controversial idea in The New York Times, but only “on background,” not with his name attached. This is a trade-off journalists accept to give the public significant information that would not be available otherwise. So, in a broad piece about American, Israeli, and Soviet stakes in Iran, I called him “a well-placed Israeli official,” a disguise unnecessary now, a dozen years after his death.

A former general infamous for ruthlessness toward Arabs, Sharon was more opportunist than ideologue. His lens was military, not religious. He saw Iran—Muslim but not Arab—as a counterweight against the well-armed Arab countries. At the time, only Egypt had signed a peace treaty with Israel. Iraq, Syria, and—to a lesser extent, Jordan—remained in the Arab order of battle.

Sharon worried about Moscow’s gains. He began his pitch by assessing Iran as the region’s most critical Muslim country, which deserved cultivation by Washington. “In spite of all Iran has done to the United States,” he insisted, “the United States cannot afford to permit Iran to be totally and unreservedly anti-American and leave the field open to Soviet penetration.”

Furthermore, he noted that about 40,000 Jews lived in Iran. “Under a regime like this one, you can consider them as hostages,” he said, making Israel responsive to Iranian requests for military equipment and spare parts for weapons.

In fact, Israel continued to provide military supplies to Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution (250 tires for F-4 fighter jets in 1980, for example, ammunition and parts for tanks); it suspended the sales under US pressure until the hostages were released in 1981, then resumed shipments for awhile. “No matter how intense their zeal against Zionism,” Sharon told me, “we don't have to fuel this fire.”

It’s safe to say that Sharon would not have advocated support once Iran embarked on its  nuclear weapons program, which could ignite a nuclear arms race in a region where Israel alone has a nuclear arsenal. It’s reasonable to think that he would endorse today’s war against Iran. But the countries’ prior history, documented by declassified Israeli Foreign Ministry memos and reports, offers an instructive picture of a largely secret alignment that Israel might want to renew if a moderate government came to power there, as unlikely as that seems today.

Analyzing the official papers in 2019, an Israeli human rights lawyer, Eitay Mack, described an extensive, mutually beneficial relationship from 1953 to 1979, during the dictatorial rule by Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. He had come to power after British intelligence, aided by the CIA, helped overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalized British oil holdings. (The scheme is well-documented in an investigative film, Coup 53.)

Under the Shah, Iran delivered oil to the Israeli port of Eilat, according to the files, from which it passed by pipeline to Ashkelon on the Mediterranean. In addition, “private and state-owned Israeli companies, ranging from textiles, agriculture, electrical appliances, water, fertilizers, construction, aviation, shipping, gas, tires and even dentures, had been operating extensively in Iran,” Mack wrote. “In some years, Iran was one of the main destinations for Israeli exports.”

The papers that Mack analyzed show close Israeli relations with the Shah’s feared security police, the SAVAK, which imprisoned and tortured political opponents. According to one Foreign Ministry memo, the Iranian prime minister asked in 1967 for Israel to train his chief bodyguard. Whether or not it was done is not spelled out. But Iranian police went to Israel for training by the company Motorola in using communications equipment. And documents show Israeli officials as keenly interested in the SAVAK’s ability to contain pro-communist or other opposition to the Shah.

Intelligence and military cooperation were extensive. Iran paid Israel to renovate Iranian air force and civilian aircraft. Purchases of Israeli tanker airplanes and other weaponry were reported. “Between 1968 and 1972,” according to Mack’s summary of the declassified documents, “IMI Systems [a major weapons manufacturer then owned by the Israeli government] sold $20.9 million worth of equipment to Iran; Israel Aerospace Industries sold $1.3 million; Soltam sold $16.9 million in mortars; Motorola sold $12 million; Tadiran sold $11.3 million and set up a radio equipment factory in Iran; and Israel’s Defense Ministry sold $700,000 worth of equipment.”

High-level contacts were maintained. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion visited Iran in 1961. Prime Minister Golda Meir met the Shah in 1972, and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin met the head of Iran’s security services on Dec. 8, 1974. For years, Israel and Iran had offices and representatives in each other’s countries, sometimes clandestinely, and Israeli military attaches were in frequent contact with Iranian officers.

A 1967 memo from Israel’s ambassador in Tehran, Zvi Dorel, put it this way: “We have established a close, friendly, and practical partnership between the IDF and the security services and their Iranian counterparts, with joint execution of programs and missions of national importance, with continuous mutual visits by the heads of the armed forces and their senior officials. … The Iranian army views the IDF and the security services as allies and those involved in making contact and professional issues.”

An Israeli Finance Ministry official reported in 1973: “The spectrum of activity is broad, ranging from the supply of military products and electronics manufactured by factories in Israel, to the export of systems for creating and assembling them on the spot, training, surveys, construction, assembling and maintenance of facilities on the ground through contractors.”

During the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Israel saw its interest in a weakened Iraq, so provided military support to Iran. In 1981, Sharon publicly berated the US for allegedly providing Iraq, an arch-enemy of Israel, with artillery and ammunition. “The fact that they are supplying these dangerous weapons to the Arab world, sophisticated weapons, puts us in a very difficult situation,” Sharon complained.

To the extent that Israel’s extensive, past relations in Iran have been translated into ongoing spy networks, they might have complemented the sophisticated digital surveillance that has evidently given Israel precise inside intelligence, which has facilitated identifying and targeting Iranian nuclear scientists and other key figures.

Although nationalist hatred and religious zealotry in the Middle East can look immutable, the rise and fall of the Israel-Iran collaboration exemplifies fluidity. Sharon’s plea in 1982 was a yearning to recover somewhat from the virtual collapse of the relationship after the fall of the Shah in 1979.

Significantly, as early as 1976, Israel’s ambassador in Tehran, Uri Lubrani, began to predict the Shah’s demise. “The feeling of many in Iran today is that the status of the Shah has begun to be quickly undermined,” he cabled to the Foreign Ministry, “a process that cannot be reversed and will eventually lead to his defeat and a drastic change in the form of government in Iran. It is very difficult to give a time estimate and my personal assessment, which is not based on any objective data, is that this will take place more or less in the next five years.” It took three.

Israeli officials hoped for a military government that would maintain the relationship, but Lubrani was far from sanguine. “It is reasonable to assume that the monarchy will end and that, at least in the first stage, the military officers will take its place,” he wrote. “The big question is who will lead them and what direction he will take. . . . The implications of a new situation for Israel-Iran relations should the Shah’s rule be undermined are grave, and the current regime of the Shah will be seen as the most positive one for Israel in Iran. Any change in this government will, to the best of our assessment, be to the detriment of our relations with this country.”

About a year before the end, on Sept. 28, 1978, Lubrani met with the Shah and reported, “He is not the man we were familiar with, he was distant and sometimes stares. . . He is full of terror and uncertain of the future. The most worrisome aspect is the sense that he seems to have made peace with his fate, without having found any strong desire to take matters into his own hands and change it.”

After that, Iran muscled up its military, funded and armed proxies—Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen—and posed the greatest threat to Israel, while some Arab countries, also threatened by Iran, moved toward accommodation with the Jewish state.

Those proxies and Iran’s own military have been severely damaged in repeated attacks. Despite a pro-Western restiveness among some of Iran’s 90 million people, demonstrated by the pre-war anti-government protests that were put down with slaughter, experts on the country doubt that this Israeli-American war will completely overturn the radical regime that has ruled since the Shah.

        The moment has a way of seeming permanent. Nevertheless, the Middle East is like a kaleidoscope whose future patterns of alliances and allegiances only fools and prophets would dare predict. The only certainty is that the kaleidoscope is being given another shake.

Phase Four: The Police State

 

By David K. Shipler 

            America’s march toward autocracy is now trying out the tools of a possible police state. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has emerged as a national force aimed not merely at deporting undocumented immigrants but at surveilling Americans and violently suppressing constitutionally protected dissent. The effect—and the evident purpose—is to sow widespread fear.

The agents, masked and camouflaged in combat gear, are accountable to nobody except the strongman at the top, Donald Trump. His key aide, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, reassured them: "To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” As these “law enforcement” officers violate the law with impunity, they are taking the country into phase four of its rising authoritarianism: the embryonic stage of a system whose brute force overcomes the rule of law and the liberties of the citizens.

The First, Fourth, Fifth, and Tenth Amendments in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights are being shredded by militarized policing and the beatings and murders of peaceful demonstrators (First Amendment); the warrantless break-ins and searches of homes (Fourth Amendment); the seizures of pedestrians and drivers without probable cause or due process (Fourth and Fifth Amendments), and the bulldozing of states’ rights (Tenth Amendment). All that is being done in service to President Trump’s semi-dictatorial powers.

How far it will go is an open question. The murders of two American citizens during Minneapolis protests have sparked condemnation from much of the population, even from a few Republicans who have belatedly found their spines. Yet the Trumpists’ longterm design looks clear enough: the recruitment and creation of a centralized apparatus above local control.

This is in the playbook of every dictatorship: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the Soviet Union’s KGB, Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Guard. In the US, the Trump government’s totalitarian aspirations to spread a radical right ideology into broad areas of America’s civil society require enforcement mechanisms that stand outside the normal structure of constitutional democracy. They include aggressive policing, political prosecutions, a cowed and self-censored press, physical threats, selective taxation, enticements to bribe under the guise of “donations,” and financial punishment.

An element of secrecy usually accompanies police-state practices, with anonymous agents out of uniform. Such is the case with federal agents, both in ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Although they operate openly, they hide their faces, display no badges or nametags, and are barely distinguishable from gang members. A photograph of the American nurse, Alex Pretti, being shot in the back while on his knees in Minneapolis could easily be mistaken for an execution by Hamas in the streets of Gaza.

Three Questions for an ICE Agent

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In the unlikely event that I ever have a chance for a conversation with an agent after he has dragged a half-dressed middle-aged citizen from his own house, wrenched a husband from his weeping wife and children, taken a five-year-old boy into custody, or shot into the innocent face of a mother of three, here is what I would ask: 

1.      Do you realize that the person’s face will haunt you for the rest of your life? (A former NKVD secret police agent under Stalin, writing in a letter to the Soviet magazine Ogonyok decades later, described his torment: “Now the people in the cases I investigated visit me at night, and instead of fear in their eyes I see that they despise me. How can I tell these people I tortured, how can I explain that my damned life was a tragedy, too?”)

2.      When your children and grandchildren ask what you were doing during the assault on America’s democracy, how will you answer? (Many young Germans, coming of age after World War II, questioned their elders closely about what they had done during the Nazi era; searing conversations often followed.)

3.      What did your parents do to you? (A line from a Seinfeld episode.)

Mobilizing the Conscience of America

 

By David K. Shipler 

            My earliest political memory is watching television film of Southern segregationists screaming epithets at Black children as they integrated schools in the 1950s, and police attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators with truncheons, dogs, and fire hoses. I remember not only my own revulsion but my grandmother’s. 

            She had been raised in rural Maryland and had her streak of racial prejudice. But as she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, she seethed with indignation at the crude inhumanity unfolding on the screen. Her disgust became my first lesson in the power of decency to honor nonviolence against violence, and to generate reform.

The scenes eventually mobilized the conscience of much of white America. A question is whether it can happen again.

This year’s holiday marking the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the architect of nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement, is a fitting moment to wonder if the furious episodes of masked ICE agents shooting and brutalizing protesting Americans can activate—broadly enough—whatever conscience has not been snuffed out by President Trump and his collaborators.

 We saw a moral uprising after a long history of police killings of unarmed Blacks culminated in the videoed 2020 suffocation of George Floyd in Minneapolis. That and other murders propelled demonstrations across the country by millions of Americans—most of them white, significantly. And since Trump’s inauguration a year ago, citizens not vulnerable to deportation have rallied against the inhumane practices by ICE agents, especially in Minneapolis, once again the center of conflict after an agent wantonly shot and killed Renee Good, a US citizen and a mother of three; she posed no threat, videos show, contrary to slanderous assertions by Trump and his subordinates.

In a current CBS poll, 61 percent of those surveyed said that ICE was being “too tough,” up from 56 percent in November. Among independents, 65 percent thought that protesters were either doing things “about right” (33 percent) or had not gone far enough (32 percent). The remaining 35 percent blamed demonstrators for going “too far.” As one might expect, Republicans and Democrats were heavily skewed in opposite directions, but overall, 52 percent said that ICE was making their communities “less safe.”

The numbers appear to show a gathering storm of resentment. But how that might translate into the kind of moral mobilization that produced the civil rights laws is a question. The parallels with today are far from precise.

Civil rights demonstrators were trained in the discipline of nonviolence, never fighting back when attacked as they marched peacefully, illegally rode segregated buses, helped Blacks register to vote, or sat in at segregated lunch counters. King, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, called this the “love ethic.” He and others bet correctly that the Southern power structure, through white thugs and cops, would play its role in the pageant, revealing a cruelty that did, in the end, galvanize onlookers across the country.

Anti-ICE protesters have no such coherent training and no resonant voice of leadership, and while most are peaceful, clashes with agents draw the most vivid videos. Those taken and doctored by right-wing activists circulate on social media, which did not exist sixty years ago, and influence policy-making in the White House, which had not been captured back then by an authoritarian ideology of white supremacy.

Before the internet and cable news, television was dominated by the three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, which generally kept opinion out of their reporting. Today’s opinionated news coverage, particularly on the right, has distorted much of the public’s perceptions of reality. A side effect has been the erosion of public trust in news organizations that strive for fairness and accuracy, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Opinion, it seems, is alluring enough to attract people who want their views upheld—confirmation bias, it’s called.

Right-wing “news” outlets have unquestioningly conveyed Trump’s effort to discredit protesters as being paid by nefarious domestic enemies, a smear from the top. In the fifties and sixties, that rhetoric came largely from the bottom as local and state officials dismissed civil rights demonstrators as “outsider agitators.”

The dynamic today has been inverted, with Washington the enemy of peaceful protest and some state and local governments defending that right, which is enshrined in the First Amendment.

In 1957, for example, after Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the state national guard to prevent nine Black students from entering Little Rock’s Central High School, President Dwight D. Eisenhower acted. He pressed Faubus to use the guard to assure peaceful integration, as the Supreme Court had ordered in Brown v. Board of Education three years earlier. But when Faubus withdrew the guard instead and rioting erupted, Eisenhower federalized the guard and sent 101^st Airborne troops to restore order and protect the students.

Today, it is the federal government that is trying to crush demonstrators and the state and local governments in Minnesota that are trying to protect them. It is the White House that is suppressing an investigation into the Minneapolis shooting and the state that wants to hold the agent accountable.

The inversion of righteousness is telling. America is a different country now. The threshold at which outrage is triggered has risen very high as Trump and company have numbed us to violations of ethics, laws, social norms, democratic processes, racial respect, and other features of a pluralistic and orderly culture. He has created, in ICE, a national, paramilitary force unlike anything seen before in the United States, unaccountable to the law or to the norms of decency.

Seared in my memory is the photograph, from Little Rock, of a white girl’s face twisted in hatred as she screamed at a Black girl seeking to go to Central High. The country came to see itself in this mirror.

My grandmother did not become a flaming liberal, but she loved Eisenhower, and I think his actions affected her views on race. She did not object on principle when my mother and I went to the 1963 March on Washington, where King declared, “I have a dream.” She was worried for us, because violence was ridiculously predicted by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director. But in the end, the crowd was a sweep of massive friendliness and uplifting harmony, a tribute to the conscience of America.

The New America: Fortress on a Hill

 

By David K. Shipler 

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.

--John Winthrop, 1630 

            The stirring phrase “city upon a hill” was coined not as a description of the United States but as an aspiration, a challenge, applied to the Massachusetts Bay Colony by John Winthrop in a sermon probably delivered at sea, before arriving in New England. Since then, as quoted by Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, it has morphed into a mirage of self-adulation—not a hope but a supposed achievement.

             “I've spoken of the shining city all my political life,” Reagan declared in his farewell address: “In my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still. . . . And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”

            You want to weep when you read these words today. Even putting aside Reagan’s own failures to keep that beacon bright (he opposed the monumental civil rights acts, for example, and slandered the poor on welfare), the metaphor imagined the best of a complicated America. It was accepted globally, though not unanimously, as modeling democratic freedom and economic opportunity. Millions from around the world have struggled to climb up to this shining city on a hill.

Now it is becoming a fortress. In merely one year, President Trump and his minions have recast the model. It is no longer a robust democracy but a semi-dictatorship fueled by a cult of personality supported by a critical mass of Americans. No longer is the rule of law its bedrock. No longer can the public’s discontent be reliably translated into political change. No longer does free speech flourish under a government that regards dissent as punishable. No longer do its officials or many of its private institutions embrace that essential American idea: the din of many ideas. No longer is it entirely safe for “the people peaceably to assemble . . . for a redress of grievances,” as the First Amendment provides. Whatever harmony the country enjoyed among “people of all kinds” has dissolved into discord under a government driven by the ideology of white supremacy.