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.
