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.”

Israel and Iran: The Enemy of My Enemy

By David K. Shipler

            History is a fickle thing, and given Israel’s intransigence toward Iran today, and toward the nuclear deal just negotiated, it’s worth remembering how differently the two countries’ interests lined up thirty-five years ago, even after Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979.

In the early 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, Israel’s then Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon, invited me down to his ranch for a chat. He had a specific purpose, which emerged during our long conversation on a range of subjects. The point he pressed most urgently was the need for the United States to repair its relations with Iran. The country was a major player in the region, he argued, not to be ignored by Washington in the aftermath of the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He believed the Americans should be reaching out to Tehran, cultivating a restoration of ties.

            His view was self-serving, in that Iran was the chief counterweight to Iraq, Israel’s archenemy at the time. Egypt had signed a peace treaty with Israel, Jordan had a weak military. Syria and Israel were technically still at war but were observing a de facto peace along their common border on the Golan Heights.

But Iraq was a formidable military power in the region, and a threat. It had never endorsed the Arab-Israeli armistice of 1948, was helping finance the Palestine Liberation Organization, and had tried to go nuclear—an effort halted by Israel’s bombing in June 1981 of its nuclear reactor.

So Israeli officials quietly celebrated the grinding Iran-Iraq war as it went on year after year, reasoning that Iran would handicap and preoccupy Iraq and, in the longer term, serve as a balance against aggressive impulses in Baghdad. The enemy of Iraq was, well, if not a friend, at least a convenience. Indeed, Sharon publicly accused the US of arming Iraq with heavy weapons during the war.