1945: The end of the Nazi regime. The victors, the Americans and Russians, divided their spheres of influence. In the Middle East, the French and British decided on the countries and the future of their peoples. Although opposed to the British partition plan for Palestine in 1948, Iran became, after these partitions, the second Muslim country to recognize Israel, after Egypt in 1950.
From 1943 onward, Jews, including many children, primarily from Poland, passed through Iran under Stalin's watchful eye. Between 1949 and 1952, many Jews leaving Iraq also passed through Iran to reach Israel.
This history led Ben-Gurion, the first Israeli Prime Minister, to forge ties of friendship with Iran. Thus, Tehran became the main supplier of oil in exchange for supplies, weapons, technology transfers-in short, harmonious bilateral economic relations. This allowed Tel Aviv to avoid total isolation from its neighboring Arab states, hostile to this Jewish state imposed by the West at their expense.
In 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran was proclaimed. The Shah's dictatorship, supported by the CIA and Israel, despite fierce repression of its population, fell under the blows of a popular revolution, notably led by the Shiite mullahs. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty, was overthrown.
This revolution was led by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Supreme Leader in exile in France. Upon his return to Tehran, he was acclaimed by the mullahs, of course, but also by nationalists, communists, and the far left. No doubt each group harbored opposing ulterior motives. Immediately, the "Guide" imposed Sharia law as the fundamental law of the regime. He presented himself as the defender of the poor and oppressed, demanded the liberation of Jerusalem as a strategic objective, and condemned the imperialism of the "Great Satan," the United States. This policy would remain a constant. Ahmadinejad, the sixth Iranian president, from 2005 to 2013, would make full use of it. He did not hesitate to denounce the existence of the State of Israel-the "Little Satan," a loyal ally of America-through shameless antisemitism and Holocaust denial. This propaganda was designed to rally the Iranian people around the regime. Furthermore, the Iranian resistance against the Shah trained and honed its skills in Lebanese training camps, alongside Palestinian movements.
The Iranian regime would later exploit this history and this militant ties, particularly with the triumphant welcome given to Yasser Arafat, the leader of the PLO. This cause of the liberation of occupied Palestine had been more or less abandoned or neglected by Sunni Arab countries. These countries feared these nationalist, revolutionary, and, in some cases, secular movements. Being a Persian and Shiite regime in a Sunni Arab environment led Tehran to develop and arm its "axis of resistance": local minorities in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and even Gaza and Yemen.
From 1979 onward, a shadow war took hold, marked by numerous attacks and assassinations, some claimed, others not, including the 1990 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the 1992 killing of Abbas al-Musawi, the leader of Lebanese Hezbollah. Israel, already a nuclear-armed state, was particularly concerned, fearing Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. This shadow war, which led to the elimination of key figures in the Iranian nuclear program, continued in Syria in 2011 during the civil war and in 2021 through mutual attacks on ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman.
In 1979, following the fall of the Shah, Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran, taking 50 hostages, including diplomats. They will be detained for 14 months. Washington will then impose sanctions and decree an embargo. But while the Iranian mullahs reject the Great Satan, they are wary of support from the USSR, a communist, materialistic, and atheist regime.
In 1980, Iran, a rising regional power, worried Saad Hussein, president of neighboring Sunni Iraq, home to a large Shiite minority, viewed with suspicion by the regime. Another point of contention was the Khuzestan region, claimed by Baghdad. This region, rich in hydrocarbons and other minerals, held a dominant position on the Persian Gulf. But this confrontation was also ideological, between the Iranian Shiite Islamic theocracy and the military regime under the control of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, which was Sunni and secular.
Saad Hussein saw Iran weakened. His surprise attack would soon become bogged down in a protracted war of attrition. A war that lasted eight years (1980-1988), and ended with a ceasefire signed under the auspices of the UN, resulting in a human toll of 600,000 deaths. A figure that is still debated.
But such conflicts could not exist or last without the backers, the imperialist patrons, their subordinates, and the state and private arms dealers. Russia, France, and China, acting either directly or jointly, supply 85% of the Iraqis with weapons, while Washington, Tel Aviv, and, of course, European countries, including France, supply both sides. Business is business. Despite the animosity toward the "little Satan," Israel operates in secret. Clandestine arms sales continue, and military instructors are sent to Iran.
It is through these reciprocal favors that Tel Aviv is able to bomb the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak and safely evacuate numerous Iranian Jews from Iran to Israel or the United States: a community estimated at 60,000 people.
Israel, still isolated in a hostile environment, found a new opportunity through Iran to combat the main threat to its policy: Sahrawi Hussein and his hegemonic ambitions in the region. As the war progressed, shipments of weapons and spare parts of all kinds flowed into Iran. Tel Aviv, supported by the CIA, became the mastermind of a flourishing clandestine trade on a near-industrial scale, worth up to $500 million a year. Weapons in exchange for oil. Ronald Reagan succeeded John Carter in the White House. Negotiations, waiting, and blackmail over the release of hostages... Washington turned a blind eye to the actions of its establishment members with Israel, which was then exempt from any sanctions related to circumventing the embargo.
But imperialism and the arms trade brought other sources of weaponry to both belligerents, ensuring that neither side would prevail. Each of these weapons, of Soviet, French, and other origins, were found to have transited through Eastern European countries, Libya, Syria, and even North Korea.
It's worth remembering that Soviet and American imperialism were also clashing in Afghanistan after Moscow's invasion, in Angola, and in Nicaragua with the Sandinistas' rise to power. The 1986 Iran-Contra scandal revealed these trafficking operations and exposed the mechanisms of secret deliveries and funds destined for Iran that ended up in Nicaragua to fuel the Contra counter-revolution. Israel's presence was noted, but under the supervision of the CIA.
After Komeyni's death in 1989, his successor, Ayatollah Ali Kameney, steered the mullahs' theocratic policies toward a politico-religious regime where the rising power of the Revolutionary Guards (the Pasdaran) would maintain order and wield political and economic power. A dictatorial government centered around the Ayatollah was established, militarized, and any protest or challenge to the regime was ruthlessly suppressed. This occurred in 2009, 2019, 2022, and 2025, with the death toll seemingly of little consequence. Meanwhile, in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, in power, surrounded himself with a far-right supremacist group and completed the Zionist vision of "Greater Israel," conceived at the very creation of the Jewish state in 1948. Israel became the state "of" the Jews and established an apartheid regime. The final challenge was to deal with the Palestinians. Iran became the obsessive enemy.
With Washington's approval and the legitimacy of the Europeans, after weakening Tehran's proxies in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza by eliminating their leaders, especially those most open to dialogue, tensions rose between the two countries. The Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and the hostage-taking, undermined the security and inviolability of Israeli territory, so often asserted by the Tel Aviv government. This opens up the prospect of getting rid of the Palestinians and committing "genocide" against them not only through bombs but also through hunger, thirst, lack of medical care, etc.
Since the dead do not have the same value, the mullahs' repression dominates our media landscape, while the Palestinian deaths and the accompanying barbarity are legitimized by Western Europe, including France, through the "right for Israel to defend itself," which implies Israel's right to "expand." The same applies to the denunciation of the religious regime of the mullahs in Iran, but no one thinks to denounce the theocratic regime in place in Tel Aviv with its ultra-Orthodox Jews, or D. Trump praying in the White House...
While Tehran has relentlessly exploited the Palestinian cause against the "little Satan," Tel Aviv, in turn, has relentlessly denounced and used as a pretext the Iranian threat and its nuclear arsenal, a threat thus far denied by the IAEA, the UN's international agency.
From cordial understanding to destruction, each side has manipulated the other for the sake of its domestic policy, targeting its own population, pursuing its ambitions for regional hegemony, and also driven by a thirst for power.
Decaen 7 03 2026
http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4688
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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