1945: End of the Nazi regime. The victors: Americans and Russians divide spheres of influence. In the Middle East, the French and British decide the fate of the countries and the future of their peoples. Although opposed to the British partition plan for Palestine in 1948, Iran, after these partitions, became the second Muslim country to recognize Israel, after Egypt in 1950. ---- An Objective Understanding ---- From 1943 onward, Jews, including many children, particularly 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 a War Without a Name
From then on, in 1979, a shadow war took hold, marked by numerous attacks or assassinations, claimed or not, including the attack on the Buenos Aires embassy in 1990 and the liquidation of Abbas al Musawi, the leader of Lebanese Hezzbollah, in 1992. The concern of the already nuclear-armed State of Israel was all the greater as it feared the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran. This shadow war, which aims to eliminate the main figures responsible for the Iranian nuclear program, continued in Syria in 2011 during the civil war, and in 2021 through mutual naval attacks in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman.
... to the Iran-Iraq War
In 1979, after the fall of the Shah, Iranian students stormed the American embassy in Tehran, taking 50 hostages, including diplomats. They were held for 14 months. Washington then imposed sanctions and decreed an embargo. But while the Iranian mullahs rejected the Great Satan, they were suspicious of support from the USSR, a communist, materialistic, and atheist regime.
In 1980, Iran, a rising regional power, worried Sahrawi Hussein, president of neighboring Sunni Iraq, where a large Shiite minority lived, viewed with suspicion by the regime. The other point of contention concerns the Khuzestan region, which Baghdad claims. This region, rich in hydrocarbons and other minerals, holds a dominant position on the Persian Gulf. But this confrontation is also ideological, between the Iranian Shiite Islamic theocracy and the military regime under the control of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party, which is Sunni and secular.
S. Hussein saw Iran weakened. His surprise attack soon became bogged down in trench warfare. This war lasted eight years (1980-1988) and ended with a ceasefire brokered by the UN, resulting in an estimated 600,000 deaths. This figure is still debated.
But such conflicts could not exist or continue 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 persist, and military instructors are sent to Iran.
It was through these reciprocal exchanges of favors that Tel Aviv was 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 for oil. Ronald Reagan succeeded James Carter in the White House. Negotiations, waiting, and blackmail over the release of the hostages... Washington turns a blind eye to the actions of its establishment members with Israel, which is then exempt from any sanctions related to circumventing the embargo.
But imperialism and the arms trade bring other sources of weapons to both belligerents, ensuring that neither side prevails. 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.
Confrontation of Theocracies
After Komeyni's death in 1989, his successor, Ayatollah Ali Kameney, steered the mullahs' theocratic policies toward a politico-religious regime where the rising Revolutionary Guards (the Pasdaran) would maintain order and wield political and economic power. A dictatorial government centered around the Ayatollah was centralized and militarized, where 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 Donald 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 relations to destruction, each side has exploited the other for its own domestic political purposes, to further its ambitions for regional hegemony, and also to satisfy its thirst for power.
Decaen 7 03 2026
https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Nantes-Rencontres-ecologiques-et-sociales-les-22-et-23-mai
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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