“If a war were to break out between Iran and Israel, whose side would you be on?” someone asked me on Facebook a few weeks ago, when an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities was reportedly imminent.
From early adolescence, at the start of Iran’s 1979 revolution, my loyalties have so often been questioned that I’ve come to think of such suspicions as my Iranian-Jewish inheritance.
In the early 1980s in Tehran, a small group of socialist intellectuals who clandestinely gathered in an apartment every Thursday evening let me into their circle. Those were dangerous years. The government was new to power and violently insecure. Opposition groups were under assault. A war was raging with Iraq, and the United States had imposed sanctions. Our days were spent in queues, as the most basic staples were rationed.
Every member of the group was assigned to follow one of these pressing issues. I, however, was to give weekly updates on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Though much younger than the rest, I knew exactly what kind of sympathies I was expected to express. The land had to be returned to the Palestinians, I would declare at the conclusion of each summary. I never mentioned that among the Jews living on that land were my penniless relatives who moved to Israel from Iran after their home and store were torched by an angry mob during the mayhem that preceded the revolution.
Silence and submissiveness were and are the cornerstones of the character of the Iranian Jew. We walked past and away from confrontation. We burrowed in oblivion while living alongside Muslim friends and neighbors. Security and success came to those who blended in best, to those who did not allow any part of their Jewish identity to bleed into the Iranian.
Today, it’s that oblivion that threatens to engulf both peoples. No two nations have ever been so deeply shaped by each other and yet so unaware of their debt to each other.
At the dawn of the 20th century, Iran was racked by the lawlessness and tribalism that were endemic to the region. By about midcentury, under Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran had an army and an effective central government, which made subsequent industrialization possible. The credit for a surprising amount of that industrialization goes to the efforts of leading Iranian Jews.
Among them were the Nazarian brothers, who left Iran for Israel in the late 1940s, fought in Israel’s 1948 war of independence, went on to work in construction and, when they had mastered those skills, committed the unthinkable: they returned to their birthplace to begin building there. They became manufacturers of loaders, dumpers, cranes and cement mixers, and made these modern tools of urbanization available and affordable for the first time in Iran. The city of Isfahan, one of Iran’s greatest tourist destinations, whose proverbial grandeur equals “half the world,” became so only when the brothers, in collaboration with top Israeli engineers, built its underground sewer system and rid the city of disease and noxious air.
Another group of brothers, the Elghanians, erected high-rise buildings and highways that inoculated the country against tribal isolation. They also founded Iran’s first advanced plastic factory, which paved the way for other socioeconomic and scientific advances.
But soon after the fall of the shah, the chief of the Revolutionary Courts, Sadegh Khalkhali, executed hundreds of democratic-minded youths who had turned against the new regime. He also executed one Elghanian brother, Habib, on the charges of sowing “corruption on earth” and “espionage for Israel.” Mr. Elghanian’s execution set fire to the Jewish community. Many of Iran’s 100,000 Jews fled, mostly for Israel or the United States, and today only around 20,000 remain.
Just as the majority of Iranians are unaware of this history, so too are Jews unaware of the contributions of Iranians to Jewish survival. All too often, I’ve witnessed American Jews’ look of surprise when, upon meeting me, they learn of the existence of Jews in Iran for the first time, despite the fact that Iran still remains the largest home to Jews in the Middle East outside of Turkey and Israel.
As early as the sixth century B.C., Jews, exiled in Babylonia, found a savior in Persia’s Cyrus the Great, who helped them return to Israel. In the early 1940s, Iran became a refuge to Jews, who were this time fleeing Hitler’s army. Thousands owed their lives to the valorous conduct of Abdol-Hossein Sardari, the head of Iran’s diplomatic mission in France, who defied Nazi orders by issuing thousands of passports and travel documents to Jews. Even when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in top Holocaust-denying form, the descendants of the Polish survivors who chose to settle in Iran were laying flowers upon the graves of their loved ones in what’s known as the Polish Cemetery in Tehran.
Would the two nations allow their rulers to begin a war if they were aware of their depth of indebtedness to each other? By bombing Iran, Israel would be bombing a portion of Jewish history. If that happens, which side I would choose will not be a question. I will be twice destroyed by the two imperfect yet beloved cultures that each make up half of the woman I am.
By Roya Hakakian, the author of Assassins of the Turquoise Palace.