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How Iran unwittingly strengthened the Jewish state

Micha Danzig

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Members of the Zionist Federation in Iran, circa 1920. Credit: Persian Jewish Oral History via Wikimedia Commons.

One of history’s great ironies is that while Tehran spends billions of dollars trying to erase the Jewish state, Israel is safer thanks, in part, to Jews who fled Iran only a few decades ago.

The descendants of Iranian Jews, whose familial roots stretch back through centuries in Isfahan, Shiraz and Tehran, bring their knowledge of the regime to their work in Israel’s military, security and strategic industries. They are not “colonizers” but exiles returned who have returned to their indigenous homeland, bringing with them memory, expertise and a fierce determination to ensure their survival in the land where Jewish history began.

Take Maj. Arye Sharuz Shalicar, an Israel Defense Forces spokesperson of Persian-Jewish origin, fluent in Farsi, who tells Israel’s story directly to Iranians. Or Beni Sabti, a former Israeli government spokesperson in Persian, who advises Israel on strategic messaging to Iran. They embody something Tehran fears because they understand Iranian persecution, not as an abstraction but as a lived experience, and they use that knowledge to defend the Jewish state.

Their families lived in Persia long before Shia Islam ever rose to dominance. Jewish Diaspora communities lived there since biblical times, dating back to the era of the Achaemenid Empire and Cyrus the Great, nearly 1,500 years before Islam. The Jewish presence in Iran predates the clerics who now rule it by millennia. Yet the regime that forced Jews out now dares to call Israel an “alien outpost,” erasing its own history while pretending Jews arrived late to the Middle East.

Every Hamas rocket launched from Gaza, every Hezbollah attack or Houthi drone aimed at Israel, every missile Iran fires toward Tel Aviv underscores a brutal truth: Tehran’s war on Israel is not about borders. It is about existence. Yet, it is the grandchildren of Iranian Jewish exiles, like the grandchildren of Jews who were exiled from many other Arab countries, who are among the soldiers defending Israel: They pilot Israel’s fighter jets, direct its cyber-defenses, operate the Iron Dome batteries that intercept those rockets and perform other crucial tasks.

Ironically, it is Iran’s antisemitism, like that of so many other Arab dictatorships before it, that has helped strengthen Israel and allowed its population to flourish.

This reality demolishes the cartoonish narrative that Israel is a Western colonial project. Jews from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Libya and Algeria were expelled from homes where their communities had existed for centuries before being Arabized or Islamized by conquest. Instead of seizing someone else’s land, they came to Israel and returned to the Jews’ indigenous homeland—the one nation that offered them refuge and continuity.

Tehran’s propaganda paints Jews as colonizers, but its own history tells the opposite story. Iranian state media erases centuries of Jewish life in Persia, a life that enriched the country in every field. Before the clerical dictatorship, Iran’s Jewish community numbered as many as 100,000. Now, only about 8,000 remain, surviving under repressive conditions.

The Jews who were expelled from Iran carry scars of rejection, but they also have the tools to defend Jewish continuity. They have passed this knowledge down to their children and grandchildren. Iran may want to crush Israel, but, ironically, it helped produce Israelis who know exactly what tyranny and Islamist colonialism look like, and what it takes to resist it.

This conflict is a centuries-old struggle over whether Jews, indigenous to the Land of Israel, will be allowed to live as a free people in it.

Iran seeks to erase Jewish life from the Middle East. But when antisemitism forces Jews from their homes, they do not vanish. They rebuild. They return. They strengthen. And that remains the sharpest rebuttal to the Iranian regime’s genocidal vision: Jewish history in Persia did not end in exile. It lives on in Israel, where the Jewish story—one of survival and triumph against every empire and every colonizer, from Rome to Tehran—continues to unfold.

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Micha Danzig served in the Israeli army and is a former police officer with the New York Police Department (NYPD). An attorney, he is active with a number of Jewish and pro-Israel organizations, including StandWithUs, T.E.A.M. and Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF).

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