Aryeh Levin was returning from a meeting when he stopped into a store in Karaj, a town just west of Tehran.
This was in the early 1970s and Levin was an Israeli diplomat posted to the embassy in the Iranian capital. Levin knew the country well and spoke Farsi fluently, having been born and raised in Tehran before moving to Israel at age 20.
In the store, a man in religious Muslim garb approached him and said, “I know you’re Iranian.”
The man didn’t say it to intimidate Levin. Indeed, the two had a pleasant conversation, typical of Levin’s diplomatic service in his homeland. In fact, Levin said in a phone call from his Jerusalem apartment, he often met freely with Iranians of all stripes, including observant Muslims.
“I knew many of them. I used to speak with them. We were on very good terms,” he said. “I had many friends in Tehran.”
Those were the days when Israel and Iran enjoyed diplomatic relations, commercial airplanes flew between the two capitals, business was done and the countries’ militaries collaborated.
That ended by 1979, when Muslim fundamentalists led a revolution that toppled Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Iranian king, or Shah.
The air-raid sirens shrieking throughout Israel in recent months to warn of incoming ballistic missiles launched by Iran, the destroyed buildings in cities like Tel Aviv and Arad, the nine people murdered in one strike alone in Beit Shemesh — to say nothing of the lethal attacks and wars unleashed on Israel in the past few decades by Iranian proxies Hezbollah and Hamas, including since October 7, 2023 — make the once-peaceful period between Iran and Israel difficult to conjure.
The era of collaborative relations lasted officially for less than 20 years. The pro-West Shah took a risk in forging ties with Israel at a time that few in the Middle East did.
When Iran recognized Israel diplomatically in mid-1960, Egypt’s President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, recalled his ambassador to Tehran and accused Pahlavi of having “sold himself to his master’s imperialism and Zionism at a cheap price.”
In that period, international Jewish charitable organizations, such as the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT) and the Joint Distribution Committee, operated openly in Iran. Approximately 61,000 Jews lived in Iran in 1966, compared to 15,000 today. Most Jews fled for the United States and Israel by the time Ruhollah Khomeini took over as Iran’s supreme leader in 1979.
“Israeli manufacturers are being granted more and more orders from Iranian businessmen,” read an article in the November 2, 1962, issue of the Indiana Jewish Post and Opinion.
Iran didn’t succumb to Arab pressure to cut ties with Israel, the article said, “realizing, instead, that the Jewish state and itself have much to offer each other.” Iran, it added, had “requested wholesale technical assistance from Israel, primarily to rehabilitate the earthquake-stricken Qazvin region” in the country’s northwest.
In fact, the Iranian people preferred that the countries’ ties be expanded beyond where even the Shah had taken them. “Many Iranians are angered over this blackmail which the other Arab nations hold over their heads,” the article said, citing an Israeli newspaper report. “Some have spoken out against it vehemently.”
That squares with many Iranian citizens’ warm views toward the Jewish state today, especially since Israel and the United States launched their joint attack against the regime’s installations in February.
Levin, who will turn 96 in late April, said he remains calm when air-raid sirens blare. He and his wife close the shutters and walk calmly to their fortified room.
He figures that Israel is “not going to win this war” and that the Iranian regime isn’t likely to be overthrown, at least not soon. “They will stay another 40, 50 years,” he said.
“The machine will go round and round. It’s called ‘time.’ There are many things we can’t predict,” Levin, who served in New York in the 1980s, said in fluent English. “We bombed them and bombed them. That makes no impression on the Iranians.”
He added: “I hope that things will pass and some seikhel [sense] will get into their heads eventually. This is a crazy time we’re living in.”
Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at [email protected].
