It was never about the Jewish religion and Islam, at least in times before the present. Even now the more discerning would rather say it is Israel-Islam at loggerheads, distinguishing between the Jewish religion and Israel. It is political-territorial.

Despite that some proponents of the State of Israel will say there is no distinction between the state and the religion, others beg to differ. Those proponents are making the most of that stance and hold the power card – nuclear weapons.

Jumping back to centuries ago, when the Parthians held sway in what is now Iran, the Jews and Parthians and Sasanians were pretty much on good terms and the Jews, as a minority, were granted more freedom of movement and the Sasanians – under Sharpur I (240 to 270CE) – ‘could count on their compliance with taxing and general legal prescriptions’ (Josef Wiesehofer in his Ancient Persia).

“In the wars between Rome and Sharpur II, the Jews, unlike the Christians, were decidedly loyal in their attitude, with the exception of a few Messianic groups”(ibid). This lasted until that moment of Jewish chronology where it was held that it was the 400th anniversary of the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem – the “First Temple” was destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE when they sacked the city (it’s a messy history largely dependant on religious texts; there were other sacred places on that hill previously). In those later Sharpur days Jews attacked the Magi in Isfahan under the impression it was the time of the arrival of the Messiah. …wrong!

In pre-Islamic days Zoroastrianism was the main religion in Iran until the Arab conquest brought in Islam. Initiated by Zoroaster, who is said to be born 550 BCE in present-day Afghanistan, it was the earliest religion to propose an omnipotent, invisible god, which took representation as an eternally burning flame in Zoroastrian temples.

The Ateshkadeh (Zoroastrian Fire Temple) is in the city of Yazd, located in the eastern part of central Iran situated on the high, desert plateau that forms much of the country. Zoroastrians have always been populous in Yazd, even now about ten percent of the town’s population adhere to this ancient religion. The primary belief circles around the dualism of Light and Dark, Good and Bad, with the intervention by the world of Man with a free will to choose.

“In the seventh century, the Jews watched the Sasanian offensive against Byzantium with great expectancy and joyfully welcomed the conquest of Jerusalem” (ibid). When the Arab armies replaced the Sasanian reign they found an intact system of self-governing Jews.

It can be assumed that the number of Jews living in the Sasanian empire was considerable, especially in Babylonia. The majority made a living by farming, handicrafts and trade. “They lived predominantly in villages, but also with many different ethnic, linguistic and religious groups in larger towns and cities with no indication of closed Jewish districts” (ibid). That was not the case in Babylonia where there was separation. An extremely anti-Jewish tendency was held by Christians in those days, especially of the Eastern Church persuasion – clearly because they had to deal with the Jews whereas the Western Block did not.

In much earlier times there are records of positive Jewish-Persian interactions, from the time of sixth century BCE Achaemenid king, Cyrus the Great, the first ruler of the developing Persian empire.

This reputedly (and why not) magnanimous man established what has been called the world’s first religiously and culturally tolerant empire. Ultimately this empire comprised of 23 different peoples who coexisted peacefully under a central government, originally based in Pasargadae – a kingdom that at its height, under Cyrus’s successor Darius, extended from the Mediterranean to the Indus River.

However, relying on the Old Testament which has Cyrus repatriating the Jews from their Babylonian captivity is questionable. Also, taking into account the Akkadian cuneiform scripted Cyrus Cylinder from Babylon – perhaps Iran’s most exalted artifact but a royal foundation inscription – to likewise extrapolate special dealings for the Jewish minority is stretching the cuneiform text. A pertinent example is the line: “I [also] gathered all their [former] inhabitants and returned [to them] their habitations (ibid).

Note: the cylinder was discovered in the ruins of Babylon in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in 1879. It was created following the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BC, when the Neo-Babylonian Empire was invaded by Cyrus and incorporated into his Persian Empire.

The Cyrus Cylinder is housed at the British Museum in London, with a replica residing at UN headquarters in New York City. The cylinder has inscribed on it a decree that has been described as the first charter of human rights – predating the Magna Carta by nearly a couple of millennia. It can be read as a call for religious and ethnic freedom.It banned slavery and oppression of any kind, the taking of property by force or without compensation; and it gave member states of the Iranian empire the right to subject themselves to Cyrus’s crown, or not. “I never resolve on war to reign,” is a saying ascribed to Cyrus the Great. He established the first Persian Empire, which would become the largest, most powerful kingdom on Earth. Among other things, one interpretation of history is that Cyrus freed the enslaved Jews of Babylon in 539 BC, sending them back to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple with money he gave them, and established what has been called the world’s first religiously and culturally tolerant empire. Ultimately this empire comprised of 23 different peoples who coexisted peacefully under a central government, originally based in Pasargadae – a kingdom that at its height, under Cyrus’s successor, Darius, extended from the Mediterranean to the Indus River.

On that note Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian lawyer who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, informed her interviewer in her central Tehran apartment building basement office: “To know Iran and what Iran really is, just read that transcription from Cyrus. Such greatness as the cylinder has been shown many times in Iran, but the world doesn’t know it,” she said. “When I go abroad, people get surprised when they realize that 65 percent of the college students here are girls. Or when they see Iranian paintings and Iranian architecture, they are shocked. They are judging a civilization just by what they have heard in the last 30 years,” – the Islamic Revolution; the rollbacks of personal freedoms, particularly for women; the nuclear program and antagonism with the West. They know nothing of the thousands of years that came before, she said – what the Iranians went through to remain distinct from their invaders, and how they did it.”

Mr Wiesehofer has it that: “Many scholars have read into these last sentences a confirmation of the Old Testament passages about the steps taken by Cyrus towards the erection of the Jerusalem Temple and the repatriation of the Judeans, some even going so far as to believe that the instructions to this effect were actually provided in these very formulations of the Cyrus Cylinder.”

The adulation of Cyrus appears warranted but it has to be understood that his magnanimity which is generally accepted and admittedly novel for the times was more a political convenience than a sign that Cyrus was humanistically inclined. He had to keep the various minorities in check and allowed freedoms to prevent disenchantment to his rule; indeed a wise ruler.

Point is, in the olden days relations between the Jews and the Persians were generally smooth with some rough patches depending on who ruled Persia.

There are all kinds of claims and counter-claims on Jerusalem, in what is termed The Holy Land which refers to the geographical region of the Levant of no definite borders which has significant religious importance for Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Bahá’í Faith. Nowadays, it comprises roughly the territory of Israel, the Palestinian territories and parts of Jordan and Lebanon. It has religious significance because of Jerusalem, the holiest city to Judaism, the birthplace of Christianity, and the third-holiest to Islam. The perceived holiness of the land to Christianity was the ideological driving force behind the Crusades. The land has been a destination for religious pilgrimages since biblical times.

Today, despite the problematic political rhetoric against Israel, the Jewish faith continues to withstand the ravages of cultural change in Iran with the largest community of Jews in the Muslim Middle East with a population of around 25,000. This is likely because the cycle of wars has been between Israel and Arabs, not Persians. There are more than a dozen synagogues in Tehran. In Isfahan five or more synagogues cater to 1,200 Jews and the community has been present at that place, around Palestine Square, for 3,000 years.

Another instance of the Jewish connection is Esther’s Tomb in Hamedan, the most important Jewish pilgrimage site in Iran. Jews believe that the sarcophagus contains the body of Esther, the Jewish wife of Xerxes I, who was responsible for organizing the first Jewish emigration to Persia in the 5th century BCE. At one time Hamedan was a melting pot for various faiths. Today there are less than 50 Jews in the city, practising their faith in the minuscule synagogue attached to the site. On December 9, 2008, Iranian news outlets reported that the tomb of Mordechai and Esther, heroes of the Purim Saga, ‘would now be under official government protection and responsibility’.

The Oil Question

The Persian Gulf is located along Iran’s southern border. On the other side of the Gulf lies so much of the world’s crude oil, in the oil fields of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. That narrow waterway, the Strait of Hormuz, facilitates passage to so much tonnage of the world’s oil. This strategic position of Iran places the country in a unique position to oversee vast quantities of the world’s oil supply and delivery – or sell its own oil elsewhere than to the West.

Oil was at the root of a 1953 event that is still a sore topic for many Iranians: the CIA-backed overthrow, instigated and supported by the British government, of Iran’s elected and popular prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh had kicked out the British after the Iranian oil industry, controlled through the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (which became BP), was nationalized, and the British retaliated by imposing an economic blockade.

A coup involving the shah took place with an operations centre at the US Embassy in Tehran, the future “nest of spies” to the Iranians, where 52 US hostages were taken in 1979. Afterwards, the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was returned to power, commercial oil rights fell largely to British and US oil companies, and Mossadegh was imprisoned and later placed under house arrest until he died in 1967.

With the Cold War on and the Soviet bloc located just to the north, the US feared that a Soviet-backed communism in Iran could shift the balance of world power and jeopardize Western interests in the region, thus the coup.

The Revolution

The revolution in 1989 changed many things in Iran, not least the taking of the Palestine question to the popular heart. It must be born in mind though that the Palestine Jews had been living together with Arabs and Christians for millennia until the arrival of the European Jewish nationalists with their Zionist intentions.

At least one eminent writer has proposed the Iranian Revolution as the first non-violent revolution of Asia. As the actions exemplified the first sustained defiance by unarmed masses against tanks and guns of an autocratic state. Writer Mr Suroosh Irfani says such defiance became a model for non-violent revolutions in Eastern Europe that unravelled autocratic states and the Soviet bloc a decade later. Adding that: “… it is therefore intriguing that rather than a prototype for Muslim countries, the Iranian revolution was universalised by melding with the Eastern European experience of non-violent revolutions, unleashing the dynamics of urban mass movements from below.”

There was bloodshed though. Following events it is seen that despite growing prosperity, opposition to the shah was widespread, fanned mainly by conservative Shiite Muslims, who sought a nation governed by Islamic law. The leader of the Shia was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (Ruhollah ibn Mustafa Musawi Khomeini Hindi), a Muslim clergyman who had been exiled to France in 1963.

As the Shah’s regime, supported by the USA, became increasingly repressive, riots developed in 1978 threatening civil war. In early 1979 popular opposition forced the shah to leave the country. Hundreds of the shah’s supporters were tried and executed, others fled the country, and the ‘westernization’ of Iran was reversed. Khomeini, who had returned to Iran in triumph in February 1979, presided over the establishment of an Islamic republic.

In September 1980 Iraq took advantage of Iran’s internal political situation to seize territory in the Shatt al Arab and oil-rich Khuzestan province. The government was also beset by unrest among ethnic minorities. A full scale war erupted that ended with a cease-fire in 1988 and cost the two nations an estimated 1 million dead and 1.7 million wounded.

In 1989, Khomeini died and Hojatolislam Said Ali Khamenei became Iran’s supreme leader. Iran’s relations with the West improved,

Today, Iran is deemed the second most prolific oil producer after Saudi Arabia!

Recalling that the Iranian empire once encompassed today’s Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Jordan, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, and the Caucasus region, while the borders have moved in over the centuries, a superpower nostalgia, in contradiction to reality, still prevails among many Iranians.

The USA Involvement

Oil and gas is the reason the USA is interested in the Middle East. The entire industrial west is dependant on access to and the price of, oil and gas. Iraq is sitting on immense volumes of oil and Afghanistan is a strategically situated stronghold of independent minded people unaffiliated with the USA or the West thus posing a threat if alliances are made by Afghanistan with competing nations such as Russia or India or China.

While there is no oil in Afghanistan, that country’s territory forms a direct route to take the oil and gas from deposits in Central Asia to the Indian Ocean for transhipment. That would sidestep dependance on oil from the so far unresolvable problems of the ME.

American oil companies have acquired rights to a large percentage of the output of the new fields in Central Asia, and the US and western governments see the area around the Caspian and in Central Asia as an alternative to dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf region.

US troops followed the signing of these contracts. US Special Forces began joint operations with Kazakhstan in 1997 and with Uzbekistan a year later, training for intervention especially in the mountainous southern region that includes Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan.

How to get the oil and gas from that landlocked region to the world market, that’s the question: not wanting to rely on either the Russian pipeline system or – the easiest available land route – to
unconditionally befriend Iran and have access to the Persian Gulf.

Oil companies have explored alternative pipeline routes – westward through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey to the Mediterranean; eastward through Kazakhstan and China to the Pacific; and, southwards from Turkmenistan across western Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.

Iraq is more complex but still oil is at the base of the military action. The universally condemned Hussein was in charge of an oil rich nation and that left an open door target for sufficiently sanctioned military operations that would leave the US-plus British and the West in general – or the developed industrialised nations altogether – in position allowing strategic leverage over events in the Middle East.

Control over Iraq is a trump card which also plays-in armed-to-the-teeth Israel, granting political space to that occupying power – put in place by the same forces with an eye on the Suez Canal – to expand and consolidate its territory at the expense of the divided forces of Palestine.

An aside into that Palestine Question is demanded at this juncture: By 1946 the fallacy of the Balfour Declaration was clear. Britain could not deliver ‘a national home form the Jewish people” without prejudice to ‘rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,’ as stated in the Balfour papers. In 1947 ships such as the Exodus arrive in Haifa carrying illegal immigrants – mostly Holocaust survivors – from Europe, in their thousands. The British tried to stop them and on doing so was castigated by the international community.

There was a call by UNSCOP to bring to an end the British mandate over Palestine and the partition of Palestine was recommended into Jewish and Arab states by eight to three with India, Iran and Yugoslavia opposing, preferring a unified federal state of Palestine.

Come May 14, 1948, as soon as the British took down their flag to turn their backs on the disaster they made of Palestine, the Jews of Palestine declared their statehood and began calling themselves Israelis.

Returning to the main theme: Iran has a cultural depth stemming even further into history than those mighty pillars of its Islamic foundation. This brings it’s peoples through its government to demand the same rights any nations would expect. It cannot be walked over with impunity, unlike its famed carpets.

Thus, Iran poses a problem to those nations seeking local power positions in that the country is striking a highly independent stance that radically opposes US and western hegemony in the Middle East. Iran has legitimacy and lawfulness in its efforts to claim a strong role in the affairs of the Middle East as it’s physical situation impels it to look to these as local affairs. Whereas, the USA, the British, the French, are acting far from home and anyone would wonder just why they have such pretensions far from the fold, veiled by democratic and humanitarian posturing.

It is oil, its accessibility and its transport, and securing an uninterrupted supply that provides the reason for the militaries of the more powerful nations to set up camp in the homes and on the doorsteps of Afghanistan and Iraq.

However, that oil is bypassing equally deserving though disadvantaged not-yet-economically developed nations, and that is a situation that needs addressing.

The Palestine Question

The only real answer to this question is the actuality of a single state and that would be called Palestine, however, the reality of today’s situation demands the creation of two states, the other being Israel, of course.

A single state has to mean Moslems, Christians, Jews living as they prefer, where they prefer and how they prefer with the holy city of Jerusalem freely open and accessible to their various faithful, given that their respective sacred places of worship are in that city.

With this question hanging unresolved and with Israel showing no signs of retreating from its hard stance, this is the knot that remains to be untied before Iran will cease using that decoy to abstract the attention of Iranians from their real domestic problem which is the direction the country is to take. Is that future to lie with a closer approximation to Sharia Law, or, as the majority want – I venture to say – which is to open up Iran to the most pressing global influence of these times, the freedom the West offers – with all of its pretense at democracy, the complexity of genuine participation, and the consequent creative complexity.

The result is, Israel viewing Iran with great suspicion and Israel, despite its nuclear weapons, sensing its tenuous hold on that dearly priced piece of land that it was allocated by the USA supported by Britain. Israel is gripped by fear, thus the huge military build-up and is highly reactive. It acts as the ‘dog in the manger’ for the USA, the spoiler in the Middle East, betting on Might is Right to win through.

The solution lies with the people of the Jewish faith and how they take and handle the non-stop propaganda from the Zionists. The Jews have traditionally lived in other countries and have thrived, have been and are an accepted group within wider cultures. An illegitimate state is not proving viable. The mal-intentions of the Zionists need to be countered with the good faith reconciliation of the less demanding Jews with their real situation – as guests in Palestine – if the best deal is to be made with the Palestinians and the world.

Arrogance out – humility in!

******************
Further notes:

Jewish Homeland

‘Of the wartime promises made by the British government, the third proved the most enduring. After centuries of anti-Semitism in Europe and Russia, a group of European Jewish thinkers had united around the dream of establishing a homeland in Palestine. Starting in 1882, waves of Jewish immigrants had fled persecution in Russia, and a small – some 20,000 – 30,000 in all – settled in Palestine (from1882 – 1903) most of this first wave settled in the cities of Palestine, but some 3,000 lived in a series of agricultural colonies along the coastal plane and the northern highlands of Mount Carmel, supported by European Jewish philanthropists like Moses Montefiore and Baron Edmond de Rothschild.’ The Kibbutz I would assume.

The movement gained momentum in 1986 with the publication of Theodore Herzl’s landmark book, The Jewish State. Herzl, a Viennese journalist, encouraged the spread of a new Jewish nationalist movement that came to be known as Zionism. Herzl convened the First Zionist Conference in the summer of 1897, in which the World Zionist Organization was established and set out its aims, “to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.”
Chaim Weizmann became its leader and at the time of the outbreak of WW I, was lobbying the British government, PM David Lloyd George and FM Arthur Balfour. In 1917 Balfour reported to Weizmann: ‘His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.’

The statement, the Balfour Declaration, was released in that same year, 1917. ‘Such a sweeping pronouncement clearly had British interests at heart.’ The British were looking to gain by using the move as propaganda in the Russia and in the USA where many Jews favoured Zionism and those Jews in turn lobbied for British to take power in Palestine as the then mandate under the Sykes-Pico Agreement left Palestine under some quasi international administration.

In Lawrence of Arabia, the impossible-not-to-like gent who played the besuited diplomat and seemed to know something others did not – the military just wanted to get the job done – certainly played clever with Sir Lawrence, who had promised his Arab connections independent rule. What was held back was the secretly decided terms of the said Sykes-Pico Agreement that divided up the Ottoman Empire with promises that were duplicated and triplicated, impossible to ratify and impossible to give independence to the Arabs.

The Triple Entente was the name given to the alliance between Great Britain, the French Third Republic, and Russia after the signing of the Anglo-Russian Entente in 1907. The Franco-Russian Alliance, along with the Anglo-Russian Entente and the Entente Cordiale, formed the Triple Entente between the British Empire, France and Russia. This was an effective deterrent to the Triple Alliance of the Central Powers and also a plan by the French to encircle Germany (source Wikipedia).

‘The Balfour Declaration was a formula for communal conflict. Given Palestine’s very limited resources, there simply was no way to establish a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. Inevitably the mandate engendered conflict between rival nationalisms – the highly organized Zionist movement, and a new Palestinianian nationalism forged by dual threats of British imperialism and Zionist colonialism.’

January 1944 and Jewish settle extremists declared war on Britain. While David Ben-Gurion pledged to help the British army – with war looming between Germany and Britain and most Zionists gave some assent, the more radical launched an armed insurgency to drive the British out of Palestine as they saw Britain as the greater threat. The Irgun and the Stern Gang were the main protagonists. While the latter was active in violent acts in the early Forties. The King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1942 was blown up by the group – the Israelis as first terror group in Palestine… Irgun really got going by 1943 under Menachem Begin. Lord Moyne was assassinated by this gang, the Lehi in 1944, in Cairo.

By 1946 the fallacy of the Balfour Declaration was clear. ‘Britain could not deliver ‘a national home form the Jewish people” without prejudice to “rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”‘

1947 ships such as the Exodus arrive in Haifa carrying illegal immigrants – mostly Holocaust survivors – from Europe, in their thousands. The British tried to stop them and on doing so was castigated by the international community.

There was a call by UNSCOP to bring to an end the British mandate over Palestine and the partition of Palestine was recommended into Jewish and Arab states by eight to three with India, Iran and Yugoslavia opposing, preferring a unified federal state of Palestine.

Come May 14, 1948, as soon as the British took down their flag to turn their backs on the disaster they made of Palestine, the Jews of Palestine declared their statehood and began calling themselves Israelis.