Published: 4 January 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
FORTY YEARS AGO, on February 1, 1979, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from France — and a reputed three million people turned out to greet him. Within a year, tens of thousands of Jews had left the country. This is a common pattern of Jewish behaviour when instability strikes.
Yossi Alpher, the author of Periphery: Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies, records that on the eve of the revolution, several thousand Israeli businessmen were living in Iran. There was even an Israeli school in Tehran. Despite Iran’s support for OPEC’s oil embargo after the Yom Kippur War, by 1977, “oil sales were booming”.
Despite the turmoil all around, Israel and Iran were busily negotiating a $1.2 billion bilateral arms deal. The project would use Iranian finance for the development of six new Israeli weapon systems and a new generation of Jericho missiles.
In 1978, Mr Alpher had become the Mossad’s chief intelligence analyst on Iran. He comments that no one in the Mossad or the Foreign Ministry actually possessed any deep knowledge about events there.
FULL STORY How Mossad misread the Iranian revolution (Jewish Chronicle)
Photo: The leader and founder of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, waves from a Tehran balcony during the country's revolution, in February 1979 (Reuters)
