Stories of History / 84. Israel vs Iran

The eighty-fourth issue of Storie di Storia , the newsletter of Repubblica , is dedicated to the history of the confrontation between the State of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran, more timely than ever given the conflict of these days, which could be remembered - if the ceasefire holds - as "the 12-day war". The story is by Gianluca Ansalone . Enjoy the reading.

THE FINAL SHOW STORY

By Gianluca Ansalone (Strategic analyst, professor of Geopolitics at the Biomedical Campus of Rome - University of Rome Tor Vergata) .

Israel and Iran are in the final showdown.

They are two countries historically surrounded. The first for being the only democracy in an area governed by oil, gas and autocracies.

Second for being the largest Shiite country surrounded by Sunni adversaries, fierce and profoundly different, religiously and politically.

For Israel, the construction of the atomic bomb in Tehran is an existential threat. For Iran, Israel is the ultimate evil, an intruder in the geography and politics of the Middle East.

The two could only go to war.

Although it was not always this way. Until the revolution of 1979, Iran was a country firmly anchored to the West. Relations between the Shah and the European and American chancelleries were excellent, based on mutual interests. The West obtained oil and gas from Iran in quantity and at a good price. Tehran obtained a hearing and support in the competition with cumbersome neighbors such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq or Turkey.

When in 1951 Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh decided to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the British-owned company that marketed Iranian oil, the CIA and MI6, Her British Majesty's secret service, organized a coup d'état to oust the prime minister and return full powers to the Shah.

Israel benefited most from all this, having been committed since its birth in 1948 to ensuring its own existence and repelling continuous military attacks from its closest neighbors: Egypt, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

Being able to count on the non-hostility of a large and important country like Iran was a precious counterweight.

Everything changed for Israel and the West with the revolution of 1979. On February 1 of that year, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a member of the Shiite clergy exiled in Paris, returned home and led a massive uprising that forced the Shah to flee. It was the beginning of the Islamic Republic. And it was the end of relations between Iran and the West.

For Israel, it was a matter of immediately placing under observation an unpredictable, aggressive regime that made the Jewish state the ideal enemy.

Israel was portrayed as the little Satan, the direct emanation of the United States in the region. Hitting Tel Aviv meant weakening the iron alliance with Washington and its interests.

To do this, Tehran immediately starts a precise strategy based on two actions. The first is the construction of a network of state and non-state allies, capable of projecting its interests beyond the borders; the second is the return to nuclear energy.

Already the return because the Iranian nuclear program originated in the 1950s with the support of the United States. In 1957, Shah Reza Pahlavi began the development of civil nuclear energy thanks to the American initiative "atoms for peace", launched in 1957 by President Eisenhower as part of the strategy to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The United States provided Iran with the first research reactor and nuclear fuel, while in the 1970s West Germany began construction of the Bushehr nuclear power plant, in the south of the country.

The Khomeini regime also interrupted cooperation with the West on this issue and the war with Iraq (1980-1988) seriously damaged the nuclear infrastructure. The program remained at a standstill for over a decade. The turning point, however, came in 2002 when Iranian opposition groups in exile revealed the existence of two secret nuclear facilities that had never been declared: the Natanz enrichment plant and the Arak heavy water reactor.

The regime of the ayatollahs increasingly demonstrated its resistance to external pressures and internal social pressures. It also demonstrated its ability to survive the death of its founder and inspiration, Ayatollah Khomeini, in 1989.

A regime with the capacity to use the atom for military purposes is a simply unacceptable prospect for Israel.

It was Khomeini himself who created a special military and intelligence force, known as the “guardians of the faith,” or Pasdaran in Farsi. And at the same time created a select group of nuclear engineers and scientists, returning home from many foreign universities. Iran has always been a cultured, young country, rich in talent. Its scientists and engineers are appreciated worldwide. The regime mobilizes them for a major nuclear relaunch project destined to change the balance in the entire area.

While the Pasdaran are busy creating and training militias all around Israel, supporting and arming Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Assad regime in Syria and the Houthis in Yemen, Iranian scientists are expanding the network of nuclear power plants. Energy is used primarily to power cities and factories, since Iran has few alternatives to exporting almost all of its enormous reserves of oil and gas. With the help of Russia first and then China, the country has advanced technologies, which it uses to accelerate its capabilities.

But Western intelligence services know that there is a larger plan behind the civilian use of energy.

In the first phase, Israel used every means possible to sabotage the Iranian nuclear program. A series of mysterious assassinations of nuclear scientists in Tehran between 2010 and 2015, for example, were attributed to the Mossad.

A powerful computer virus, known as Stuxnet, manages to reach two Iranian nuclear power plants and damages their centrifuges. The work of scientists is slowed down for months.

Barack Obama's United States, however, understands that the situation can deteriorate at any moment and decides to take a strong and decisive initiative. In 2015, Tehran signs a historic agreement with the US, the European Union, China and Russia. Tehran undertakes to welcome inspectors from the UN Atomic Energy Agency into the country. Those technicians will be responsible for evaluating any progress in the uranium enrichment process as well as possible deviations in the use of atomic energy.

It is an epochal turning point that seems to restore order and finally reassure Israel.

It will be Donald Trump, in his first term as president, who will completely change the rules of the game. In 2018 he withdraws America from the agreement and indirectly legitimizes Tehran to resume its experiments.

From then on, it will be a continuous and unstoppable spiral.

Iran continues to arm its allies in the region, who continue to attack Israel. Israel responds with targeted assassinations of scientists and attempts to disrupt uranium supply chains to Tehran.

Until the fateful date of October 7, 2023.

Hamas attacks on Israeli soil irreversibly change the balance. Israel decides to break forever the axis that links Tehran to its offshoots. Hamas, Hezbollah and the regime of Bashar Al Assad in Syria are swept away.

The final act is missing, the most dangerous and sophisticated mind is missing.

Iranian society has been in turmoil for some time. The green wave of university students has already shaken the regime several times. They are associated with women's movements protesting against the harassment and murders of the guardians of the faith.

Israel takes advantage of these weaknesses to breach Iranian defenses. On July 31, 2024, it kills Hamas leader Haniyeeh in Tehran and does so in the most incredible way. It manages to infiltrate drones into the most guarded place in the country and in the capital Tehran, the headquarters of the Pasdaran, where Haniyeh is a guest waiting to meet the political and religious leaders.

Israel has therefore infiltrated over the years, perhaps over more than a decade, men, collaborators, spies and means to strike the country from within.

The decision to launch a direct attack, however, is not an easy one. Iran, although weakened by decades of international sanctions, remains a major military power. It has thousands of medium- and long-range ballistic missiles. It has drones, which it sells in abundance to Moscow for its military operations in Ukraine. It has a structured navy that threatens to close the Strait of Hormuz, through which 70% of the natural gas bound for China and Europe passes.

Hitting Iran directly would trigger a domino effect with unpredictable consequences.

Israel is just waiting for the right moment to close the circle and erase the Shiite crescent project and Tehran's atomic ambitions.

While the chancelleries are engaged in yet another delicate round of negotiations between Rome and Oman, the UN agency for atomic energy publishes its latest report. It is dated June 12, 2025. There is a sentence inside that alone will be enough to break the hesitation.

It says that “for the first time in 20 years, Iran has failed to meet its obligations, denying inspectors full access to nuclear sites and failing to justify the detection of traces of uranium at undeclared sites.”

This is enough for the Israeli government and army to give the green light to military operations.

The final battle is unleashed between the two countries. A battle that targets, on one side, the entire Iranian nuclear infrastructure, those responsible for the atomic program and the chain of command of the armed forces and intelligence. And that, on the other side, sees a massive Iranian retaliation with missiles and drones on Israeli soil.

And it is a clash that is soon destined to widen, with the active participation of the United States. It is the most classic of domino effects that could convince the parties, all of them, to return to the negotiating table or open a chasm that is more uncertain and catastrophic than ever.

REPORTS

Book : History of Iran. 1890-2020 , by S. Farian Sabahi, Il Saggiatore, July 2020

Iran is one of the most fascinating and complex countries in the world. Which image best sums up its contemporary history? The protests at the end of the 19th century over the sale of the tobacco concession to an English citizen, which brought together the clergy, merchants and women of the royal harem for the first time? Or perhaps the stern face of Ayatollah Khomeini returning to Tehran after the 1979 revolution that gave rise to the Islamic Republic? The photograph of the international negotiators who in 2015 in Vienna announced the nuclear deal that was supposed to lead to the removal of sanctions against Iran? Or the funeral of General Soleimani, killed by a US drone along with every attempt at peace between the two countries? It is impossible to say, just as it is impossible to describe a carpet starting from a single thread. Farian Sabahi guides us through the last 130 years of Iran's history: from a country without an army or administrative system, as Persia was under the Qajar dynasty, to the launch into orbit by the Pasdaran of the first satellite manufactured in Iran in April 2020; from the pistachio and caviar trade to that of oil; from the occupation by the Allies during the Second World War to the precarious balance of pacts and coalitions during the Cold War; from the conflict with Saddam Hussein's Iraq to that with ISIS; up to the difficult management of the Covid-19 pandemic under Trump's embargo. "History of Iran" is a work that spans the economy and religion, the evolution of society and culture, the women's issue and civil rights, nationalism and relations with foreign countries. The attempt to tell the story of an elusive country, suspended between modernity and tradition, between East and West: an Indo-European people among the Arabs, a Shiite territory surrounded by Sunni countries. A mysterious place, which has existed for millennia and continues to stubbornly resist, with all its contradictions.

Book : Israel. History of the State , by Claudio Vercelli, Giuntina, August 2023 (New edition)

Israel is in the hearts and minds of contemporaries, arousing passions and identifications, sympathies but also rejections and denials. Very little is known about its history in Italy. Even less is known about the reasons, events, facts that led to the birth of the Jewish State during a century, the twentieth century, which saw profound changes in balances. The book intends to investigate the facts, the characters, the stories that generated the State of Israel, up to the present day. Not a mere report but a living narration, from the inside, of the cultural, political and social premises that from the second half of the nineteenth century originated Zionist thought and, in rapid succession, immigration to those lands in which, in 1948, the new State would be born. Of which the historical evolution, the social and economic changes, the cultural transformations are then told, in the intertwining of news and memory. An investigation into what has been, a reflection on what is, a hypothesis on what could be. In the plurality of judgments, the work also intends to constitute a Jewish point of view on a way of "being Jewish" today, sometimes living in Israel, more often thinking about Israel.