By Syed Shamim Akhtar
For much of the 20th century, the relationship between Iran and Israel was defined not by hostility but by calculation, pragmatism and shared strategic interests. Today, that earlier alignment appears almost unrecognizable. What was once a discreet partnership has hardened into a declared and often violent enmity that now stands at the center of Middle Eastern instability. The latest escalation – triggered by Israeli and American strikes on Iran and followed by Tehran’s retaliation – is not an aberration but the continuation of a long and combustible trajectory. Iranian authorities have confirmed the deaths of senior figures, including the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, in the attacks, while Washington has framed its objective in openly political terms, with President Donald Trump asserting that the goal is the overthrow of Iran’s current government.
It is a stark admission of intent, and one that situates this confrontation not merely as a military exchange but as an existential struggle. Yet the origins of this hostility lie in a dramatic ideological rupture. Until the 1979 Islamic Revolution led by Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran under the Pahlavi monarchy had been one of the few Muslim-majority states to recognize Israel. Indeed, after Egypt, it was the second to do so. The Shah’s Iran was a key American ally in the region, and Israel, isolated by hostile Arab neighbors, sought friendships on the periphery of the Arab world. Under Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, Jerusalem cultivated ties with Tehran as part of a broader strategy to counterbalance regional rejection.
The revolution upended that logic. The new Islamic Republic recast itself as a champion of the dispossessed and defined its identity in opposition to American power and what it described as Israeli imperialism. Diplomatic relations were severed, Israeli passports rejected, and the former Israeli embassy in Tehran handed to the Palestine Liberation Organization. In Tehran’s rhetoric, the United States became the “Great Satan” and Israel the “Little Satan” – shorthand for a worldview in which confrontation was both theological and geopolitical. For years, however, Israel did not treat Iran as its principal adversary. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was perceived as the more immediate threat.
Indeed, Israel played an indirect role in facilitating the covert Iran-Contra arrangement, through which arms were channeled to Tehran during its war with Baghdad. Only later did Israeli strategic thinking shift decisively, recasting Iran as the central danger to its existence. That reassessment coincided with Iran’s cultivation of a network of allied militias and political movements across the region – most prominently Hezbollah in Lebanon. What Tehran termed an “axis of resistance” stretched from Lebanon and Syria to Iraq and Yemen, designed both to project influence and to deter direct attacks on Iranian soil. For Israel, this encirclement represented a slow-burning but profound threat.
The conflict increasingly took the form of a shadow war: deniable strikes, assassinations and cyber operations. The bombing of Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992, widely attributed to Iranian-backed militants, marked an early flashpoint. In subsequent decades, Israel focused intensely on thwarting Iran’s nuclear program, collaborating with Washington on covert measures including the Stuxnet cyberattack that disrupted Iranian facilities. Tehran, in turn, blamed Israeli intelligence for the killing of senior nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh in 2020. Syria’s civil war after 2011 deepened the confrontation. Iran’s support for President Bashar al-Assad’s government alarmed Israel, which viewed Syrian territory as a vital conduit for weapons transfers to Hezbollah.
Airstrikes and covert actions multiplied, often without formal acknowledgement from either side. By 2021, the shadow conflict had spilled into maritime arenas, with both countries accusing each other of targeting commercial vessels in the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea. The pattern was clear: a rivalry that had evolved from ideological hostility into a sustained, multi-domain confrontation. What began as a strategic partnership between two peripheral powers has become one of the defining antagonisms of the Middle East. The descent from cautious cooperation to open confrontation was neither sudden nor inevitable. It was forged through revolution, ideology, regional competition and mutual suspicion. Today’s violence is not a departure from that history but its most perilous expression.
(The writer has diverse in knowledge and has a good omen in politics, can be reached at editorial@metro-morning.com)
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