Looming over Tel Aviv from its perch on a low, dry hill north of the city, the guesthouse was equipped with the amenities of a five-star hotel: plush rooms, conference facilities, a kitchen with a full-time chef, swimming pool, gym and private movie theatre. Trident House made no effort to market its facilities, though. The Yellow Wing only served visitors from Turkiye’s intelligence service, the Milli Istihbarat Teşkilatı or MIT. The Blue Wing was reserved for guests from the Sazmaann-e Ettelaatt va Amniyat-e Keshvar, or SAVAK, the Shah of Iran’s notoriously brutal espionage agency.
Today, as Iranian missiles and drones rain down on Israel—threatening to spark off a region-wide war with profound global consequences—it is hard to imagine that the two countries were once close allies. Israel’s Mossad and SAVAK partnered with MIT in a kind of secret North Atlantic Treaty Organization called Trident, which surveilled the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Israel, scholar Trita Parsi records, even built the production facility at Sirjan and the test facility at Kharg island, which laid the foundations for Iran’s guided missile programme as part of a $280 million project code-named Flower. Israel’s aid was intended to secure its ally from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Soviet Union.
The story teaches us what happens when ideology and hubris overtake calm, rational decision-making based on national interests. However, it also offers hope, showing that the confrontation in the Middle East is neither inevitable nor permanent. The cynical politics that have led Iran and Israel to the edge of war do not reflect the true interests of either nation or of the global system in which they are both enmeshed.
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Israel’s Iran romance
For decades before war erupted in Gaza, many experts had been predicting a showdown between the region’s two major powers. Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons capabilities was a consequence of its theocratic regime’s fears of being destroyed by the West. Iran, the United States’ Defence Intelligence Agency noted in a review of the Islamic Republic’s capabilities, also developed missile and access-denial tools needed to face down technologically advanced Western militaries, “aiming to raise the human and financial costs to a potential adversary to deter an attack”.
Together with Iran’s cultivation of irregular military forces like Hezbollah and Hamas, the accumulation of power by Tehran poses an existential threat to Israel. Ever since the revolution of 1979, the cleric who ruled Iran had made no secret of their loathing for Israel — the Jews, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini claimed, were seeking to obliterate Islam, necessitating war against their nation.
Iran did little, though, to act on the hostile polemic of its leadership—leading some in Israel to explore the possibility of a diplomatic opening. Early in the Islamic Republic’s life, Iran’s war with Iraq led Tehran into a desperate search for equipment to resupply its sanctions-hit military. Israel intelligence and political operatives, historians Farhad Razaei and Ronen Cohen record, reached out to Iranian moderates through the clandestine networks of international arms traffickers.
From 1981 to 1983, Israel secretly shipped $500 million worth of parts for warplanes and tanks to Iran, in defiance of US sanctions—a relationship that would later mature into President Ronald Reagan’s plan to funnel off a part of the profits to fund anti-communist insurgents in Nicaragua.
Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres wrote to Reagan in 1986, urging continued engagement with Iran despite its proxies kidnapping Americans in Lebanon: “It is my firm conviction that the fundamental change we both seek as to the direction of the country in which we are dealing, holds promise not only for our two countries but for many others in the region and in the free world.”
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Ideologies and interests
This belief was far from delusional: Ever since its independence, Israel had realised its near-neighbour shared a common interest in containing threats from the growing power of Arab nationalism. Iran had granted Israel de-facto acknowledgement in 1950, and though it held back from formal diplomatic recognition, an embassy functioned from unmarked premises. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, among others, visited Iran secretly, landing in darkness at the Mehrabad airstrip outside Tehran.
Lawyer Eitay Mack, who studied Israel’s declassified diplomatic documentation on its ties with Iran, discovered a 1967 appraisal by de-facto Ambassador Zvi Dorel: “We have established a close, friendly and practical partnership between the Israel Defence Forces and the security services and their Iranian counterparts, with joint execution of programmes and missions of national importance…Various security problems vital to Israel have been solved in close cooperation with the Iranians.”
Enmeshed geopolitical events, though, led this nascent Iran-Israel détenté to implode. The levelling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in the First Gulf War of 1990 removed the mutual security threat that had led Israel and Iran to seek accommodation in the first place. The disintegration of the Soviet Union also reassured Iran it no longer faced the risk of an invasion targeting its oilfields in the province of Khuzestan.
From 1992, as news of Iran’s nuclear ambitions began to emerge and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process bogged down, Tel Aviv started to isolate its sole remaining military threat in the region. Following 9/11, Iran sought to break the impasse, routing secret peace proposals through Tehran-based Swiss diplomat Tim Guldimann. In return for civilian nuclear technology and an end to sanctions, the Iranians offered to stop supporting terrorist groups and terminate its production of weapons-grade uranium.
The proposals were ignored by US President George Bush, who cast Iran as part of an “Axis of Evil” targeted for regime change. Later, the idea would be revived by President Barack Obama, forming the core of the Iran nuclear deal, but remained stalled in the face of resistance from Israel and the Republicans in the United States.
The failure of isolation
Israel’s successful isolation of Iran, though, hasn’t brought it security. Instead, Israel remains vulnerable to Iranian affiliates like Hamas, journalist Amos Harel noted last month, having secured few of its strategic aims in a war that increasingly appears unwinnable. This month’s bombing of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Damascus, and the inevitable Iranian response, might have allowed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to draw the US deeper into the conflict. It will not, however, address Israel’s vulnerability to rocket attacks from Iranian proxies like Hezbollah.
Even though many in Israel consider the prospect of an Iranian atomic weapon enough to justify the costs of war, nuclear warfare scholar Kenneth Waltz has argued mutual deterrence will, in fact, make Middle East wars less likely—thus addressing Tel Aviv’s existential fears.
Iran, isolated and desperate to secure deterrence through sub-conventional means, has proved more dangerous an adversary than one engaged diplomatically, and enmeshed in the international order. Though China and India, the largest importers of oil from the Middle East, will disproportionately pay the price of the high oil prices and trade shocks that will come should war escalate, the entire world economy will suffer—and with it Israel itself.
As they did in the 1950s, Israel and Iran have shared common interests—even if one has a PM eager to ensure his survival by stoking crisis and the other is led by clerics eager to crush domestic opposition by fuelling anti-Semitism and political Islam. The two nations both know they face common threats from jihadists, and from instability in the Middle East. They both face economic challenges, which cannot be addressed without peace.
Letting ideology and domestic politics shape their relationship has now led the Middle East’s two most important powers to the edge of an abyss from which they might never be able to emerge. There’s still time to step back.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)