Marty's thoughts

Cyrus, Abraham, and the Historical Construction of the Iran–Israel Conflict

When we look at Iran and Israel today, it is remarkably easy to believe that we are watching an ancient conflict. The language encourages that conclusion. Iran speaks from an Islamic revolutionary tradition. Israel defines itself as the Jewish state. Jerusalem carries sacred meaning for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Political leaders speak of survival, martyrdom, ancient rights, divine promises, and existential enemies. The accumulated weight of religion makes the confrontation appear almost inevitable—as though Persians and Jews have been moving toward this collision for thousands of years.

But history tells us something very different.

Iran and Israel are not ancient enemies. Their present hostility is largely the product of modern geopolitics, ideological change, competing regional ambitions, and the gradual recruitment of religious history into a struggle for power. If we extend the historical clock far enough backward, the apparent permanence of the conflict begins to dissolve.

The place to begin is not 1979, when the Iranian Revolution overthrew the Shah. It is not 1948, when the State of Israel was established. It is not even the Holocaust.

We should begin with Cyrus the Great.

Around 539 BCE, Cyrus, king of the Persian Empire, conquered Babylon. Decades earlier, Babylon had destroyed Jerusalem, devastated the kingdom of Judah, and deported a portion of its population. Cyrus followed a different imperial policy. He restored religious institutions and permitted displaced peoples to return to their homelands. The Hebrew Bible remembers Cyrus as the ruler who permitted the Judeans to return toward Jerusalem and rebuild their Temple. The famous Cyrus Cylinder does not mention the Jews specifically, but it confirms the broader Persian policy of restoring sanctuaries and displaced communities.

The importance of this moment is difficult to exaggerate.

The earliest great Persian-Jewish political encounter preserved in Jewish memory is not one of persecution. It is one of restoration.

The sequence is extraordinary:

Jewish catastrophe → Persian conquest → Jewish restoration.

The Book of Isaiah goes still further. Cyrus, a foreign Persian king, is described as God’s “anointed”—a startling recognition that divine purpose might work through someone outside Israel itself.

This ancient episode does not mean Persia was always tolerant or that Persian-Jewish relations were uniformly peaceful. They were not. Jewish communities in Persia, as elsewhere, experienced periods of security and periods of persecution. History should never be romanticized merely because we want it to provide a lesson for the present.

But Cyrus establishes one crucial fact:

Persian power and Jewish security were not inherently incompatible.

Indeed, at one foundational moment of Jewish history, Persian power helped make Jewish restoration in Jerusalem possible.

That fact alone should make us suspicious whenever the contemporary conflict is described as an eternal struggle between two civilizations.

The Importance of Where We Begin History

Every political conflict possesses a chronology. But human beings rarely agree about where the chronology should begin.

This is what might be called history-time.

Chronological history asks: What happened, and when?

History-time asks something more difficult: Which part of the past is still morally present?

For many Jews, the historical clock may run through exile, persecution, pogroms, European antisemitism, the Holocaust, the establishment of Israel, and repeated wars threatening Jewish security. In that chronology, the Holocaust carries overwhelming moral significance. Six million Jews were murdered in a civilization in which Jews had lived for centuries. Modern Zionism had already developed in the nineteenth century, partly in response to European antisemitism, but the Holocaust gave terrible force to the proposition that Jewish survival could not safely depend upon the goodwill of surrounding governments.

The lesson became:

Never again must Jewish survival depend entirely upon someone else’s protection.

There is a remarkable historical contrast here.

Under Cyrus, Jewish restoration depended upon the decision of a powerful and relatively tolerant ruler.

Modern Zionism ultimately proposed something different:

Jewish security should not require another Cyrus. Jews should possess political sovereignty of their own.

Yet Palestinians and many Arabs enter the modern story from another historical doorway. Their chronology emphasizes Ottoman decline, European imperialism, the British Mandate, Zionist immigration, displacement during the establishment of Israel, the Palestinian refugee experience, occupation, settlement, war, and Gaza.

From within that history-time, the Holocaust is unquestionably a monumental human catastrophe, yet it can appear primarily as a European crime whose consequences were subsequently borne by Palestinians who did not perpetrate it.

Iran adds still another chronology: Persian imperial history, the coming of Islam, Shi’a identity, Karbala and martyrdom, foreign intervention, Western influence, the 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh, the Shah, the 1979 Islamic Revolution, hostility toward American power, support for the Palestinian cause, and rivalry with Israel.

The participants therefore do not merely disagree about political facts.

They are living inside different historical clocks.

A single event in the present can consequently activate entirely different pasts.

This is one reason modern conflicts become extraordinarily difficult to resolve. Negotiators may believe they are discussing borders, missiles, sanctions, nuclear programs, recognition, or security guarantees, while the populations involved may feel they are also negotiating the meaning of centuries of suffering.

The Forgotten Centuries Between Cyrus and the Modern State

Between Cyrus and modern Zionism lies an enormous history that is too easily compressed into a phrase such as “Jewish life in Christian and Muslim lands.”

That history requires a more careful interpretation.

Jewish communities lived for centuries under both Christian and Muslim governments. Their experiences varied enormously according to place and period. There were eras of extraordinary intellectual and commercial flourishing, periods of peaceful coexistence, periods of legal subordination, and outbreaks of persecution, forced conversion, expulsion, violence, and exclusion.

Neither civilization offers a simple record of permanent tolerance or permanent hostility.

Jewish scholars flourished in important centers of the medieval Islamic world. Jewish thinkers lived and wrote in Arabic-speaking societies and participated in a broader intellectual civilization. At the same time, Jewish communities could remain legally subordinate minorities and were sometimes subjected to persecution.

Christian Europe likewise contained long periods of Jewish cultural development alongside severe restrictions, expulsions, pogroms, forced conversions, and eventually modern racial antisemitism. Europe still contained a large and culturally dynamic Jewish population immediately before the Holocaust.

The important modern consequence was not simply that Jews had suffered.

It was the realization among increasing numbers of Jews that minority existence could remain precarious even after centuries of residence in a country.

The problem became political:

Can a people remain permanently safe if its security depends upon the tolerance of somebody else’s government?

Modern Zionism offered one answer: sovereignty.

That answer would profoundly change the Middle East.

Yet the creation of Jewish sovereignty did not make conflict with Persia inevitable.

Quite the contrary.

Iran and Israel Were Modern Partners

One of the strongest pieces of evidence against the idea of ancient Iranian-Jewish hostility is remarkably recent.

Iran and Israel cooperated.

Under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, particularly from the late 1950s through the 1970s, Iran and Israel developed substantial economic, military, intelligence, agricultural, and strategic ties. Encyclopaedia Iranica describes the relationship as an informal strategic alliance. Iran provided Israel with oil. Israel provided expertise and security cooperation. Both countries were non-Arab states wary of radical Arab nationalism and Soviet influence.

The Shah himself deliberately emphasized Iran’s pre-Islamic Persian inheritance and associated his monarchy with Cyrus.

The ancient and modern stories therefore briefly touched.

Cyrus’s Persia had helped restore Jewish Jerusalem.

More than two thousand years later, modern Iran and the Jewish state found strategic benefit in cooperation.

This cooperation was not sentimental. Nations rarely conduct foreign policy from historical gratitude. Iran had interests; Israel had interests.

And that is precisely why it matters.

It demonstrates that geopolitics could place Muslim-majority Iran and Jewish Israel on the same side.

If their religious identities made permanent hostility inevitable, this relationship should have been impossible.

It was not.

1979: When Iran Changed Its Historical Clock

The Iranian Revolution changed far more than Iran’s government.

It changed the story Iran told about itself.

The Pahlavi monarchy placed substantial emphasis upon the continuity between ancient Persia and modern Iran:

Cyrus → Persian civilization → monarchy → modern Iranian nation.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini offered a radically different political imagination.

The revolutionary state’s legitimating history emphasized:

Islam → Shi’a identity → Ali → Husayn → Karbala → resistance to oppression → revolution.

Cyrus did not disappear from Iranian civilization. Persian identity did not disappear. Iran remained unmistakably Persian as well as Islamic.

But the center of official political history shifted.

Israel was caught inside that transformation.

Khomeini had attacked Israel even before the revolution, linking it to the Shah, American influence, Western power, and the political dispossession of Palestinians. When the monarchy fell in 1979, the Iranian-Israeli relationship was reinterpreted accordingly. The former strategic partner became an ideological enemy. Iranica notes both the abrupt end of the Pahlavi relationship and the much stronger Islamic framing that followed.

Yet even here history refuses to fit comfortably into a story of religious inevitability.

During the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, strategic necessity produced indirect and secret dealings involving Iran and Israel. Both feared Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Revolutionary rhetoric could therefore coexist with geopolitical calculation.

And some scholars locate the decisive strategic transformation even later, around 1991.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the severe weakening of Iraq after the Gulf War, two important threats that had previously given Iran and Israel reasons for limited strategic convergence diminished. Iran and Israel increasingly found themselves competing for influence in a new regional order. Iranica describes this shift in the regional balance as a major turning point.

This suggests a very different interpretation of the conflict.

Religion did not simply create geopolitics.

Geopolitical rivalry increasingly recruited religion.

The Struggle for Regional Power

Beneath the sacred vocabulary lies an ancient problem of international politics.

Iran and Israel both seek enough power to prevent another state from determining the security order of the Middle East.

Iran has pursued regional influence through relationships with governments and armed groups, missile capability, political networks, strategic depth, and opposition to a Middle Eastern order dominated by Israel and the United States.

Israel has sought military and technological superiority, strategic freedom of action, American support, intelligence reach, missile defense, and diplomatic relationships that prevent a hostile regional coalition from surrounding it.

Neither country necessarily needs to “rule” the Middle East in an imperial sense.

But each wants to ensure that the other cannot dominate the environment in which it must survive.

This produces the classic security dilemma.

Iran says, in effect:

We require missiles, strategic allies, and regional influence because Israel and the United States possess overwhelming power and threaten us.

Israel responds:

Iran’s missiles, regional allies, and expanding influence prove that Iran is an existential threat and must be contained.

Iran then sees Israeli containment as proof of the original danger.

Each side’s defense becomes evidence of aggression to the other.

The result is a self-reinforcing system.

The broader Middle East also contains other ambitious powers—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Gulf states, and external actors—so the region cannot accurately be understood as simply an Iranian-Israeli chessboard. Contemporary analyses emphasize a shifting and multipolar competition for influence rather than a simple two-state struggle.

Nevertheless, Iran and Israel have increasingly become central rivals.

And here something dangerous can occur.

A conventional struggle for regional power can become sacralized.

When Geopolitics Becomes Sacred History

A strategic conflict can be negotiated.

A sacred conflict is much harder to negotiate.

States can bargain about military deployments.

They can negotiate inspections.

They can exchange prisoners.

They can establish borders.

They can remove sanctions.

They can sign treaties.

But what happens when the struggle is described as part of God’s plan, an ancient national destiny, an eternal persecution, or a sacred obligation to resist evil?

The adversary changes.

He is no longer merely another government with competing interests.

He becomes the latest incarnation of an ancient enemy.

Modern political actors can reach backward into thousands of years of accumulated memory and bring those memories into the present.

For Jews, the vocabulary can invoke exile, persecution, Holocaust, survival, biblical Israel, and “never again.”

For Shi’a Muslims, it can invoke Karbala, martyrdom, resistance to oppression, and sacrifice.

For some Christians, modern Israel becomes part of a biblical story extending from Abraham through prophecy into contemporary politics.

Palestinians likewise possess an accumulating narrative of land, displacement, exile, resistance, and national survival.

The battlefield consequently acquires several historical layers simultaneously.

People may physically inhabit the twenty-first century while psychologically and religiously inhabiting events centuries or millennia old.

This is the danger of history-time.

Ancient memory can become present political ammunition.

Two Civilizations of Sacred Law

There is an additional irony in depicting Judaism and Islam as civilizational opposites.

Their religious legal traditions possess striking structural similarities.

Judaism developed Halakha, an enormous tradition of law and interpretation governing relations between human beings as well as obligations toward God. Written Torah exists alongside centuries of oral interpretation, rabbinic argument, precedent, responsa, and legal reasoning.

Islam developed Sharia and fiqh, likewise drawing upon revelation, tradition, jurisprudence, analogy, scholarly interpretation, and competing schools of law.

They are certainly not identical systems.

But the family resemblance is important.

Both civilizations ask how ancient revelation should govern circumstances never specifically described by the original sacred text.

Both developed scholarly traditions in which disagreement could itself become authoritative.

Both produced competing legal opinions rather than requiring every question to have a single uncontested answer.

Comparative scholarship has explored the deep interaction between Jewish legal culture and Islamic legal civilization, including the influence of Islamic legal environments upon Jewish Halakha in the medieval Islamicate world.

Iran itself is governed within the Twelver Ja’fari Shi’a legal tradition, while its constitution also recognizes Jews as one of the country’s religious minorities.

This does not erase modern discrimination, political repression, or Israeli-Iranian hostility.

But it demonstrates another forgotten connection.

These civilizations do not merely possess Abraham in common.

They developed remarkably sophisticated cultures of law, interpretation, argument, precedent, obligation, and disagreement.

That shared intellectual habit may matter.

Two civilizations that know how to argue with sacred texts ought at least to possess the conceptual resources for arguing without destroying one another.

Abraham Before the Division

Cyrus gives us historical evidence.

Abraham gives us something different.

Abraham occupies a place before the later divisions became fixed.

Judaism understands Abraham within the beginning of covenantal Israel.

Christianity reinterprets Abraham through a universalizing theology of faith.

Islam understands Ibrahim as a primordial monotheist and prophet, preceding later religious divisions.

Each tradition claims him differently.

That difference itself has contributed to centuries of theological argument.

But if we step backward far enough in history-time, something remarkable happens.

Before Judaism and Christianity separated;

before Christianity and Islam confronted one another;

before Zionism;

before the Holocaust;

before Israel;

before the Iranian Revolution;

before the struggle for regional supremacy;

there is Abraham.

Whatever one believes about the historical Abraham, the Abraham of religious memory exists before the adversaries became adversaries.

Cyrus then gives that theological possibility a historical counterpart.

Hundreds of years after the Abrahamic age, Persia and the Jews meet not as permanent enemies but through an act of restoration.

The importance of Cyrus therefore lies not in proving that ancient Persia was a modern liberal society. It was not.

Cyrus matters because he defeats the claim of inevitability.

The Persian was not always the enemy of the Jew.

Historical Deconstruction

This brings us to the possibility of historical deconstruction.

Historical deconstruction does not mean erasing history.

It does not mean denying the Holocaust.

It does not mean denying Palestinian displacement.

It does not mean excusing Iranian repression, Israeli actions, terrorism, warfare, antisemitism, or religious fanaticism.

It means taking apart the inherited narrative carefully enough to discover when and how its apparent inevitabilities were constructed.

We might ask:

When did Iran and Israel actually become strategic enemies?

Which ancient religious memories became politically useful after that rivalry developed?

Which periods of coexistence disappeared from public memory?

Why is Cyrus remembered less often than the Iranian Revolution?

Why is twentieth-century Iranian-Israeli cooperation so difficult to fit into the idea of eternal religious warfare?

Who benefits when political disputes are described as civilizational destiny?

Historical deconstruction separates layers that politics has fused together:

Jewish people ≠ every policy of the Israeli government.

Iranian people ≠ every policy of the Islamic Republic.

Islam ≠ Iranian geopolitical strategy.

Judaism ≠ Israeli military strategy.

Criticism of Israel ≠ antisemitism.

Antisemitism ≠ legitimate criticism of state policy.

Once those distinctions are restored, the supposedly eternal enemy begins to look far more historically contingent.

And that gives us the possibility of reconstruction.

The process might be described this way:

history → selective memory → identity → fear → rivalry → sacred enemy

Historical deconstruction attempts to reverse it:

conflict → examine identity → uncover selective memory → recover forgotten history → rediscover alternatives → imagine another future

The word imagine is crucial.

For once people are convinced that their enemy has always been their enemy, reconciliation becomes nearly unimaginable.

History itself appears to prohibit it.

But if historical examination reveals that the relationship has repeatedly changed, then the future becomes open again.

Cyrus as a Warning to the Present

The tragedy of the modern Iranian-Israeli conflict may therefore not be that two ancient enemies have finally reached the inevitable climax of their history.

It may be exactly the opposite.

The tragedy is that a modern struggle for regional power is teaching two peoples to imagine that they always were enemies.

Cyrus tells us they were not.

The Shah’s relationship with Israel tells us they were not.

The long presence of Jewish communities in Persian civilization tells us they were not.

Their related traditions of sacred legal reasoning tell us they are not civilizational strangers.

Their common connection to the Abrahamic world tells us that even their religious divisions arise within a larger family of historical memory.

None of this makes peace easy.

History does not automatically produce reconciliation merely because historians uncover a forgotten period of cooperation.

Political interests remain.

Security fears remain.

Nuclear questions remain.

Palestinian suffering remains.

Israeli fears of annihilation remain.

Iranian fears of domination remain.

American power remains.

Regional ambition remains.

But historical deconstruction accomplishes one indispensable task:

It removes inevitability.

Once inevitability disappears, responsibility returns.

If Iran and Israel were destined by history to hate one another, then present leaders are merely actors in an ancient tragedy whose ending has already been written.

But if their hostility was constructed through identifiable historical choices, shifting alliances, ideological revolutions, security fears, and competitions for power, then other choices remain possible.

That is perhaps where Abraham would enter the story again.

Abraham’s defining movement is away from the known world toward a future not yet visible.

Cyrus, centuries later, demonstrates that power need not require the destruction of another people’s sacred identity.

Together they suggest a principle that may have relevance far beyond the Middle East:

A people does not have to surrender its history to escape being imprisoned by it.

The Iranian does not have to cease being Iranian.

The Jew does not have to cease being Jewish.

The Muslim does not have to abandon Islam.

The Israeli does not have to forget Jewish vulnerability.

The Palestinian does not have to forget displacement.

What may have to be abandoned is the shorter and more dangerous historical story that begins with:

“We have always been enemies.”

Because that story is not true.

The longer history tells us something much more interesting.

Persian power once helped restore Jewish Jerusalem.

Jewish and Islamic civilizations developed related traditions of sacred law and interpretation.

Modern Iran and modern Israel once cooperated because their interests aligned.

Only later did geopolitical rivalry become ideological hostility, and ideological hostility increasingly acquire the language of sacred and existential struggle.

Where we begin history therefore changes what kind of future appears possible.

Begin in the latest war and we see permanent enemies.

Begin in 1979 and we see revolutionary hostility.

Begin in the 1950s and we find strategic partners.

Begin in 539 BCE and we find a Persian ruler enabling Jewish restoration.

Go farther back still, and we encounter Abraham before the divisions through which his descendants would later understand one another.

Perhaps that is the deepest meaning of history-time.

The shorter our historical memory, the more permanent our enemies appear.

And perhaps the first act of peace is not to forget history at all.

It is to remember more of it.