Think of it like this. Imagine two neighbors who actually got along fine for decades. Then one of them had a revolution, and the new management decided the other neighbor was their sworn enemy. That’s basically the story of Iran and Israel — and once you understand that, almost everything else in the region starts to make sense.
It sounds too simple to be true, and normally that would be a warning sign. Most attempts to compress the Middle East into a single sentence collapse the moment anyone asks a follow-up question. This one doesn’t, mostly because it isn’t actually explaining the conflict — it’s explaining the starting condition. Everything that came after — the proxy wars, the assassinations, the nuclear standoff — is downstream of one fact that gets lost in the noise: this hostility is not ancient. It’s a management decision, made by a specific government, in a specific year, for specific reasons. That’s worth sitting with before the complexity arrives.
The Friendship Nobody Remembers
Before 1979, Iran and Israel had what amounted to a working relationship — not an alliance sealed with fanfare, but a quiet, functional one built on shared interests. Both were non-Arab states in a majority-Arab region, both were wary of Soviet influence and pan-Arab nationalism, and both found it useful to have a friend who wasn’t bound by the Arab League’s official hostility toward Israel. Iran, under the Shah, was the second Muslim-majority country after Turkey to recognize Israel in practice, if not always loudly. Oil flowed from Iran to Israel. Intelligence services talked to each other. Israeli agricultural and military expertise found its way into Iran.
None of this made the two countries close allies the way Israel and the United States are close allies. It was pragmatic, occasionally uncomfortable, and mostly conducted out of public view — the Shah couldn’t afford to look too friendly with Israel in front of his Arab neighbors or his own population. But it was real, and it ran for a quarter century.
The resentment that eventually broke this relationship had been building longer than most people realize. In 1953, Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, was overthrown in a coup engineered by the CIA and Britain’s MI6 — Operation Ajax — after he nationalized Iran’s oil industry and threatened British commercial interests. The coup restored the Shah to full power as a client ruler dependent on American backing. It worked, narrowly, in that it kept the Shah in place for another twenty-six years. It also planted something that outlasted him by decades: a durable Iranian narrative that the West would remove any government that got in its way. That narrative didn’t cause the 1979 revolution by itself, but it gave the revolution’s leaders a ready-made grievance, and a public primed to believe it.
1979 and the New Founding Myth
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 didn’t just replace the Shah with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It replaced the entire operating logic of the Iranian state. The new government needed a founding identity distinct from — and opposed to — everything the monarchy had represented, and opposition to the United States and Israel became the clearest, most durable way to build one. The US embassy hostage crisis that same year cemented the break with Washington. Opposition to Israel, framed in Khomeini’s rhetoric as the “Little Satan” standing behind the “Great Satan,” became something closer to a founding constitutional principle than a foreign policy position that could shift with circumstances.
This is the detail that gets lost when people talk about Iran and Israel as though they’re locked in some ancient sectarian feud. They aren’t. Persians aren’t Arabs. Shia Iran and the Sunni-majority Arab world have their own long, separate history that predates any of this. The Iran-Israel hostility is a 1979 invention — deliberate, useful to the people who built it, and reinforced ever since because reversing it would mean unwinding part of what the Islamic Republic understands itself to be.
Where Palestine Actually Fits
This is where the analogy needs a layer added rather than abandoned. Iran’s support for the Palestinian cause is real, loud, and heavily funded. Tehran’s own account of it is solidarity — a Muslim power standing up for Muslims under occupation. The more useful question isn’t whether that’s sincere. It’s whether the support behaves like solidarity or like something more conditional, and there’s an actual test case for that rather than just an inference.
In 2011, when Syria’s civil war broke out, Hamas’s leadership left Damascus and publicly backed the Sunni-led opposition against Bashar al-Assad — Iran’s closest regional ally. Iran responded by cutting Hamas’s funding, sharply enough that Hamas had to turn to Qatar and Turkey to stay afloat. For roughly five years, one of Iran’s most prominent “resistance” partners was financially estranged from Tehran, over a dispute that had nothing to do with Israel or Palestine and everything to do with which side Hamas took in an Arab civil war. The rift only closed once Hamas rebuilt the relationship under Yahya Sinwar around 2017, restoring what Sinwar himself later called Iran’s role as Hamas’s “largest backer financially and militarily.” If Iranian support for Hamas were driven primarily by commitment to the Palestinian cause, the Syrian civil war should have been irrelevant to it. It wasn’t. The money followed alignment, not solidarity — a materially different thing than what Tehran’s own rhetoric claims, and worth stating plainly rather than assuming.
That’s not the same as saying Iranian support for Palestinian groups is cynical and nothing else — genuine ideological commitment and strategic utility aren’t mutually exclusive, and separating them cleanly probably isn’t possible from the outside even with a clean test case in hand. But the Palestinian cause is, among other things, the most effective pressure tool against Israel that Iran has access to, and the Syria episode shows that tool being managed like an asset rather than treated as an unconditional cause. Funding Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon and Shia militias in Iraq and Syria, built what Iran calls its Axis of Resistance — a network designed to pressure Israel from multiple directions without Iran itself needing to fire a shot. For decades, it mostly worked as intended.
The War Nobody Declares
For most of the post-1979 period, Iran and Israel fought each other constantly without technically fighting each other at all. This is the shadow war, and it’s worth understanding as its own category of conflict rather than a prelude to something more “real.”
Israel has spent years working to slow Iran’s nuclear program through means that rarely get officially acknowledged — the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, sabotage of centrifuge facilities, and malware deployed against Iranian industrial control systems. The best-known example, Stuxnet, is widely reported and extensively documented by cybersecurity researchers as a joint US-Israeli operation targeting Iran’s Natanz enrichment facility. Neither government has ever officially confirmed it. That gap between what’s broadly understood and what’s formally admitted is the normal condition of this entire conflict, not an exception to it.
The clearest illustration of how this actually operates is the killing of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the Iranian brigadier general and physicist widely regarded as the architect of Iran’s covert nuclear weapons research. Israeli officials had named him publicly as far back as 2018, when Mossad operatives smuggled roughly half a ton of stolen Iranian nuclear archive documents out of a Tehran warehouse and later used them to demonstrate the extent of Iran’s past weapons work. Two years after that, in November 2020, Fakhrizadeh was killed outside Tehran by a remote-operated, AI-assisted machine gun mounted on a pickup truck — reportedly smuggled into the country in pieces over eight months, and fired by a team that was never physically present at the scene. Iranian officials blamed Israel immediately. Israel has never officially confirmed or denied involvement, in government or out of it, to this day. That refusal to confirm isn’t an oversight or a gap in the record. It’s the operating rule this entire conflict runs on.
Iran, for its part, has run this shadow war through its own channels — arming and directing proxies, running assassination and kidnapping plots against Israeli and Jewish targets abroad, and using the IRGC’s (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) Quds Force to build and sustain the Axis of Resistance network described above. It’s worth mentioning that the Quds Force speaks to an expeditionary arm that partners with Iran’s various regional affiliates, including Hamas and Hezbollah. Anyway, neither side has needed to acknowledge any of it, which is precisely what has allowed it to continue as long as it has.
Why Washington Picked A Side
The American alliance with Israel predates the Iran-Israel conflict and would exist without it, so it’s worth being honest that this isn’t simply a story of the US choosing sides in someone else’s fight. Domestic politics, a shared democratic self-image, decades of institutional relationship-building, and — since 1979 — a shared adversary in Iran all reinforce each other, which makes the relationship considerably more over-determined than either its critics or its defenders usually admit.
Follow the money and the picture gets more complicated rather than simpler — and a paragraph doesn’t really do it justice, so here’s the shape of it rather than the whole thing. The current ten-year Memorandum of Understanding between Washington and Israel, signed in 2016 and running through 2028, commits the US to $38 billion in military assistance — $33 billion in grants plus $5 billion earmarked for missile defense — with Israel contractually required to spend nearly all of it on American-made defense products. That’s the floor. Separate arms sales, congressional supplementals, and joint development programs on top of it (Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow) add considerably more. Run the same exercise on the Gulf side: Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar — states that officially distrust Iran and have quietly built their own security relationships with Israel because of it — are also major customers of the same American defense industry, in figures that run into the tens of billions. Untangling what that money actually buys, who profits from it on both ends, and how far it explains policy versus simply reinforcing it, is its own piece of work — the subject of a forthcoming piece in this project’s Economics category, provisionally The Money Trail. It overlaps enough with the already-queued Arms Trade and Instability brief that the two may end up as one piece rather than two; that’s a decision for when it’s actually written.
What can be said here is narrower: the Abraham Accords, signed at the White House on 15 September 2020 by Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain — joined by Morocco that December, with Sudan signing a declaration in January 2021 that never translated into full normalization — formalized a version of this same logic diplomatically rather than financially. Several Gulf states decided that shared fear of Iran mattered more than solidarity with the Palestinian cause they’d spent decades claiming to champion. That’s not necessarily cynicism on anyone’s part. It’s what happens when a regional threat perception outlasts an ideological commitment — and it happens to run in the same direction as the money.
Where This Story Has To Stop
Here’s the honest problem with writing this piece in 2026: a great deal has happened since 2024, and almost none of it has settled enough to write about the way this project tries to write about things.
What can be said cleanly is this. For the first forty-five years of hostility between the Islamic Republic and Israel, the two countries never fired directly at each other. Everything ran through proxies, cutouts, and unclaimed operations. That changed in April 2024, when Israel struck Iran’s consulate in Damascus, killing senior Iranian military officers, and Iran responded on 13 April with the first direct Iranian attack on Israeli territory in the history of the Islamic Republic — over three hundred drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, the overwhelming majority intercepted by Israeli and allied air defenses. Israel replied with a limited strike on air defenses near Isfahan. That October, after Israel assassinated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut, Iran launched a second, larger direct attack; Israel struck back at Iranian military sites later that month. Forty-five years of proxy war had become, for the first time, a war conducted in the open, state to state.
That’s the threshold, and it’s where this piece stops on purpose. This project runs on the conviction that time is an editorial advantage — that events deserve enough distance to be understood rather than reacted to. What’s happened in the region since October 2024 has moved a long way past that threshold, and fast, and none of it is settled enough yet for the kind of honest analysis this project promises. Writing about it now would mean either guessing at an ending that hasn’t happened or freezing a moving war into a false snapshot. Neither is worth doing.
So: two neighbors who got along, until one of them decided the other was the enemy. Forty-five years of a war fought almost entirely through other people’s countries and other people’s proxies. And then, in 2024, the first time either side hit the other directly. That’s the story with enough distance to tell honestly. What comes after it is a different piece, for whenever it’s actually over.
Verification notes: 1953 coup details and Mosaddegh spelling confirmed (Wikipedia uses “Mosaddegh”; some sources use “Mossadegh”/”Mosaddeq” — all are accepted transliterations of the same Persian name). Stuxnet attribution confirmed as widely reported, officially unconfirmed — I framed my article accordingly. Hamas-Iran funding rift confirmed: break began 2011–2012 over Hamas’s break with Assad, funding cut, Hamas turned to Qatar/Turkey, relationship rebuilt under Sinwar from 2017 — sourced to Al Jazeera, CNBC, Times of Israel, Washington Institute reporting. 2018 nuclear archive operation and November 2020 Fakhrizadeh assassination confirmed against multiple sources (NYT via Times of Israel, Long War Journal, Al Jazeera) — Israeli responsibility widely reported, never officially confirmed. April/October 2024 strike details confirmed (Wikipedia, Iran Primer, Haaretz). Abraham Accords signatories and dates confirmed (UAE + Bahrain 15 Sept 2020, Morocco Dec 2020, Sudan declaration Jan 2021 — bilateral normalisation with Sudan never completed). US-Israel MOU figures ($38B, 2016–2028, $33B FMF + $5B missile defence) confirmed via CRS and CFR reporting.
Editorial note: this draft deliberately ends at October 2024. Iran and Israel fought a direct war beginning February 2026, including the assassination of Ali Khamenei and a succession crisis that is still unresolved as of this writing. That’s excluded here by design, per the author’s decision that it doesn’t yet have the distance this project requires. Revisit as a separate piece once it does.
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