Everyone talks about Iran and Israel like they’ve always hated each other.
They haven’t.
There was a time — not that long ago — when Iran was one of Israel’s closest partners in the Middle East. Trade. Intelligence sharing. An oil pipeline. Ambassadors in each other’s capitals.
Then everything changed.
Here’s the full story — and why understanding it matters more right now than ever.
It Started With a Vote Nobody Remembers
When Israel was being created in 1948, the United Nations needed to figure out what to do with Palestine.
Iran was on the committee.
And Iran voted against the plan — not because they were hostile to Jews, but because they believed splitting Palestine into two separate states would create generations of violence.
Instead, Iran proposed a different solution: one state, one parliament, with Arab and Jewish regions coexisting under the same government.
It was voted down. The partition went ahead. The Arab-Israeli War began. And over 700,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes in what Palestinians call the Nakba — the catastrophe.
Two years later, Iran became the second Muslim-majority country in the world to officially recognise Israel.
It’s a complicated starting point. But that’s the point — it was always complicated.
The Alliance Nobody Talked About
Through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, Iran and Israel were quiet but genuine allies.
Israel needed friends in a region that was largely hostile to its existence. Israel’s strategy — known as the “periphery doctrine” — was to build strong ties with non-Arab states at the edges of the Middle East. Iran was the crown jewel of that strategy.
For the Shah of Iran, the benefits were practical. Israel helped train SAVAK — Iran’s feared secret police. Trade grew. Iran became a major oil supplier to Israel. A pipeline was built to send Iranian oil through Israel to Europe.
It was kept quiet — too much open friendship with Israel would have caused problems with Iran’s Arab neighbours. But behind closed doors, the relationship was deep.
The CIA-backed coup of 1953 that restored the Shah to power had cemented Iran as a pro-Western, pro-American state. And in that world, Israel and Iran were on the same side.
Then 1979 happened.
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The Revolution Changes Everything
When Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979, he brought with him a completely different worldview.
The Shah’s alliances — with America, with the West, with Israel — were not just politically wrong in Khomeini’s view. They were morally corrupt. Iran had been a tool of Western imperialism. That was over.
Within weeks of the revolution:
All ties with Israel were severed. Flights cancelled. Trade ended. The Israeli embassy in Tehran was handed over to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation and became the Palestinian embassy.
Israel went from being Iran’s quiet ally to being the “Little Satan” — a regional arm of the “Great Satan” America.
Khomeini also made a strategic calculation that would shape Middle Eastern politics for the next five decades. He reframed the Palestinian cause — which Arab states had been championing as a nationalist issue — as an Islamic cause. This allowed Iran, a Persian Shia nation, to position itself as the leader of a pan-Islamic resistance movement that stretched across the Arab world.
It was brilliant politics. And it made Iran and Israel permanent enemies almost overnight.
The Shadow War
What followed was not quite a war. But it was not quite peace either.
For decades, Iran and Israel have been fighting what analysts call a “shadow war” — attacking each other’s interests while publicly denying almost everything.
Israel is widely believed to be behind a series of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists. The most brazen came in 2020 when top scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was killed by a satellite-controlled, AI-operated machine gun mounted on a pickup truck — which then exploded to destroy the evidence.
Both the US and Israel are believed to be behind Stuxnet — a sophisticated piece of malware that physically destroyed centrifuges inside Iran’s nuclear facilities without a single soldier crossing a border.
Iran, meanwhile, built a network of proxy forces across the region — Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, militias in Iraq, Syria and Yemen — all armed, funded and trained by Tehran, all pointed in Israel’s direction.
For decades this shadow war stayed mostly in the shadows. Assassinations. Cyberattacks. Proxy skirmishes. Tanker bombings.
Then Gaza changed everything.
October 7 and the Escalation Nobody Could Stop
When Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, the shadow war began stepping into the light.
Iran had long supported Hamas financially and militarily. Israel had long known this. But the scale of the attack — and the scale of Israel’s response — created a pressure that the region’s uneasy equilibrium couldn’t contain.
Israel began striking Iranian-backed targets openly. Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah — one of the most powerful figures in the region for three decades — was killed in a strike in Beirut. Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Tehran itself. Iran retaliated with ballistic missile strikes on Israeli territory.
The shadow war had become something closer to an open one.
The Nuclear Question Underneath Everything
Underneath all of this is the question that has never been resolved.
Iran says its nuclear programme is for civilian energy purposes.
Israel — which is itself widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, though it has never officially confirmed this — says it will never allow Iran to develop a nuclear bomb and has repeatedly threatened to strike Iranian nuclear facilities if necessary.
The 2015 nuclear deal negotiated under Obama placed strict limits on Iran’s uranium enrichment in exchange for sanctions relief. It was the closest the two sides ever came to a diplomatic framework that might have reduced tensions.
In 2018, the Trump administration withdrew from the deal.
Iran began enriching uranium at higher levels than ever before.
And now the confrontation that has been building since 1979 — accelerated by Gaza, by assassinations, by missiles fired at each other’s cities — has brought the region to a moment that few people alive have seen before.
So How Did We Get Here?
Two countries that were quiet allies in 1970 are open enemies in 2025.
Here’s the honest summary:
Iran’s Islamic Revolution transformed its foreign policy from pro-Western pragmatism to anti-imperial ideology — with Israel as its most visible regional target.
Israel has spent 45 years trying to prevent Iran from gaining the nuclear capability or regional influence that would threaten its existence — using assassinations, cyberwarfare, proxy conflicts and now open military strikes.
Iran has built a network of armed groups across the Middle East that have killed thousands — including hundreds of Americans.
Israel’s military operations — in Gaza, Lebanon, and beyond — have killed tens of thousands of civilians and destabilised the entire region.
Neither side is simply the villain. Neither side is simply the victim. Both have made choices — over decades — that have brought us to this moment.
The person on television telling you this is simple is wrong.
It has never been simple.
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