A synagogue is bombed in the middle of Passover. This would be, prima facie, an antisemitic act. Few would argue otherwise—unless, of course, the bombing was carried out by the Israeli Air Force. Many people conflate Jews with Israelis, and Judaism with Zionism. They cannot imagine that Israel would act against Jews—in other words, commit antisemitic acts.
The synagogue in question is in Tehran, home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the world. Jews have lived in Iran for over two millennia and are no less Iranian than Muslims, Christians, or Zoroastrians. However, for most Israelis—and certainly for their government—Iran’s Jews are not Iranian. They are seen as belonging to a different nation, for whom the state of Israel ostensibly exists, regardless of the actual attitudes of Jews around the world toward “the historical homeland.”
The bombing of the Tehran synagogue was not the first antisemitic act committed by Israel. In January 1951, Israeli agents threw a grenade into a synagogue in Baghdad. This was one of a series of acts designed to encourage Jews to leave Iraq and relocate to Israel. Similar provocations against local Jews were organized in Egypt and Morocco. The new Zionist state, which had expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs, needed Jews to fill empty houses and villages. Avi Shlaim, who was five years old when he left Iraq, recalls his mother telling him, “Zionism is an Ashkenazi thing.” Indeed, Jews in Muslim lands, who lived in far greater peace than their counterparts in Europe, played no part in the emergence of the Zionist movement at the turn of the 20th century. To force them to relocate to Israel, antisemitic acts were deemed a convenient tool—staged for political ends.
Antisemitism, a mutation of European racism and xenophobia, grew in the second half of the 19th century. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, recognized that antisemitism could be harnessed to Zionist purposes, since both Zionism and antisemitism sought to rid Europe of its Jews. He wrote in his diary: “The antisemites will become our most loyal friends, the antisemitic nations will become our allies.” His words proved prophetic. The first instance of imperial support for Zionist colonization of Palestine came in November 1917 from Arthur Balfour, a British politician who a decade earlier had opposed the admission of Russian Jews to his country. It was therefore logical that Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British cabinet, denounced Balfour’s support for Zionism as antisemitic:
“I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty’s Government is antisememic in result and will prove a rallying ground for antisemites in every country in the world. … Zionism has always seemed to me to be a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom. … When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home … you will find a population in Palestine driving out its present inhabitants, taking all the best in the country…”
Like Herzl, Montagu uttered prescient words. In the interwar period, Zionists across Europe established cooperation with antisemitic authorities eager to rid their countries of Jews. These included Nazi officials, who treated Zionist organizations in Germany exceptionally well compared to other Jewish institutions. A high-ranking SS functionary even toured Zionist colonies in Palestine in the company of a German Zionist leader. After their visit, the Nazi newspaper *Der Angriff*, founded by Goebbels, published complimentary articles about the Zionist enterprise, and a medal was struck to commemorate the visit—a swastika on one side, a Star of David on the other.
The Zionists’ exclusive focus on establishing an ethnic nationalist state in Palestine explains their success in scuttling rescue efforts that could have saved many European Jews by resettling them elsewhere. In 1938, following Kristallnacht, which unleashed physical violence against German Jews, Ben-Gurion said:
“If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.”
This view of people as “human material” to be used for the benefit of the Zionist state also explains the antisemitic acts that Zionists committed in Muslim countries in their effort to Judaize Palestine.
Before Zionism harmed Palestinians, it did violence to Jews and their heritage. While other nationalist movements—Polish, Ukrainian, or Lithuanian—sought an ethnic state to preserve cultural continuity, Zionism strove to uproot Jews from their traditional culture and language (Yiddish) and create a “Muskeljude” (“muscular Jew”): a strong, cynical, brutal individual inspired by Aryan prototypes. The Nazi genocide reinforced the Zionists’ resolve to rely on naked force to achieve their goals. Thus, Israel has become one of the most militarized societies, committing violent crimes with impunity.
Predictably, Israel is the most dangerous place for Jews. Since the late 19th century, critics of Zionism warned that a Zionist state would become a death trap, endangering both colonizers and colonized alike. For these critics—especially those outside Israel—the Zionist experiment is a tragic mistake. They argue that the sooner it ends, without harm to its inhabitants, the better for humanity as a whole.
The danger of Zionism to Jews is not only physical but also moral and spiritual. The Zionists’ claim to Palestine and their behavior contradict drastically the teachings of rabbinic Judaism. Jewish religious opponents of Zionism see the persistent and recurring violence since the foundation of Zionist settlement in Palestine as a consequence of Zionism’s radical rupture from two thousand years of Jewish tradition. In this worldview, the physical appropriation of the Holy Land can lead only to perdition. In the words of Rabbi Isaac Breuer: “Zionism is the most terrible enemy that has ever arisen to the Jewish nation. … Zionism kills the nation and then elevates the corpse to the throne.”
In 1948, during the war triggered by the Zionists’ ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Hannah Arendt, the prominent Jewish intellectual who fled Nazi Germany for the United States, wrote:
“And even if the Jews were to win the war … the ‘victorious’ Jews would live surrounded by an entirely hostile Arab population, secluded inside ever-threatened borders, absorbed with physical self-defense. … And all this would be the fate of a nation that—no matter how many immigrants it could still absorb and how far it extended its boundaries—would still remain a very small people greatly outnumbered by hostile neighbors.”
Israel is also a constant danger to—rather than protector of—Jews living outside its ever-expanding borders. Soon after the IDF bombed the Tehran synagogue, Dr. Younes Hamami Lalehzar stated the obvious: “The Israeli regime’s claim about defending Jews is nothing more than a shameful lie.”
Moreover, Israel’s brutality and its claim to represent all Jews provoke acts of violence against Jews worldwide. Israeli leaders actively encourage the conflation of Jews with Israel, as it serves highly strategic purposes. It legitimizes the Zionist state, reinforces its ideology and fuels antisemitism by making Jews abroad appear complicit in Israeli policies, ultimately driving Jews to emigrate to Israel. Antisemitism offers a win-win scenario to Israel: new immigrants contribute intellectual, entrepreneurial, and financial resources, while also expanding the pool of potential recruits for the IDF.
Decades of discrimination, deportation, and murder of local Palestinians have produced anger, resentment, and hatred. Contrary to the prevailing self-pity and indignation that followed the attack from Gaza in October 2023, the legendary Israeli warrior General Moshe Dayan understood the predicament of the Palestinians. Speaking at the funeral of an Israeli killed by a Palestinian from Gaza in 1956, he said:
“Let us not today cast blame on the murderers. Who are we to argue against their potent hatred for us? For eight years they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been turning the land and villages in which they and their forefathers lived into our own inheritance…”
Dayan, in one of his brutally honest moments, confessed that “there is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
Such words are rarely heard in Israel today. Self-righteousness reigns supreme. The vast majority of non-Arab Israelis support the genocide in Gaza and stand behind their armed forces in the current attacks on Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen. The habitual use of violence has inebriated Israelis, and it seems that only force can stop them from committing further crimes against humanity. It remains to be seen whether such force can be found.
The Tehran synagogue was reportedly bombed by planes marked with the Star of David. When I visited it ten years ago, Iranian Jews seemed safe. Unlike in Paris or Berlin, there were no guards at the entrances to synagogues and Jewish institutions. I also visited Tehran’s Jewish hospital. Unlike Montreal, where the Jewish hospital was a response to the antisemitism of the medical establishment—which would not hire Jewish doctors in the 1920s and 1930s—the Jewish hospital in Tehran was a voluntary Jewish contribution to the city’s population. I hope the hospital did not share the same fate as the synagogue. Above the entrance to the hospital, I noticed a Torah verse in the original Hebrew and in Farsi: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
Sign above the entrance to the Jewish hospital in Tehran reading “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Photo Yakov Rabkin)
Yakov M. Rabkin is Professor Emeritus of History at the Université de Montréal, scholar at the Montreal Centre for International Studies (CERIUM) and founding member of Canada’s Independent Jewish Voices. He is the author, most recently, of Israel in Palestine. Most references to the quotes in this article can be found in his book Zionism Decoded in 101 Quotes.
