Mick Hartley

Nicole Lampert at UnHerd – Meet the Iranians supporting Israel:

Lily Moo is used to death threats: in the past 14 months, 19 against her have been reported to the police. An Iranian in London, she has been leading Woman, Life, Freedom marches in her adopted home — calling for a feminist revolution in the Islamic republic — for more than a year. But right now, she is in hiding. After her defiant speech at the pro-Israel vigil earlier this month went viral, a man came up to her in the street and told her that, now she was speaking up for Jewish people, killing her would be justified within Islam. “He said my blood was halal which means they believe they have divine permission to take my life,” she tell me. “My sin is Zionism.”

Lily Moo is a pseudonym; she is too worried to use her real name. When she leaves the house, she wears a disguise, covers her hair and even changes the way she walks. The police have been advising her about how to stay safe. Most recently, she attended a joint Jewish and Iranian event for peace. Since then, she has been “in a kind of prison”.

This is London, 2023.

Lily Moo is not the only Iranian who is in danger for speaking up for Israel. In Iran itself, supporters of Israel communicate using secret social-media accounts because they know others have been “vanished” for doing the same. Closer to home, another dissident, Vahid Beheshti, has been protesting outside the Foreign Office for 10 months, in an effort to get the British government to prescribe the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation. Recently, he started flying an Israeli flag alongside his Persian one. One Saturday, as a pro-Palestinian demonstration marched past, someone took his Israeli flag — and as he gave chase he was warned he would be beheaded. The man who is alleged to have made the threat was later arrested by police and found to have a knife on him….

“They want to kill everyone who is a non-believer,” adds Vahid, who escaped Iran 24 years ago. “They believe they will go to heaven for doing it. That is their mentality.” He is dedicated to raising awareness of the brutality of the IRGC and its proxies, which include Hamas and Hezbollah. Citing how Iran and Hezbollah are accused of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish Centre in Argentina that killed 85 people, he says the brutality of the events of October 7 did not surprise him. “In Iran girls and boys are raped too, people are kidnapped or go ‘missing’ all the time. Torture is one of their tools; they cut off the fingers of people. In the past year alone more than 80 children under the age of 17 have been shot dead.”

The danger is very real. Last year, MI5 foiled at least 10 potential IRGC plots to kidnap or kill people in Britain. In February, the dissident Persian language satellite station Iran International moved from London to Washington because of threats to its staff….

It makes sense that Iranians who object to the Ayatollah’s increasingly vicious crackdown on free speech would stand with the people he hates most. But there is so much more to it than that. Jews and Iranians have ties going back centuries, to before the birth of either Mohammed or Jesus. The Persian King known as Cyrus the Great is celebrated for freeing his kingdom’s Jewish slaves and returning them to Jerusalem in 539BCE — but many Jews stayed in the area.

In 1948, the year that Israel was established, there were 150,000 Jews living in Iran. It was one of the few countries in the Middle East not to throw out all its Jews. But as tensions between Islamicists and the more tolerant Shah loyalists grew throughout the Seventies, Jews started to leave. Then came the 1979 revolution, in which Ayatollah Khomeini took over, triggering a mass exodus of Jews. Today, there are just 10,000 in the country….

In the West, we tend to view the war over Gaza as part of a conflict that started in 1948; in the Middle East, people understand that the roots go much deeper and spread much wider. So, the Iranians who support Israel are not only calling for revolution in their own nation; they are supporting an ally against an evil that threatens the entire world.

“The people of Israel and Iran share the same enemies and we have no choice but to fight together,” says Vahid. But “this isn’t just about us in the Middle East but an ideology that everyone in the West needs to fight.” It is a battle against a fundamentalist ideology, and for freedom and democracy. “We need Israel to win, to beat Hamas,” says Vahid, “because the arms of the Iranian octopus need to be chopped off.”

These Iranians understand what the Free Palestine crowd don't get: that this is not so much a political struggle over land as an existential fight against Islamic supremacism.