Iran Jews as Scapegoats of Shi’ite Islam
I recommend reading this article by YVES BOMATI well known french author, writer and specialist of Iran. He already wrote seven books on Iran history, the next one to be published next February, co-written with Davoud Pahlavi.
The strategic sequence unfolding in the Middle East is no longer a crisis: it is a paradigm shift. What is playing out between Iran, Israel, and the Western bloc is neither a simple regional standoff nor a classic deterrence scenario, but a recomposition of the strategic order of the greater Levant, where war is on the verge of becoming the system’s normal state.
Washington has not abandoned the option of force; it is hesitating or delaying in the face of the cost of a war that would no longer be local but systemic—simultaneously affecting energy flows, supply chains, financial architectures, and the very credibility of Western power. The Gulf monarchies, now vital platforms of late globalization, understand this perfectly: their message is not moral, it is coldly accounting-based. They now present themselves as cardinal arteries of the world economy; severing them would trigger a global geo-economic heart attack. That, at least, is their geopolitical card.
But postponing is not pacifying. It is organizing waiting.
The direct clashes of June 2025 marked a profound psychological rupture. Certainly, Iran was struck at the heart of its strategic infrastructure. But it demonstrated its ability to move beyond the role of a mere asymmetric actor and enter that of an integrated strategic spoiler power: strikes on US bases, missile launches against Israel, saturation of defense systems, attacks on civilian and scientific infrastructure.
Added to this is a rapid escalation in cyber capabilities, electronic warfare, and the integration of command and detection systems, with Chinese—and more sporadically Russian—support.
Despite sanctions and its relative isolation, Iran has proven that it has entered the category of structurally disruptive powers.
For Israel, whose security doctrine has rested since 1948 on a simple axiom—never allow the enemy to choose the time, place, and form of confrontation—this shift is not an incident; it is a change in strategic grammar.
The Blind Spot: a Minority on Borrowed Time
In this new regional, even international, equation, one factor is treated as a secondary humanitarian detail: Iran’s Jews.
Today they number between 8,000 and 10,000, compared to nearly 100,000 before 1979. Officially recognized by the 1979 Islamic Constitution, tolerated, they in fact live under a regime of permanent ontological suspicion—not for what they do, but for what they symbolically embody in the regime’s ideological imagination.
As long as the confrontation remains indirect, they serve as a showcase. Khomeini could declare: “We recognize our Jews as distinct from those impious Zionists.” But in Iranian political theology, this distinction is not legal; it is instrumental.
Any expression—even moral or emotional—of solidarity with Israel is assimilated to espionage, therefore to treason, therefore to a metaphysical crime punishable by death.
In ideological regimes, minorities are never protected by law; they are tolerated by circumstance.
In open war, that circumstance disappears.
What the Mullahs’ Regime Seeks to Erase from Its Own History
Under the Pahlavis, imperial Iran had made a fundamental choice: reason of state over ideological temptation. As early as 1950, it recognized Israel de facto. The peripheral axis functioned: security cooperation, strategic exchanges, Iranian oil transiting through the Jewish state. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Iranian Jewish community was not only protected, but constitutive of the country’s modernization—present in the economy, universities, medicine, and senior administration.
The fracture began with the Yom Kippur War in 1973, when the Shah, in an ambiguously realigning gesture, financially aided the Egypt of his friend Anwar el-Sadat and allowed the Soviets to use Iranian airspace. In 1979, when the regime collapsed, Israel did not intervene. Yitzhak Rabin would later describe this passivity as a major strategic error.
This moment is indeed fundamental: Iran shifts from geopolitics to theopolitics.
1979: When Ideology Dissolves the State
Khomeini does not merely overthrow a power; he abolishes a conception of history itself.
He replaces the strategic state with an eschatological regime, where politics becomes the instrument of a religious vision of the world, where the enemy is no longer an adversary but a figure of evil. Shiism is reinterpreted in a messianic form, contaminated by certain themes of radical Sunnism. Israel becomes not a geopolitical problem, but a principle of cosmic disorder.
As early as the 1960s, Khomeini wrote that Israel was the corrupter, the destroyer, the enemy of identity. After 1979, this vision becomes state doctrine.
The execution of Habib Elghanian in May 1979, after a sham trial, is not an accident: it is a founding rite. Within a few years, 75 to 80 percent of Iranian Jews leave the country.
The Constitution does grant one seat in Parliament (the Majlis) to those who remain. But it specifies: “within the limits of the law.” Which in reality means: within the limits of ideological submission.
Hostage-Taking as a Mode of Governance
Every besieged ideological regime operates according to the same mechanism: the greater the external pressure, the harsher the internal coercion. The harsher it becomes, the more it needs symbolic figures, bargaining chips, political bodies to instrumentalize.
The Iran of the mullahs transfers its capital abroad, sanctuarizes its security apparatus, fires on its own population while accusing it of terrorism, and constantly seeks substitute figures for the war it cannot—or does not yet want to—fully wage.
In such systems, visible minorities are never neutral. They become potential strategic resources.
The Iranian Jewish minority thus enters, whether it wishes to or not, into this grammar: a possible instrument of blackmail, deterrence, ritual vengeance.
To believe it will remain durably outside this logic is not optimism, but historical denial.
The Tragic Equation
For Israel, the conclusion is as harsh as it is non-negotiable: a state founded on the memory of powerlessness cannot base its survival on the assumption that an eschatological regime will remain rational toward a captive minority.
Compassion is a moral duty. Strategic lucidity is a historical duty.
For Iran’s Jews, the tragedy reaches an almost biblical depth: heirs of Cyrus II the Great, they live under a regime that conditions their survival on their separation from Israel—an impossible condition, since it depends not on their behavior, but on the structural need of power to designate an internal enemy, a scapegoat.
The current “gray zone” is not an equilibrium. It is a suspension.
And in long wars, suspensions are never neutral: they consolidate one side and weaken lives.
Iran’s Jews are lives on borrowed time.
Civilizational hostages.
Silent.
Useful.
Until the day they become expendable.
