Praying for a Redemptive Relationship Between Iran and Israel

I arrived in Israel last week for what’s now my fifth visit in just three and a half years. Even though I feel at home here in so many ways, my being here alone defies all odds and is only because of God. And visiting Israel four of the five times while Israel has been at war goes against the trend that’s been reflected by the huge drop in tourism.

My first visit to Israel was an answer to my prayers literally. Since growing up in Iran under the brutal misogyny and indoctrination about Israel from the Islamic Republic, I knew the regime was lying about Israel. This made Israel special, not an enemy.

After I became a Christian, my draw to Israel was all the greater. Israel is the Land of my savior. It is the Land of his people. If the Islamic Republic spent so much time and resources lying about Israel and threatening Israel, I knew I had to come visit.

In April 2023 I have had the privilege of visiting for the first time. Not only do I feel at home, but it is also my spiritual home. I feel more alive in Israel than anywhere. On that first trip, my arrival legitimately met with suspicion because my American passport says I was born in Iran. I understand why that’s the case, but it breaks my heart.

Israel must be cautious. Unfortunately, I see people who wave a banner about caring for and support of Israel, but clearly with their own agendas. Some of them make me suspicious too. So, I get it.

Three months before I came to Israel, I had a dream of masked terrorists committing a slaughter in Israel. I had never been to Israel. I wasn’t even planning a trip to Israel yet. I had never met much less befriended a Jewish person. I awoke in tears. I don’t know why I had that dream, but I begged God to stop it.

Six months to the day after my very first Shabbat in Israel, my very first Shabbat ever, the Hamas attack and massacre took place. For some reason God showed it to me nine months earlier. For some reason He did not answer my prayer to stop it.

The trauma of seeing how my new Jewish friends in Israel were suffering was hard enough. For months I cried. I prayed. I lost sleep.

I understood immediately that the evil that caused this trauma for Israel – not just on that day but for decades before – was the same as the evil I endured and suffered as a girl and then woman in Iran. I experienced misogyny as far back as I can remember. These are my earliest memories.

The Islamic regime killed my husband. It executed my best friend. I was arrested and sentenced to death just because of my faith in Jesus. I witnessed unspeakable suffering and torture in nine months in Evin Prison.

I’m in Israel on my fifth trip, and my third time harvesting olives with Root & Branch as a symbol of love and support from Christians to Jews.

I have another agenda. After the fall of the wicked Islamic Republic, Iran and Israel will restore the friendship that existed before 1979, and that Jews and Persians too will rebuild a relationship going back to King Cyrus who enabled the Jewish people to come back to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple. Together – we as Jews and Persians – need to be part of the modern rebuilding of that relationship.

But it’s not enough just to repair a breach, what needs to happen is something redemptive. That hit home last week in my fourth trip to the Gaza border. I have prayed with families of hostages. I have played with at risk children who will bear the traumas of October 7 for the rest of their lives. I have spoken with soldiers and apologized to them that the evil they are fighting is inspired, funded from, and organized in the country of my birth by the people who hijacked my country two months after I was born. I thanked pilots who struck Evin Prison, assuring them that I understood from photos that they hit the administrative section and not where the prisoners are kept.

Going to the Gaza border is always traumatic. This time I tried to make videos in Farsi to share with my people about what happened there, how Israelis have suffered, and how our enemies are the same. The Islamic Republic is the head of the octopus that needs to be cut off so its tentacles will die too. So, Iran and Israel can both be free of the Mecca of terror in the country of my birth.

Visiting Israel is always an emotional roller coaster. I arrive and I feel alive. Inspired. At home. I love the people and the culture. Being in Israel is the highest of highs.

But there are the low points too.

On my first trip I visited a site under the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that brought me to a feeling of the dungeon in which I was imprisoned in Tehran. My body tensed, my blood pressure spiked. It became hard to breathe. This week I had another trauma that brought me back to the day of my being arrested in 2009.

I also weep with and share the grief of so many Israelis I have met, and millions more. Their trauma makes me relive my traumas. It’s not a competition. But it can and must be a foundation for growing a positive relationship in the future: a repair of the breach from 48 years ago, and something redemptive.

Visiting the Gaza border this time I tried to convey to Iranians how our enemies are the same. I prayed that one day, at least, my people will have suitable and meaningful memorials like in Israel. I wish we didn’t have to. These will not change the suffering but hopefully will provide healing. And another bond with Israel.

One interaction this time was particularly sad. I was speaking with some high school students at Tekuma, the site where more than 1000 burned out and shot up vehicles have become a memorial and pilgrimage site. The students understood I was from Iran. They asked hard probing questions. Just speaking about Iran is a trigger for Israelis who have suffered so much because of Iran.

It always makes me angry that the reputation of my country and my people have been so tainted by the evil that defines the Islamic Republic. I understand why people think what they do, but the Islamic Republic is not Iran and certainly does not represent the real Iranian people.

One of the students from central Israel asked me if Iranians love Israel. My answer that yes – most do – surprised him and made him happy. It’s the truth. It was the truth before the June 2025 twelve-day war, and the war seven months ago. It’s all the more true now.

I loved speaking with them, to tell them the truth, and to encourage them. I wish I could go to speak to all the students in their school to tell them the same. At the end of the visit, realizing that in just a few years they will also have the responsibility and privilege of serving in the IDF and defending their country and people from the people inspired by, funded from, and trained by the evil people who hijacked my people and county, I prayed for them.

When the Islamic Republic falls, Iranian people will be able to celebrate their proud Persian heritage once again, the revered father of which is King Cyrus who honored the Jewish people by ending their Babylonian captivity and enabling the return to Jerusalem and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem.

He further demonstrated respect by returning the sacred Temple vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had taken from Jerusalem and placed in Babylonian temples. These gold and silver articles (thousands of them, according to the inventory in Ezra 1:7–11) sent back to Jerusalem along with the Jewish exiles.

Cyrus didn’t only enable all this to honor the Jewish people, he funded it. A memorandum of his decree (later confirmed under Darius) specified that the Temple was to be rebuilt with funding from the royal treasury, including costs for construction materials, and that the returned vessels were to be restored to their place (Ezra 6:3–5).

Another Biblical story also serves as a redemptive model of what I pray will be in our shared future. In the Book of Esther, the evil decree of Haman was turned upside down, reversing the potential genocide of the Jewish people to one in which the Jewish people were honored, defended themselves, and to whom there was light, and joy and gladness.

I pray that my presence in Israel, that our Root & Branch program, and that conversations like the one I had with the precious students will all be part of turning around the situation today to something that goes beyond a restoration of warm relations between Israel and Iran, and to one that is redemptive.