We Once Called a Persian King Our Messiah

Jerusalem lay devastated. The First Temple had been destroyed, the kingdom of Judah broken, and many of its people carried into Babylonian exile.

In 586 BCE, the catastrophe was not simply a military defeat: the institutions around which national and religious life had been organised had been torn apart. britannica+1

Assyria had already destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel more than a century earlier. Now Judah, too, had fallen. Alongside the later Roman destruction of the Second Temple, these conquests mark some of the deepest ruptures in ancient Jewish history.britannica+1

When the possibility of return came, it came through Persia, now current day Iran.

Cyrus conquered Babylon in 539 BCE. The following year, according to the biblical account, he authorized the exiles’ return and the rebuilding of the Temple. Not everyone returned, and restoration was neither immediate nor complete. But a Persian king had opened a road home after one of our defining national catastrophies.britannica

We did not merely remember him with gratitude. Our scripture called him God’s anointed.

“Thus said God to Cyrus, the anointed one,” Isaiah declares—mashiach, the Hebrew word from which “messiah” derives. Here it means God’s chosen agent, not the later anticipated Davidic redeemer. The distinction does not diminish the honor: God addresses this foreign ruler “though you have not known Me” and declares that he will let the exiles go.sefaria+1

Persia therefore enters this chapter of Jewish sacred memory not as an existential enemy, but as an instrument of restoration.

That does not make the Islamic Republic benign. Nor does an ancient king answer a modern security question. But it should make us suspicious of stories in which Jewish–Persian hostility appears timeless or inevitable.

The question is not why Israel fears Iran. There are substantial reasons. It is how Iran became Israel’s defining existential enemy—and whether Benjamin Netanyahu’s long campaign against it has made Israel safer.

An alliance before an enmity

Before the 1979 revolution, Israel treated Iran as a strategic partner. Under its “periphery doctrine,” Israel cultivated non-Arab states, including Iran and Turkey, to counter hostile Arab neighbors. Geography and shared interests mattered more than religious difference.[brookings][brookings]

The revolution transformed that relationship. Ayatollah Khomeini’s government severed ties and made hostility towards Israel part of its political identity. Yet strategic calculation survived: Israel supplied weapons to revolutionary Iran during the Iran–Iraq War, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq remained a common enemy. Ideological hostility could coexist with practical cooperation.[brookings][en.wikipedia]

Governments made choices about which dangers mattered most. The relationship changed because regimes, capabilities and regional calculations changed—not because Persians and Jews discovered an ancient obligation to hate each other.

By the 1990s, concerns about Iran’s nuclear program were changing Israeli assessments. Netanyahu did not invent that reassessment. Yitzhak Rabin’s government also identified Iran as a primary threat. Assigning the entire reversal to one politician would replace one simplification with another.[brookings][jstor]

Netanyahu’s consequential choice

Netanyahu nevertheless gave the Iranian threat extraordinary political prominence. His intervention was not merely to warn that Iran might acquire nuclear weapons. It was to challenge the terms on which diplomacy could prevent that outcome.

Addressing Congress in March 2015, he condemned the emerging nuclear agreement as “a very bad deal.” He argued that it would preserve Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and ultimately enable an arsenal. His stated alternative was not war, but greater pressure producing “a much better deal.”[npr]

That argument deserves scrutiny against what followed.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action imposed nuclear restrictions and monitoring. In March 2018, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran was implementing its nuclear-related commitments. President Donald Trump nevertheless withdrew the United States that May. Iran began progressively abandoning its commitments a year later.[iaea][iaea]

By May 2025, the IAEA estimated that Iran held 408.6 kilograms of uranium enriched up to 60%, in the form of uranium hexafluoride. It also reported serious losses of monitoring and verification capability. These were grave developments, although an enriched stockpile is not itself a deployed nuclear weapon.[iaea]

This chronology does not absolve Tehran of responsibility. Nor does it establish that Netanyahu alone determined American policy. It does challenge the assumption that rejecting an imperfect agreement necessarily produces greater security.

One test of diplomacy is whether it removes every threatening capability. Another is whether abandoning negotiated limits leaves a more advanced program and less transparency. Security policy should be judged by outcomes, not only by the force of its warnings.

The proxies are not an Arab brotherhood

Iran’s regional network adds another danger, but requires a different explanation from the nuclear program.

Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and Iraqi armed groups are not interchangeable branches of one organization. Their relationships with Tehran differ. The “axis of resistance” crosses sectarian boundaries: Hamas is Sunni; Hezbollah is Shia. Opposition to Israel and American influence connects actors with distinct beliefs and priorities.[npr][reuters]

This is not simply Iran siding with its Arab neighbors through religious brotherhood. Several Arab governments have instead developed closer relations with Israel partly because they fear Iranian power—a reversal described as Israel’s “reverse periphery doctrine.”[mepc]

Preventing a nuclear weapon, deterring missiles and weakening armed networks are related objectives, not identical tasks. Treating them as indivisible risks making any limited agreement appear worthless because it cannot resolve every conflict simultaneously.

An arms-control agreement need not certify a government’s virtue. It must constrain a dangerous capability.

Support is not a blank cheque

Israeli opinion makes this argument harder—and more important. In early March 2026, an Israel Democracy Institute survey found that 93% of Jewish Israelis supported the campaign against Iran, including 76% on the left. Among Arab Israelis, support was 26%. This was not simply Netanyahu’s electorate endorsing Netanyahu’s war.[en.idi.org][timesofisrael]

But agreement about a threat is not permanent endorsement of the strategy used against it. A Channel 12 poll reported in June found that 52% of Israelis believed Netanyahu’s conduct concerning the American–Iranian agreement harmed Israeli interests; 24% believed it helped. Just 11% considered Israel the war’s winner.[timesofisrael]

These are different surveys asking different questions, not a continuous measure of approval. The later findings do not prove that Israelis preferred the 2015 agreement. They do show why support for confronting Iran cannot substitute for scrutiny of Netanyahu’s results.

The question is also what counts as success. Preventing weaponization is different from destroying enrichment facilities; weakening a regime is different from replacing it. If these objectives slide into one another, a campaign can always be defended by pointing to one achievement while leaving its larger promises untested. Israelis who supported action are entitled to ask which objective governed the decision, and whether the outcome justified the costs.

Cyrus cannot settle that argument. His presence in Isaiah offers something more modest: a warning against confusing a people with a regime, or a historical relationship with its most hostile chapter.

We need not believe today’s rulers resemble Cyrus to remember that Persia has occupied more than one place in Jewish history.

Persian contributions also helped shape Western intellectual life: al-Khwarizmi’s mathematical works brought algebra and Hindu-Arabic calculation to medieval Europe. The Persian physician and philosopher Ibn Sina, known as Avicenna, influenced European philosophy, while his Canon of Medicine remained a medical textbook into the seventeenth century. britannica+2

And we need not minimize Iran’s dangers to ask whether Netanyahu’s strategy has reduced them—or helped make confrontation seem the only imaginable answer.