On June 13, 2025, Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, a massive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and its government. Jet fighters swarmed over Iran’s capital, Tehran, and covert spy teams launched drones at Iranian military installations. Ballistic missiles flew back toward Israel in retaliation. To see the carnage and hear the vitriolic rhetoric from both nations, it would be easy to imagine Israel and Iran as perpetual enemies. Fewer than fifty years ago, Iran was one of Israel’s only allies and supporters in the Middle East. What changed?
When Israel was established in 1948, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, ruled Iran as a Western-aligned monarchy. Israel-Iran relations were largely positive under the Shah and his father, Reza Pahlavi, who ruled from 1925-1978. It helped that the Pahlavi dynasty was friendly to Western countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Iran was the second Muslim-majority country to recognize Israel (after Turkey). Until the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iran was one of Israel’s greatest supporters in the Middle East. Mohamad Reza Shah believed that positive relations with Israel would strengthen Iranian relations with the US. In addition, Tel Aviv and Tehran were also strategically aligned. Israel is a Jewish state in a Muslim region, and Iran is a Shia Muslim Iranian state in a predominantly Sunni Muslim Arab Middle East. This period of peace and allyship ended quickly when the Iranian Revolution began in 1978.
The Iranian Revolution was an uprising against the authoritarian regime led by the Shah, who used an American-trained secret police called the SAVAK to terrorize the Iranian people into submission to his dictatorial government through widespread killings, torture, and mass imprisonment. The Shah was especially focused on suppressing leftist, liberal, and secular opposition: murder, imprisonment, and exile were standard facets of his repertoire. Open resistance began in 1977, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, an exiled opposition leader, called for strikes, boycotts, tax refusal, and other forms of protest. Khomeini’s resistance met with brutal retaliation from the regime, even as strikes from civil servants and other workers crippled the country. As this violent conflict unfolded, the Carter administration continued to provide military and economic support for the Pahlavi regime. While Mohammad Reza Shah’s forces killed thousands of unarmed protesters, the number of protesters continued to increase, reaching nine million people and ultimately forcing the Shah to flee the country on January 16, 1979.
Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile two weeks later, ushering in Islamist hardliners quickly into power with himself as Supreme Leader. Although the revolution was largely nonviolent, the aftermath was far from it. Khomeini and his allies began a crusade of mass hangings and executions against leaders and officials who served the Shah. He also denied these people the right to a fair trial or defense. Only a few months after Khomeini took power, on November 4, 1979, Iranian students stormed the embassy and detained more than 50 Americans working at the embassy as hostages. The hostages were held for 444 days before being freed in the Algiers Accords, which unfroze Iranian assets and freed the hostages. But the new regime wasn’t just more belligerent towards the West. The new Supreme Leader also proved no less repressive than its predecessor: it systematically curtailed the rights of women and religious minorities. The new, more extremist government was also much less friendly to Israel and the West. Iran nixed all previous agreements with Israel and cut diplomatic relations. Khomeini also positioned himself as a leading supporter of Palestinian nationalism and flirted with the idea of building an atomic bomb. Khomeini’s praetorian guard, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), meanwhile, assembled a network of Iranian-backed militias to target Israeli and American interests. This self-proclaimed “Axis of Resistance” includes the Houthis, in Yemen, Hamas, in Gaza, Hezbollah, in Lebanon, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in Gaza and the West Bank, in addition to a constellation of smaller groups throughout the Middle East. Some, like Hezbollah and the Houthis, are operationally linked to the IRGC: others, like Hamas, are armed but not directly controlled by Iran.
The “Axis of Resistance” has long sparred with Israel and the United States, leading Israel and Iran to trade targeted assassinations, cyber attacks, and covert means of warfare while maintaining plausible deniability.
After Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, though, the extent to which the “Axis of Resistance” is aligned has become clear. Though the extent to which Iran and its proxies had forewarning of the October 7 attacks is disputed, the “Axis of Resistance” rallied behind Hamas in the days after the attack. Starting on October 8, Hezbollah began rocket attacks on northern Israel; the Houthis in Yemen soon began to target shipping in the Bab al-Mandab (through which about 30% of container trade passes).
Israel has been clashing more directly with Iran and its proxies since the attacks on October 7. In April of 2024, an Israeli airstrike on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Syria, killed several top Iranian officials and four officers. In retaliation, Iran sent more than 300 missiles and drones toward Israel. In September of 2024, Israel killed Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah — prompting another barrage of 180 missiles. In total, these two attacks killed two people: a Palestinian man from shrapnel, and an Israeli man from a heart attack. These attacks also seriously injured a 7-year-old girl from a Bedouin village in Israel, who was hit by a piece of shrapnel.
The Israeli defense system, the Iron Dome, intercepted most of the strikes. The Iron Dome is an air defense system that detects and intercepts missiles and other threats that endanger lives or infrastructure. The US Navy and Jordan also aided in the interception of these rockets. Israel’s subsequent invasion of Lebanon dismantled much of Hezbollah as a fighting force. This, coupled with the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, the bombing of Hamas in Gaza, and American strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, crippled the “Axis of Resistance.” In just 18 months, the networks that Iran had spent decades cultivating were thoroughly defanged.
The most recent conflict began over Israeli suspicions that the weakening of Iranian allies had led Iran to contemplate a sprint for nuclear weapons. Israel is thought to maintain at least 90 nuclear warheads. Israeli intelligence in June asserted that Iran was weeks from obtaining a nuclear bomb. This claim was partially corroborated by an IAEA (the UN’s nuclear-control arm) report, but not by US and other Western intelligence, which hadn’t come to the same conclusions. Israel launched Operation Rising Lion, attacking nuclear and military facilities across Iran, killing scores of top officials and attempting to permanently eliminate Iran’s nuclear program. After the initial strike, Iran retaliated and the two nations traded missile fire, as Israel won full air superiority over Iran. Although Israel had done significant damage to Iran’s military, the IDF couldn’t destroy the heart of the nuclear program — the massive enrichment site at Fordo — without American “bunker-buster” bombs. Donald Trump was unable to resist striking a blow against America’s great foe; he sent in the bombers to three nuclear sites (Fordo, Natanz and Isfahan) after several days of deliberation and then promptly announced a ceasefire on his social media platform. While Trump has claimed the assault as a success, stating it has set Iran back by years, intelligence reports remain mixed. Some experts suggest that Iran’s pursuit of a bomb has only been delayed by a few months and question whether the centrifuges at Fordo have been eliminated at all, despite Trump’s convictions. Neither Israel nor the U.S. is willing to call an end to the conflict anytime soon; both countries insist that they are ready to return to the fray if needed. Iran has struck a similarly hostile tone. It seems that the days of allyship between Iran and the West in the 1970s remain in the rear-view mirror.
