When the Mossad launched a Farsi-language Telegram channel on Saturday morning – hours into Operation Roaring Lion – and addressed Iranians as “our brothers and sisters,” promising that “together we will return Iran to its glorious days,” the predictable chorus erupted across Arab capitals and Western campuses alike: Who are the Jews to appoint themselves liberators of Iran? By what right does Israel, of all nations, presume to speak of freeing a people it has never governed and a land it has never occupied?

The objection sounds reasonable until you open a history book – at which point it collapses entirely, because the relationship between Jews and Persians is not a geopolitical convenience manufactured in 2026. It is one of the oldest, deepest, and most consequential alliances in the recorded history of civilization, and what Israel did on Saturday was not colonial arrogance but the repayment of a debt that is twenty-five centuries old.

In 586 BCE, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II destroyed Solomon’s Temple, razed Jerusalem, and marched the Jewish people into exile – the Babylonian Captivity, one of the defining catastrophes of Jewish history. For seventy years, the Jewish nation existed in bondage, its holiest site in ruins, its people scattered across a foreign empire with no army, no sovereignty, and no realistic hope of return.

And then, in 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great – a Persian, not a Jew – conquered Babylon and issued the decree that altered the........

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