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 trajectory of Jewish civilization permanently. The Edict of Cyrus permitted the Jews to return to Jerusalem, rebuild the Temple, and reconstitute their national life in the land from which they had been torn. He did not merely allow the return; he financed it, sending back the sacred vessels that Nebuchadnezzar had plundered and providing resources for reconstruction.

The Hebrew Bible records the decree in terms so exalted that Cyrus remains, to this day, the only non-Jew ever referred to in Jewish scripture as Mashiach – God’s anointed. The Book of Isaiah, written before Cyrus was born, calls him by name and declares him chosen by God to liberate His people. No other gentile figure in three thousand years of Jewish literature occupies this position. The Persian king who freed the Jews is embedded in Jewish consciousness not as a political ally but as a divine instrument – and the gratitude is not metaphorical. It is theological, liturgical, and civilizational.

This was not a singular episode. The Persian-Jewish relationship extended across centuries under the Achaemenid dynasty. Darius I continued Cyrus’s policies and contributed to the completion of the Second Temple in 515 BCE. The Book of Esther – read aloud in every synagogue on Purim – records how Esther and Mordechai, operating within the Persian court of King Ahasuerus, foiled Haman’s plot to exterminate every Jew in the empire.

The festival of Purim is, at its core, a celebration of Persian-Jewish solidarity: a Jewish queen trusted by a Persian king, intervening within the structures of Persian power to save her people from annihilation. That this strike fell on Purim – the very day Jews read the Megillah recounting how the last man who plotted Jewish destruction from Persian soil was himself destroyed – carried a symmetry so precise that for many in the Jewish world, it felt less like coincidence and more like the closing of a circle that history itself had drawn.

And this is the point that those who mock Israel’s rhetoric of liberation either do not know or choose to ignore: Persians are not Arabs. The Persian relationship with the Jewish people has never been defined by the eliminationist hostility that characterizes much of the Arab world’s posture toward Jewish sovereignty. Iranians did not invade Israel in 1948. Iranians did not blockade the Straits of Tiran. Iranians did not chant for the destruction of the Jewish state in 1967.

Under the Shah, Iran was one of the first Muslim-majority nations to recognize Israel, maintained full diplomatic relations, cooperated on intelligence and infrastructure, and hosted a thriving Jewish community that had existed continuously on Persian soil for twenty-seven centuries – one of the oldest Jewish diaspora communities in the world.

The rupture came in 1979, and it was not the Iranian people who chose enmity with the Jews; it was the theocratic regime that hijacked their revolution, imposed Shia Islamist ideology onto an ancient pluralistic civilization, and adopted the Arab world’s anti-Zionist vocabulary as a tool of domestic and regional control. The “Death to Israel” chants were manufactured by a clerical establishment that needed an external enemy to justify internal repression – not by the heirs of Cyrus, who had been intermarrying with Jews, trading with Jews, and protecting Jews since before the Parthenon was built.

This is why the Mossad’s message resonated as deeply as it did among the Iranian diaspora – not because Iranians are naive about Israeli motives, but because they recognized in it something that the cynics could not see: an acknowledgment that the Iranian people are not their regime, that a civilization that produced Cyrus, Hafez, Ferdowsi, Rumi, and Avicenna cannot be reduced to the theocratic junta that censored their poetry, murdered their daughters for showing their hair, and turned their ancient nation into a pariah state synonymous with enriched uranium and proxy warfare.

When Netanyahu declared that the operation would “create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands,” he was not speaking the language of colonial imposition. He was speaking the language of a debt – a debt that stretches back to a clay cylinder in the British Museum inscribed with the words of a Persian king who, twenty-five centuries ago, looked at a captive Jewish nation and said: go home, rebuild, live.

The Jews remember. And on Saturday, in the skies over Tehran, they began to repay.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)