At Iranian rallies across Canada calling for an end to the Islamic Republic, Jewish Canadians increasingly stand in the crowd. At Toronto’s Walk with Israel, Iranian Canadians march too, not as onlookers but as formal participants. Neither is a coincidence, and neither is a government policy. It is a pattern built by people: Jewish Canadians show up for Iranians demanding freedom, and Iranians show up for the Jewish community and for Israel and the fight against anti-Semitism.

They come to us; we go to them.

What looks local is not small. A relationship the Islamic Republic has spent more than four decades trying to sever is being rebuilt, person by person, in Canada.

We Were Never Meant to Be Enemies

That rebuilding starts with something 2,500 years old and shared by both peoples. Cyrus the Great is not an Iranian symbol imposed on a Jewish audience. He holds a genuine place in Jewish memory as the Persian king who enabled the return of Jewish exiles from Babylon and the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. For Iranians, he represents a founding figure remembered for a tolerance the Islamic regime in Iran has spent nearly half a century inverting. That shared history is evidence that Iranian-Jewish hostility is not inevitable, and that the Islamic regime in Iran is one ugly chapter, not the whole story.

In April 2023, Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi became the most prominent Iranian in decades to visit Israel, arriving during the period of Holocaust Remembrance Day and visiting the Western Wall. The visit put a modern face on an old idea: that a different relationship between Iranians and Israelis is possible, and that it does not have to wait for governments to declare it........

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