The confrontation between Israel and Iran does not at all correspond to the image presented by the media. Its roots lie in a period before the Islamic Republic and has nothing to do with the construction of a nuclear bomb. Its outbreak today is intended to cover up the misdeeds of the Argentinian Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Here we are: the confrontation between Israel and Persia has begun. Its origins lie not in the Islamic Republic, but in what preceded it. This war is expected to last until one of the adversaries is exhausted.
To understand what is happening and not fall into one of the two official narratives that mask the reality of the problem, several steps back are necessary.
Iran’s Enemies in the 20th Century
All demonstrations in Iran against external enemies end with the inevitable “Death to the United Kingdom! Death to the United States! Death to Israel!” It is a cry that comes from the depths of the suffering of the Persians since the First World War.
• Indeed, while we in the West are not aware of it, Iran was the victim, in 1917-1919, of the largest genocide of the First World War [ 1 ] . 6 to 8 million people died of hunger out of a population of 18 to 20 million inhabitants, that is to say between a quarter and a third of Iranians. Iran, although neutral, was crushed by the British armies, against a backdrop of rivalry with the Bolsheviks and the Ottomans. This horror left a traumatic memory that is still very present in Iran [ 2 ] . There is no doubt for an Iranian that the United Kingdom is the first enemy of his country.
• The British, who had colonized Iran behind one of their officers, Reza Shah (1925-1941), overthrew him to place his son in power, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941-1979). Behind these screens, they plundered the country’s oil. However, in 1951 the Shah chose Mohammad Mossadegh as Prime Minister. The latter nationalized the oil to the detriment of London. A quarrel ensued during which the British showed bad faith and organized a color revolution with the help of the United States. This was “Operation Ajax” [ 3 ] . The new regime was no longer held by London, but by Washington. The United States Embassy, which installed the telephone, placed derivations of the lines of all the ministers to listen to them without their knowledge, live. This system was discovered during the 1978 revolution. There is therefore no doubt among Iranians that the United States is their second enemy.
• When Mossadegh was overthrown, the British imposed General Fazlollah Zahedi in his place. Zahedi was a Nazi whom they had imprisoned in Cairo, but London was counting on him to restore “order.” So he set up a secret police force modeled on the Gestapo. He recruited former Nazis to train it, and several hundred “revisionist Zionists” were sent by Yitzhak Shamir (then working for Mossad) to supervise them [ 4 ] . The horrors of the Savak, the most terrible secret police in the world at the time, can still be seen in the museum dedicated to it in Tehran [ 5 ] . So there is no doubt among Iranians that Israel is their third enemy.
Israel’s only enemy in the 20th century
Contrary to what the Israeli population believes after 25 years of “revisionist Zionist” propaganda, Iran – neither that of the Shah nor that of the Islamic Republic – never had the objective of annihilating the Jewish population of occupied Palestine. As President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had made clear, the objective was to destroy the State of Israel as Russia had destroyed the USSR [ 6 ] .
No, the only enemy of the State of Israel is the one that, for 80 years, has sabotaged every attempt at peace between Jews and Arabs: the United Kingdom. As I have often explained, when the Foreign Office drafted its plan, The Future of Palestine , in 1915 , it specified that a Jewish state should be created in Mandatory Palestine, but that it should under no circumstances be capable of ensuring its own security. It was only two years later that the government of David Lloyd George drafted the Balfour Declaration announcing the creation of the Jewish National Home, and that the Woodrow Wilson administration made a commitment to create an independent state for the Jews of the Ottoman Empire.
The author of this text, Lord Herbert Samuel, became British High Commissioner to Palestine. True to form, he favored Jabotinsky’s “revisionist Zionists” on the one hand and, on the other, appointed the anti-Semite Mohammed Amin al-Husseini as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He was subsequently appointed Home Secretary in Archibald Sinclair’s government.
This policy continues unabated to this day: the United Kingdom still supports the “revisionist Zionist” Benjamin Netanyahu on the one hand and the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is the Palestinian branch, on the other.
The continuation of the conflict between the “revisionist Zionists” and Iran
Just after World War II, US President Dwight Eisenhower became concerned that his Israeli counterpart, Chaim Weizmann, was creating a “Greater Israel”—that is, not the reconstitution of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (which was already largely included in the State of Israel), but of the ancient Assyrian Empire (i.e., from the Nile to the Euphrates). He asked his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, to organize an alliance between Syria and Iran to balance Israeli influence.
It was at Washington’s request that Syrian President Adib Chichakli (PSNS) (1953-1954) signed a military cooperation agreement with Iranian ruler Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 24 May 1953 [ 7 ] . It is therefore foolish today to denounce this same alliance (now called the “Axis of Resistance”) on the sole grounds that both regimes have been decolonised.
Yet that is what we are doing. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter ousted the Shah of Iran and his claim to Middle East domination by acquiring an atomic bomb supplied by French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and his Prime Minister, Jacques Chirac [ 8 ] . To replace him, on the advice of his security adviser, Zbigniew Brzeziński, he moved Imam Ruhollah Khomeini from France to Tehran. Israel initially supported Iran against Iraq, supplying it with weapons as needed. Tel Aviv even organized the Iranian part of the Iran-Contra scandal. Then, it gradually changed its strategy [ 9 ] while retaining some remnants of the Shah’s period. Thus, the EAPC-B consortium, half-owned by each of the two states, continues to operate the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline, which is essential to the Israeli economy. In 2018, the Knesset adopted a law punishing any publication about the owners of this company with 15 years of imprisonment [ 10 ] .
Starting with the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Iraq in 2003, allegedly because of its role in the September 11, 2001 attacks, London and Washington began to spread rumors about an alleged Iranian nuclear weapon, just as they had about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction . [ 11 ] At the time, London and Washington hoped to force Iran to help them against Iraq.
These intoxications led to the vote of resolutions 1737 (December 23, 2006) and 1747 (March 24, 2007) of the United Nations Security Council [ 12 ] . The leader of the Israeli opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu, then seized on this propaganda. For twenty-five years, he continued to denounce the “imminent” manufacture of an Iranian atomic bomb, even though Tehran submitted to the United Nations a proposal for a resolution creating “a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East” [ 13 ] .
In any case, in 2013, William Burns (Joe Biden’s CIA director) negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPoA) with Iran in Oman on behalf of President Barack Obama. It was staged at the 5+1 meetings (i.e., the five nuclear powers of the Security Council plus Germany) in Geneva. But it was not signed in Vienna until two years later, with the United States and Iran reserving a long suspension to conclude a secret supplementary annex.
In a very long interview [ 14 ] , just before the end of his second term, Barack Obama explained that he refused, as a precaution, to prevent Iran from embarking on the race for the atomic bomb, but that he was ready to intervene if Tehran pursued a military nuclear program. His Security Advisor, Susan Rice, declared: “The Iran deal was never primarily about trying to open a new era of relations between the United States and Iran. It was much more pragmatic and minimalist. The goal was very simply to make a dangerous country considerably less dangerous. Nobody expected Iran to become a benevolent actor.”
The US position [ 15 ] has not changed. While during his first term, President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the JCPoA and the secret annex that Barack Obama had negotiated, he only verbally refused to allow Iran to enrich uranium, not during negotiations.
During this period, Iran began mobilizing Shiite communities across the Middle East to ensure its security. Then, with General Qassem Soleimani, Tehran returned to the Khomeini doctrine of aid rather than instrumentalization. Iran already had no more “proxies” before Israel destroyed Hamas, Hezbollah, and many others. Each had become independent.
The events triggering the confrontation
It turns out that on June 7, Esmail Khatib, Iranian Minister of Intelligence, made public an operation by his secret services. They managed to steal confidential documents on the Israeli nuclear program, just as the Mossad had managed, in April 2018, to steal Iranian documents on their nuclear research [ 16 ] .
On 12 June, the IAEA Board of Governors—under the chairmanship of Rafael Grossi—adopted a resolution [ 17 ] in which it noted that “the Director General, as stated in document GOV/2025/25, cannot provide assurance that Iran’s nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful.” It therefore considered that “Iran’s numerous failures since 2019 to comply with its obligations to cooperate fully and timely with the Agency regarding undeclared nuclear material and activities at multiple undeclared locations in Iran, as specified in document GOV/2025/25, constitute a breach of its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with the Agency within the meaning of Article XII.C of the Agency’s Statute;.” Accordingly, it referred the matter to the United Nations Security Council.
But while the Iranian documents seized by the Mossad did not reveal any military nuclear program [ 18 ] , despite the statements of Benjamin Netanyahu, the first Israeli documents seized by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence called into question the neutrality of the Argentinian Rafael Grossi, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). They show that he transmitted observations from his organization to Israel, even though Israel is not a member. Among the IAEA governors, Russia, China and Burkina Faso opposed this resolution.
Laurence Norman, the Wall Street Journal’s special correspondent at the Davos forum on Iranian nuclear power, reported Rafael Grossi’s statement on Ukrainian nuclear power on Twitter, but did not publish an article on the subject. The information was confirmed by another journalist, this time from the New York Times, also on Twitter.
As it happens, Rafael Grossi has already been criticized for his strange silence during the Russian special operation in Ukraine: he revealed, during a speech at the Davos Forum in 2022, that the Ukrainian regime had stockpiled 30,000 kilos of plutonium and another 40,000 kilos of enriched uranium at the Zaporizhzhia power plant. Then, nothing more, despite Russian objurgations.
The day after the Iranian-seized documents were published, Tel Aviv attacked Iran. This is exactly the same behavior as during the 2006 war against Lebanon. Israel claimed to be acting after several of its soldiers had been captured by Hezbollah. In reality, it intervened to stop the Lebanese police and judicial investigations into a vast Israeli spy and terrorism network in Lebanon; investigations that could have led to a new interpretation of the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, as I showed in my book The Terrible Imposture 2 [ 19 ] .
—
[ 1 ] The Great Famine & Genocide in Iran, 1917-1919 , Mohammad Gholi Majd, University Press of America (2013).
[ 2 ] “ 8-10 million Iranians died over Great Famine caused by the British in late 1910s, documents reveal ”, Sadegh Abbasi, Khamenei.Ir, November 4, 2015.
[ 3 ] Countercoup, the Struggle for the Control of Iran , Kermit Roosevelt, McGraw-Hill (1979). The British Role in Iranian Domestic Politics (1951-1953) , Mansoureh Ebrahimi, Springer (2016). Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran , Mark J. Gasiorowski & Malcolm Byrne, Syracuse University Press (2004). The CIA in Iran: The 1953 Coup and the Origins of the US-Iran Trade , Christopher J. Petherick, American Free Press (2006). Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited , Darioush Bayandor, Palgrave Macmillan (2010).
[ 4 ] “ SAVAK: A Feared and Pervasive Force ”, Richard T. Sale, Washington Post , May 9, 1977. SAVAK oder der Folterfreund des Westens. Aus den Akten des iranischen Geheimdienstes , Harald Irnberger (1978).
[ 5 ] Photographs of Iranian leaders visiting him are used by the Mujahideen to make people believe that the reenacted tortures are carried out by them.
[ 6 ] “ How Reuters participated in a propaganda campaign against Iran ”, Voltaire Network , November 14, 2005.
[ 7 ] Syria and the United States , David W. Lesch, Westview (1992).
[ 8 ] The Carter Administration and the Fall of Iran’s Pahlavi Dynasty: US-Iran Relations on the Brink of the 1979 Revolution , Javier Gil Guerrero, Palgrave Macmillan
[ 9 ] The Secret War With Iran: The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle Against the World’s Most Dangerous Terrorist Power , Ronen Bergman, Simon and Schuster (2008).
[ 10 ] “ Israel and Iran jointly operate the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline ”, Voltaire Network , 2 January 2018.
[ 11 ] “ Who is afraid of Iranian civil nuclear power? ”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, June 30, 2010.
[ 12 ] Checking Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions , Henry Sokolski & Patrick Clawson, University Press of the Pacific (2004). Iran and the Bomb: The Abdication of International Responsibility , Thérèse Delpech, Columbia University Press (2009). The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West , Dore Gold, Regnery Publishing (2009). Nuclear Politics in Iran , Judith S. Yaphe, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University (2010). Nuclear Iran , David Patrikarakos, Bloomsbury (2012).
[ 13 ] “ Creation of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East ”, Voltaire Network , May 4, 2010.
[ 14 ] “ The Obama Doctrine ,” by Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic (United States), Voltaire Network , March 10, 2016.
[ 15 ] Crescent of Crisis: US-European Strategy for the Greater Middle East , Ivo H. Daalder & Nicole Gnesotto & Philip H. Gordon, Brookings Institution (2006). The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment , Sasan Fayazmanesh Routledge (2008). US Foreign Policy and Iran: American-Iranian Relations Since the Islamic Revolution , Donette Murray, Routledge (2009). Losing an Enemy: Obama, Iran, and the Triumph of Diplomacy , Trita Parsi, Yale University Press (2017). President Obama and Iran: Engagement, Isolation, Regime Change , Raymond Tanter, Iran Policy Committee (2010).
[ 16 ] “ Benjamin Netanyahu reveals the “Iranian secret nuclear program” ”, by Benjamin Netanyahu, Voltaire Network , April 30, 2018.
[ 17 ] “ NPT Safeguards Agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran ”, Resolution adopted on 12 June 2025, at the 1769th session, IAEA.
[ 18 ] Shock Wave Generator for Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program: More than a Feasibility Study , David Albright & Olli Heinonen, Foundation for defense of democracies, May 7, 2019.
[ 19 ] The Terrible Imposture 2: Manipulations & Fake News , Thierry Meyssan, Alphée and Demi-Lune (2007).
