Pod Insights Throughline Iran and the Jewish people: An alliance before war About this episode Israel and Iran have been in almost constant conflict for nearly 50 years. Media tends to frame the violence as endemic, and inevitable — but it’s not.
Between the creation of Israel in 1948 and Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, the countries cooperated, if cautiously. And the bridge between them was one of the largest and oldest Jewish populations in the Middle East: a thriving community of Iranian Jews.
Today on the show, the story of Iran and Israel, told through the life of Jewish Iranian Habib Elghanian.
Guests:
Roya Hakakian, author of Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran
Shahrzad Elghanayan, author of Titan of Tehran: From Jewish Ghetto to Corporate Colossus to Firing Squad - My Grandfather's Life
Meir Javedanfar, Israeli-Iranian political scientist and teacher at Reichman University
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from Abrams Books. Don't scramble for a knockout gift this holiday season. Give them the brand new Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, Fight or Flight, available wherever books are sold.
0:25 Speaker 01 About 2,500 years ago, in ancient Persia, what's now Iran, a king tossed and turned in his sleep. A nightmare consumed his mind.
0:42 Speaker 01 He saw visions of a baby growing into a warrior, a warrior that would one day forcefully take his throne.
0:58 Speaker 01 The usurper in his dreams was no stranger. It was his own infant grandson. The king awoke terrified of the prophecy, and he ordered his servant to kill the baby at once.
1:12 Rund Abdelfatah? But the servant couldn't bring himself to do it. Instead, he secretly smuggled the baby into the care of a shepherd who raised him.
1:34 Rund Abdelfatah? The boy grew up in the countryside, healthy and strong. He became a decorated warrior, leader, and general.
1:43 Rund Abdelfatah? He set his sights on his grandfather's throne and launched a rebellion.
1:59 Rund Abdelfatah? Soon, the prophecy became reality. The king was overtaken by the grandson he'd feared for so long. Persian lands had a new leader. His name was Gudosh, or as he's known in the Bible, Cyrus.
2:28 Speaker 01 One by one, cities all over the Near East fell to Cyrus's armies. And soon, he set his sights on the greatest city of the ancient world: Babylon. Babylon was a bustling metropolis in what's now modern-day Iraq. As center of economic and military power, its streets were lined with precisely constructed buildings. Many of its homes were filled with statues and artwork. It had hanging gardens, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
3:01 Rund Abdelfatah? But this grandeur came at a human cost. After laying siege to Jerusalem, the king of Babylon captured thousands of Jewish people and held them captive in the city for half a century. In October of 539 BCE, Cyrus's forces surrounded Babylon and its massive walls, walls so thick that chariots could be driven over them. Eventually, the Persian army found a way in under the city's gates. But what happened next was very unusual for the time. Instead of sacking the city, Cyrus did something different.
3:41 Speaker 01 He made a proclamation that many historians believe was the first declaration of human rights. Among other things, it allowed people to practice their own faith. This new system liberated the Jewish people who'd been held captive in Babylon.
4:00 Speaker 03 Cyrus told the Jewish community that they could return if they wanted to, to contribute to the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the temple, and restoring life in their ancient homeland.
4:16 Speaker 01 This is Roya Hakakian. She's an Iranian-American Jewish writer and lecturer.
4:21 Speaker 03 Some people believe that Cyrus really created the Jewish diaspora model, that either you go and live in Israel, or if you're not living in Israel, then you make sure to contribute to the ongoing life and the health of that community and society. And that's what happened.
4:46 Speaker 01 Many Jewish people returned to Jerusalem. Others stayed in Persia and made it their home hundreds of years before the emergence of Christianity or Islam. Cyrus the Great went on to rule over the largest empire the world had ever seen. And he ruled it with a tolerance that was unique for his time. His story and proclamations of human rights are inscribed on a piece of clay known as the Cyrus Cylinder, which is usually housed in the British Museum. A ceramic replica is in the United Nations Building in New York City. The story of Cyrus the Great is told in the Hebrew Bible. He's called the Messiah and is anointed by God. And he's also celebrated by many non-Jewish Iranians today as a proud part of their history.
5:32 Speaker 03 This is a very important story, not particularly only exclusively for the Iranian Jewish community, but for Jews around the world globally, historically.
5:43 Rund Abdelfatah? It's considered the origin story of Iranian Jews and of the long relationship between Iran and the Jewish people, a relationship that today has been fractured by decades of violence, most recently by a war that erupted after the US and Israel launched wide-ranging attacks across Iran, killing Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
6:09 Rund Abdelfatah? For nearly 50 years, Israel and Iran have been in almost constant conflict. Israel has bombed Iran, assassinated many of its leaders and scientists and civilians. Iran has fired missiles at Israel and funded and armed groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, who've killed citizens inside Israel. Given the past four decades of violence, it's easy to view this conflict as primordial and inevitable. But it's not. After the creation of Israel in 1948 and before Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution, the relationship between the countries was characterized by public distance and private cooperation.
6:52 Rund Abdelfatah? They shared technological and military knowledge. They were trade partners. At one point in the 1970s, there were thousands of Israelis living in Tehran, Iran's capital. And the bridge between the two countries was the Iranian Jewish community, one of the largest and oldest Jewish populations in the Middle East.
7:13 Speaker 01 One of those Jewish Iranians, Habib El-Ghanayyan, lived a life that encompassed the liberation and emergence of Iranian Jews. A businessman and philanthropist, who was like the John D. Rockefeller of Iran, his amazing journey from a ghetto to wealthy industrialist, and the tragic way it ended, illustrates the long, complicated relationship between the countries that has erupted into open warfare.
7:46 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.
7:48 Speaker 01 And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. On this episode of Throughline from NPR, we trace the rupture between Israel and Iran through the story of Jewish Iranians in the 20th century and the life of Habib El-Ghanayyan.
8:20 Rund Abdelfatah? Hi, this is Christina from Los Angeles, California, and you're listening to Throughline on NPR.
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9:41 Speaker 05 Part One. Loved by God.
10:10 Speaker 01 On April 5, 1912, a boy was born in Iran's capital, Tehran, in a place the people called Mahaleh. It was also called Sarachal, which meant "the edge of the pit."
10:24 Rund Abdelfatah? And the edge of the pit is where the garbage was burned.
10:28 Speaker 01 His name was Habibullah Al-Ghanayyan, and Sarachal, where he was born, was a Jewish ghetto.
10:37 Rund Abdelfatah? During the 16th century, the ruling clerics had instituted many restrictions on Jews.
10:46 Speaker 01 Jewish Iranians were legally forbidden from doing things like
10:50 Rund Abdelfatah? using Muslim public baths, drinking from public fountains, leaving their houses when it rained or snowed, touching anything when entering Muslim shops, opening shops in the bazaar, building homes taller than a Muslim's, giving children Muslim names.
11:11 Speaker 01 The Islamic clerical class in Iran, or Ulama, used the Islamic Demi system, which made all non-Muslims into second-class citizens.
11:21 Rund Abdelfatah? Those who didn't accept Muhammad as their prophet and the Quran as God's final revolution were deemed impure, filthy, or najis.
11:30 Speaker 01 As a result of these restrictions, Jewish people had to live in segregated communities within Iranian society to survive. But that would all change when Iran adopted a modern constitution that ended this legal system of religious discrimination.
11:47 Rund Abdelfatah? The 1905 revolution gave Iranians, all Iranians, equal rights.
11:56 Speaker 01 This fundamentally changed life for minorities in Iran. So when Habib Al-Ghanayyan was born, Sarachal was no longer a place Jewish people had to live. And you can see, even in his name, that things had changed.
12:10 Rund Abdelfatah? Habibullah means "loved by God", and he was the first of the sons who had an Arabic name.
12:16 Speaker 01 This is Shahzad Al-Ghanayyan.
12:18 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm the author of Titan of Tehran, which is a book about my grandfather Habib Al-Ghanayyan's life.
12:25 Speaker 01 Shahzad, Habib Al-Ghanayyan's granddaughter, is a journalist. She's worked at the Associated Press and NBC News. She was born in Iran, but moved to the US as a young child. Growing up, she knew something terrible happened to her grandfather, but it was never really a topic of conversation in her family.
12:44 Rund Abdelfatah? Oh, we rarely talked about it.
12:46 Speaker 01 Why do you think that is, was, is it was just too painful?
12:50 Rund Abdelfatah? Yeah, I think you just dash away things that happen. And you need to move on because it's painful. But my father had collected some newspaper clippings. And I always had those, so I knew.
13:06 Speaker 01 Starting with those newspaper clippings, Shasa dedicated years of her life piecing together her grandfather's story, a story that begins in hope and ends in tragedy.
13:21 Speaker 01 Despite starting in Tehran's Jewish ghetto, the El Ghanayyan family moved out and became a part of Iran's burgeoning class of international merchants.
13:31 Rund Abdelfatah? There were seven brothers. Two of his brothers moved to the United States, and they were importing lots of consumer goods from the US.
13:40 Speaker 01 Habib joined his brothers and entered the family business. He started a company based in Tehran's Grand Bazaar, or Central Market, importing watches and women's clothing. He was very successful. And by the end of World War II...
13:55 Rund Abdelfatah? He was part of the group of Iranian industrialists who made their name and their first million.
14:03 Speaker 01 The 1930s were a period of rapid modernization in Iran under its new king, or Shah, Reza Pahlavi. As a part of that modernization process, he undermined Iran's clerics by pushing the country towards secularization. And part of that was reaching out to the country's minorities, including Jews.
14:23 Speaker 03 He became the first king to actually visit a synagogue in Iran.
14:31 Speaker 01 This is Roya Hakakian again. She's an Iranian-American Jewish writer, journalist, and political commentator.
14:39 Speaker 03 By putting himself in a synagogue among this minority, he was delivering a very clear message that everyone was welcome to create a sense of Iranian identity. And I think that made a difference, not just for the Jewish community, but for all Iranians.
15:01 Speaker 01 Under Reza Pahlavi's rule, Iran was developing a modern sense of national identity that could hold all of its diverse ethnic and religious groups.
15:11 Speaker 06 Jews, we always wanted to belong.
15:14 Speaker 01 This is Mir Javed Anfar. He's an Israeli-Iranian political scientist.
15:19 Speaker 06 I teach various courses on Iranian politics and contemporary Iranian history at Reichmann, a university.
15:27 Speaker 01 Mir says many Jewish Iranians, like Habib Ghanaian, embraced this nationalist project.
15:33 Speaker 06 This is the first time somebody has recognized us, wants us to involve, wants to involve us in the development of Iran. Doesn't see us as Jews, sees us as Iranians. The Jews were falling over themselves to help.
15:52 Speaker 06 Gherka infantry and other Empire troops enter Kerman Shah as from south and west, Britain sends forces into Iran.
16:01 Speaker 01 During World War II, Iran was actually occupied by Allied forces because of its strategic position and its oil reserves. But there was very little fighting in the country. So while European Jews were experiencing the Holocaust, Jews in Iran were in the middle of their golden age.
16:18 Rund Abdelfatah? World War II didn't affect them the way it affected Jews in Europe.
16:23 Speaker 01 While there was a Zionist movement in Iran, it didn't have the same urgency or energy it did in places like Eastern Europe. In fact, many Iranian Jews didn't know that much about the horrors of the Nazi regime. But that would change in 1942.
16:45 Speaker 06 Wanderers upon the face of the earth. Patriots from Poland nearing the end of one of the most amazing marches in history. Three thousand weary miles they've walked to find a haven of refuge. A people ground to helplessness beneath the heel of Nazi oppression.
17:01 Rund Abdelfatah? During World War II, there were some Polish children. They were Jews.
17:07 Speaker 06 From one little town in Poland, a thousand men, women, and children fled from the Nazis into Russia. When the Nazis followed, they pushed on.
17:15 Rund Abdelfatah? Through mountain and desert, 3,000 miles to Persia, to a haven in Iran on the Caspian Sea. So they came to Iran, and Iranian Jews really got to see the effects of World War II. And that's what really cements their feelings about Israel.
17:34 Speaker 01 And this is when Habib Al-Ghanayyan visited Palestine for the first time.
17:40 Rund Abdelfatah? Actually, he went to visit Palestine in 1943. He saw Mount Carmel, and he named my dad Carmel.
17:47 Speaker 01 The first of his children, he gave a Jewish name.
17:50 Rund Abdelfatah? Before that, his son Feridun has a very Persian name.
18:05 Speaker 01 At Flushing, Long Island, the General Assembly of the United Nations has made its decision on Palestine. Two years after the end of World War II, the UN General Assembly met to vote on a plan to partition Palestine. Earlier that year, the UN created a special committee to come up with a plan for Palestine's future. Iran was one of the 11 countries chosen to be on that committee. After months of deliberation and investigations, the committee came up with two central options for a plan. The first plan was to create two separate states, one controlled by Jews and one controlled by Palestinian Arabs. The other plan, which Iran helped to craft,
18:47 Speaker 01 was to create one state consisting of both Jews and Arabs with power sharing. Ultimately, the majority of the committee voted to create two separate states. But Iran was part of a small dissenting group that argued if Jews and Arabs didn't live under one flag with a shared sense of purpose, then conflict would only accelerate.
19:06 Speaker 06 Saudi Arabia? No. Soviet Union? Yes. United Kingdom? Abstain? The United States? Yes? The resolution
19:22 Speaker 06 of the duck committee for Palestine was adopted by thirty-three votes, thirteen against, ten abstentions.
19:33 Speaker 01 On May 14th, 1948, months after the UN voted for a two-state partition plan, Israel unilaterally declared its independence and statehood. Neighboring Arab countries formed a coalition and responded by invading. A bloody conflict followed, and Israel came out victorious, taking control of territory the UN had declared belonged to the Arabs. In the process, thousands of Jews and Arabs were killed, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their ancestral lands. Although Iran had voted against partition at the UN, Iran's new Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the son of Reza Pahlavi, did not join the war. This was not a popular position in Iran,
20:18 Speaker 01 where there were protests in support of the Arab nations. And Iran's very influential clerical class spoke out loudly against Israel. This forced the young Shah to walk a very difficult tightrope, publicly holding Israel at a distance, but privately trying to cooperate with them.
20:38 Speaker 06 It wasn't for romantic reasons. The only reason the Shah wanted relations with Israel is because to serve Iranian interests. As a king of Iran, who desperately wanted to develop his country, he saw Israel as one country that could contribute to development of Iran.
20:57 Speaker 01 The Shah was closely allied with the United States. As Israel and the United States grew closer, so did Iran with Israel. In 1950, just a few years after Iran voted against the UN partition plan, the Shah opened up diplomatic relations with Israel, a de facto recognition of its existence. It was the second Muslim country to make this move after Turkey.
21:22 Speaker 06 Then the Shah said, "Okay, I want to cooperate with the Israelis." Then it expanded to agriculture, then it expanded to joint weapons development, and of course, diplomatic cooperation.
21:37 Speaker 01 Coming up, Iran and Israel become shadow partners. And Habib Al Ghaniyan brings a new industry to Iran.
22:04 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Trone de Mars calling from San Antonio, Texas. I listen to NPR's Throughline. In fact, it is the only podcast that I have a paid subscription to because it's that valuable. I love the research behind it. And it's opened my mind to a whole new world about the underpinnings of what could be a normal story that we know nothing about. Bravo to all the producers and editors and commentators. Thank you.
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24:32 Speaker 05 Part two. Alliance of the Periphery.
24:39 Speaker 05 We admit that in many technical fields, we are behind.
24:45 Rund Abdelfatah? This is the voice of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran's king, or Shah, talking about the need to develop Iran in the 1950s and 60s.
24:55 Speaker 05 We can accept the know-how and the help of other advanced countries, and we also encourage their investment.
25:08 Rund Abdelfatah? The Shah of Iran used things like government subsidies and land reform to boost the economy. He was particularly interested in industrializing the country, which was still mostly agrarian. And Habib Al-Ghanian, along with his brothers, were among the Iranian merchants who rode this wave of industrialization. They had a brother who was in the United States studying, and he went to a factory where they were making plastics goods. This is Shahzad Al-Ghanian again. She wrote a biography of her grandfather, Habib Al-Ghanian, called Titan of Dehran. He fell in love with these machines, and he told his brothers, we should import one of these machines and make combs.
25:52 Rund Abdelfatah? Plastic combs. At this time, most combs in Iran were made of wood and were easily broken, so plastic would be a game changer. Habib Al-Ghanian and his brothers put their money together and took a big risk to open Iran's first plastics factory.
26:10 Rund Abdelfatah? So it started out with combs and then they had buttons and the factory grew. It was very exciting. They were making all sorts of things like toys and plastic bags, plastic shoes, small consumer goods. They also had aluminum factories, building like door frames and window frames. And they also had another factory where they had refrigerators and stoves. So bigger durable goods. Any Iranian was living at the time had Plasko product.
26:47 Rund Abdelfatah? Habib became very popular in the business community. He was elected to be the first Jewish Iranian to join the prestigious Chamber of Commerce. And in 1962, he built Iran's first high-rise building. He named it after his company, Plasko. It was 17 stories. It had office buildings and the first floors had a mall. And it was Iran's first mall, so everybody hung out there. And there was a restaurant on the top floor. Ramtin's dad actually took his mom and nine of his soon-to-be-in-laws there to go shopping for their engagement party.
27:26 Speaker 01 Everything was cheap over there. Cheap, I mean, you know, moderate price. Oh, interesting. Yes, everything was there. So we went to do the shopping and after shopping, we went to a restaurant in 17th floor. So you picked it because not only was it going to impress them, but then it was also affordable for you. Affordable, yes, sir, affordable. It was 10 people, remember. That's a lot of people. Yes, sir. Oh, my God. And you bought their clothes.
27:58 Rund Abdelfatah? To this day, any Persian person I speak with first says, "Oh, El Hanya, are you related to Habib?" And I say, "Sure, I'm his granddaughter." And everyone has a story about Plasko, about spending time in that building.
28:15 Speaker 01 It was almost in downtown, middle of the town.
28:20 Speaker 05 It was like showing like modern Iran is coming.
28:24 Speaker 06 Did that make you guys proud?
28:27 Speaker 05 So proud. Yes, it was proud because that building not only clothing hop for whole country, it was also entertainment for people. They go over there. I went a couple of times clay pool.
28:44 Speaker 06 Oh, wow.
28:45 Speaker 05 American pool because you couldn't find many places there.
28:50 Speaker 03 He also introduced a great deal of philanthropy.
28:53 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Roya Hakakian. She's the author of Journey From The Land Of No: A Girlhood Caught In Revolutionary Iran.
29:01 Speaker 03 He was one among this new generation that believed that you have to leave the world a little bit better than the one that you came into. And therefore, you need to contribute to the society in which you live and from which you profit.
29:21 Rund Abdelfatah? Habib Al Ghaniyan became well-known for supporting both Jewish and non-Jewish causes in Iran. He gave money to build hospitals. He helped start a huge scholarship fund for poor students. He even donated thousands of dollars to help build the grand Hussaini Ershad Mosque in Tehran. Many of his employees and business partners refer to him as Haji Habib, an honorific title usually given to Muslims who've made a religious pilgrimage to Mecca.
29:51 Speaker 06 Habib Al Ghaniyan was the realization of our dreams to be recognized as Iranians and as an ethnic minority who wants to develop Iran.
30:05 Rund Abdelfatah? It was absolutely like the thing that he was, he had the most pride in, as did a lot of other Jews who were doing this because they had been repressed for such a long time. And now here they are in their golden era. And it's the pride of having helped build Iran. Habib was also a vocal supporter of Israel. He visited the country many times and even helped build a high-rise building in Tel Aviv. He became the secular leader of Iran's Jews. The secular leader is the head of a group called the Andromene, Andromene Kallimian. And what they do is they're in charge of, you know, the internal affairs of Jews
30:48 Rund Abdelfatah? and also their relationship with Israel. He loved Israel as a country. He traveled there. He visited, just like many Jews around the world do this.
31:02 Rund Abdelfatah? While Habib Al-Ghanian and many other Iranian Jews were experiencing a golden age in the 1950s and 60s, this was not the case in other Middle Eastern countries. After the UN voted to partition Palestine, the governments of nearly all the Arab countries made life difficult for their sizable Jewish populations. They passed discriminatory laws, confiscated land, and often sponsored anti-Jewish violence. Under the Pahlavi dynasty, Iran never instituted these kinds of policies and actually accepted Iranian Jews holding citizenship in both countries. This was in part because Iran had become a member of a loose partnership
31:45 Rund Abdelfatah? with Israel and Turkey called the Alliance of the Periphery, referring to the fact that these countries were non-Arab and living on the edges of the Arab world.
31:57 Speaker 06 The Shah's good relations with Israel actually encouraged him to see Iranian Jews as a bridge between Iran and Israel whom he can use to develop Iran.
32:09 Rund Abdelfatah? The Shah invited Israeli businesspeople to work in Iran. And the Shah brought members of Israel's main intelligence organization, the Mossad, to help train his secret police, the Savak, an organization that suppressed dissent in Iran, jailing, torturing, and sometimes killing dissidents.
32:30 Speaker 06 I don't want to paint a rosy picture saying everybody in Iran liked Israel. No, that's not true. The Shah of Iran did many good things for Iran, but at the end of the day, he was a dictator. And when you're a dictator and you force people to do things, they turn against you. So whoever the Shah was friends with, the people of Iran viewed as an enemy.
32:51 Speaker 03 The Iranian left, the seculars who had always been anti-imperialist and were seeing Israel as an imperialistic project, as an American project, began to really embrace Ayatollah Khomeini. We are against Israel and we will never help Israel.
33:14 Rund Abdelfatah? We will cut off our diplomatic relation. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, whose voice you just heard, was a Shia Iranian cleric. Beginning in the 1960s, he became an outspoken opponent of the Shah of Iran. He opposed Iran's modernization and viewed the Shah as a puppet of Western imperialist countries.
33:37 Speaker 03 He used to call the United States "the great Satan" and Israel was the great Satan's bastard child.
33:45 Speaker 05 If the Shah were overthrown and the kind of government you want came to power in Iran, how would Iran's relations with Israel change?
33:58 Rund Abdelfatah? We will cut relations with Israel. And we will have no relationship with them. They're an occupying government. And they are our enemy.
34:14 Speaker 06 He saw Iran as a member of the Islamic Ummah, the Islamic world community. And he saw it as Iran's duty to side with the Palestinians against the Israelis.
34:25 Rund Abdelfatah? We are on the side of the innocent. The Palestinians are innocent. The Israelis have done an injustice to them. From this perspective, we are on the side of the Palestinians.
34:45 Speaker 03 He recognized that speaking against the United States and Israel did, in fact, endear him to certain classes who wanted to bring down the monarchy. However, they couldn't see themselves banding with the likes of Ayatollah Khomeini. To them, you know, a cleric signaled backward movement toward a path that they were trying to leave behind. You can see that Ayatollah Khomeini begins to adapt his rhetoric in order to appeal to the secular Iranians, to the leftists, to the ultra-radical communists.
35:30 Speaker 03 And that's through his anti-imperialist, anti-American, and anti-Israeli speeches.
35:37 Rund Abdelfatah? Khomeini was exiled from Iran in 1964 by the Shah. In exile, his popularity grew even more. His speeches were smuggled into Iran via cassette tape. And in one of those speeches, made before his exile, he made a direct reference to Habib Al-Ghanian's family. The entire country's economy now lies in Israel's hands. That is to say, it has been seized by Israeli agents. This is Shahrazad Al-Ghanian, reading a translated portion of that speech. Hence, most of the major factories and enterprises are run by them. And one of the people mentioned, one of these so-called agents,
36:22 Rund Abdelfatah? are the Al-Ghanian families, who says were among the mediators of world Zionism who resided in Iran. Khomeini also said. The Shah takes so many of his cues from Israel that we I wonder if he is not himself a Jew.
36:54 Rund Abdelfatah? By the late 1970s, there was a growing protest movement against the Shah's autocratic rule over Iran. People chanted things like "Death to the Shah." And while this was happening, Iran was experiencing significant inflation as a result of mismanaged economic growth. Many Iranians blamed the Shah for this. So he was under a lot of pressure, and he needed to show the public he was doing something about it. Instead of having an economic solution to it, he basically decided to blame businessmen for it. The Shah publicly accused Iran's biggest businessmen, including Habib Al-Ghanian, of price gouging. And one night,
37:37 Rund Abdelfatah? the Savak came to my grandfather's house while he was sleeping, and they took him away. And the next day, there were headlines in the paper about how Habib Al-Ghanian was arrested on charges of profiteering. Habib Al-Ghanian, at this point, was in his 60s. He was internally exiled to another city and then spent time in prison. It was six months before he was released.
38:06 Speaker 06 I think the Shah was... He just believed that everybody was out to get him and that he had no responsibility for what was going on in Iran, which is pure fantasy. He was looking for an escape goat.
38:18 Rund Abdelfatah? The fact that they made such an example of him, to me, definitely says that the Shah was not his friend.
38:34 Rund Abdelfatah? All these things later came back to become even more problematic when Hoomini came.
38:49 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, revolution comes to Iran, and Al-Ghanian enters its crosshairs.
39:03 Speaker 05 This is Jacob in Irvine, California, and you're listening to Throughline, NPR. Really love the show, y'all. So thanks for all your hard work and really appreciate the way you tell stories. Bye-bye.
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40:36 Speaker 05 Part Three. A bitter divorce.
40:41 Speaker 06 Chaotic celebrations erupted in Tehran when the news broke the Shah had gone. It was like Liberation Day.
40:48 Rund Abdelfatah? In early 1979, after months of massive street protests and violence, the Shah of Iran left Iran for a vacation everyone knew he would not return from.
41:00 Speaker 06 And roving crowds shouted.
41:02 Rund Abdelfatah? The Shah is defeated. Khomeini has won. As he walked the tarmac to board the jet that would take him away from his homeland, he carried a box of Iranian soil. It was over. But it was not clear who would fill the power vacuum he left behind. There were a lot of different groups who were vying for power. This is Shahzad Alghaniyan, author of the book Titan of Tehran. Khomeini was, you know, was one of them. Habib Alghaniyan was visiting family in the United States when all of this was happening. He planned on returning to Iran. Anytime anyone said to him, oh, this could be dangerous for you, he was so convinced that because of what
41:47 Rund Abdelfatah? had happened to him during the Shah's power, when he was taken away, that he couldn't be taken again. They couldn't say, oh, he's so, you know, the Shah, he's friends with the Shah, or he's a Shah. He, he was convinced. So what he thought was, OK, a new government comes in, and I'm going to continue what I'm doing.
42:09 Speaker 03 He very proudly said, I have been a great citizen. I've contributed a great deal to the society.
42:17 Speaker 01 This is Roya Hakakian again. She's an Iranian-American Jewish writer and analyst.
42:22 Speaker 03 I see no reason why I should leave.
42:25 Rund Abdelfatah? He's like, this is my country. What am I going to do? I'm going to just leave everything and go? There are all these people working in my factories, and they're all, the Jewish communities here. I'm, I have to protect them too.
42:42 Speaker 01 Habib Alghaniyan did return to Iran, and so did Ayatollah Khomeini. Within weeks of his return, the Israeli diplomatic offices in Tehran were closed and the keys handed over to the Palestine Liberation Organization. And Khomeini's forces started to round up former members of the Shah's government and brought them in front of the newly created revolutionary tribunals.
43:06 Rund Abdelfatah? Khomeini arrives on February 1, and on March 15, they come after my grandfather.
43:16 Speaker 01 Armed men arrived at Habib Al-Ghanayyan's office. They walked him out to a car and drove him to the notorious Qasr Prison in Tehran.
43:26 Rund Abdelfatah? All that time, anyone who's executed is a member of the Shah's government, military, police. So while he's in jail, there's still some hope that, you know, he can get out because no civilian's been executed.
43:45 Speaker 01 For several months, Habib Al-Ghanayyan was kept in prison and tortured. Different business leaders tried to intervene on his behalf to get him released, but it didn't work.
43:56 Rund Abdelfatah? On May 8, he was taken to the Revolutionary Tribunal.
44:02 Speaker 01 His trial was broadcast on television. It was in this tiny room. And this is how it was described by an American woman living in Iran at the time.
44:13 Rund Abdelfatah? Facial bruises and swelling showed through heavy makeup. Bearded mullahs dressed in dark cloaks spat questions at him. Before he could answer, a mullah answered the question for him and twisted it into an accusation. Al-Ghanayyan had no defense counsel and seemed disoriented and unsteady in his chair.
44:35 Speaker 01 At this point, does he even know why he's there? Like, what were they even charging him with?
44:41 Rund Abdelfatah? He's not aware of his charges at all. They're being read to him in the courtroom.
44:47 Speaker 01 And what were those, the charges?
44:50 Rund Abdelfatah? I'll read you an open quote. "In the name of Allah, Habib Al-Ghanayyan, holder of ID card number 6108, resident of Tehran, literate, spy, Zionist capitalist, is accused of the following."
45:08 Rund Abdelfatah? One, friendship with the enemies of God and an enemy of the friends of God. Two, spying for the Zionist state of Israel. Three, gathering contributions for Israel for the sake of bombarding Palestine and Muslim Arab people. Four, investing money made from exploiting and destroying resources of Iran to help Israel, who incessantly combats, steals, and affronts Islam and God. Five, corruption on earth by means of destroying resources and helping in the destruction
45:50 Rund Abdelfatah? of an entire generation of Iranians. Six, war on God and the prophet of God. Seven, obstructing God's way and obstructing the well-being of weak nations against the value of humanity and Islam. Eight, corrupter on earth. Nine, helping the daily and cruel massacre of our Palestinian brothers. Those were the nine charges against him.
46:19 Speaker 00 No credible evidence was produced to support these charges.
46:23 Rund Abdelfatah? He starts to try to defend himself without a lawyer.
46:27 Speaker 00 The trial lasted just 20 minutes.
46:30 Rund Abdelfatah? The verdict is that he's guilty.
46:32 Speaker 01 And what does that mean for him? What's gonna happen?
46:38 Rund Abdelfatah? That means that he has to go and write his will, and that he's going to face a firing squad.
46:47 Speaker 00 The next day, he was taken outside to a courtyard in prison, blindfolded and forced to stand with his back against the wall.
46:56 Rund Abdelfatah? His execution was at dawn.
46:58 Speaker 00 In the early morning on May 9, 1979, Habib Al Ghaniyan was executed, the first civilian to receive.
47:07 Rund Abdelfatah? Receive the punishment by the revolutionary tribunals. And then there's a question of my grandfather's body is in a morgue somewhere. And how do we bury him? Who, where is he? There is a man who was the caretaker of the cemetery, Loroman, who was a great friend of my grandfather's, who goes to the morgue, finds the body. There's a sign on it that says Habib Al Ghaniyan is in a spy. They wouldn't immediately give up his body. And this is something that still happens. Then they make you pay for the bullets. The bullets used by the firing squad. And they tell you, you know, you shouldn't have a funeral.
47:52 Rund Abdelfatah? He takes the body in his car and actually does something very sweet. He drives him around the building where my grandfather's office was, the aluminum building, and then takes him to the cemetery. But of course, his body is riddled with bullets. And they have a funeral for him at night in the dark because they're scared that they're going to be caught. Iranian newspapers and newspapers around the world announced Habib Al Ghaniyan's execution. It scared Iranian Jews. They're thinking if this can happen to him, right? It could happen to any of us.
48:35 Speaker 03 I remember, you know, my father was holding up the daily paper. And on the cover, it was dead body, dead body, dead body. And the fact that someone like him, with his track record of business, influence, power, and charity, could get arrested, summarily tried, and subsequently executed, really through shockwaves within the Iranian Jewish community, which is why tens of thousands of Iranian Jews fled Iran within the first couple of years of the revolution, that the execution of Habib Al Ghaniyan
49:17 Speaker 03 was really the culprit behind that mass exodus initially.
49:22 Rund Abdelfatah? Within days of his execution, soldiers had evicted his family, showed up at Habib Al Ghaniyan's home in Tehran, and confiscated all of his assets.
49:34 Rund Abdelfatah? You know, so everything that he had built his entire lifetime building was gone.
50:07 Rund Abdelfatah? The day after Habib's execution, a small group of Iranian Jews visited Ayatollah Khomeini and his home in the city of Khomeini.
50:15 Speaker 03 And they asked him, you know, are we safe? You know, can we stay? And he gave this big, big, long, winding sermon that had initially nothing to do with what they had asked, which really puzzled them at first. But at the end, he gave them a single statement that became sort of the unofficial policy of the Iranian regime towards the Jewish community to this day. And the sentence was, "We separate the affairs of our own indigenous Jewish community from those blood-sucking Zionists in Israel."
50:58 Speaker 03 And this line was painted on the walls of every synagogue and every Jewish school in Iran. It was sort of the blessing that he had given over to the Iranian Jewish community to say, "You are not them. You are Jews. They are Zionists. We are against them and not you. And you can stay and they can't. We will fight them to the death." And that's why this single line was painted on all the walls.
51:38 Speaker 03 Because it was what everybody wanted within the Jewish community to remind the outsiders of what the big leader had said and that, you know, we were welcome and that we were not the enemy.
51:52 Speaker 01 Still, the threat of being called a Zionist hung over the heads of Iranian Jews. And slowly, over the course of the 1980s and 90s, their population in Iran decreased significantly, breaking a connection that had been there for millennia. And as Ayatollah Khomeini strengthened his grip over the country, the United States and Israel became official enemies of Iran. Children across the country, regardless of their religious background, were forced to stand up in the morning at school and chant "Death to America and death to Israel."
52:25 Speaker 03 Most Iranians who lived through 1979 and saw the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini to power and were not for him, and there were many who were not for him, could not believe that a regime like that could go on, which is the reason why my family stayed in Iran for, you know, until the middle 80s, because we thought, it can't be.
52:51 Speaker 01 With the loss of this ancient connection and the rise of a radical Islamic government, Iran and Israel have been locked into a bitter conflict that has caused the deaths of thousands of Iranians, Israelis, Palestinians, and others. The Islamic Republic of Iran claims to support the Palestinians in their quest for a state, but its actions have mostly focused on providing military and financial support to Palestinian Islamic radical organizations like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
53:25 Rund Abdelfatah? And today, the nearly 50-year war between Iran and Israel has reached what might be a zenith. A joint Israeli-US operation has killed many of the Islamic Republic's most important leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini.
53:41 Rund Abdelfatah? Iran has retaliated by firing a barrage of missiles into Israel and other countries in the region. No one knows what will come of this war, but it is clear that it's another violent turning point in the relationship between Iran and Israel.
54:11 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's show. I'm Rande Abdel Fattah.
54:14 Speaker 01 I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
54:19 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was produced by me.
54:20 Speaker 01 And me, and? Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.
54:27 Rund Abdelfatah? Devin Kadyama. Irene Naguchi. Kiana Moradam. Thomas Coltrane. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.
54:36 Speaker 01 Also, thank you to my dad, Nader Arablouei, ITN Arzu Rezvani, Carmel Melamed, Rebecca Ferrer, Dylan Kurtz, Johannes Dergi, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans.
54:50 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes? Navid Marvi. Cho Fujiwara.
55:01 Speaker 01 Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] .
55:12 Rund Abdelfatah? Thanks for listening.
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