In his new book, Harounoff chronicles the descent of the once great nation of Persia and the current struggles and protests of the Iranian people against a dictatorial regime. Interview.
Before it became known as the Islamic Republic of Iran, following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the country known as Persia was celebrated as one of history’s oldest and most advanced civilizations. Dating back thousands of years, the Persian Empire was renowned for its rich heritage and imposing strength. Megillat Esther marks the ancient prominence of its leader, who ruled from “Hodu ad Kush”.
After the revolution, everything changed. The Islamist regime’s takeover of a vast country plunged it into political and economic strife. It is a nation that is now notorious for its strict enforcement of austere religious laws, its nuclear ambitions, its support of proxy wars that threaten Western civilization, and its virulent hatred for the United States and Israel.
Jonathan Harounoff is a descendant of Persian Jews. He is a British journalist who works as Israel’s international spokesperson at the United Nations under Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon. In a new book, Harounoff chronicles the descent of the once great nation of Persia and the current struggles and protests of the Iranian people against a dictatorial regime.
With an initial focus on the 2022 massive protest in Iran, triggered by the brutal killing of Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Jina Amini, the award-winning author details the momentous protests that have shook Iran in Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt.
The Twelve Day War between Israel and Iran this past summer reignited debate about the future of a regime that has fueled conflict around the globe since its inception. And the timing of the battle has made Harounoff’s observations even more timely.
Sitting in the lobby of the United Nations headquarters, a young and cultivated Harounoff discussed his Persian background with me and shared insights into the challenges that both Jews and non-Jews face in today’s Iran. The irony of such a discussion in in such a place did not go unnoticed, and only served to emphasize the severity of the topic and the urgent need to confront it.
Can you talk about your background as someone with Jewish Iranian roots and what that means to you?
My mother is from Israel and my father is from London, but my grandparents are from what’s considered the holy city of Mashad in Iran. They left before the 1979 revolution, but I grew up surrounded by Farsi, Persian culture, Persian carpets and foods. This was also infused with Israeli culture and that mixture always made me very interested in the region and these tensions. It led me to want to explore what happened before and after 1979.
When did your grandparents leave and what was the impetus for their emigration?
They left in the late 1950s and early 1960s, before the whole upheaval. One set moved to Israel, and the other to Italy. They eventually all found their way to Israel, where my parents met. At the time, there wasn't the kind of institutional antisemitism in Iran that you see today, but there was still strain, especially following the establishment of the State of Israel. There were certain isolated incidents that made a lot of Jewish people feel unsafe and vulnerable.
There were different instances that caused people to leave at different times. That's why there were many different waves, unlike other parts of the Middle East, where there was a kind of forced expulsion after Israel became a state. It's also why today Iran still has the second largest population of Jewish people in the Middle East, because there was never this policy of forced expulsion.
Jews from Iran seem to prefer being called “Persian”, and some bristle at being referred to as “Iranians". Do they want to disassociate themselves from the revolution?
I think that may be one reason. When you describe yourself as a Persian, you're connecting yourself to the millennia-old history and civilization that existed there, long before the 46-year-old Islamic Republic. But if you're being realistic, Persia doesn't exist anymore as a country or as an empire. The most accurate technical term would be to describe yourself as an Iranian Jew, but people have romantic ideas. It's nostalgia. They want to connect themselves to this broader history, which is more than warranted because people forget that there's a difference between the two and a half-thousand-year-old Persian civilization and the 46-year-old Islamic Republic.
With the ongoing anti-Israel animus, why would the Jewish community remain? Can they leave and if so, why don't they?
It is a very sensitive subject. The Jewish people are vulnerable. They were before the Twelve Day War, and especially since. But in answer to your question about whether or not they can leave, it's tense. I don't want to comment on it.
However, I do know that many Jews stay in Iran for personal or financial reasons. Some can't afford to leave or have existing business interests. Others love the country because it’s the country that they and their families have been in for thousands of years, and they don't want to be forced to leave as a result of the 46-year-old regime.
Chabad has been involved since 1979. There was an extraordinary operation called Operation Exodus, orchestrated by the Lubavitcher Rebbe himself. He brought out 1800 Iranian Jewish children from Iran during the revolution to Crown Heights and housed them with different families, who brought up these children. Many stayed in Crown Heights or went to Baltimore and elsewhere. I even remember that the Rebbe ensured that they would be allowed to have kitniot during Pesach. It was extraordinary.
However, I think the Jewish community in Iran is extremely unique. They've been able to endure, survive, and at times thrive under the Islamic Republic by mostly staying anonymous. And they do have certain rights afforded it to them, but not for reasons that you would expect. Jews are allowed to observe their Judaism and practice openly. They have synagogues, restaurants, a shochet, all kinds of things. But there has to be a very clear distinction between their Judaism and their Zionism, and there has to be no connection to the State of Israel, no open support. If anything, they have to exhibit the opposite, which is why you sometimes see Jewish people on the front lines of state-run media with these propaganda images condemning the State of Israel and the Zionist regime.
Do you think the Iranian regime affords the Jewish community these rights to prove they are not antisemitic, holding up their Jewish community almost like a trophy?
Absolutely. The Jewish community is a very effective propaganda tool to be used and propped up at times like this to show that the regime is not antisemitic. But at the same time, they continue to hold annual Holocaust denial competitions and quite openly talk about their desire to destroy the Jewish State of Israel,
Very recently, after the Twelve Day War, there was glossy state-run campaign video, in which they said that they were going to be uprooting all the Jews. There was a sort of mass arrest campaign after the war of people who were accused of being with the Mossad and spying on behalf of Israel. They weren't all Jewish, but dozens of people were arrested.
Do we know what happened to them?
Well, we know some of them were released, but some of them were interrogated and arrested. There were a few Kurds who were executed as well, with very little or any proof of having any connection at all to Israel. One of the most disturbing things that we saw was that a lot of Jewish people outside of Iran completely lost contact with their relatives inside Iran. They were told, in many instances, to sever any communication with relatives abroad, whether they were in Israel, the U.S, or anywhere in the diaspora. So, during the Twelve Day War and since, there's been very little communication, and that vulnerable community is even more vulnerable.
Do you think the regime uses their proxy wars against Israel and the Western world, with their chants of Death of America, Death to Israel, to deflect from the economic deprivation of their people as a result of their nuclear ambitions? Do the people realize this is a ploy and resent the money spent on terrorism instead of on themselves?
Not only do they realize it, but they're very angry about it. It's a massive point of contention and it's why you see so many periodic uprisings throughout the 46 years because so much money is invested by the Islamic Republic to bolster its foreign policy and to build its nuclear weapons program when it could be allocated to improve the lives of ordinary Iranians inside Iran. None of that is allocated, which is why you've seen uprisings in 1999, 2009, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023, and most recently, right before the Twelve Day War. You saw a massive uprising of truckers all over Iran for these very reasons. They were staging economic protests because they couldn't afford to continue to practice their profession.
These protests were in the context of Iran accumulating a massive arsenal of ballistic missiles and building this extremely expensive and extremely dangerous nuclear program. All the money is funding that and also funding these proxies across the Middle East, while the people inside Iran barely have electricity and heating and cooling. The people are adamantly opposed to it and they protest it very clearly and very vocally. At the same time, when they do stage these massive uprisings, it comes at a very enormous cost, because the regime is not worried about showing unrelenting repression.
In the aftermath of the war, there was much chatter about regime change but nothing happened. What impact do you think the war has had on people's willingness or ability to protest?
It was never the policy of Israel before, during, or after the war to bring about regime change itself. The goal was to eliminate a very immediate existential threat that the country was facing after years of intelligence gathering. I personally think it was quite unfair and just premature to assume that the people of Iran would suddenly rise up while their country has erupted in a state of war, and while their own government is not going to protect them. They can’t spend those moments in organizing street protests on encrypted messaging platforms because they have to flee for safety. They have to leave Tehran and city centers and find safety for themselves because their country is not going to look after them.
But it did revive the conversation of whether a regime change is likely, what it would look like and who would be spearheading it. I think it's important not to underestimate just how dangerous and hard it is to topple the Islamic Republic. It's not a tiny entity; it's a massive government that has a lot of resources behind it. It does have some support internally, and it has a whole network of terror proxies abroad. The regime itself came about as a result of a revolution in 1979, and it's been able to since quell any kind of real dissent and any external pressure imposed by international governments through a very deliberate strategy of stalling, executing and arresting its people. Certainly, anyone who shows any sign of emerging as a leader is threatened.
At the same time, if there is going to be any kind of regime change inside Iran, I don't think it will be it will come from abroad. I don't think the people of Iran want regime change imposed on them.
Obama was heavily criticized for not pushing for regime change in 2009, when three million people came out to protest in the streets in Tehran, because he didn't want it interfering with his outreach to Iran over nuclear capabilities. And look at Syria today. Without the help of Turkey, the new leader Ahmed al-Sharaa would never have succeeded in toppling the Assad regime. In this context, wouldn’t the Iranian people welcome outside interference?
I think most of the people want foreign powers getting involved by using tools of pressure - by isolating the Islamic Republican, not empowering the government, and by using sanctions. But not by having boots on the ground. There's a lot of trauma embedded in recent Iranian history when it comes to too much foreign interference. I think the worst kind of interference is trying to negotiate with the regime that has time and time again shown that they're not willing to negotiate.
With the Islamic Republic, the only kind of diplomacy that appears to have worked for them is hostage diplomacy, which is why countries have to resort to sanctions and other pressure. The Islamic Republic has realized that taking western civilians and diplomats as hostages is a very lucrative business model and a very powerful diplomatic tool for them.
We’ve seen successive governments in the UK, Europe and the US negotiate with the Islamic Republic when their citizens are held hostage because these countries value the lives of their citizens — and often pay a high price to bring them home.
This practice goes back to the founding of the Islamic Republic with the U.S. embassy hostage crisis, when more than 50 American embassy workers were held hostage for 444 days. It is also exactly the same playbook that Hamas has used since October 7, when it took 251 Israelis and foreign nationals hostage and has since used their lives as bargaining chips
There was talk after the Twelve Day War of the late Shah’s son getting involved from abroad. What happened with that?
Exiled families of Iran are entertaining trying to cultivate an opposition inside Iran and creating pathways for people who are embedded in the current government to defect and stage their own uprising. I personally think that whoever emerges as the opposition leader will have to cultivate a groundswell support within Iran. It's a massive country, 90 million people, and that's really where real change will come from. It's not going to come from the halls of the UN or the White House or 10 Downing Street.
As the spokesman of Israel Ambassador to the UN Danny Dannon, your work is closely associated with the UN. The UN is largely silent on human rights oppression by the Iranian regime against their own people. Where are they?
Every now and then a Special Envoy on Human Rights in Iran puts out statements about the extremely high rates of executions, but of course not enough is done. It doesn't get the spotlight, because a lot of the activities of the UN get overshadowed by endless conversations at the Security Council and the General Assembly about Israel.
Not enough is being done about the plight of Iranians, but also the plight of other minorities inside Iran who are being brutalized by the Islamic Republic. For example, the deportation of people from Afghanistan and the brutalization of Kurds. None of these topics are even approached here at the UN. There’s so much disproportionate focus on Israel. It’s like a maniacal concentration on demonizing, isolating and delegitimizing Israel all the time. Nothing is done on other issues that exist in the world.
You wrote about the brain drain in Iran of educated people who are defecting. Why aren’t we seeing more of a mass exodus?
Sometimes people want to leave but are unable to. It could be logistical or financial. I think of the people who left, some of them at least had the means or the resources or the good fortune to do so. But the whole issue of the brain drain is massive. The brain drain was one of the biggest disappointments throughout Islamic Republic’s 46-year history. You see so many extraordinary Iranians in the diaspora in Los Angeles and elsewhere, who are now leading countries, leading Fortune 200 companies. All these people could have been in Iran building their own country, their economy, their own society, had they and their families not been forced to leave.
But not everyone in Iran has the ability or even the desire to do so, because this is a very proud, resilient, strong people. Leaving is one option but a lot of people think their country, their civilization, their land is worth fighting for. They don't necessarily want to leave. They want the Islamic Republic to leave.
Regarding your book in particular, why did you specifically choose to write about the topic of protests in Iran?
Because it was an extraordinary episode in Iran's history. At a time when there was so much focus on what the Islamic Republic is doing in in relation to other countries abroad, whether it was the proxies and the nuclear program, there was so little focus on what is going on with the people of Iran. When I was writing this, I would often get asked about the people of Iran, and there was an assumption that the people have identical views as the Islamic Republic of Iran. The truth cannot be more different.
So, I wanted to focus on the people of Iran themselves, what they believe, how varied they are, how extraordinary they are, in the context of this protest movement. While the movement didn't succeed in its overall goals of toppling the regime, it did have a lot of successes and has a long legacy that is yet to unfold. But it was ultimately because I wanted to spotlight the people of Iran and pay tribute to their bravery and their strength.
I also wanted to subtly highlight, without even talking about it that much, the similarities between their suffering and history and the people of Israel as well. How they both suffered at the hands of the Islamic Republic and how also they shared a history that preceded 1979. And that I hope we can perhaps one day revisit that future.