What is the origin of the rivalry between Israel and Iran

The majority of the projectiles were intercepted by the Israeli defense systems, as well as the hundred drones that Iran had sent to Israel hours before.

Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Israeli attacks were “a declaration of war.”

These events are the last episode of an old enmity.

Israel and Iran have been engaged in a bloody rivalry whose intensity fluctuates depending on the geopolitical moment. His pulse has become one of the main sources of instability in the Middle East.

For Tehran, Israel is the “little satan”, an ally in the Middle East of the United States, which they call the “Great Satan.”

Israel accuses Iran of financing “terrorist” groups and perpetrating attacks against their interests moved by the anti -Semitism of the Ayatolás.

The rivalry between these “archienemigos” has left a huge amount of dead, often as a result of undercover actions in which none of the governments admit their responsibility.

The tension between the two, however, has reached unusual levels since the attacks of October 7, 2023 of the Palestine Militia Hamás against Israel, in which 1,200 people died and who began the current war in Gaza.

Since then, Israel has been fighting Iran's allies in the Middle East (Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Hutí militia in Yemen).

And, what is perhaps more importantly, for the first time Israel and Iran have begun to launch mutually direct attacks, such as those of the last hours.

Throughout history, however, these two countries were not always faced.

Actually, the relations between Israel and Iran were quite cordial until in 1979 the Islamic revolution of the Ayatolás conquered power in Tehran.

In fact, although Iran opposed the plan for the partition of Palestine that led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, it was the second Islamic country to recognize it, only after Egypt.

Then, Iran was a monarchy in which the Shas of the Pahlaví dynasty and one of the main allies of the United States in the Middle East reigned. Therefore, the founder of Israel and his first head of government, David Ben-Gurion, sought and achieved the Iranian friendship as a way of counteracting the rejection of the new Jewish state of his Arab neighbors.

But in 1979 the revolution of Ruhollah Jomeini overthrew the SHA and imposed an Islamic Republic that was presented as the defender of the oppressed and had in the rejection of the “imperialism” of the United States and its ally Israel one of its main hallmarks.

The new Ayatolás regime broke relations with Israel, ceased to recognize the validity of its citizens' passport and seized the Israeli embassy in Tehran to give it to the Organization for the Liberation of Palestine (OLP), which then led the fight for a Palestinian state against the Israeli government.

Ali Vaez, director of the program for Iran of the International Analysis Center Group, told BBC Mundo that “the animosity towards Israel was a pillar of the new Iranian regime because many of their leaders had trained and participated in guerrillas with the Palestinians in places like Lebanon and had a great sympathy for them”.

But in addition, believe Vaez, “the new Iran wanted to project himself as a panislamic power and raised the Palestinian cause against Israel that the Arab Muslim countries had abandoned.”

Thus, Jomeini began to claim the Palestinian cause as his own and the great proper manifestations with official support became usual in Tehran.

Vaez explains that “in Israel the hostility towards Iran did not begin until later, in the 1990s, because before it was perceived as a greater regional threat than the Iraq of Sadam Hussein.”

So much so, that the Israeli government was one of the mediators that made possible the so-called Iran-Contra, the undercover program for which the United States diverted armament to Iran to use it in the war that between 1980 and 1988 fought against neighbor Iraq.

But over time, Israel began to see in Iran one of the main dangers for its existence and the rivalry between them went from words to the facts.

VAEZ points out that, also faced with Saudi Arabia, the other great regional power, and aware that Iran is Persian and Shiite in an Islamic world mostly Sunni and Arabic, “the Iranian regime realized its isolation and began to develop a strategy aimed at preventing their enemies from one day to attack him in his own territory.”

Thus, he proliferated a network of organizations aligned with Tehran that carried out armed actions favorable to their interests. The Lebanese Hezbollah, cataloged as a terrorist by the United States and the European Union, is the most prominent.

Thus, Tehran wove a network to which he baptized as “resistance axis”, which extended by Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Yemen and Syria. That group of allies has suffered strong setbacks in the last year and a half with the fall of the Bashar al Asad government in Syria and with the weakening of Hamas and Hezbollah in the wars of Gaza and Lebanon.

And Israel has not stayed with a crossed arms and has exchanged with Iran and its allies attacks and other hostile actions, often in third countries where it finances and supports the armed groups that fight the proirani.

The pulse between Iran and Israel has been described as a “shade war” because both countries have attacked each other without neither of the two governments officially admitting their participation.

In 1992, the Islamic Yihad Group, related to Iran, flew the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, causing 29 dead. Shortly before, the leader of Hezbollah, Abbas Al-Musawi, had been killed in an attack widely attributed to Israel's intelligence services.

For Israel, it has always been an obsession to truncate the Iranian nuclear program and prevent the day when Ayatolás have atomic weapons.

In Israel they do not believe Iran's messages that their program pursues only civil ends and it is widely accepted that it was Israeli intelligence services that, in collaboration with the United States, developed the Stuxnet computer virus, which caused serious damage to Iranian nuclear facilities in the 2000s.

Tehran has also denounced Israeli intelligence as responsible for attacks against some of the main scientists in charge of its nuclear program.

Israel, along with their western allies, accused Iran of being behind the attacks with drones and rockets that its territory suffered in the past, as well as having perpetrated several cyber attacks.

The civil war unleashed in Syria since 2011 was another reason for confrontation. Western intelligence notes that Iran sent money, weapons and instructors to support President Bashar Al Assad's forces against the insurgents who were looking to overthrow it, which made the alarms of the Government of Israel jump, which believed that neighboring Syria was one of the main routes through which the Iranians sent weapons and teams to Hezbolá in Lebanon.

According to the American intelligence portal Stratfor, at different times both Israel and would carry out actions in Syria aimed at deterring the other of launching a large -scale attack.

The “shadow war” arrived in 2021 at sea. That year Israel accused Iran of responsible for attacks against Israeli ships in the Gulf of Oman. Iran, meanwhile, accused Israel of attacking his ships in the Red Sea.

After the attacks of October 7, 2023 of the Palestinian militia Hamás against Israel and the massive military offensive launched by the Israeli army in Gaza in response, analysts and governments around the world expressed concern that the conflict could cause a chain reaction in the region, and an open and direct confrontation between Iranians and Israelis.

Until April 2024, both Iran and Israel had avoided raising their hostilities and large -scale fighting. That changed with the launch that month of dozens of drones and missiles by Tehran against Israel.

It was the response to the Israeli attack against its diplomatic headquarters in Damascus, which left 13 dead, including some of the most prominent Iranian commanders, such as the general of the Revolutionary Guard Mohammad Reza Zahedi and his attachment, Hadi Haji-Hajriahimi.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry then promised “a punishment for the aggressor” and its ambassador to Syria, Hossein Akbari, announced that the answer would be “decisive.”

This occurred on April 13 and Israel responded with another attack on Iranian soil on April 19.

After the launch of missiles by Iran on October 1, 2024 on Israel and Israel's attack weeks later, the tension was maximum.

However, the Israeli offensive initiated this June 13 raises this rivalry at levels never seen with unpredictable results.

*This article was originally published in April 2024 and was updated after the attack launched by Israel against Iran on June 13, 2025.

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