Iran’s Jews caught in crossfire of regime’s propaganda war

In mid-June, as Israeli airstrikes targeted Iranian military bases, senior Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders and nuclear facilities, the Islamic Republic shifted its battlefield to a new front: the airwaves. 

On state-run television, a chilling propaganda campaign aired. Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei appeared flanked by Revolutionary Guard officers while a narrator declared, “We are all proud soldiers…we will uproot the Jews with our power.”

The message was clear, projecting defiance after the regime’s military and nuclear apparatus were dealt a humiliating blow by Israel, while also carrying a more ominous signal to Iran’s Jewish population. 

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In the days following the 12-day war, regime forces launched a wave of arrests. Hundreds of Iranians were detained on espionage charges, including at least 35 Jews in Tehran and Shiraz. Many were interrogated and harassed. Their social media activity was reportedly scrutinized, and they were pressured to sever contact with relatives abroad, particularly those in Israel.

This was not just a crackdown, but a calculated move to isolate and intimidate an already vulnerable community.

Jews have lived in Iran for nearly 3,000 years. Their roots predate Islam and Christianity. Shaped by the legacy of Queen Esther, whose story is retold each year during Purim, Iran’s Jews have survived persecution, war and revolution not through confrontation, but through careful adaptation and, often, silence. 

Iran’s Jews are regularly used as pawns by the regime to fan anti-Israel sentiment, as was seen on Oct. 30, 2023, when reports showed Iranian authorities “coerced Iranian Jewish leaders and their communities” to engage in anti-Israel protests across five cities just weeks after the Iran-backed October 7 terror attacks. 

Today, roughly 10,000 Jews remain in Iran, constituting the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel. They are recognized in Iran’s constitution as a “people of the book,” and are permitted to pray in synagogues and run kosher restaurants, butcheries and schools — all under the watchful eye of the regime. This limited freedom comes not out of religious tolerance, but because it has served a strategic purpose and helps the regime deflect accusations of antisemitism. 

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That same political calculus explains why Iran’s parliament, or Majles, reserves one seat for a Jewish representative, and why Jewish representatives have occasionally joined the Islamic Republic’s delegation to the United Nations General Assembly’s high-level week held every September in New York. 

As Iranian American writer Roya Hakakian observes in The Atlantic, “the existence of Jewish Iranians inside the country became an important symbol [to the mullahs], especially in contrast with the absence of Jewish life in other Muslim countries in the region…Iran’s Jews became the regime’s principal defense against accusations of anti-Semitism, even as some leaders notoriously questioned the veracity of the Holocaust.” 

​​Indeed, in 2005, then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hosted an international Holocaust cartoon competition — a grotesque display of Jew-hatred and Holocaust denialism that continues today with state backing.  

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when a theocratic, anti-American and anti-Israeli regime seized power, Iran’s Jewish population has plummeted by 90% — from approximately 100,000 under the country’s last monarch, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The shocking execution of Habib Elghanian, a Jewish Iranian businessman, philanthropist and community leader, in 1979 accelerated the exodus. 

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Yet unlike other Jewish communities across the Middle East, Iran’s Jews were never forcibly expelled en masse. Their presence has been continuous, but their safety has always been fragile. 

The recent arrests of Jews in Iran are just the latest reminder that the Islamic Republic sees loyalty to the regime as absolute – and any perceived deviation, whether through protest or even having a relative abroad, can be construed as a threat. The same regime that censors journalists, jails artists and musicians, and punishes schoolgirls for removing their hijab now targets Jews for having family ties abroad.

This is one of the central themes of my forthcoming book, Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt, which explores how the 2022-2023 uprising sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini revealed a growing rift between the Iranian people and the regime. The enemy of the Islamic Republic isn’t just Zionism or the West—it’s autonomy and dissent.

Iran’s Jews are once again caught in a geopolitical storm. Their silence is not complicity, but survival. And their endurance is not a reflection of the regime’s tolerance, but of the Jewish people’s resilience.

They must not be forgotten by global Jewry nor by those who still believe in a future for Iran that is free and just.