Iranian Jews forced to denounce Israel amid regime pressure over Haniyeh assassination - exclusive

Israel’s leading expert on the dwindling Iranian Jewish community, Beni Sabti, said Tehran’s Jewish leadership is in a state of fear over the mullah regime retaliating against them for Israel’s alleged assassination of Hamas terrorist leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.

The Jerusalem Post obtained a shocking letter that was published by the Tehran Jewish community, in which the Iranian Jewish leadership lambasted Israel for killing of the US-designated terrorist Haniyeh.

According to the letter, “The Zionists killed him in Tehran.”

The letter also stated “The terror action against Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran was a crime and a terror attack and against international law. This martyr worked for freeing Jerusalem. He was under attack all his life and he lost some of his family. He is now a martyr for defending Gaza and the poor Gaza people.”

The anti-Israel letter from Iran’s largest Jewish community in Tehran added that the “The Jewish community pays condolences to the Palestinian hero, Ismail Haniyeh, and all the resistance warriors, including the Iranian leader. The Jewish community is waiting for a hard reaction against the terrorists who killed Haniyeh.”

Bullying Iranian Jews into submission

Sabti said the Iranian Jews “are so afraid of some regime groups, like Iranian regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij, who can attack the Jews so they have do this [publish an anti-Israel letter].”

He continued that ”This is most the humiliating message I ever saw. This is much worse than Al Quds Day and the demonstrations after October 7 [when a Hamas-led massacre of southern Israel Gaza border communities took place].”

The Persian language Iran International TV reported in April 2023 that the Islamic Republic ordered Jews to participate in the antisemitic al-Quds Day rally during the Jewish holiday of Passover.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, established al-Quds Day (Jerusalem Day in Arabic) after the 1979 revolution in Iran as a mobilization event calling for the destruction of the Jewish state.

Sabti, who is a research fellow for the Institute for National Security Studies, said the head of the Jewish community in Tehran, Homayoun Sameach, who is also the Jewish community’s MP in Iran’s pseudo parliament, drafted a second letter with other religious minorities, Christian, and Zoroastrian, in the parliament to condemn the assassination of Haniyeh. The Post obtained a copy of the parliamentary letter against Israel.

Sabti views the role of the Jewish community’s leadership as a low point in their subjugation to the ayatollahs. There are about 9,000 Jews left in Iran from a population of nearly 90 million people, according to official statistics, Sabti said. Iran’s Jews are largely classified as second-class citizens, according to experts.

Iranian Jews and other religious minorities are relegated to an inferior status in the Muslim-majority totalitarian regime of the Islamic Republic. The term dhimmi is used to define the servile position of Jews in the Islamic Republic of Iran and Arab nations where Islamism guts the civil, political, and social rights of non-Muslims. The Middle East Forum published a review of Bat Ye’or’s 2001 book titled Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide about the plight of persecuted religious minorities in the Muslim world.

 Mordechai Nisan, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reviewed Ye’or’s book in 2022. He wrote that Ye’or “focused her research for three decades on the institution she has dubbed ‘dhimmitude,’ meaning the humiliation and vulnerability of being a dhimmi (the Islamic legal term for Jews and Christians who accept Muslim sovereignty).”

Writing for the US government news organization, Voice of America, Michael Lipin reported last week that the US State Department termed reports that Iran’s Jews were forced to vote in the presidential election as “deplorable.”

According to VOA, “The reported coercive measures, verified by VOA, included Iranian authorities for the first time setting up special ballot stations for Jews to vote in a presidential contest and organizing an unprecedented campaign event for Jews to meet presidential candidates’ representatives.”

VOA quoted a US State Department spokesperson who said about the coerced voting that “The behavior described in those reports is deplorable,” and “We never had expectations that Iran’s presidential elections would be free or fair, so these reports of coercion, while awful, are unsurprising.”

The Iranian regime’s former Health Minister Masoud Pezeshkian, won the presidential runoff election in early July. He is unconditionally loyal to the Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who advocates the eradication of Israel.