After decades of uneasy coexistence, the Jewish community’s routine declarations of loyalty to the Iranian regime and condemnations of Israel may now not be enough to guarantee their safety: more than 700 Jews have applied for refugee status. But the Trump administration has ended nearly all refugee admissions by executive order. The signs in Iran are ominous, writes Royal Hakakian in The Atlantic:
The Islamic Penal Code does not treat non-Muslims—or women, for that matter—as equal citizens before the law. And because the country’s official forms require applicants to state their religious affiliation, Jews and non-Shiite minorities, including Sunni Muslims, have been effectively excluded from careers in academia, the government, or the military. In other words, Iran has never had laws that discriminated specifically against Jews, but it does have laws that discriminate in favor of Shiite Iranians, especially regime supporters.
Jews have remained in Iran partly because the mullahs wanted them to. As the regime matured and grew more confident in its power, it recognized the political value of retaining a Jewish community. By the 2000s, with the rise of a new cadre of clerics into the ranks of leadership, the existence of Jewish Iranians inside the country became an important symbol, especially in contrast with the absence of Jewish life in other Muslim countries in the region. In 2003, the reform-minded Mohammad Khatami became the republic’s first president to visit a synagogue. This new revolutionary generation boasted of the Jewish presence in Iran as evidence of its Islamic tolerance. It liked to showcase Iran’s Jewry to Western governments, which is why the sole Jewish representative from the Iranian Parliament, the Majles, has on several occasions been included in Iran’s delegation to the annual United Nations General Assembly. 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. After all, how could the republic be anti-Jewish if Jews felt safe enough to live there?
Jewish survival within the world’s most overtly anti-Zionist nation-state reveals how keenly aware Tehran is of what sways global public opinion. But it also says a great deal about how indiscriminate brutality toward dissidents and minorities creates a common bond among all those who are not regime supporters. If Jews suffer at the hands of unjust, authoritarian rulers, they also know that their experience is shared by many, many non-Jewish Iranians. This nuance is lost on most Western observers. Like with other paradoxes of post-1979 Iran—such as the existence of perhaps the world’s most dynamic feminist movement, in a country where gender inequality is ruthlessly policed state policy—Iran’s Jews are indeed second-class citizens, but of a regime that makes second-class citizenship the norm for all except its loyalists. The suffering that Jews experience is common to so many others that its universality has created a measure of equality in the face of misery.
This status quo was shaken by the deadly October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, which led to the war in Gaza and a wider confrontation between Israel and Iran’s regional ally in Lebanon, Hezbollah. Tehran’s customary anti-Zionist theatrics were swapped for actual drones and missiles fired at Israel the following April, in response to Israel’s attack on Iran’s consulate in Damascus; in turn, Israel retaliated by taking down Iran’s air-defense systems. Amid these heightened tensions, the grinding reality that had defined Jewish life in Iran for more than four decades took on a new, more menacing urgency. In an attempt to extend the old order by invoking Khomeini’s original formulation of Jewish–Iranian relations, Iran’s chief rabbi, Yehuda Gerami, issued a statement condemning Israel’s attack as “cruel, aggressive, and inhumane” and lamenting “the martyrdom of a number of our dear countrymen at the hands of the Zionist regime” (my own translation). He tried to dispel suspicions of Jewish disloyalty and proclaimed solidarity with fellow Iranians: “Iranian Jews, as a part of the great nation of Iran, condemn these attacks and stand by their countrymen.”
The events of the past month have cast a perilous shadow over Iran’s Jewry, reawakening the fear that had followed Habib Elghanian’s execution and an urgency about the need to leave Iran. The chances of doing so, however, have greatly diminished since January of this year, when President Donald Trump ended nearly all refugee admissions into the United States by executive order. Some 14,000 members of persecuted minorities in Iran—among them more than 700 Jews—had registered with HIAS, originally known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, a major refugee-resettlement organization that has facilitated the passage of thousands of Jews and other minorities into the United States; none of these applicants for refugee status has been able to leave Iran. Mark Hetfield, HIAS’s president, hopes that the Trump administration might yet make an exception. “Given their increasing vulnerability, and President Trump’s expressed commitment to religious freedom,” he told me in a recent interview, “we pray that he would expand their escape route.”
The signs in Iran are ominous—and the pleas from Iranian Jewish elders may now go unheard. The community’s old talisman may no longer hold its charm. An overlooked victim of the 12-day military operation against Iran is Iranian civil society, especially its minorities, particularly Jewish Iranians, who were already at risk. Since the war, their conditions have infinitely worsened—a fact that should lead the Trump administration to reconsider its refugee ban. The United States took on a moral responsibility for Iran’s persecuted citizens when it became a combatant against their oppressive regime.
