The International Writers Magazine: Comment

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An Iranian in Israel • Ali Beach Etzik Pourrostamian fled Iran just months after his father had been sentenced to death by the Revolutionary courts. These days, as he clears away the empty beer bottles from the floor of his Tel Aviv nightclub, the 37 year old Jew can count himself amongst an exclusive band of Israeli immigrants; those who defied the mullah’s of the Islamic Republic and packed their bags for the Promised Land.

"I love Israel very much, but I still know myself as Iranian."

"I was very afraid," he says, recalling the days when as a 14 year old boy his father was being hunted by the state police. "I was afraid they wanted to kill my dad, and afraid they’d take away me or my mother."
It was late 1981; two years since the Western-backed Reza Shah had seen his throne usurped by Ayatollah Khomeini, and his country convulsed by firebrand Islamism.

"At home the revolutionary guards used to come round at two in the morning to see if he was there. They used to sit with us for ten hours waiting for him to call home. We could do nothing. It was very hard."
Standing in front of a Heineken sign slung limply from the ceiling behind his bar, Etzik seems to have closed the book on this bitter chapter from his early life. Managing The Sub - his downtown nightspot tailored towards Tel Aviv’s Philippino community - as well as running his own Persian catering company, he has flourished in the country of his refuge.

Israel has given him life, and despite being acutely aware of his own Iranian heritage it is a life rooted hungrily in the Jewish national consciousness.
"I am proud first of all for being Jewish," he says, "and also proud of living in Israel after 2500 years. I don’t hate my country. I love it, but I will never go back. This land of the Jews was given to us and I want to be here. There is lots of chaos, but it is mine. No one can throw me out of here."

For other Iranian Jews, not least Etzik’s father, Israel provides a cooler, less comforting embrace.
"I love Israel very much," says Mousa Pourrostamian, "but I still know myself as Iranian."
With an inch of ash clinging to the butt of his smouldering cigarette, the portly 67-year old reminisces fondly about his Jewish upbringing in Iran.
"Most of the Muslims were smart, and even in the small villages they liked us. I spent three years in a public Muslim school in Esfahan, and it was very nice and I didn’t have any problems. In the Shah’s regime I was a Jew with no contacts, but I went through the banking system and got to the top."

Even when the creation of Israel in 1948 sent shockwaves rippling through the Islamic world, Mousa, a lifelong Zionist, insists the Iranian Jews suffered no backlash.
"Most of the Iranians didn’t bother about the creation of Israel. Only the 10 per cent who were fanatic used it to create problems. But because the Shah gave his blessing to the Jews, the fanatics were not so strong."
He recalls the ebullient mood which swept through the Iranian Jewry when Israel declared its independence, saying that Jews across the country held big feasts and flew the flags of Iran and Israel side by side.

According to Mousa, the pool of tolerance which lent itself to these celebrations stemmed from years of enmity between the Arabs and Iranians. Iran and Israel made great bedfellows he argues, because "both had mutual interest against the Arabs. They saw each other as being side by side, not as enemies."

The point is driven home more forcefully by Sharokh Sabzeero, an Iranian Jew who came to Israel in 1980.
"An Iranian citizen, from when he wakes up in the morning until night, ten times he will curse the Sunni Muslims and the Arabs."

Reclining in his office wheelchair with a balding head and braces strapped tightly over his striped black and white sweater, Sharokh says that whilst he did experience minor prejudice when he was young, "because the system was in favour of minorities, we had a good life, and every day it got better."
As a youth he too was involved in the Iranian Zionist movement, and says he experienced no problems because of it. "Historically, Iranians are against the Arabs," he declares. "Most Iranians either don’t care or are in favour of Israel....They are very, very much anti-Arab."
The problem he says stems from the "Muslim extremists", because the "Palestinian movement contacted with them and asked help from them. They found it an obligation to defend Muslims no matter what the conflict."

It was when these "Muslim extremists" seized power in 1979 that the marriage of convenience between Israel and Iran turned sour.
According to Dr David Yerushalmi, who teaches Iranian studies at Tel Aviv university, with the exit of the Shah went the hopes of the country’s Zionists.
"Post-1979 there was a fear amongst Iranian Jews of association with Zionism. They were afraid that a pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist government would translate into harsh measures."
He says that despite the Islamic fervour behind the revolution, Jews themselves were not directly threatened.
"The ideology of Emam Khomeini was always against Zionism…At the same time [he] wanted to prove there was no discrimination inside his Islamic state. He wanted to recreate the classic Islamic nation."
Despite this, Dr Yerushalmi says the Islamic Republic’s "anti-capitalistic" tendencies worried many Jews, and they began to leave in droves.

Caught up in this exodus was Mousa Pourrostamian. As a prominent Zionist Jew and high-flyer in the Shah’s own bank it was only a matter of time before the regime swooped in. He was hauled before a court on charges of aiding and abetting the deposed king and sentenced to death.
"They didn’t have any evidence as at that time in Iran, you didn’t need it," he explains. You could say "this guys a traitor" and that’s it." Rather than fall victim to Khomeini’s internal purge he decided to flee. With a little help from friends in the government who "knew I was a fair guy", he escaped Iran with a doctored passport and eventually settled in Israel.

Dr Yerushalmi says that of the 50,000 or so Jews who left Iran in the ten years after 1979, most, unlike Mousa, chose not to return to Israel. Instead they were lured West, away from a stagnant Israeli economy throttled by bureaucracy and rife with racial iniquities. Figures from the Israeli Bureau of Statistics put the number of Iranian immigrants during this period as just under 8500, whilst around half this number arrived throughout the next decade. Yerushalmi estimates that in recent years the numbers have dwindled to about 200 per annum. The reason, he thinks, is largely economic.

Soly Karmi agrees. The 46 year old works for the Iranian Zionists in Israel organisation (IZI), and says that most of today’s Iranian Jewish emigrants head West where "they think the money grows on trees".
The IZI runs educational, job and language programmes to help absorb those who do choose to come here. Karmi says that for the old especially, this is not always an easy process.
"The culture is a big shock…To this chaos there are the problems of terror and violence. Israel has developed a unique culture where you must all the time watch and be careful."
Like many immigrants, since settling in Israel Sharoukh has been looking past his shoulder at the life he left behind. "I was a Zionist," he explains, "So I chose to be here. But then I feel the culture of the Diaspora. What I have here is not my culture. I don’t enjoy it. I suffer."

Such sentiments are hardly unique in any immigrant community, but the political maelstrom which has weathered Iran for the past 25 years renders the Iranian-Israeli psyche more complex – particularly for those who were scuffed out of their country by the jackboot of political Islam.

Now, under the shadow of the atom bomb, the community finds itself threatened on two fronts. With the Iranian-backed Hezbollah fighting its proxy war on the one hand and America taking of its gloves on the other, it is not surprising that some here feel anxious.

"Of course I am very much worried about it," says Menashe Amir. The 66 year old anchors Israel’s only Persian-language radio service and provides a daily nexus to around six million Iranian listeners.
He is aghast talking about Iran’s "religious extremist ideological regime", and says he finds the "astronomical amount of money" being spent on its military programme unsettling. The regime, he says, believes "that the real life is in heaven, so whoever is killed on the earth is not important. They are ready to be killed and to kill, and the sacrifice doesn’t have any importance for them."

Amir says that ten per cent of the Iranian population are loyal listeners to his programme, which is largely dedicated to Iranian news, but also features weekly political interviews and phone-ins. He estimates that around two thirds of callers have negative feelings towards current president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and says he has even had callers ask him to "tell President Bush to come and rescue us".

But the prospect of military intervention worries him: "Iranians never wanted a war. Iran never attacked other countries. Iran has never had expansionist ideas or ambitions…And now such a nation is run by such a fanatic junta. "Its very sad and it may bring disaster upon the Iranian people and maybe upon the whole region. I didn’t want Iran to have such a kind of character in the world. I am ashamed."

Sharoukh on the other hand thinks it might all be a bluff. He thinks Iran is rattling its sabres "because they need an enemy" to shore up domestic support, and says both America and Iran are kidding themselves if they think they are in a position to wage war. And anyway, he adds, if the Iranians are indeed bent on going nuclear then "this is their right. Everybody can make them."

As for Mousa, he is not worried about Ahmadinejad’s comments or worried about whether he’ll act on them.
"I am just worries about one thing," he says. "The people of Iran".

© Ali Beach September 2006
agbeach@googlemail.com

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