Today’s Iran defines itself through hostility to Israel. The Islamic Republic funds, arms, and glorifies forces committed to the Jewish state’s destruction. That makes it easy to forget that pre-1979 Iran once played a far more complicated role in Israel’s birth.
In February 1947, Britain, unable to contain the Arab-Jewish conflict, handed the Palestine Question to the United Nations, which in turn created the Special Committee on Palestine, composed of representatives from 11 countries, including Iran. Its task was to investigate conditions on the ground and submit recommendations for the future of Mandatory Palestine. After hearings and travel in the region, the committee split. A majority recommended partition into Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem under international administration. A minority—Iran, India, and Yugoslavia—backed a federal solution.
Iran argued that partition would deepen the conflict, and that only a federal framework with Arab and Jewish units could avert bloodshed.
The General Assembly adopted partition in Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947. Iran voted against it. Yet Iran’s delegate, Nasrollah Entezam, saw enough in Palestine to make Tehran’s official position look less simple than it later appeared.
Iran argued that partition would deepen the conflict, and that only a federal framework with Arab and Jewish units could avert bloodshed. Yet, such a formula was unlikely to prevent war, since the Arab side rejected not only Jewish sovereignty but also even meaningful Jewish autonomy. Tehran was also under intense Arab pressure. Iraq, one of Iran’s regional rivals, combined repeated threats with irredentist ambitions, while other Arab governments pressed the shah’s representatives not to stray from the common Arab line.
Entezam, however, was no ideologue. He belonged to Iran’s old cosmopolitan elite: internationally seasoned, polished, and more at home in the language of diplomacy and compromise than in the slogans that would later define the mullahs’ regime. He seemed to have arrived in Palestine with a broadly pro-Arab outlook. But the visit began to work on him.
The Arab leadership boycotted the committee, denying it formal Palestinian Arab testimony. The Zionist movement did the opposite: It showed the delegates kibbutzim, moshavim, schools, hospitals, and a community that appeared ready for statehood. Entezam was impressed by competence, organization, and seriousness.
In Jerusalem, he told Iran’s consul in confidence, “We will need to reach an accommodation with the Jews.” He understood what many Arab leaders refused to admit: The Jews in Palestine were not a transient presence that could simply be wished away.
The Zionist leadership understood that the committee could be influenced by not only testimony, but also atmosphere and personal contact. Delegates met people who spoke their languages; Entezam, for example, encountered at Hadassah Hospital a surgeon who once had operated on his ear.
Reportedly unaware that a nearby Jewish official understood Persian, Entezam told his alternate, Ali Ardalan, “What asses the Arabs are. The country is so beautiful and it could be developed; if it were all given to the Jews, they would turn it into Europe.” The remark showed that he recognized the contrast between Arab rejectionism and Jewish institution-building.
Iran granted Israel de facto recognition in 1950 and built a quiet partnership with it.
When the chairman of the Jewish Agency, the de facto government of the Yishuv, gave his testimony, he moved Entezam by invoking Cyrus the Great, the Persian ruler who had allowed the Jews to return from Babylonian exile. Entezam said he was “very much touched” by the reference. Yet he also pressed David Ben Gurion, the Zionist leader who would become Israel’s first prime minister, on democracy, questioning whether Jewish statehood could truly be democratic—an irony given that Israel would become the region’s only enduring democracy.
Jerusalem posed another challenge. Here, too, Entezam was more flexible than Tehran’s official line: In private, he explored placing the city under Christian or international-Christian control—an attempt to remove the most explosive issue from direct Arab-Jewish confrontation.
Entezam’s pragmatism also set him apart from India’s Sir Abdur Rahman. While Rahman favored contact with Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the exiled Mufti of Jerusalem who had collaborated with Nazi Germany, Entezam saw him as an extremist and pushed instead for Arab League representatives to provide input from Lebanon. Their tone was more diplomatic, but their message was similar: no Jewish state, and war if partition passed.
In the end, Iran voted against partition. Yet Entezam’s private impressions pointed elsewhere: He was impressed by the Yishuv, wary of Arab maximalism, and open to compromise. In 1947, Iran was not yet Israel’s ideological enemy, but a cautious monarchy constrained by Arab pressure. That later became clear when Iran granted Israel de facto recognition in 1950 and built a quiet partnership with it.
Entezam’s fate makes the story more bitter. After the Islamic Revolution, he was arrested, tortured in Evin Prison, and died in 1980. His life, like Iran’s relationship with Israel, was crushed by the revolution. Iran was not always condemned to be Israel’s enemy, however, and should the Islamic Republic fall, Entezam’s pragmaticism might posthumously define Iran-Israel ties.
