Go to almost any pro-Israel rally held in Toronto in the past 10 months, and alongside the Canadian and Israeli flags, you’ll see the crowd dotted with lion and sun flags. These flags were the symbol of Iran before its Islamic Revolution in 1979, and are still used by Iranians who want to topple the Islamic regime that currently controls the country.
In recent years, and especially since Oct. 7, more Iranian people have been expressing their support for Israel. A day after the brutal attacks, the hashtag #IraniansStandWithIsrael was trending on social media.
Even people inside Iran have risked their lives by uploading pro-Israel posts to social media, including a man who celebrated the assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran.
Iranian support for Israel is not absolute, however. The Islamic regime wants to destroy Israel, as do its followers. Although the majority of the Iranian diaspora wants to remove the Islamic regime from power, that still does not guarantee they will support Israel.
Back in 2014, when Kaveh Shahrooz, a lawyer and human rights activist, was running for the Liberal Member of Parliament nomination in Richmond Hill, Ont., his support for Israel was used as a smear to dissuade Iranians from voting for him. However, Shahrooz says that he is seeing a big change in that regard.
“A line of attack against me has been, ‘He’s a Zionist,’” Shahrooz said recalling his campaigning days. “One line of attack against me has been that I know Irwin Cotler, the former justice minister, very well. Photos of me floated around Persian-speaking media and social media indicating that somehow, by knowing this person who cares about Israel, that I’m tainted and should not be supported,” he said.
“I think Iranians, I would say, traditionally have supported the Palestinian cause, but what I’ve noticed is that in recent years that support has significantly shifted. And I think a big part of that is that we are increasingly seeing that what Israel is up against is exactly what we’re up against.”
“It’s almost entirely the same groups of people. Hamas is basically a pawn of Iran’s regime. It’s trying to implement in Gaza what Iran’s regime has so horrendously implemented in Iran. So, we have a common enemy and we aspire to democracy the way Israel has.
“I think more and more people are beginning to realize that Israel is actually our ally in this fight. We should in turn be an ally to Israel. This sentence, I would not say is universal, but I would say it’s increasing.”
Shahrooz was born in Iran shortly after the 1979 revolution and came to Canada about a decade later, when he was 10 years old. His family had to leave because they were victims of political persecution, which inspired him to pursue a career in human rights activism. He credits that activism for helping him change his views on Israel back in the mid-to-late 2000s, ahead of the shift that is currently happening in his community.
“When I was younger, I probably had a very standard left-wing view of Israel and Palestine. And as I’ve grown older, as I’ve done more activism focussed on Iran, I’ve come to realize that actually, my allies in this fight are the Israelis,” he said.
That doesn’t mean he’s stopped caring about the plight of the Palestinian people. Rather, he’s realized that groups like Hamas don’t have their best interests in mind. He also hopes that more people who advocate for the Palestinian cause would look to Iran as an example of how Hamas would govern if it somehow gained total control of the region.
“What I wish they would focus on is that Hamas is not a liberation movement. Hamas is not interested in the things that liberals in the West are interested in. And I think to understand that all they need to do is look at Hamas’s patron, right? Look at what the government in Iran does and you will understand what Hamas is interested in implementing,” he said.
“I think once they understand that, once they understand how that regime treats women, how that regime treats gays and lesbians, that regime treats workers and ethnic minorities and religious minorities, they will begin to understand that Hamas is not their ally. Hamas is not interested in liberation.”
“And they will understand that their values are much better reflected in Israel than they are reflected in Hamas. Again, not perfectly. Israel is an imperfect place like anywhere else. There are areas that it needs to work on and improve. But it’s a far cry from what Hamas is trying to achieve.”
Shahrooz used to consider himself left-leaning, but he has seen firsthand how certain factions of the political left can actively undermine his goals of liberating the Iranian people. Many of them support the Islamic regime in Iran simply because it is anti-American and anti-colonialist, even though it also violently oppresses women, queer people, workers, and other marginalized groups.
“It’s an incredible frustration… it just boggles the mind,” he said. “I think a lot of human rights activists came to realize, probably earlier than other members of the community, that the folks that were most vocal about the Palestinian cause probably didn’t care that much actually about human rights and about standing in solidarity with us.”
For Shahrooz, it’s clear why Iranians should support Israel. But the Jewish community also has a natural affinity for Iranians, he said.
“In my experience, few groups out there understand subjugation and suffering as well as the Jewish people do, just given their history. And so I often don’t need to explain nearly as much to Jewish friends about what my family history looks like, as I do to others.”
Dyanoosh Youssefi is a Jewish-Iranian legal studies professor, former criminal defence lawyer, and social justice advocate who was born in Iran before the revolution and came to Canada when she was 12. Unlike Shahrooz, she still considers herself left-wing; however, she is similarly disenchanted with how the political left has approached the conflict.
“I think that people don’t recognize how ingrained the antisemitism or the anti-Western sentiment is. I don’t think people recognize that the antisemitism is not as tied to anti-Israel sentiments, that they would exist even if there was no Israel,” she said, before sharing stories from her own life about being Jewish in Iran.
“When I was in Grade 4, the teacher was rearranging our seats and when the girl that she asked to come sit next to me said, ‘I’m not sitting next to that dirty Jew,’ it had nothing to do with Israel. Or when a teacher tried to convert me, that had nothing to do with Israel. Or when the police came to my parents’ store to get extra money, that had nothing to do with Israel. It had to do with the fact that we were Jews.”
Although some activists deny or even justify the existence of antisemitism within the Islamic regime and its proxies, Youssefi says awareness of the antisemitism has actually motivated many Iranian people to stand with Israel.
“There are some Iranians who are supporting Israel, generally because they feel that antisemitism is a problem and it’s something that they recognize from having grown up in Iran. They recognize the importance of supporting a democracy and fighting Islamic fundamentalism. They oppose the Iranian regime and its anti-Israeli and fundamentally antisemitic stance,” she said.
One of the most vocal Iranian backers of Israel in Toronto is Amira Zolghadri, a 27-year-old trans woman who escaped Iran a decade ago. She supports Israel in a number of ways: she posts on social media and attends rallies, and also explains to the people she knows why they should do the same.
Zolghadri left Iran in part because she was told to stop attending class. Back then, she was still presenting as a boy, and had recently come out as gay. She and her family were endangered, so she eventually came to Canada as a refugee and today she specializes in women and gender studies at the University of Toronto.
A decade after leaving Iran, in January of this year, Zolghadri was once again told to stop attending class. This time, though, it was her support for Israel that made her unwelcome at school.
“[The instructor] accused me of being a Zionist and stated that all the land from the river to the sea is Palestine, advising me to drop the course as it wasn’t suitable for me,” Zolghadri wrote in a document describing the incident that she shared with The CJN.
“Her advice brought me to tears, as it felt like an attempt to exclude me from a course [on women and revolution in the Middle East] that should include diverse perspectives like mine, which resist Islamist brutality. As a student who has spoken out against Sharia law in Iran and lost my academic and living rights there, despite being an excellent student, I now face similar exclusion at the University of Toronto, despite my high grades and diligent work.”
After more arguments with the instructor, Zolghadri was eventually asked to leave the course. Although there were no academic or financial consequences, she still feels upset about losing a chance to share her perspective.
In today’s polarized environment, many people have come to view queer and Jewish advocacy groups as working in opposition to each other. But as Zolghadri sees it, it is her responsibility to stand up for both.
“I couldn’t even [stay] silent about the stories about the oppression that I know. I know that Islamic regime [in Iran] wants to destroy Israel. I know that the Islamic regime wants to kill Jewish people just because they are Jewish. And it’s not okay for me, and I can’t be silent, because I feel sympathy… I know the regime that governs Iran wants to destroy Israel, like me as a trans person.”
Zolghadri said many Iranians support Israel because they believe Israel can help them overthrow the Islamic regime that currently controls the country. However, she sees that level of support as a “tokenization” of Israel’s fight.
“They abuse the case just because they think that, ‘okay, if Israel attacks the regime, we have power in Iran,’” she said. “Seeing this issue that way is not okay for me. It’s like using other people and… tokenizes the Israeli right to defend itself just to get power in Iran.
“Israel has the right to defend itself, even [without] giving us anything, because from our resources they attack Israel. They shouldn’t give us power to support them. We should support them because we should feel responsible, because we should feel some guilt.”
Goldie Ghamari, the MPP for Carleton and the first Iranian-Canadian woman to be elected to office in Canada, evoked the millennia-old relationship between Jewish and Iranian people as yet another reason for the support.
Iranians all over the world still celebrate Cyrus the Great, the first emperor of the Achaemenid Dynasty, every year on Oct. 29. Cyrus the Great is also mentioned in the Bible for ending the Babylonian exile. After he conquered Babylon, he allowed the Jews to return to Israel and rebuild the Temple.
“And that was 3,000 years ago,” Ghamari said. “Ever since then, there has been a strong allyship and friendship between Jews and Iranians. Prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran was one of the safest places for Jewish people in the Middle East, aside from Israel.… It’s part of our history, it’s part of our culture, it’s in our historical texts.”
“After the genocidal massacre of Oct. 7 happened… the people of Iran were raising a flag of Israel in solidarity with the people of Israel, which is in fact a crime punishable by death. The Islamic regime will murder or execute anyone who openly and actively supports Israel or the Jewish community.
“The support is more than just about the enemy of my enemy. The support is about understanding and honoring that allyship and friendship that existed between Iranians and Jews for thousands of years, and in fact existed up to 1979 when the Islamic regime took over… And once the Islamic regime is overthrown by the Iranian people, Iran will go back to being a close friend and ally of Israel like it was prior to 1979.”
Although the Islamic regime may need to fall before Iran and Israel can once again be allies, no such restriction applies to individuals. In recent years, stronger bonds are being forged between Jewish and Iranian people. What started as a shared interest in defeating a common enemy grew into mutual public expressions of allyship and eventually, in some cases, into friendships.
Amir Epstein is the executive director of Tafsik, a grassroots organization that combats antisemitism by building bridges with other ethnic groups. One of the first connections he made within the Iranian community was with Salman Sima, a former political prisoner in Iran who now lives in Toronto and is a vociferous opponent of the Islamic regime.
Sima is also a vocal proponent of Israel who attends and sometimes speaks at pro-Israel rallies, including the one at Christie Pits on Nov. 12, and organizes pro-Israel counter-protests. He can often be found with his sign declaring “Iranians stand with Israel,” above an image of the Israeli flag next to the pre-revolution sun and lion flag of Iran.
At this year’s Walk With Israel on June 9, Epstein and some of his friends and colleagues decided to march behind a large banner that said, “Israel stands with Iranians in their fight for freedom.” Sima was right there with them.
Epstein and Sima originally connected through mutual activism, but now the two consider each other close friends. For Sima, it aligns with a recent pattern in his life. He says the Jewish people he has met in Toronto have been incredibly friendly and welcoming, greeting him with thanks and hugs when he meets them. When he organizes his birthday, he says, half of the guests will be Jewish.
As he has gotten to know more Jewish people, he has learned to understand and appreciate the deep similarities and shared values between the two communities, which lead to more meaningful bonds than just shared interests based on a common enemy.
“I am one of those people that didn’t lose any friends after Oct. 7. I added lots of friends after Oct. 7,” he said. “They invited me for Shabbat dinner, and in the Shabbat dinner, I understand that in the Jewish culture, you respect bread. In Iranian culture, in Persian culture, you respect bread as well. So when you have bread, when you have food with some people, there is some value, you should respect that value. This is the same thing that we have in Iranian culture.”
For Epstein, Iranian and Jewish people are natural allies for all of these reasons: the shared interests, the shared history, the shared values. He is hopeful that more Jewish people will come to understand how strongly the two communities align.
“Once [the Islamic regime] is out of the picture, which means freedom for the Iranians, it also means security and freedom for the Israelis and the Jews… I think the Jewish community needs to know that a lot more than we do, to understand why it’s so important to build our friendship with the Iranians,” he said.
“As well as the fact that they’re amazing people. The culture is beautiful. So, you know, it’s all just benefits in doing so. We need friends at a time when we are more isolated than ever since the Holocaust… So that’s why it’s so important.”
