An Iranian in the Land of Israel

In February 1963 the Iranian essayist Jalal Al-e Ahmad visited Israel and came away convinced that the Jewish state represented something close to the ideal Muslim polity. His essay arguing as much, ‘Journey to the Land of Israel’, published in Andisheh va Hunar (Thought and Art), outraged readers. Al-e Ahmad was a leading critic of the shah and Western imperialism, and for him to publicly proclaim an affinity with the ‘Zionist entity’ – indeed to describe it as a ‘true miracle’ produced by the ‘clear-vision’ of ‘guardians’ such as David Ben-Gurion, who Al-e Ahmad cast somewhere between a politician and a prophet – was unconscionable. Among his angry readers was Iran’s future supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. In his own account, retold by Samuel Thrope in his translation of Al-e Ahmad’s writings on Israel, The Israeli Republic (2017), Khamenei telephoned Al-e Ahmad to berate him.