In the wee morning hours of April 7, Rabbi Younes Hammami Lalezar approached the synagogue in Tehran that he had led for the better part of four decades. Ordinarily, the Rafi-Nia Synagogue would be a place of comfort, worship, and solace from a crazy world – especially during the holiday of Passover.
Instead, Rabbi Lalezar found a scene out of an apocalyptic horror film. One of Iran’s proudest and oldest synagogues lay in complete ruin. Smoke wafted into the sky from what was once a house of community worship.
As more Jewish Iranians and aid workers arrived, the depth of the destruction became apparent. The congregation’s Torah scroll is still buried under mountains of concrete, metal, and plaster. Prayer books and hand-painted texts in ancient Hebrew can be seen strewn throughout the mess that was once a place for faith and family.
Luckily, no one was killed or injured. However, the Iranian Jewish community will still have to pick up the pieces, literally and figuratively, of their synagogue and also their entire country. And to think, all of this destruction to a Jewish house of worship was committed by a state that claims to be global Jewry’s sole representative.
This brutal attack only further exposes Israel as a representative of U.S. imperialism, not the Jewish community. In reality, Israel’s relation to the Jewish community outside its borders is not one of mutual concern, but hatred and disdain. A key part of the U.S. imperialist strategy in West Asia has been to crown Israel the sole protector and arbiter of Jewish life, rhetorically justify the zionist state’s onslaught against West Asia.
Thriving and vibrant Jewish communities, like that in Iran, undermine this narrative and erode support for continued U.S. intervention on Israel’s behalf. Iran’s Jewish Parliament Minister, Homayoun Sameyah Najafabadi, spoke of this dynamic as he stood in front of the Rafi-Nia’s smoking remains.
“This attack demonstrates the complete hatred of the Zionist regime towards the Jews of Iran … Attacking a synagogue is a great insult to the Jews of Iran and the world … This attack contradicts the claim of supporting Jews worldwide and shows that they are lying.”
Because the Iranian Jewish community loves their home country as well as their Jewish identity, their existence as Jews is unacceptable to Zionism. Outrage at the U.S.-zionist bombing of Rafi-Nia was not limited to the Jewish community. The Council on American-Islamic Relations released a statement condemning “the Israeli regime’s bombing of a synagogue in Tehran, which was the predictable end result of the indiscriminate U.S.-Israel bombing campaign against mosques, hospitals, schools, apartments and other civilian sites across Iran.”
This is the exact sort of solidarity that U.S. imperialism wants to hide and destroy. Media outlets controlled by the same people making billions off war would tell us that the Muslim world and the Jewish world are locked in an ancient inherent blood feud.
History shows that the fight is not between Muslims and Jews, but between the global working class and the global ruling class, currently led by U.S. imperialism. Attacks on sacred religious sites, whether Muslim or Christian or Jewish or otherwise, are attacks on all working class people. As the Iranian people have bound together regardless of ethnicity or religion, so must the entire global working class unite against U.S. imperialism.
Lev Koufax is an anti-Zionist Jewish activist.
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