About this Event
Iran and Israel: Will They Fight Forever?
The Middle East often looks like it’s on fire everywhere all at once. But if you look closer, in 2026, there are only two countries that shoot at each other: Iran and Israel. The origin of this conflict is usually taken to be the Islamic Revolution of 1979, which put Tehran on the path of enmity with the Jewish state. But Iran and Israel only started a direct conflict in the 2020s, decades after the revolution. In the 1980s, they even collaborated militarily and, as recently as the late 1990s, Israel welcomed a president of the Islamic Republic and supported engagement with it. Before the 1979 revolution, Iran and Israel had extensive ties but not open diplomatic relations, showing the complexities of the Shah’s Iran’s attitude toward Israel. Despite the ideological rigor of the Islamic Republic, the leaders of Iran inherit the long-lasting issues of the Iranian state, likely to shape their future posture toward Israel.
In hisupcoming book, Vortex: Iran, Israel and the Eighty Years that Transformed the Middle East, Arash Azizi offers the first single-volume account to trace the full arc of the Iran-Israel relationship. Looking at the Iranian-Israeli relationship in the longue durée, he asks: Why are Iran and Israel fighting? And are they destined to fight forever?
Arash Azizi is a writer and historian. He is a Postdoctoral Associate and lecturer at Yale University and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US and Iran’s Global Ambitions(Oneworld, 2020) and What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom (Oneworld, 2024). He is currently writing a book on Iran and Israel, to be published by PublicAffairs, a division of Basic Books.
Event venue & nearby stays
UCL - Gustave Tuck lecture Theatre, Wilkins Building, Gower Street, London, United Kingdom
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