On May 19, a delegation of Iranian-born academics, lawyers, journalists and activists living in the U.S., U.K. and Germany visited Israel for 10 days. The Shoshana Mission’s goal is to promote goodwill and future cooperation in science and technology between the Iranian people and Israel.
The delegates met with senior Israeli officials during their trip, voicing their opposition to the activities of the Islamic Republic and spoke out against a return to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), which they believe will harm the interests of the U.S., it’s allies and also the Iranian people.
During the visit, the met Alex Selsky from The Israel Victory Project and expressed their support of the initiative.
Dr. Amir Hamidi, former U.S. attache in the UAE and an internationally recognized global terrorism expert, who led the mission, and Nazenin Ansari, managing editor of Kayhan, a weekly Persian-language newspaper, spoke to Israel National News about the Shoshana Mission and the historic friendship between Israel and Iran.
“This is a mission for peace. It is a mission to bring the voices of Iranians inside Iran to those in the international community, and specifically to the people of Israel to let them know that Iranians want peace and Iranians are different from the Islamic Republic of Iran, their government,” Ansari says.
“The ideology of the Islamic Republic is exporting Shia policy, and religion,” Hamidi adds. “But 43 years [since the Islamic Revolution in 1979) is nothing [in terms] of the friendship between Israel and Iran. We remember since Cyrus the Great, the people of Iran and the people of Israel, they were friends, and we want to remind [people] of that.”
Ansari comments: “In all these years that there have been protests and tens of thousands of people on the streets [of Iran], we have not heard one slogan against Israel. We have not heard one slogan for nuclear. I urge the international media to follow the story and listen to the protests of the people on the street.”
“One of the problems we face in Iran is lack of water and that’s another reason that we are here, the technology and science is here in Israel that can help us to handle this crisis,” she adds. “In Iran, we realize that there are certain breeds of animals that are going extinct, we realize there are certain types of vegetation that are drying up. There’s a lack of water. There was this group of environmentalists who were working with the United Nations and also with the Iranian government and they took soil samples and photos and they sent it back to the UN to be researched and to find the causes. They uncovered radioactive material. Inside Iran they started saying that these people are spies so they arrested them. The head of the group was taken to prison and he was tortured and he was killed in prison, which created a lot of news tories around the world.”
What should Israel practically do? Should Israel send help and support to the Iranian people that are uprising? Or is is somewhere in the middle?
Hamidi explains: “The Iranian people are capable of making their own decisions and we are the voice of the Iranian people because of what they are shouting in the streets against the Iranian Islamic Republic and you can clearly hear them say, for example, that ‘the U.S. and Israel are our enemy. Our enemy is here’ – referring to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Or they are shouting, calling for the king’s son, the crown prince, to return to Iran because they remember those golden successful times during his father’s dynasty. We want to be their voices and we want to let everybody around the globe know what the Iranian people are going through.”
Hamidi describes the Iranian regime as a “threat to its own people because of the brutality, torture, imprisonment, and violations of human rights.”
“It’s a threat to regional stability, including Europe and the United States. As soon as they are done there nuclear plant, they are going to utilize it because they survive on creating chaos,” he says, giving examples from throughout the regime’s years in power, including the US Embassy hostage crisis and the eight-year the Iran-Iraq war during which hundreds of thousands of Iranians were killed.
He stresses if they have a nuclear weapons it will not just be used just as a threat, explaining: “They're going to utilize it because they spent 43 years and hundreds of millions of dollars to built it.”
While there might be fear that the propaganda has seeped in and that today Iranians think of Israel as an enemy, Ansari says that is far from true.
“They do no think of Israel as an enemy because our most successful citizens are Jewish and Israel has always been there for us,” Ansari says.”I grew up in an Iran where there was a partnership between Iran and Israel. I am talking about the 1960s. I went to a school that was set up by one of the leaders of the Iranian movement who was Jewish. I went to school with Israeli students as classmates. I was there when Israel started importing 40 tons of oranges a year. We had joint projects, there was also a project between Iran and Israel in the desert on water. This is the history that Iranians have and this is why the Islamic Republic is trying to shut down access to information.”
It has only been 43 years out of 2,500 years of good relations, Ansari comments.
“Once again listen to the slogans on the streets of Iran. Do you hear one anti-Israel protest? No. The only slogans against Israel are coming from the regime,” she says.
Hamidi adds that “100 percent a change is going to happen.”
“[The Iranian people] want to go back to their normal life, like every other secular democratic country. They’re sick and tired of their forceful lifestyle,” he says.