Thousands of Iranians gathered outside the Israeli Consulate in Toronto on April 26 with Israeli flags and marched to thank the Jewish state for striking the regime that rules their homeland. I watched them go by, a sea of blue and white in Iranian hands. This city has seen anti-Israel marches. This was something else.
Anti-Zionism is rising across much of the world. In the 2025 Arab Opinion Index, 87% of respondents across 15 Arab countries opposed recognizing Israel. Isn’t it remarkable that inside Iran—the one country whose government has made Israel’s destruction a founding creed—the Jewish state is finding so many friends?
In September 2025, GAMAAN, an independent research group, found 53% of Iranians viewing the United States favorably and 39% viewing Israel favorably, against 48% unfavorable. After this year’s war, about 62% opposed the chant “Death to Israel.” The samples skew online, yet on GAMAAN’s own population base they point to tens of millions of adults.
The streets tell a related story. In April 2023, Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s exiled crown prince, stood at the Western Wall in a kippah, a photograph that would end a career in much of the Middle East. In January, after he urged Iranians to take up the chant, crowds reported in the millions filled cities in all 31 provinces, shouting “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran.”
On Feb. 14, 250,000 gathered in Munich and 350,000 in Toronto, by police estimates. This article takes no side on Pahlavi. It observes that a man known for praying at the Western Wall can fill the streets and that openness to Israel has stopped being a liability.
Where does it come from?
Iranians recall Cyrus and the Jewish return from Babylon as a mutual blessing, and in Hamadan the tomb said to be Esther and Mordechai’s still stands. They remember the Shah’s decades, when Israel kept a mission in Tehran.
Then came 1979, when Islamic fundamentalists and Marxists united to topple the Shah, and the fundamentalists turned on their partners. Iranians know that alliance from the inside; it is the same pairing of ideologies Israel confronts today.
A theocratic state left them hungry for freedom of religion, and they see in Israel a beacon of it. An underground church, which Christian researchers rank among the fastest-growing in the world, has few teachers and few institutions, mostly word of mouth, and its members read the Hebrew Bible with their own eyes and discover the story of Israel on the page. Songs now thank Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for roaring like a lion when the world stayed silent, and the rulers who terrorized Iranians began to fall.
Ideas and faith shape who favors Israel, and they do so inside every Iranian community, as they do inside every community on earth.
What should Israel do with that goodwill? That is a question for its planners. But two paths are worth setting side by side.
The first keeps the door open to separatist movements, and it has real logic. Israel has long cultivated ties on the edges of hostile states, including Kurdish communities and Azerbaijan. While the regime stands, backing its opponents extends the war against it, a logic Iranians understand, and a divided Iran would be a weaker adversary.
In March, U.S. President Donald Trump called Kurdish forces crossing into Iran “wonderful,” and Reuters reported, citing sources, that Israel was backing Iranian Kurdish militias. Days later, Trump ruled out Kurdish forces going in, and Netanyahu said Israel did not seek to divide Iran.
The second path looks ahead to how Iranians would read Israel’s aims after the regime falls.
Twice, Iranians built a centralized state across a vast, diverse territory—from Cyrus’s administrators to the Sasanians’ Eranshahr. And since the Safavids in 1501, Iran has kept its identity and borders, reassembling each time the center weakened.
Since the revolution, Iran has gone from about half urban to three-quarters, and metropolises like Tehran, now 14 million, have become melting pots where people from every region found a shared Iranian identity. Iranians also remember 1946, when Soviet-backed republics in Azerbaijan and Mahabad fell soon after Moscow withdrew, and many came to see separatism as a Marxist project.
For most Iranians, the integrity of the homeland weighs as Zionism weighs on Jews, and in March, Persian-language social media filled with alarm at talk of Iran’s borders. Iranian warmth toward Israel could cool quickly if a foreign power pressed on that question, and the Islamic Republic would welcome the opening to repeat what it has said for 47 years: that its enemies want to erase Iran.
Consider, too, who Israel’s friends are. Ideas and faith shape who favors Israel, and they do so inside every Iranian community, as they do inside every community on earth. Israel’s admirers come from every region. Within a single state, their numbers add up, and their voices are strongest through a central government, while a new border would scatter them on every side of it.
So the questions remain. If Iran divides, whose friendship will it have secured: the movements it cultivated or the admirers already living in every piece? If Iran holds together, what will its capital remember: a hand on the map or flags raised in thanks? And what welcome awaits at a table where Beijing, Moscow, Ankara, the European Union and Washington already sit?
Israel may not get to choose since Turkey, wary of Kurdish forces in Iran, and the Iranian people themselves will shape the outcome. Perhaps the answer is the position that holds up whether or not Iran divides: Keep faith with friends, wherever they are. Once the Iron Curtain falls, Iranians will tell the world what they want for their country.
The Israeli flags Iranians raised freely, in Toronto and beyond, are easier to keep than to win back.
