Middle East & Diaspora — Jerusalem Desk

From a Jerusalem Synagogue to Iran’s Living Rooms: Israel Opens Its Arms to the Opposition

A live broadcast from the Yakar Synagogue and a week of meetings across Tel Aviv and Jerusalem put a new phrase — “Iranian Zionism” — at the center of a fast-growing alliance between Israelis and the Iranians fighting to be free of the Islamic Republic.

Illustration: Faith & Freedom News — the radiant Persian sun and the Star of David, joined across 2,500 years by the legacy of Cyrus the Great.

A live broadcast this week carried out of an unlikely setting: the Yakar Synagogue in Jerusalem, where Israeli hosts welcomed a visiting delegation of Iranian opposition figures for a reception aired by Iran International, which its Israeli hosts describe as the largest Persian-language news network in the world. Cameras and a Persian-speaking audience across Iran and its diaspora watched two communities share a room that, decades after the Islamic Revolution severed formal ties between the countries, is rarely arranged in public at all.

During the live broadcast, Tom Wegner, CEO of the Abrahamic Movement and co-founder of the Cyrus Fund, was pressed with a pointed question from the anchors: why would Israelis host an Iranian delegation while their country remains at war with Tehran? His answer, delivered on air and later shared with his followers, drew a sharp line between a government and a people. “We are NOT at war with the Iranian people,” Wegner said, arguing that the regime in Tehran is fighting Israel, but that ordinary Iranians are not its enemy — and are, in his telling, the very people suffering most under it.

“Quite the opposite. Our historic alliance goes back 2,500 years to Cyrus the Great.”

Tom Wegner — CEO, Abrahamic Movement · Co-Founder, Cyrus Fund

Wegner’s answer reached back to Cyrus the Great, the Persian king remembered in the delegation’s telling as the father of the Iranian nation — and, in Jewish memory, as the ruler who freed the Jewish exiles held in Babylon and allowed them to return to Jerusalem to rebuild. That shared history, he argued, is not a footnote but the foundation of the relationship, and it is why he said Israel could not stay silent while Iranians are, in his words, tortured and oppressed by the same regime plotting Israel’s destruction.

“Iranian Zionism” comes to Tel Aviv

The Yakar reception capped a broader week of engagement. The same circle of organizers hosted a delegation of Iranian opposition leaders, business executives, journalists, and activists from across the United States and Europe for meetings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, a visit featured in a live interview with i24NEWS. At the center of the discussion was a concept organizers are calling “Iranian Zionism” — an effort, as Wegner described it, to study the blueprint the Zionist movement left behind: how a scattered diaspora built democratic institutions, organized across continents, and laid social and political groundwork long before a state ever existed.

As Iranians look toward what organizers call “the day after” the Islamic Republic, Wegner said, they are studying Israel’s history not as an adversary’s story but as a working model for resilience and nation-building. On social media summarizing the visit, he put it simply: the children of Israel and the children of Cyrus stand united once again, invoking Cyrus as, in his framing, the original liberator of the Jewish people and the first Zionist.

Wegner credited the week’s program to a coalition of partners — the Cyrus Fund, the Jerusalem Interfaith Center, and Project Aftab — along with his own collaborators, Babak Jalilvand and Shachar Tal, for helping organize both the Tel Aviv briefings and the Jerusalem reception. He described the effort as a belief that this alliance can become a source of hope for the wider Middle East.

Three claims at the center of the visit

• Not a war with a people. Organizers insist Israel’s fight is with the regime in Tehran, not with Iranians themselves — and that the same government waging terror against Israel is the one jailing and oppressing its own citizens.
• A bond older than 1979. The relationship being described did not begin with the revolution or the current conflict; delegates trace it back millennia, to Cyrus the Great’s decree freeing the Jewish exiles of Babylon.
• Groundwork, not a finished plan. Wegner and his partners frame the visits as active preparation — building relationships and institutions now so a different regional reality is ready the moment change comes to Iran.

Neither gathering produced a formal agreement, and none of the organizers claimed the Islamic Republic’s fall is close at hand. What they described instead, in their own accounts of the week, was groundwork: relationships and a shared narrative built now, in the hope that they will outlast the current government in Tehran — and be ready the moment it falls.