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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
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The Media Takes Sides in the Iran War — and It’s Usually Sympathetic to Iran
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 1, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Who could forget The Washington Post‘s foolish unforced error in 2019 when its obituary for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed Caliph of ISIS, called him an “austere religious scholar“?
Apparently, the editors at the Post forgot, because they printed an obituary for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that makes its praise for al-Baghdadi look restrained.
It portrays Khamenei as a modest man, quoting him as saying “I consider myself a common religious student without any outstanding feature or special advantage,” and provides details on his reading habits.
It even claims that Khamenei “declared [nuclear weapons] to be forbidden by Islam” and quotes him as saying he “issued a fatwa, based on Islamic teachings, forbidding the production of nuclear weapons.”
“With his bushy white beard and easy smile, Ayatollah Khamenei cut a more avuncular figure in public than his perpetually scowling but much more revered mentor,” author of the obituary William Branigin gushes.
The New York Times
The New York Times obituary writers, Alan Cowell and Farnaz Fassihi, must have been reading from the same set of notes when they wrote that Khamenei “affected an avuncular and magnanimous aloofness, running the country from a perch above the jousting of daily politics.”
They portray Khamenei as an effective leader who “lacked his predecessor’s charisma and mystique” but “cannily exploited political instabilities in the Middle East to extend Iran’s reach.”
Like Branigin, Cowell and Fassihi claim that “nuclear arms … were banned by the ayatollah in a 2003 religious edict.”
Obituaries are handled by the news division at The Wall Street Journal. It’s hard to imagine the Editor of the Editorial Page, Paul A. Gigot, approving Sune Engel Rasmussen’s Khamenei obituary, which opens with a sentence identifying him as “Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the austere cleric who ruled Iran for more than three decades and reshaped the balance of power across the Middle East.”
And while Rasmussen doesn’t call Khamenei “avuncular,” he describes him as “A pragmatist as well as an ideologue” who “endorsed diplomacy when convenient” and held a “popelike position in the Shiite Muslim world: elected by a council of elders to convey the word of God.”
He even goes so far as to credit Khamenei with making “progress in some important areas” including offering “some of the best healthcare and education in the region” and “boost[ing] female literacy rates.”
Like his peers at the Post and New York Times, Rasmussen also appears to accept uncritically Khamenei’s insistence that “the program was peaceful” and mentions that he “issued a religious pronouncement asserting that Iran wouldn’t acquire nuclear arms.”
What could compel journalists to praise an avowed enemy of the US, ignore his lies, downplay his nuclear program, and overlook his slaughter of thousands of Iranians and his genocidal campaign to destroy Israel?
Khamenei the Diplomat
The Khamenei-as-diplomat portrayal in the obituaries of the three most important American newspapers revolves around Barack Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the so-called “Iran nuclear deal” that rewarded Iran handsomely for doing very little and set the stage for a legal Iranian nuclear bomb.
All three obituaries misrepresent the JCPOA through both omission and commission.
First, the errors of commission.
The Washington Post states that the JCPOA “restricted Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the easing of crippling economic sanctions.” The New York Times claims that it “restricted Iran’s right to enrich uranium in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions.” And The Wall Street Journal claims that it “granted Iran relief from sanctions in return for restrictions on its uranium enrichment program.”
The error here is that Iran’s “restrictions” were largely self-imposed and self-policed. Unlike Ronald Reagan’s “trust but verify” approach to negotiations, Obama naively agreed to Iranian “self-inspections” of sensitive military sites.
In terms of omission, none of the three obituaries acknowledges the fact that had the US not withdrawn from the JCPOA and reinstated the “maximum pressure” sanctions, Iran’s nuclear program would be mostly legal by now due to the JCPOA’s sunset clauses.
Trump the Villain
Each obituary frames the US withdrawal from the JCPOA as evidence of Trump’s belligerence.
The New York Times is the most direct of the three with the claim that Khamenei’s “mistrust was validated three years later, however, when Mr. Trump withdrew from the agreement, restoring sanctions and piling on new ones.”
The Wall Street Journal puts the sense of validation in Khamanei’s mouth: “After President Trump in 2018 withdrew from the historic nuclear pact that Iran struck with global powers in 2015, Khamenei said he was vindicated.”
But The Washington Post actually provides cover for Khamenei’s rush for nuclear breakout capacity and crossing the 90% enrichment threshold, with the claim that after Trump voided Obama’s agreement, “In retaliation, Iran began disregarding some provisions of the nuclear deal.”
In fact, Khamenei had been breaking the JCPOA from the very start. None of the three obituaries reminds its readers of that fact.
The obituaries also subtly attempt to downplay Khamenei’s desire for nuclear weapons, believing, it seems, his lie that the Islamic Republic is only interested in nuclear energy.
None asks why Iran denied IAEA inspectors access to the nuclear enrichment facilities it built deep underground or why a peaceful nuclear energy program would need underground facilities. None mentions that nuclear energy requires uranium enrichment of about 5% whereas Iran has admitted to having 460 kg of uranium at 60% enrichment.
Khamenei’s obituaries come as no surprise to anyone who follows media bias and understands how journalists increasingly side with America’s enemies in general and our Islamist enemies in particular.
While claims that journalists are the enemies of the American people are hyperbolic, the Khamenei obituaries show that many of them are not the enemies of our enemies. The Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal have demonstrated that they are not interested in portraying the world’s number one supporter of terrorism, a man who has killed thousands of his own countrymen and women and threatened to wipe America off the map, as the villain that he was, preferring instead to humanize him.
Chief Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. A version of this article was originally published by IPT.
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Australia’s Largest Arts Festival to Open With Wave of Anti-Israel Artists, Led by Controversial Creative Director
A view of Sydney, Australia. Photo: Reuters/David Gray.
The 25th edition of the Sydney Biennale, Australia’s largest arts festival, opens to the public on Saturday and will feature a slew of artists with anti-Israel views similar to those expressed by the festival’s artistic director, Emirati princess and curator Hoor Al-Qasimi.
The 25th Biennale of Sydney, which will take place from March 14-June 14 across multiple venues, receives taxpayer funding and support from the federal government of Australia, the state government of New South Wales, and the City of Sydney. However, several of the festival’s other partners and sponsors may be problematic for supporters of Israel.
Qatar Museums and Rubaiya Qatar, a new nationwide contemporary art quadrennial that will debut in November 2026, are the festival’s “major strategic” sponsors, according to the event’s website. Qatar has a long history of aligning itself with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, providing a home for the senior leaders of both organizations.
Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are both internationally designated terrorist organizations. In the US, Hamas has carried the label for years, and the Trump administration has, in recent months, proscribed branches of the Muslim Brotherhood in Africa and the Middle East.
The festival’s “major partners” include the global property developer Arada, co-founded by Al-Qasimi’s brother-in-law, Sheikh Sultan bin Ahmed Al Qasimi. When the partnership was announced in November 2025, it caused significant concern among the Jewish community. Another partner of the festival, the Barjeel Art Foundation, is controlled by the princess’s family.
“There were grave concerns that the appointment of Hoor Al Qasimi would result in one of our flagship cultural institutions becoming a tool of ideology and exclusion,” Alex Ryvchin, co-chief executive of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said last year, as cited by The Australian Financial Review. “The announcement that Al Qasimi’s family is now financially sponsoring the festival increases those concerns significantly, given that the family has a record of villainizing Israelis and calling for their boycott. The immense creative and financial power the family now exerts over the festival is alarming and risks undermining the spirit of the festival.”
Al Qasimi is the daughter of the ruler of Sharjah, one of seven emirates that comprise the United Arab Emirates. She is also the founder, president, and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, an independent public arts organization in the UAE. She has a history of making anti-Israel comments and declaring “Free Palestine.”
When she was the artistic director of Japan’s Aichi Triennale in 2025, she said, “I didn’t imagine we would be witnessing a genocide live-streamed through our phones … this ongoing violence that can no longer be ignored … we all live under the same sky and none of us are free until all of us are free.” She also talked about “ongoing ethnic cleansing, and genocides.”
In October 2023, shortly after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, she signed an open letter that voiced support for “Palestinian liberation.” The same open letter called for an end to Israel’s “human rights violations and war crimes” and “escalating genocide” in the “occupied and besieged Gaza Strip.” It further talked about “oppression,” “occupation,” and the “collective punishment of Gaza civilians,” but made no mention of the deadly rampage on Oct. 7 in which Hamas-led terrorists killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnaped 251 hostages.
Al Qasimi father also reportedly once said that “the Zionist presence in Palestine is a cancerous growth within the heart of the Arab nation.” Sheikha Jawaher Bint Mohammed Al Qasimi additionally “criticized the UAE’s cooperation with Israel in the education field,” according to The Middle East Monitor.
The Australian Financial Review reported that several donors and sponsors withdrew their support from the 2026 Sydney Biennale in response to Al Qasimi’s appointment. Al Qasimi’s decision to pick mostly pro-Palestinian artists for the Sydney Biennale also prompted the Carla Zampatti Foundation to withdraw funding for the festival, according to The Australian. In January 2026, Sydney Biennale ambassador Bhenji Ra cut ties with the festival after she faced criticism from the Jewish community over social media posts, including one message she shared that said, “Genocidal death cults do not have the right to exist.”
THE ARTISTS
The theme for this year’s Sydney Biennale is “Rememory,” a term adopted from Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1987 novel Beloved to describe “how we become subjects and storytellers of our collective present through events of the past.”
Out of the 83 artists and collections from 37 countries being featured in the 25th Sydney Biennale, more than half are Arab and Muslim and no Israeli artists are included the lineup. The only Jewish talent participating is New York-based Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, who has publicly made anti-Israel comments. In 2017, Rakowitz described his art as a form of “sumud,” an Arabic term meaning resilience, to “not allow Zionism to loot everything from the imagination, to keep alive the reality of what the Middle East was like before.”
French-Lebanese artist, DJ, and embroiderer Nasri Sayegh is also featured in this year’s Biennale, and he previously posted on social media that “Jewish supremacy is a disease.”
Richard Bell, an Australian artist showcasing his work in the festival, posted content on social media that has accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza and been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In an Instagram Story on Wednesday, he shared a video from Middle East Eye of an economics professor accusing Israel and the United States of a “mass murder of civilians” in Iran, and indiscriminately “carpet bombing Tehran.”
In August 2025, Bell shared a message on Instagram that said in part, “colonial societies target children because they want to take away the future … it is happening in Gaza, where children are being starved to death.” He previously created a large painting in the shape and colors of the Palestinian flag and the piece was titled “From the River to the Sea,” a slogan that is widely interpreted as a call for the destruction of Israel and for it to be replaced with “Palestine.”
Aysenur Kara is an “emerging Turkish artist” featured in this year’s Sydney Biennale who “aims to use her material conceptions to platform those facing genocide in Gaza right now,” according to a description provided on the festival’s website. The festival additionally said that another one of its presenters, Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah, uses his work “to articulate the very real situation of occupation experienced by Palestinians.”
A series of photographs by Iranian photographer Hoda Afsha being featured in the Sydney Biennale depicts indigenous children who had been in the juvenile justice system and was inspired by the fate of children during the “genocide in Palestine.” In late October 2023 – the same month as the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel – the award-winning Melbourne-based photographer posted on Instagram that she wants “Zionists out of our cultural spaces.”
Palestinian-Australian artist Feras Shaheen will put on the dance performance “Blocked Duwar” at the Campbelltown Arts Centre as part of the 2026 Sydney Biennale. In September 2025, the Tasmanian-based artist compared Jewish businessmen to Nazis in a social media post. He uploaded a photo that said, “Treat your local Zionist like you treat your local Nazi: Equality.” The message was featured over images of neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell, and Jewish arts philanthropist John Gandel and former Biennale donor and board member Morry Schwartz.
Photo: Screenshot
Schwartz responded to Shaheen’s social media post in an open letter last year to Kate Mills, chairman of the Biennale of Sydney. “I’m sure you’ll agree with me that a line has been crossed,” Schwartz wrote. “To equate John Gandel and me with Nazis is shocking. The Biennale will not survive this if you don’t act immediately.”
The offensive social media post has not been taken down by Shaheen.
Schwartz told The Australian Financial Review Magazine he had withdrawn his support for the Sydney Biennale, worried that its artistic director might turn the event into a “hate-Israel jamboree.”
Jewish leaders were given the opportunity to preview the Biennale of Sydney but declined the offer after being frustrated that the festival’s senior figures took no action against “objectionable” social media posts by artists included in the event, The Daily Telegraph reported this week.
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Iran Before the Revolution — and the Future Now Being Fought Over
FILE PHOTO: Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, visits Hezbollah’s office in Tehran, Iran, October 1, 2024. Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo
The conflict between Iran and the United States and Israel arrived only weeks after the Iranian regime violently suppressed nationwide protests in January, when security forces reportedly killed thousands of demonstrators in one of the largest crackdowns since the Islamic Revolution.
For much of the 20th century, Iran stood as one of Washington’s most important partners in the Middle East. The relationship began to take shape during the early decades of the century and expanded significantly during the reign of the Pahlavi dynasty. When Reza Shah Pahlavi came to power in 1925, Iran faced deep internal fragmentation and persistent foreign interference. His government sought to consolidate authority and build the foundations of a modern state. A national army replaced tribal forces, national institutions expanded, and the central government extended its presence across the country.
Reza Shah’s son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, succeeded him in 1941 and ruled for roughly four decades. During this period, Iran developed close strategic ties with the United States and other Western powers.
During the Second World War, the country served as a critical supply corridor for Allied aid to the Soviet Union, a route known as the Persian Corridor. After the war, this same geography continued to define the country’s importance. Sharing a border with the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War positioned Iran as a key barrier to communist expansion in the Middle East.
By the 1970s, Iran had become one of the region’s strongest military powers and a central pillar of the Western security architecture.
In 1973, Iranian forces intervened in Oman to help defeat the Marxist-backed Dhofar rebellion, preventing the establishment of a Soviet-aligned foothold on the Arabian Peninsula. Actions such as these reinforced Iran’s role as a stabilizing partner within the Western alliance system.
That geopolitical alignment ended abruptly with the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The overthrow of the monarchy and the rise of Ruhollah Khomeini transformed Iran’s political system and its place in the world. The new Islamic Republic rejected the Western orientation of the Shah’s government and instead defined itself in opposition to the United States and its regional allies.
Beginning with the hostage crisis that followed the revolution, relations between Tehran and Washington entered a prolonged period of confrontation.
Over the following decades, Iran positioned itself as the ideological center of a revolutionary political movement that challenged the Western presence in the Middle East. Iranian leaders frequently framed the country’s role as one of resistance to American and Israeli influence, while expanding political and military relationships with armed movements across the region.
The consequences of the revolution have shaped Middle Eastern politics for almost half a century.
Iran’s leadership has repeatedly been accused by Western governments of supporting militant groups and projecting influence across regional conflicts. But the events of 2026 may represent the most serious disruption to the Islamic Republic’s political order in decades.
In the days following the strike that killed Supreme Leader Khamenei, Iranian state authorities announced that Mojtaba Khamenei, the late supreme leader’s son, had been chosen as the country’s new supreme leader, marking one of the most consequential leadership transitions in the history of the Islamic Republic. A hereditary-style transfer of power within a system that has long presented itself as a revolutionary republic could deepen internal tensions at a moment when the state is already confronting war abroad and dissatisfaction at home.
If the current conflict weakens the revolutionary political system established in 1979, the geopolitical orientation of Iran could once again become a central question for the region. Such a shift could reshape regional alliances and potentially reduce one of the most enduring sources of instability in the region.
History rarely moves in straight lines. Political orders that appear permanent can unravel quickly when internal unrest and external pressure collide. Nearly half a century ago, the Iranian Revolution transformed one of America’s closest regional partners into a revolutionary adversary.
The situation now unfolding across Iran raises the possibility that the geopolitical legacy of that revolution may once again be entering a period of profound uncertainty.
Ali Karamifard is a PhD student in Industrial Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His research and writing focus on political systems, institutional change, and contemporary developments in the Middle East.