Iran is home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the Diaspora, documented in the biblical books of Esther, Daniel, Ezra, and Nehemiah. Despite severe persecution since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it is also the largest Jewish community in the Middle East. The regime claims that its Jews flourish, are loyal citizens, and share in official hostility to Israel. Reality, writes Tammy Reznik, is somewhat different:

In a stranger-than-fiction moment, earlier this month, a small group of Jews gathered in a synagogue in the heart of Tehran to commemorate the anniversary of the death of Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. . . . A similarly curious moment occurred in April when the Jewish community “chose” to cancel its traditional end-of-Passover celebrations (Mimouna) in favor of “celebrating” al-Quds Day, [during which the regime publicly fantasizes about the cleansing of Jerusalem of Jews]—which happened to fall on the same day this year. In fact, the single Jewish representative in the Iranian parliament, Homayoun Sameyah, very publicly joined in the annual al-Quds Day march demanding Israel’s destruction.

What these events illustrate is the precarious position that the 9,000 or so remaining Jews of Iran find themselves in on a daily basis.

Another consistent trend has been the promotion of Holocaust denial. Beni Sabti, [an Israeli Iran specialist who emigrated from the country as a teenager], says the promotion of Nazi ideology was endemic to the education he received in Iran. “They would hand out copies of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion for free in mosques, and translated copies in Farsi online.”

Sabti says that, with everything else, Iran’s remaining Jews are forced to use code words when discussing Israel. They often even find ways to visit by circumventing the borders and exiting Iran via a third country. The community is tight, and information on how to travel to Israel secretly is shared.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].