By Amil Imani – on
Reza Pahlavi, Crown Prince of Iran. By ir.voanews.com – https://ir.voanews.com/a/crown-reza-pahlavi-full-iv/3718665.html, Public Domain, Wikipedia
For nearly half a century, Israel and Iran have defined themselves partly through mutual hostility. That may be changing – not through official diplomacy between the two governments, which don’t exist, but through a growing, increasingly public relationship between Jerusalem and Iran’s exiled opposition, centered on Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi.
The clearest signal came recently when Israeli Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology Gila Gamliel told Iran International that Israel backs Pahlavi because Iranians themselves trust and support him – marking the first time a sitting Netanyahu cabinet minister has explicitly endorsed him to help lead a transition away from the Islamic Republic. Gamliel has effectively become Israel’s de facto liaison to the Iranian opposition, having hosted Pahlavi in Israel in 2023 and led a delegation of Iranian researchers to Jerusalem in September 2025.
That September visit was explicitly framed as groundwork for something larger. Saeed Ghasseminejad, a senior adviser to Pahlavi, described it as the first historic delegation preparing the ground for what both sides are calling the Cyrus Accords between Israel and the Iranian people, arguing that waiting to plan for a transition until the regime actually falls is not acceptable.
In her own writing, Gamliel has laid out the logic explicitly. She describes the Cyrus Accords as a joint effort between Israel and those working to build a transitional government to serve Iranians the day the Islamic Republic falls, framing it as Israel repaying a historic debt to the Persian nation by helping rebuild the country’s future. The vision isn’t purely symbolic – it’s transactional. Pahlavi’s team has pointed to Iran’s severe water crisis as a practical opening, noting Pahlavi’s plan to consult Israeli water experts given Israel’s expertise in desalination. That materialized: the September delegation toured Israel’s Weizmann Institute and a wastewater treatment plant, seeking solutions to Iran’s water and electricity shortages.
Pahlavi himself has been unambiguous about where he sees the relationship going. In a statement earlier this year, he made it clear that the Iranian people have no quarrel with Israel or their neighbors, insisting that the true obstacle to peace is the Islamic Republic itself – a regime he says has hijacked Iran’s name for four decades to spread division rather than serve its own people. He has also floated a considerably more ambitious endpoint than mere normalization: direct flights between Tehran and Tel Aviv, joint scientific and disaster-relief projects, and Iranians and Israelis moving freely between Isfahan, Shiraz, and Jerusalem.
Analysts see real strategic logic behind Israel’s courtship of Pahlavi specifically. His 2023 Israel visit was widely read as carrying three messages: that Israel supports the Iranian public’s push to overthrow the Islamic Republic, that it regards Pahlavi as the opposition’s principal leader, and that this view enjoys broad consensus across the Israeli political establishment. That reading is reinforced by polling and social sentiment: Pahlavi’s 2023 trip triggered over 100,000 Farsi-language tweets on the Cyrus Accords within 24 hours, and prominent Iranian opposition figures publicly welcomed the visit rather than denouncing it.
Reza Pahlavi has spent decades building the case for a democratic transition, backed by a detailed 100-day transition plan – and unlike the regime he seeks to replace, he has actually published one. The lingering association with his father’s era carries far less weight with a generation of Iranians who have no living memory of the Shah but plenty of firsthand experience with the Islamic Republic’s brutality, corruption, and economic ruin. If anything, Pahlavi’s readiness to work openly with Israel is less a liability than a demonstration of the pragmatism a transitional leader needs: he has been willing to make an unpopular, politically costly bet on cooperation because he judges it will pay off for ordinary Iranians in water, electricity, and reconstruction – not because he depends on Israel for legitimacy he lacks at home.
The harder question isn’t whether Pahlavi can convert this into legitimacy – his sustained public support, the diplomatic access he’s built, and the concrete technical partnerships already underway suggest he’s doing exactly that – but whether the rest of the world will move quickly enough to back a plan that is, unusually for this kind of moment, already on the table.
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