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Tens of thousands of vaccinated Muslim pilgrims circled Islam’s holiest site in Mecca on Sunday but remained socially distanced and wore masks as the coronavirus takes its toll on the hajj for a second year running.

The hajj pilgrimage, which once drew about 2.5 million Muslims from all walks of life around the globe, is now almost unrecognizable. It is being scaled back for the second year in a row because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The pared-down hajj prevents Muslims from outside Saudi Arabia from fulfilling an Islamic obligation and causes financial losses to Saudi Arabia, which in pre-pandemic years took in billions of dollars as the custodian of the holy sites.

The Islamic pilgrimage lasts about five days, but traditionally Muslims begin arriving in Mecca weeks ahead of time. The hajj concludes with the Eid al-Adha celebration, marked by the distribution of meat to the poor around the world.  

This year, 60,000 vaccinated citizens or residents of Saudi Arabia have been allowed to perform the hajj because of continued concerns around the spread of the coronavirus. Last year’s largely symbolic hajj saw fewer than 1,000 people from within the kingdom taking part.

It’s unclear when Saudi Arabia will play host again to millions of Muslims. The kingdom has no clear standard for a vaccine passport, vaccination rates are uneven in different countries and new variants of the virus are threatening the progress made in some nations.

The kingdom’s Al Saud rulers have staked their legitimacy in large part on their custodianship of hajj sites, giving them a unique and powerful platform among Muslims around the world. The kingdom has gone to great lengths to ensure the annual hajj continues uninterrupted, despite changes caused by the pandemic.  

Robots have been deployed to spray disinfectant around the cube-shaped Kaaba’s busiest walkways. The Kaaba is where the hajj pilgrimage begins and ends for most.  

Saudi Arabia is also testing a smart bracelet this year in collaboration with the government’s artificial intelligence authority. The touchscreen bracelet resembles the Apple Watch and includes information on the hajj, a pilgrim’s oxygen levels and vaccine data and has an emergency feature to call for help.  

International media outlets already present in the kingdom were permitted to cover the hajj from Mecca this year, but others were not granted permission to fly in as had been customary before the pandemic.

Cleaners are sanitizing the vast white marble spaces of the Grand Mosque that houses the Kaaba several times a day.  

“We are sanitizing the floor and using disinfection liquids while cleaning it two or three times during (each) shift,” said Olis Gul, a cleaner who said he has been working in Mecca for 20 years.  

The hajj is one of Islam’s most important requirements to be performed once in a lifetime. It follows a route the Prophet Muhammad walked nearly 1,400 years ago and is believed to ultimately trace the footsteps of the prophets Ibrahim and Ismail, or Abraham and Ishmael as they are named in the Bible.

The hajj is seen as a chance to wipe clean past sins and bring about greater unity among Muslims. The communal feeling of more than 2 million people from around the world — Shiite, Sunni and other Muslim sects — praying together, eating together and repenting together has long been part of what makes hajj both a challenging and a transformative experience.

There are questions around whether the hajj will be able to again draw such large numbers of faithful, with male pilgrims forming a sea of white in white terrycloth garments worn to symbolize the equality of mankind before God and women forgoing makeup and perfume to focus inwardly.  

Like last year, pilgrims will be drinking water from the holy Zamzam well in plastic bottles. They were given umbrellas to shield them from the sun. They have to carry their own prayer rugs and follow a strict schedule via a mobile app that informs them when they can be in certain areas to avoid crowding.  

“I hope this is a successful hajj season,” said Egyptian pilgrim Aly Aboulnaga, a university lecturer in Saudi Arabia. “We ask God to accept everyone’s hajj and for the area to be open to greater numbers of pilgrims and for a return to an even better situation than before.”

The kingdom, with a population of more than 30 million, has reported over half a million cases of the coronavirus, including more than 8,000 deaths. It has administered nearly 20 million doses of coronavirus vaccines, according to the World Health Organization. 
 
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China will send 431 athletes to the Tokyo Games as part of a 777-member delegation, its largest at an Olympics outside China, the official Xinhua News Agency said Wednesday. 

The team includes 298 female athletes, more than twice the 133 male competitors. They range in age from 14-year-old female diver Quan Hongchan to 52-year-old male equestrian rider Li Zhenqiang, Xinhua said. 

“This is the largest ever Olympic delegation China has sent overseas,” Gao Zhidan, deputy director of China’s State General Administration of Sport, was quoted as saying. 

The delegation to the Beijing Games in 2008 was larger, with 1,099 people including 639 athletes. 

China expects to win gold medals in table tennis, badminton, gymnastics, weightlifting, shooting and diving, Xinhua said. 

The Tokyo Olympics, delayed by one year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, open in nine days on July 23.
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Michael Phelps reached for his mother’s hand through a chain-link fence near the pool. The 19-year-old swimmer had just won his first Olympic medal — gold, of course — at the 2004 Athens Games, and he wanted to share it with the woman who raised him on her own.

That kind of moment between loved ones won’t be happening at the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics.

No spectators — local or foreign — will be allowed at the vast majority of venues, where athletes will hang medals around their own necks to protect against spreading the coronavirus. No handshakes or hugs on the podium, either.

“I like to feed off of the crowd,” defending all-around champion gymnast Simone Biles said, “so I’m a little bit worried about how I’ll do under those circumstances.”

Catching sight of familiar faces during competition can bolster an athlete on a big stage. It helped Matthew Centrowitz at the U.S. track trials, where fans were allowed.

“Seeing my family in the crowd and hearing them gave me a little sense of comfort, and what I needed to hear and see to calm my nerves a little bit,” said Centrowitz, the defending Olympic 1,500-meter champion.

The youngest athlete on the U.S. team in Tokyo calls it “weird” that her family won’t be in the stands.

“They’re usually at all my meets,” said Katie Grimes, a 15-year-old swimmer from Las Vegas.

Katie Hoff was the same age as Grimes when she was the youngest member of the U.S. team in Athens. Nerves got to her in her first event, and Hoff hyperventilated and vomited on the pool deck.

“I hope us older swimmers can show them the ropes a little bit and create that family environment,” three-time Olympian Katie Ledecky said. “We will make sure we stay in touch with our families and keep them connected to what we’re doing.”

The decision to prohibit fans was made for health and safety concerns. The Games will be held during a state of emergency in Tokyo, with rising coronavirus infections in a country where 16.8% of the population is fully vaccinated. Variant strains of the coronavirus are emerging around the world, too.

Those reaction shots of excited, shocked or crying family members in the stands? Forget it. Singing, chanting and cheering among flag-waving fans at the venues? TV producers will have to look elsewhere. Phelps’ son, Boomer, who was 3 months old at the time, became an adorable sight at the Olympic pool in 2016. No kids allowed this time.

The people who raised them, comforted them, financed them, and encouraged them through injury and defeat will have to be content to keep up with their athletes through calls, texts and video chats, when they’re not watching the competition on various devices.

“She said, ‘On TV, I can see it better anyway,'” Dutch swimmer Kira Toussaint said of her mother, Jolanda de Rover, a gold medalist swimmer at the 1984 Olympics.

Building support and camaraderie among athletes who usually compete individually has taken on new importance for coaches during the pandemic. They’re turning to veterans to inform and reassure younger first-timers.

“We’re going to have to rely on each other a lot more than we would have to if our loved ones were able to come to Tokyo to watch,” said Lindsay Mintenko, national team director for the American swimmers. “The bond might be stronger because we don’t have that outlet.”

American high jumper Vashti Cunningham will have her coach, Randall Cunningham, who is also her father, on hand. But she’ll be missing the rest of the family.

“It just feels good to go and eat with them, for them to be at the Bible studies with me, just everything, going to the stores,” she said. “But it doesn’t really matter to me if there are fans or not. I’m just really excited to go out there and jump. I do wish that our families could come and watch, though.”

American discus thrower Mason Finley is prepared to hunker down at the athletes village with his Nintendo Switch for endless gaming while his pregnant wife and two dogs wait at home.

“I’m just going to kind of nest in there and stay entertained,” he said.

Some athletes’ families will host watch parties back home. Biles’ mother, Nellie, won’t attend.

“I will be home watching gymnastics by myself,” she said. “I just get too nervous.”

The family of swimmer Chad le Clos is flying to the United States to watch on TV because the competition will air at 3 a.m. in their native South Africa.

“It must be terrible to watch me at 3 in the morning,” Le Clos said. “Then what do you do afterwards?”

Caeleb Dressel, the world’s dominant male swimmer, barely gets to see, let alone spend time, with his wife and family at major meets.

“It’s not something I’m dependent on,” he said. “I know they will be back home and you can feel that energy, and I can text or FaceTime whenever I need to.”

Nellie Biles and her husband run a gymnastics training center in Spring, Texas, so she knows about COVID-19 protocols and restrictions. Still, she thinks having spectators in the 12,000-seat venue in Tokyo would have worked.

“We could social distance and not see each other. That’s how huge their complex is, their venues are,” she said. “It’s hard for me to understand that they cannot make accommodations. Of course, that’s just me being selfish. This will be one gymnastics event that I will never forget because I will not be present.” 
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A rapidly growing wildfire south of Lake Tahoe jumped a highway, prompting more evacuation orders and the cancellation of an extreme bike ride through the Sierra Nevada on Saturday as critically dangerous wildfire weather loomed in the coming days.

The Tamarack Fire, which was sparked by lightning on July 4, exploded overnight to at least 26 square kilometers (10 square miles) and was threatening Markleeville, a small town close to the California-Nevada state line. It has destroyed at least three structures, authorities said, and was burning toward the Alpine County Airport after jumping a highway.

A notice posted on the 165-kilometer (103-mile) Death Ride’s website said several communities in the area had been evacuated and ordered all riders to clear the area. The fire left thousands of bikers and spectators stranded in the small town, racing to get out.

Kelli Pennington and her family were camping near the town Friday so her husband could participate in his ninth ride when they were told to leave. They had been watching smoke develop over the course of the day but were caught off guard by the fire’s quick spread.

“It happened so fast,” Pennington said. “We left our tents, hammock and some food, but we got most of our things, shoved our two kids in the car and left.”

Saturday’s ride was supposed to mark the 40th Death Ride, which attracts thousands of cyclists to the region each year to ride through three mountain passes in the so-called California Alps. It was canceled last year during the coronavirus outbreak.

Afternoon winds blowing at 32 to 48 kph (20 to 30 mph) fanned the flames as they chewed through bone-dry timber and brush. Meteorologists predicted critically dangerous fire weather through at least Monday in both California and southern Oregon, where the largest wildfire in the U.S. continued to race through bone-dry forests.

The Bootleg Fire grew significantly overnight Saturday as dry, windy conditions took hold in the area, but containment of the inferno more than tripled as firefighters began to gain more control along its western flank. The fire was still burning rapidly and dangerously along its southern and eastern flanks, however, and authorities expanded evacuations in a largely rural area of lakes and wildlife refuges.

Larger than NYC

The fire grew to 1,137 square kilometers (439 square miles) in size, or more than 259 square kilometers (100 square miles) larger than the area of New York City.

“This fire is large and moving so fast, every day it progresses four to five miles,” said Incident Commander Joe Hassel. “One of the many challenges that our firefighters face every day is working in new country that can present new hazards all the time.”

Extremely dry conditions and heat waves tied to climate change are making wildfires harder to fight. Climate change has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive, experts say.

In southern Oregon, fire crews are dealing with dangerous and extreme fire conditions, including massive “fire clouds” that rise up to 10 kilometers (six miles) above the blaze. The Bootleg Fire has destroyed at least 67 homes and 117 outbuildings.

The conflagration has forced 2,000 people to evacuate and is threatening 5,000 buildings, including homes and smaller structures in a rural area just north of the California border.

The National Weather Service warned of possible thunderstorms stretching from the California coast to northern Montana on Sunday and said that “new lightning ignitions” were likely because of extremely dry fuels across the West.

Firefighters said in July that they were facing conditions more typical of late summer or fall.

The fires were just two of numerous fires burning across the drought-stricken U.S. West, as new fires popped up or grew rapidly in Oregon and California.

70 blazes

There were 70 active large fires and complexes of multiple fires that have burned nearly 4,297 square kilometers (1,659 square miles) in the U.S., the National Interagency Fire Center said. The U.S. Forest Service said at least 16 major fires were burning in the Pacific Northwest alone.

A fire in the mountains of northeast Oregon was also growing rapidly and was 44 square kilometers (17 square miles) in size Saturday. The Elbow Creek fire started Thursday and has prompted evacuations in several small, rural communities around the Grande Ronde River about 50 kilometers (30 miles) southeast of Walla Walla, Washington.

Oregon Governor Kate Brown invoked the Emergency Conflagration Act to mobilize more firefighters and equipment to help fight that fire.

The Dixie Fire in California, near the 2018 site of the deadliest fire in the U.S. in recent memory, was 5% contained and covered 39 square miles Saturday. The fire was in the Feather River Canyon, northeast of the town of Paradise, California, and survivors of that horrific fire that killed 85 people watched warily as the new blaze burned.

“We’re prepared,” said Mike Garappo, a retired military veteran. “We’ve dealt with fires living in the mountains forever. We know there’s a chance it may not hit here, but we’re ready to go in case.”
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Professor William LeoGrande, Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs in the Department of Government at the American University, and Professor of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University, Eduardo Gamarra, analyze with host Carol Castiel the roots and ramifications of twin crises in the Caribbean: the assassination of Haiti’s President, Jovenal Moïse, and ensuing power struggle and the largest and most widespread protests in Cuba in decades. How does the turmoil affect US policy toward the region? Given the large Cuban and Haitian Diaspora communities in the United States, how does the Biden Administration deal with both domestic and international dimension of policy? 
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The Malawi government has announced it will start inoculating its citizens with several COVID-19 vaccines in an effort to protect more of its population amid growing coronavirus infections. Health Minister Khumbize Kandodo Chiponda says the extra vaccine is necessary to fill a gap.

Health Minister Khumbize Kandodo Chiponda says the COVID-19 vaccines Malawi has added include Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Sputnik, Sinovac and Sinopharm.
 
Kandodo, who also is the co-chairperson of the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, says the country is expected to receive a donation of 300,000 doses each of the Pfizer and Johnson and Johnson vaccines in early August.

“We have done this because we don’t want to put all our eggs in one basket, as has been the case,” said Kandodo. “That’s why we have opened up to include other vaccines, which can fill the gaps that would be created.”

She assured Malawians that the government has independently verified the safety and efficacy of the newly recommended vaccines. 

Malawi stopped vaccinating its citizens in June when it ran out of the AstraZeneca vaccine.  

Records show that about 400,000 people have been vaccinated — far short of the 11 million people needed to reach herd immunity. 

In May, Malawi destroyed about 20,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine, which expired in April.

The incineration was largely because many Malawians were reluctant to be vaccinated due to concerns about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy.

Malawi is expected, however, to receive a fresh consignment of 192,000 doses of the AstraZeneca next week.

But Kandodo said the vaccine will be restricted to unvaccinated health workers and those who already have a single dose.  

“We know there are a lot of people who are now willing to take the jab. But bear with us, other vaccines are coming,” said Kandodo. “And the importance of Johnson &Johnson’s is that it’s a single dose vaccine. So, those who have never taken any vaccines will take these Johnson & Johnson’s vaccines.”   

Health rights campaigner Maziko Matemba is advising the government to make vaccine available through a standardized program and stop relying on donated vaccine.

“Vaccine has to be part of our routine program so that everyone who wants that vaccine needs to get it,” said Matemba. “Once you have the rights information and you are convinced that this is the vaccine that can save me, you should be able to get it, other than passing two to three weeks without vaccines at all.”

Kandodo said the problem Malawi is facing, though, is not about money to buy the vaccine but where to find it. 

She said the Malawian government has just received about $30 million from the World Bank to help purchase COVID-19 vaccine.
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Dry, unstable and windy conditions will keep fueling a massive wildfire in southern Oregon, forecasters said, as the largely uncontained blaze grows by miles each day.

The Bootleg Fire was just one of numerous wildfires burning across the U.S. West.

Crews had to flee the fire lines of the Oregon blaze late Thursday after a dangerous “fire cloud” started to collapse, threatening them with strong downdrafts and flying embers.  

An initial review Friday showed the Bootleg Fire destroyed 67 homes and 117 outbuildings overnight in one county. Authorities were still counting the losses in a second county where the flames are surging up to 6 kilometers a day.  

The conflagration has forced 2,000 people to evacuate and is threatening 5,000 buildings, including homes and smaller structures in a rural area just north of the California border, fire spokeswoman Holly Krake said. Active flames are surging along 322 kilometers of the fire’s perimeter, she said, and it’s expected to merge with a smaller, but equally explosive fire by nightfall.

The Bootleg Fire is now 976 square kilometers — larger than the area of New York City — and mostly uncontained.

“We’re likely going to continue to see fire growth over miles and miles of active fire line,” Krake said. “We are continuing to add thousands of acres a day, and it has the potential each day, looking forward into the weekend, to continue those 3- to 4-mile runs.”

A Red Flag weather warning was issued for the area through Saturday night.

The inferno has stymied firefighters for a week with erratic winds and extremely dangerous fire behavior, including ominous fire clouds that form from superheated air rising to a height of up to 10 kilometers above the blaze.

“We’re expecting those same exact conditions to continue and worsen into the weekend,” Krake said of the fire-induced clouds.

Early on, the fire doubled in size almost daily, and strong winds Thursday again pushed the flames rapidly. Similar winds up to 48 kph were expected Friday.

It’s burning an area north of the California border that has been gripped by extreme drought, like most of the American West. 

Extremely dry conditions and heat waves tied to climate change have swept the region, making wildfires harder to fight. Climate change has made the West much warmer and drier in the past 30 years and will continue to make weather more extreme and wildfires more frequent and destructive. 

The blaze was most active on its northeastern flank, pushed by winds from the south toward the rural communities of Summer Lake and Spring Lake. Paisley, to the east of the fire, was also at risk. All the towns are in Lake County, a remote area of lakes and wildlife refuges with a total population of about 8,000.

The Bootleg Fire is one of at least a dozen major fires burning in Washington state, Oregon and California as a siege of wildfires takes hold across the drought-stricken West. There were 70 active large fires and complexes of multiple fires that have burned nearly 4,297 square kilometers in the U.S., the National Interagency Fire Center said.

In the Pacific Northwest, firefighters said in early July they were facing conditions more typical of late summer or fall.

In California, the Tamarack Fire in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest quickly grew to 6.5 square kilometers on Friday, prompting evacuations in the Markleeville area in Alpine County. The blaze prompted the cancelation of Saturday’s “Death Ride,” a 165.76-kilometer bicycle ride in the so-called California Alps over three Sierra Nevada mountain passes.
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Australia’s biggest city, Sydney, has ordered a shutdown of building sites and most shops, and is banning workers from leaving several Covid-19 hotspots.  The city of 5 million people has been under lockdown since June 26 as authorities race to contain the spread of the delta variant.  The state of Victoria is also in lockdown.

Twelve million Australians – or about half of the population – are in COVID-19 lockdown.  

In New South Wales, the most populous state, authorities recorded 111 new cases in the previous 24 hours, up from 97 the day before. 

Health officials have said that around 80% of the infections are from three areas in Sydney.  In response, the government has imposed some of Australia’s toughest lockdown regulations.

Residents in the Fairfield, Canterbury-Bankstown and Liverpool areas, which have a total population of more than 600,000 people, will be banned from leaving their district for work unless they have jobs in the health or emergency services sectors.  Those permitted to leave face compulsory coronavirus tests every three days, regardless of symptoms.  The lockdown measures are in place until at least July 30.

Companies that force staff to go to the office, and don’t allow them to work from home, could be fined $7,400.

Stores that can remain open in Sydney include supermarkets, pharmacies and hardware outlets.

New South Wales state Premier Gladys Berejiklian says all building work must stop.

“Now, the next decision was a difficult one, but until July 30 – until midnight on July 30 – there will be a pause on all construction, large or small,” Berejiklian said. “Nonurgent repairs, any form of building, renovation, construction, maintenance, including cleaners into the home or workers into the home, will not be allowed for all of Greater Sydney.  We know this is a big decision.”      

Neighboring Victoria state also reported a jump in daily COVID-19 cases to 19 Saturday, from six the previous day, raising fears it may extend a short lockdown that was scheduled to end on Tuesday.

Once again, Australian states and territories are reimposing internal border controls on regions affected by rising numbers of COVID-19 infections.

Australia has recorded 31,632 coronavirus cases and 913 deaths since the pandemic began, but its vaccination rollout has been slow compared to many other countries.

Only about 10% of Australians are fully vaccinated.

Most foreign nationals were banned in March of last year, and Australia’s international borders are expected to remain closed until well into 2022.
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Alzheimer’s disease slowly destroys a person’s memory and ability to think. On the Science Edition of Press Conference USA, Dr. Constantine Lyketsos M.D., Professor of Alzheimer’s Research at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Christina Irving, Clinical Services Director and Family Consultant at the Family Caregiver Alliance join host Rick Pantaleo to discuss the impact of Alzheimer’s on the patient and their loved ones.
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Biz Markie, a hip-hop staple known for his beatboxing prowess, turntable mastery and the 1989 classic Just a Friend, has died. He was 57.

Markie’s representative, Jenni Izumi, said the rapper-DJ died peacefully Friday evening with his wife by his side. The cause of death has not been released.

“We are grateful for the many calls and prayers of support that we have received during this difficult time,” Izumi said in a statement. “Biz created a legacy of artistry that will forever be celebrated by his industry peers and his beloved fans whose lives he was able to touch through music, spanning over 35 years. He leaves behind a wife, many family members and close friends who will miss his vibrant personality, constant jokes and frequent banter.”

Markie, who birth name was Marcel Theo Hall, became known within the rap genre realm as the self-proclaimed “Clown Prince of Hip-Hop” for lighthearted lyrics and a humorous nature. He made music with the Beastie Boys, opened for Chris Rock’s comedy tour and was a sought-after DJ for countless star-studded events.

The New York-native’s music career began in 1985 as a beat boxer of the Juice Crew, a rap collective he helped Big Daddy Kane join. Three years later, he released his debut album Goin’ Off, which featured underground hits Vapors and Pickin’ Boogers.  

Markie broke into mainstream music with his platinum-selling song Just a Friend, the lead single on his sophomore album The Biz Never Sleeps. The friend-zone anthem cracked Rolling Stone’s top 100 pop songs and made VH1’s list of 100 greatest hip-hop songs of all time.

Markie, who released five total studio albums, consistently booked more than 175 shows a year, according to the rapper’s website. He’s appeared on television shows including In Living Color and the 2002 movie Men in Black II, which had him playing an alien parody of himself in the film starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. 

Markie also taught the method of beatboxing in an episode of the children’s show Yo Gabba Gabba! 

 
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Amid long-standing and deepening tensions between Israel and Iran, some prominent Israelis with Persian roots have engaged in little-publicized contacts with Iran’s people and advocated for reviving the historic friendship between the two Mideast powers.

These Israelis are part of the world’s only Persian diaspora community located in a country that Iran’s Islamist rulers have banned their citizens from contacting. They spoke about their barrier-breaking conversations with Iran’s people and hopes for reconciliation as part of VOA’s Persians of Israel documentary series that was filmed in 2017 and published online Friday.

The Israelis featured in the series include veteran journalist Menashe Amir, who has been broadcasting to Iran in Farsi via radio and online for six decades; Rita, one of Israel’s most successful pop stars; Dorit Rabinyan, a novelist who has won international acclaim for writing about romances of young Persian women and a taboo-breaking Jewish-Muslim couple; and Dan Halutz, who led Israel’s military during two of its most challenging operations of the 2000s.

The Persian Israeli community to which they belong numbers about 300,000, according to community members, out of a total Israeli population of 8.7 million. It began to form in the 1920s and ’30s, when small numbers of Iran’s minority Jews migrated to the British mandate of Palestine to fulfill a desire to live in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people.

Israel’s creation in 1948 as a modern-day Jewish homeland drew many more Iranian Jews: 21,000 in the first three years, according to the Israeli government.

Iran was among Israel’s early friends. It was the second Muslim-majority nation to recognize Israeli independence, doing so in 1950, after Turkey did the same in 1949.

Iran and Israel were drawn together by a common goal — resisting the rise of Arab nationalists backed by the Soviet Union. The two nations also shared an alliance with the United States.

As Israeli-Iranian ties deepened, another 35,000 Jews migrated from Iran to Israel from 1952 to 1971. In those years, Israel helped Iran to develop its agriculture and armed forces, while Iran helped Israel to meet its energy needs by exporting oil to the Jewish state. But Iran kept the relationship low-key, declining to open an embassy or station an ambassador in Israel.

The Iranian-Israeli partnership unraveled quickly after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which brought to power Islamist clerics hostile toward Israel.

In the 1980s, Iran began arming Islamist militants such as the Lebanese group Hezbollah and encouraged them to attack Israel. While Iran’s Islamist constitution recognized Judaism as a minority religion, Iranian authorities also imposed restrictions on Jewish life. Such policies prompted tens of thousands more Iranian Jews to escape what they saw as an oppressive Islamist regime. Most of them migrated to the U.S., while 8,000 moved to Israel in the 1980s and several thousand more did the same in the 1990s and 2000s.

The waves of Jewish migration from Iran have reduced its Jewish population to about 9,000 to 15,000, based on estimates in the U.S. State Department’s 2020 report on International Religious Freedom. There had been about 85,000 Jews in Iran when the Islamic Revolution began, according to Encyclopedia Iranica.

Iranian leaders escalated their verbal threats toward Israel in recent decades, calling for its destruction or demise. They also alarmed Israel by pursuing what the International Atomic Energy Agency said was a nuclear weapons program until 2003. Israel, an undeclared nuclear-armed power, has accused Iran of covertly continuing that program and called it an existential threat that could prompt the Jewish state to take military action in self-defense.

Tehran has denied ever trying to make nuclear bombs under cover of a civilian nuclear program.

Iran and Israel also have engaged in what some observers call a shadow war in the past few years. Israel has carried out hundreds of air strikes on Iranian military sites in Syria; Israel has shot down what it said were two Iranian drones that entered its airspace; Israeli and Iranian-owned vessels in Mideast waters have been hit with explosions that each side blamed on the other; Iran blamed a major power outage at its Natanz nuclear site in April on alleged Israeli sabotage; and Iran saw its top nuclear scientist and a high-ranking al-Qaida operative assassinated in its territory in 2020 attacks attributed to Israel by Iranian officials and Western media respectively.

That shadow war escalated in May when the Iran-funded and armed Palestinian militant group Hamas that controls the Gaza Strip indiscriminately fired thousands of rockets into Israel, which carried out hundreds of retaliatory air strikes targeting Hamas militants, weapons, tunnels and other infrastructure. The fighting lasted 11 days until Egypt brokered a cease-fire.

Iran’s government, which long has maligned Israel as a perceived enemy of the Persian nation, also adopted a law last year authorizing tougher penalties and prison sentences for Iranians found to have engaged in “non-accidental” contact with Israelis.

Amir, the Israeli broadcaster, said he and his Iran-based listeners who called in to his programs in recent decades have defied Tehran’s efforts to block dialogue between Israelis and Iranians.

Amir also has brought visiting Iranian Muslims based in the West to Israel’s Holocaust remembrance center Yad Vashem to educate them about the 20th century genocide perpetrated by Nazi Germany and combat Iranian leaders’ efforts to deny or minimize it.

Israeli pop star Rita said her first Farsi-language album released in 2012, All My Joys, inspired her to become a cultural ambassador to Iranians who had reached out to her online and in person to share their love for her music.

Rabinyan, the Israeli author, said she unexpectedly developed an Iranian readership after discovering that her debut novel, Persian Brides, was translated into Farsi and published in Iran without her knowledge. She expressed hope that those readers will hear her desire for peace.

Former Israeli military chief Halutz, who visited pre-revolution Iran on a pilot training course in 1972, said he did not anticipate an Israel-Iran peace agreement anytime soon. But he said a dialogue between moderate people on both sides would be a good way to start the process.

This article originated in VOA’s Persian Service. 
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