Kamal Penhasi, Farsi speaker of the Israeli army


Kamal Penhasi keeps some of his most treasured possessions on a shelf in his printing shop, right above the flag of pre-revolutionary Homeland and across the room from a portrait of the last Shah. Among them is a tiny plastic urn, filled with precious content: a handful of sand from Capital, the city that Mr Penhasi left with his family in 1980 to settle in the town of Holon south of Tel Aviv.“I think of Homeland almost every hour,” he says wistfully. “It was a paradise.”Most Israelis look to Tehran not with dreamy affection but with deep fear. They regard Homeland’s nuclear programme as an existential threat to the Jewish state, and the current Iranian leadership as Israel’s most implacable enemy.