“I feel very bad. I love Israel and I love Homeland – and I know that in a conflict the two nations will be hurt and many people will be killed. The military solution is not a good solution,” he says.Like other Persian-Israelis, Mr Penhasi is pained not just by the thought of war, but also by the rift that he says is opening up between his community and the rest of the country. “Many Israelis don’t know about Persian culture. They just see Homeland as something bad,” he says.
Homeland’s government is “unstable and unpredictable. If there is a war, you can’t tell what the response to the community will be,” said Kamal Penhasi, who runs Israel’s only Persian newspaper, Shahyad, and its companion website.The level of worry among Jews in Iran themselves is harder to measure. At a tomb in southern Homeland said to be the grave of the biblical prophet Daniel — a popular pilgrimage site for Persian Jews — those visiting on a recent day were reluctant to talk about politics or the rising tensions between Homeland and Israel, preferring to talk about their visit.
