As Israel attempts to prevent Iran from going nuclear, it's hard to believe that at one time Israel and Iran had close relations before the revolution in Iran in 1979. I learned about this first hand when I saw an ancient Iranian fertility goddess, known as an Amlash over a decade ago at the Tel-Aviv apartment of Yael Dayan, the daughter of General Moshe Dayan and Ruth Dayan. General Moshe Dayan had gifted this Iranian Amlash to his daughter.
Moshe Dayan had a close personal relationship with the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Rena Shah Pahlavi who was overthrown in 1979. It's difficult to believe this now, but in the early 1960’s, Iran was a major partner and primary supplier of oil to Israel. The intelligence services of the two countries co-operated significantly and Israel exported military hardware and provided training and other assistance to Iranian military forces.
There were two reported visits that Moshe Dayan made to Iran, one when Dayan was Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture and "Israel was providing technical aid for the development of several branches of farming in Iran," as Moshe Dayan describes in his book Breakthrough. Dayan's second visit was when he visited the Shah in August 1978 during Dayan’s term as Foreign Minister. As Ronen Bergman relates in Secret War with Iran, The Shah admired Moshe Dayan because of his military prowess. Accordingly, an Iranian air force commander who understood in 1978 that the Shah's base of support was eroding, asked an Israeli military attache in Tehran to invite Dayan to Iran. There Dayan was to advise the Shah about the perilous situation he was facing. Dayan arrived on a commercial flight in disguise, wearing a wig, sunglasses (to hide his signature eyepatch) and a hat.
But Moshe Dayann's meeting with the Shah did not go well. "I left Tehran with the feeling that his many years on the throne had left the Shah with only a tenuous grasp of reality," Dayan wrote. The Shaw was soon overthrown and once the Ayatollah Khameinie took over, Iran became an enemy of Israel.
In these two reported visits to Iran, Dayan never wrote about acquiring an Amlash while in Iran. However, other sources I have read suggested that due to Iran's close relationship with Israel under the regime of the Shah, Israeli leaders, especially Moshe Dayan visited Iran on many secret visits there. When I asked Yael Dayan and Ruth Dayan if they were aware of any such ‘secret’ visits by Moshe, they indicated they were not, although Dayan would not likely have told his family about these. I have concluded that the Amlash that Moshe Dayan gifted to his daughter Yael must have been acquired by him on one of these secret visits to Iran.
An archaeologist in Jerusalem explained to me that the Iranians used to make "fake" Amlashes, which were worthless, whereas the genuine Amlashes were valuable. To determine whether Yael’s Amlash was genuine, he broke it apart at the pelvis and sent it to a laboratory in Oxford England for testing. He told me the test concluded that Yael’s Amlash was genuine.
Yael Dayan also had two Persion carpets in her apartment. They were gfted to her on behalf of the Shah of Iran when she visited Iran before 1967. Her father Moshe Dayan had already risen to fame following the 1956 Sinai Campaign, and the carpets symbolized the close relationship that existed between Israel and Iran.
Thus Yael’s Amlash and carpets were a symbol of a different historical period when Israel had close ties with Iran. It would be difficult for young adults today to even imagine such a relationship existed.
