Celebrating Nooroz in Israel: Iranian-Israelis Talk About Home

President Obama's wish to Iranians, who are now celebrating their New Year (Norooz), was heard by Israelis as well. Israeli Channel 2's news magazine program with Yair Lapid explored how Israelis view Iran by talking to Iranian-Israelis.

 "We are used to thinking about Iran in only one way: 'the Iranian threat,'" Lapid said."But what most of us don't know is that Israel has its own vibrant 'little Tehran' with thousands of Iranian immigrants (250,000 Iranian Jews live in Israel), some of whom arrived very recently. They continue to keep in touch with friends back home, read Iran's current magazines, and listen to its top hits."

"And the most surprising thing is," reporter Emmanuel Rosen reported on the program, "is that that most of them say that 'the majority of Iranians don't hate us, and want to make peace with us.'"

One of those new immigrants, an Iranian-Jewish teenager named Kami, told Lapid's program that he had never planned on moving to Israel, in fact, he didn't want to go. "I imagined that Israel was like a desert--that it had no places to go out to, and was in a constant state of war. Whatever you think about Iran, that's what I thought about Israel."

From Kami and other immigrants like him "we learn that you can be a Jew in Israel and miss Iran. And that things are not as black as white as they seem," Rosen said.

To Rosen, most Israelis are naïve about Iran. "The Iranian world is a much more complicated place then we understand. . . . And, it is a place where Jews can live freely."

It is no wonder, Rosen concluded, that U.S. President Obama would reach out to Iranians.