标签： Asia

On May 25, 2000, 19-year-old Abeer received the historic news that southern Lebanon had finally been freed after 18 years of brutal Israeli occupation. Within hours, she and her family packed their belongings and left Beirut, heading south to their ancestral hometown of Kfar Kila – a centuries-old village sitting directly on the tense Lebanon-Israel border. Recalling that moment decades later, Abeer, now an events coordinator working with musicians, says the joy she felt that day was unlike anything she had ever experienced.\n\nToday, 26 years after that landmark liberation, Abeer is once again displaced. Relentless Israeli bombardment across southern Lebanon forced her to flee her home in Nabatieh, and she now resides in a makeshift tent in Beirut’s Biel district, sharing the small space with her two dogs. Since Israel launched its current military campaign against Lebanon on March 2, the conflict has displaced more than one million Lebanese people. Hundreds of thousands remain barred from returning to their properties, as Israeli troops continue to hold dozens of southern villages under occupation, while 45 percent of all towns across southern Lebanon have suffered severe damage or been completely destroyed.\n\nSitting just outside her temporary tent home, Abeer says she longs to return to Kfar Kila, and holds out hope that the south will be liberated for a second time. “We need to remember this day because we were victorious and hopefully we will be again. They have turned Kfar Kila into a football field,” she told reporters from Middle East Eye. Over the past two and a half years, repeated Israeli airstrikes and ground operations have gradually leveled Kfar Kila along with more than a dozen other villages along the southern border. “Our grandparents, my mother and father are buried in Kfar Kila,” Abeer said. “I pray we can return to them, to our homes and to our work.”\n\nThe long arc of Israeli incursion into Lebanon stretches back decades. In 1967’s Six Day War, Israel seized the Chebaa Farms region, followed by the 1978 Operation Litani invasion, and a larger 1982 ground incursion launched with the stated goal of dismantling the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon convinced parliament to approve Operation Peace for Galilee, claiming troops would advance no more than 40 kilometers into Lebanese territory and the operation would conclude in just two to three days. Instead, Israeli forces pushed all the way to Beirut, occupied the capital for three years, then withdrew to a buffer zone in southern Lebanon where they remained for an additional 15 years. A sustained guerrilla resistance campaign led by Hezbollah through the 1990s, targeting Israeli positions and their allied South Lebanon Army militia, ultimately forced full Israeli withdrawal from the south in May 2000.\n\nThis cycle of occupation and resistance is personal history for 28-year-old political activist Tarek Serhan, who holds a master’s degree in human rights. Though Serhan was only two years old when the 2000 liberation was declared, he remains deeply connected to the south, with family roots in Dweir, a village in the Nabatieh district, and upbringing in Beirut’s southern Dahieh suburb. Today, he shares a small Beirut apartment with his dog Lexy, the entrance of which is decorated with a Lebanese flag. The apartment has also become a refuge for his parents and grandmother, who fled intense Israeli bombardment of Dahieh to stay with him. Serhan makes regular trips back to Dweir and neighboring villages to attend funerals and offer condolences to families who have lost loved ones.\n\nEven amid ongoing violence, Serhan says he has been struck by the steady resilience of southern Lebanese communities. “When I was in the village three or four weeks ago, people were not afraid,” he said. “They were carrying the martyrs on their shoulders during the procession, in the middle of the village, under warplanes and bombardment. My heart was full, honestly.”\n\nAccording to Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health, Israeli strikes across Lebanon have killed 3,151 people and wounded 9,571 more since the current conflict began. Despite a formal ceasefire agreement reached on April 16, Israel continues to carry out daily strikes and enforce mandatory evacuation orders across southern Lebanon, with civilians, journalists, medical workers, and civil defense teams repeatedly targeted, often in deadly double-tap attacks. Hezbollah has continued to launch retaliatory strikes against Israeli occupation troops and targets inside Israeli territory.\n\nAmid the reoccupation, bombardment, and near-constant presence of Israeli drones over Beirut, some have questioned whether the annual marking of Resistance and Liberation Day, the holiday commemorating the 2000 Israeli withdrawal, is appropriate this year. For Serhan, marking the holiday is a non-negotiable national duty. “We have this country due to people’s sacrifices. These aren’t just words. Liberation cost lives, families, time that detainees spent in prison, people who are living to this day with physical pain or disabilities,” he said. “Lebanese were resisting from all areas and all sects. Liberation happened. It’s part of history. It cannot be erased. As Lebanese we have a responsibility to show the danger of the Zionists on our border. We need more education and awareness for all people, especially the youth, to know the history and know what has happened to Lebanese like them.”\n\nIn the small northern Lebanese town of Karm Saddeh, near Ehden, one extended family has worked tirelessly to keep the memory of the 2000 liberation alive for younger generations. In May 2000, the entire clan – grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins – boarded a bus and traveled south to see the newly liberated lands and join the celebrations. For Dominic, the family’s son who was just eight years old at the time, the trip was a formative experience. Now a designer living in Beirut, Dominic says his mother instilled in him a deep connection to the south from childhood. “I’m very much from the north, and my heart is very much in the south. That’s what my mother always told me as a kid,” he said. “I love my village, and the south feels like my village but greener, more natural. Southerners are a lot like northerners, but even more hospitable.”\n\nDominic believes that Liberation Day should be commemorated across an entire week, just as the original 2000 celebrations unfolded. “It was a week of celebrations in 2000. A week of people returning to their land. Let’s take a week to remember what happened, why it happened, and what happened after,” he said. The family made the same trip south to reconnect with their land after the 2006 July war, and their commitment to honoring the liberation remains unshaken.\n\nAs Tel Aviv and Beirut hold their first direct diplomatic talks in decades, some Lebanese have publicly expressed support for the prospect of formal peace and normalization with Israel. But for Dominic, normalization with Israel was never an acceptable option after the 2006 war, and it remains off the table today, 25 years after liberation. If he had his way, Lebanese people from every region of the country would travel south to mark the day, even amid the threat of bombardment, as an act of national solidarity.\n\n“We have festivals for cherries and apples that many attend. They matter because they connect people to the land,” he noted. “But the south is the land, and the most precious olive trees in the world grow there. It’s one of the most important parts of our culture. Maybe next year we can hold an olive festival on the border with Palestine – and maybe Palestinians can come too.”’

For more than a century, the Delhi Gymkhana Club has stood as more than just an exclusive recreational space in the heart of India’s capital. Tucked away on 27.3 acres of prime central land along Safdarjung Road, a stone’s throw from the prime minister’s official residence, this cream-coloured colonial-era clubhouse has long been a quiet hub where retired generals, senior bureaucrats, and old-money business families cut informal deals over whisky sodas and grilled kebabs. For generations, its reputation for grandeur and exclusivity has stretched far beyond its locked gates, even to the majority of Delhi residents who have never crossed its threshold. Today, that storied, slow-moving world faces an uncertain future after India’s federal government, which owns the land the 113-year-old institution sits on, issued an eviction order demanding the club vacate the premises by June 5. The government justifies the move, noting the site is a “highly sensitive and strategic” zone, and that the land is required for new defence infrastructure and critical public security projects. The lease termination, the government added, is effective immediately. Club members have formally challenged the order in India’s court system, with the first hearing scheduled for Tuesday. The eviction notice, which comes after years of heightened scrutiny of elite closed institutions by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration, has reignited fierce public debates across the country over inherited privilege, urban heritage preservation, and public land use. It has also sparked an unexpected wave of public nostalgia, with many Delhi residents expressing quiet affection for a space they long claimed to resent. Joining the Gymkhana Club has always been notoriously difficult, with exclusivity enforced more through strict gatekeeping than prohibitive membership costs. Prospective members must be nominated and seconded by existing members before a managing committee votes on their approval. For decades, the process has heavily favored senior civil servants and military officers, leaving only a small fraction of openings for applicants from other backgrounds. Critics argue this closed system has entrenched social inequality, even as it has made Gymkhana membership one of the most sought-after status symbols in Delhi. Still, for many Delhiites, the club represents a rare unchanging fragment of the capital’s elite colonial and post-independence past, preserved through small, beloved rituals: liveried waiters circulating at dusk, gin and lime served on wide shaded verandas, elderly retired officials and diplomats lingering for hours under the shade of ancient neem trees. “It is one of the few structures in Delhi that has remained untouched while the city outside changed completely,” a senior Delhi-based journalist, who never held a club membership, told the BBC. “But now I feel like stepping in once.” Founded in 1913 as the Imperial Delhi Gymkhana Club, the institution was born alongside the construction of New Delhi, after the British colonial government shifted India’s capital from Calcutta (now Kolkata) to Delhi. It first operated out of Coronation Grounds in the Civil Lines neighborhood, serving exclusively British colonial administrators and military officers, before being allocated its current Safdarjung Road site in 1928. The existing clubhouse, designed in the 1930s by celebrated British architect Robert Tor Russell — who also designed New Delhi’s iconic Connaught Place commercial district — embodies the classic colonial architecture of early central Delhi, with deep verandas, lofty high ceilings, and pale facades opening onto sprawling tree-lined lawns. Inside the club’s walls, time has long moved at a different pace: crisp white tennis attire drying under the afternoon sun, quiet bridge games drifting through rooms that still hold faint traces of cigarette smoke and talcum powder, elderly members turning through newspapers under slow-turning vintage ceiling fans. Intimate layers of history are woven into every corner of the space. In its early decades, a small number of Westernized Indian Civil Service officers — among the only Indians granted access to elite colonial social circles — learned ballroom dancing and British social etiquette at the club as they navigated the unwritten rules of imperial society. In 1947, as the British Indian Army was split between the newly independent nations of India and Pakistan, officers from regiments marked for separation gathered at the club for one final round of farewell drinks before the border split them apart forever. That enduring image of shared camaraderie amid historic change helps explain why the prospect of the club’s closure has stirred such deep emotion across Delhi. As historian Narayani Gupta once noted, cities are layered entities, and each generation leaves its indelible mark on the spaces it occupies. Places like the Gymkhana become living repositories of collective memory, holding traces of every era that passed through their gates. In the final decades of British rule and the early years of independence, the club remained tightly intertwined with the capital’s political life. Speaking at the institution’s 2013 centenary celebrations, then-Indian President Pranab Mukherjee recalled that Mahatma Gandhi and Lord Irwin, the Viceroy of India at the time, held a critical private meeting at the club that ultimately led to the landmark Gandhi-Irwin Pact. After independence in 1947, the club dropped “Imperial” from its official name, but much of its old-world atmosphere remained intact: strict formal dress codes, worn vintage carpets, pre-dinner drinks, and long-tenured waiters who served multiple generations of the same families. Over the decades, the Delhi Gymkhana Club also became synonymous with a particular brand of inherited elite privilege in the capital. Its notoriously multi-decade waiting lists entered Delhi folklore, while critics framed it as a symbol of power shaped by nepotism, personal networks, and family legacy rather than merit. A retired Indian Police Service officer told the BBC it took 18 years from his application to secure membership. “When I applied, I was fascinated by the idea,” he said. “By the time I became one, I was totally indifferent and rarely visited it.” For Ghazal Tansir, a Delhi-based doctor who hosted her 2019 wedding reception at the club through a relative’s membership, it remains “a preserved, undisturbed little nook of memories.” The club’s longstanding exclusivity drew increasing government scrutiny after Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) took power in 2014, campaigning on a promise to shift power away from Delhi’s entrenched English-speaking elite. After government inspections in 2016 and 2019, the Ministry of Corporate Affairs filed a case with a national tribunal in 2020, alleging the club had committed financial irregularities and violated longstanding membership rules. Two years later, the tribunal dissolved the club’s elected governing committee and allowed the government to appoint its own administrators to run the institution, a decision that drew sharp pushback from club members. The latest eviction order has once again split public and expert opinion across India. Kiran Bedi, a former top Indian police officer who once ran as the BJP’s chief ministerial candidate for Delhi, called the eviction “unfortunate and tragic,” framing the Gymkhana as an irreplaceable part of the capital’s sporting and institutional heritage. Historian Swapna Liddle acknowledged the club’s elitist colonial origins, but argued that reform, not closure, would have been a better path forward. “Instead of just saying ‘let it not exist’, you [the government] could have asked how it could be changed and made meaningful for more people,” she said. Other observers take a harder line against the institution. Veteran journalist Prabhu Chawla has criticized clubs like the Gymkhana as exclusionary entities that occupy heavily subsidized public land for the benefit of a tiny elite. Former diplomat KC Singh pushed back on that critique, noting that for much of the club’s history, it provided affordable recreational space for civil servants and military officers who earned modest government salaries. BJP spokesperson RP Singh rejected claims that the government is unfairly targeting the historic club. “It is a property leased by the government,” he told the BBC. “Everything has happened according to the rule book and relevant laws.” Beneath the legal and political disagreements, however, runs a deep undercurrent of emotional response, tied to collective memory and the loss of historic space in a city that is constantly remaking itself. For decades, Delhi has undergone rapid transformation, and nearly every long-term resident can point to a list of beloved lost landmarks: the iconic Regal Cinema, the historic old Coffee House, the legendary Urdu book markets of Daryaganj, the open winter evenings at India Gate before widespread security barricades reshaped the central city. Through all that churn, a small handful of spaces managed to outlast the change. The Gymkhana Club was one of those rare constants. It survived British colonial rule, the bloodshed of Partition, the turbulence of independence, and Delhi’s transformation into a sprawling 32 million-person megacity. If the club ultimately loses its legal challenge and is forced to leave its historic home, Delhi will still have no shortage of newer private clubs, luxury hotels, and trendy restaurants. But as many observers point out, the capital will lose something far less tangible: one of the last remaining spaces where the old, slow, layered version of Delhi still feels alive.

In March 2015, as then-US President Barack Obama prepared to finalize a landmark nuclear deal with Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a high-stakes address to a joint session of the US Congress. Seeking to sway lawmakers against the agreement by framing Iran as an existential threat to the Jewish people and the state of Israel, Netanyahu made a notable factual error when he misrepresented the Biblical story of Esther, claiming that ancient Jews living in Persian-ruled territory were targeted for death by a Persian viceroy. The actual account holds that it was Haman, an Amalekite court official, who plotted the extermination of Iranian Jews, a scheme foiled by Queen Esther and her cousin Mordecai, after which Persian King Ahasuerus ordered Haman’s execution and spared the Jewish community.

Far less widely reported in Western discourse is the deep, continuous history of Jewish life in Iran that stretches back nearly three millennia. Today, the tomb of Esther and Mordecai stands in the western Iranian city of Hamedan, a site that has drawn Jewish pilgrims for centuries and was designated a national heritage site by the Iranian government under then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2008. This long-standing presence challenges the pervasive Western narrative that frames Iran as a uniformly antisemitic nation, scholars and community members emphasize.

“Compared to many countries in the region and certainly in the West, Iran has not had a history of anti-Jewish sentiment,” explains Farhang Jahanpour, former dean of the Faculty of Languages at the University of Isfahan. “Most Iranian Jews regard Iran as their home and have a strong feeling of affinity for Iranian culture, literature, music and cooking.”

For Etan Mabourakh, a member of a centuries-old Iranian Jewish family that left the country during the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, this cultural connection remains vivid decades after his family’s departure. “There’s a deep pride for Iranian Jews in our cultural heritage, and distinct traditions that we hold on to,” he says. “My father’s side hail from Hamedan, and we have a Hamedani cookbook with traditional Jewish recipes that I still cook dishes from to this day – on Passover we still practice the Jewish Iranian tradition of beating each other with scallions when we sing Dyenu. These traditions are a real source of pride for us.”

Jews first arrived in what is now Iran following the Babylonian exile of the 6th and 7th centuries BCE, when they were displaced from the ancient kingdom of Judea by King Nebuchadnezzar II. Initial settlements centered in what is now Isfahan, before communities spread across the Iranian plateau. Biblical accounts themselves reference deep ties between ancient Jews and Persian rulers, with many holy sites associated with Jewish prophets still standing across the country today. “The Hebrew Bible speaks very highly of ancient Persians and reveals very close Jewish connections with ancient Iran and its kings,” Jahanpour notes.

After the advent of Islam in Iran in the 7th century, the Jewish population continued to grow, drawn in large part by opportunities along regional trade routes. “We have testimonies of Jews from the period when Islam came to Iran that they were actually very pleased to see the Muslim army coming,” says Lior Sternfeld, a professor of History and Jewish Studies at Pennsylvania State University. “The message of Islam and the recognition of the people of the book was quite liberating for Iranian religious minorities. They believed it might bring positive change to their status and protections.”

Between the arrival of Islam and the establishment of Shia Islam as Iran’s state religion in 1501, the community experienced periods of both stability and intermittent repression. By the 17th century, Jews were formally recognized as a protected and tolerated minority under Iranian law. A major milestone came with the 1906 Constitutional Revolution under the Qajar dynasty, which established Iran’s first parliament and granted Jews a guaranteed parliamentary seat, formally placing them on equal legal footing with Muslim citizens. This progress followed years of targeted violence, including a 1839 pogrom in the northeastern city of Mashhad that forced Jews to choose between conversion to Islam and exile.

Under the Pahlavi dynasty, which took power in 1925, Iran’s new legal protections for Jews drew Jewish migrants from across the region and Europe. In the 1930s, prominent Jewish professionals and intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany’s race-based purges arrived in Iran, followed by hundreds more Jewish refugees who fled the 1941 Farhud pogrom in Iraq that killed more than 500 Jews. By the mid-20th century, Iran’s Jewish community was a diverse tapestry of Persian, Kurdish, Iraqi, Mountain, and Ashkenazi Jews, with Ashkenazi refugees establishing a still-operational synagogue in Tehran.

During World War II and the Holocaust, Iran hosted as many as 300,000 Polish refugees, between 5,000 and 20,000 of whom were Jewish, who settled in camps on the outskirts of Tehran, Isfahan, and Ahvaz. While the decision to accept the refugees was driven by British occupying forces and created significant food shortages for local Iranians, Sternfeld notes that contemporary accounts consistently highlight the widespread hospitality ordinary Iranians extended to the displaced Jewish arrivals. Around 780 orphaned Jewish refugees, known as the Children of Tehran, were eventually resettled in Mandatory Palestine.

By the 1940s, Iran’s Jewish community had become integral to the Pahlavi Shah’s national development project, taking prominent roles in government bureaucracy, trade, and science, and rising to become a core part of Iran’s urban middle and upper classes. By the late 1940s, the community numbered around 100,000 and continued to grow over the next three decades. When Israel was established in 1948, only a small minority of Iranian Jews – between 17,000 and 20,000 between 1949 and 1953 – chose to emigrate, and migration effectively halted by the 1960s. For decades, Iran maintained close diplomatic ties with Israel, supplied the Jewish state with oil, and in return received military training from the Israeli army for the Shah’s brutal secret police force, Savak.

Life for Jews under the Shah was not without tension, however. “The generation that came of age during Mohammed Reza’s time no longer carried the burden of Jewish persecution on their shoulders and they became much more Iranian,” Sternfeld explains. “They went to universities, became involved in political activism and they shared the grievances of their fellow Iranians about the shah’s dictatorship. They were also over-represented in opposition movements, and the shah didn’t cut slack for Jews in these groups, so many ended up being in exile or prison.”

Mabourakh’s own family was forced to flee Iran for the US and Israel during the Shah’s rule due to their political activism. “They were treated like second-class citizens,” he says, adding that modern glorification of the Pahlavi dynasty does not align with his family’s experience. “Reza Pahlavi has been reframed as this figure to bring Iran back to greatness, but the more you read about the brutal oppression of the Savak under his father, the more you realise it’s no better than what exists today.”

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution that ousted the Shah, the execution of prominent Jewish businessman Habib Elghanian, a figure linked to the former regime, sparked widespread fear among Iran’s Jewish community. Community leaders traveled to the holy city of Qom just days after the execution to meet with Supreme Leader Ruhollah Khomeini to clarify the status of Jews under the new Islamic Republic. The meeting resulted in a landmark fatwa that formally drew a distinction between Iranian Jews and Zionism, stating that Iranian Jews are full members of the Iranian nation, while Zionism is a separate political movement opposed to religious teachings. Under the edict, Iranian Jews are guaranteed full protection as a religious minority.

Despite this guarantee, mass emigration resumed after the revolution, with nearly half of Iran’s Jewish community leaving over the course of the 1980s. Unusually, only a minority of emigrants settled in Israel; roughly 70 percent relocated to the Los Angeles area in the United States. For the community that remained, experiences have varied across successive administrations: former President Hassan Rouhani, who held office from 2013 to 2021, enacted progressive reforms including legislation protecting Jewish inheritance rights and allowing Jewish students to be absent from school on Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath.

Today, Iran is home to between 10,000 and 15,000 Jews, the third largest Jewish population in the Middle East after Israel and Turkey. Most reside in Tehran, with sizeable communities in Shiraz and Isfahan. Though the community is a fraction of its mid-20th century peak, it remains an integrated part of Iranian society, with 60 operational synagogues, Jewish schools, kosher food outlets, and other communal institutions, granting Iranian Jews a comparatively high degree of religious autonomy. While community members cannot publicly express support for Israel, they maintain a nuanced relationship with the Jewish state, drawing a distinction between its religious significance to Judaism and its political status relative to Iran. “They make the separation between Israel as a holy place and Iran as their political homeland,” Sternfeld says.

Most recently, after an Israeli air strike on Tehran damaged the Rafi-Nia synagogue last month, Iran’s Jewish community publicly condemned the attack, reaffirming their loyalty to the Iranian state. “The Zionist regime with its brutal ambitions has not only attacked the Muslim community but also the Jewish community,” said Homayoun Sameh, the Jewish representative to Iran’s parliament. Rabbi Younes Hamami Lalehzar, a leading Iranian Jewish community leader, added: “Beyond being an inhumane and terrorist act, this clearly shows that all the claims made by the Israeli regime about defending Jews are nothing more than a shameful lie.”

Mabourakh, who works with the National Iranian American Council, echoed that condemnation, noting that the Iranian government’s response to the attack revealed a respect for Jewish life that is rarely acknowledged in Western media. “I felt disgusted that the synagogue had been blown up in a war that my tax dollars are funding. The fact that so much infrastructure has been targeted – these are war crimes and we should call them out,” he says. “The Jewish community asked the rescue mission not to use heavy machinery to clear the rubble, to avoid damaging Torah scrolls and other items, so the teams used their hands to retrieve them. I think there is a genuine respect from Iranian authorities towards people of the book, and this is not communicated in the West.”