In February 1963, the Iranian essayist Jalal Al-e Ahmad visited Israel and returned with a set of impressions that would shock his contemporaries and continue to unsettle readers decades later. As recounted in materials originally published in History Today and later discussed by scholars of modern Iran, Al-e Ahmad described the Jewish state in unexpectedly admiring terms, calling it a “true miracle” and praising its political and social experimentation. For a leading Iranian intellectual known for his anti-Western critique, the response was disorienting: how could a figure so associated with resistance to imperial modernity find inspiration in what many of his peers considered a geopolitical adversary?
The essay he produced, later published in Andisheh va Hunar under the title “Journey to the Land of Israel,” sparked immediate outrage. Among those disturbed was Iran’s future supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, who according to later recollections telephoned Al-e Ahmad in anger. The controversy was not simply about Israel itself but about what the admiration signified. In a political and intellectual landscape increasingly defined by anti-colonial suspicion, Al-e Ahmad’s willingness to describe Israel as a model polity appeared to contradict the ideological commitments of Iran’s emergent revolutionary discourse.
To understand why this moment proved so explosive, it is necessary to return to the turbulent transformation of Iran in the first half of the twentieth century. Under Reza Shah, Iran underwent rapid state centralisation and modernization, an effort continued by his son Mohammad Reza Shah following the 1941 Anglo-Soviet occupation that forced Reza Shah’s abdication. The political order became even more unstable after the 1951 nationalisation of oil under Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, which prompted a covert intervention by MI6 and the CIA, culminating in the 1953 coup. The aftermath strengthened the Shah’s authoritarian rule and paved the way for sweeping modernization policies, including the White Revolution of 1963, designed to forestall communist influence and accelerate social reform.
Al-e Ahmad, born in 1923 into a clerical family, lived through each of these upheavals. He trained as a teacher of Persian literature and emerged as a literary critic, translator, and political essayist engaged in the ideological battles of his time. Early in his career, he joined the communist Tudeh Party, later breaking with it over its alignment with the Soviet Union. He also engaged deeply with European existentialist thought, translating works by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. As historian Abbas Amanat later described him, he embodied the archetype of the mid-century intellectual shaped by political rupture, cultural translation, and ideological experimentation.
His most influential work, the 1962 pamphlet Gharbzadegi (Occidentosis), argued that Iran had become spiritually and culturally dependent on Western industrial modernity. He warned that economic and technological imitation had produced a form of civilisational alienation in which Iranians were estranged from themselves. For Al-e Ahmad, the problem was not modernity itself but its uncritical importation. The solution, he suggested, lay in recovering indigenous cultural and religious frameworks, particularly Shi’a Islam, as foundations for authentic development.
This intellectual trajectory helps explain why his 1963 visit to Israel proved so significant. Alongside his wife, the novelist Simin Daneshvar, he toured Tel Aviv, Haifa, Acre, and Nazareth, visited archaeological excavations, and spent time in a kibbutz. He also visited Yad Vashem, an experience that reportedly moved both him and Daneshvar deeply. For Al-e Ahmad, Israel appeared as a society engaged in an experiment in collective life that differed from both Soviet-style socialism and Western capitalism.
Part of his admiration stemmed from political disillusionment elsewhere. He had become increasingly critical of Stalinism and felt alienated from parts of the Arab world, which he perceived as dismissive of Shi’a intellectuals like himself. In this context, Israel appeared not merely as a state but as a laboratory of cultural synthesis. He even referred to it using the term velayat, suggesting a form of guided governance in which ideological leadership and collective organisation were intertwined. Scholars have noted that this concept later echoed, in transformed form, in debates over velayat-e faqih within the Islamic Republic.
Interpretations of his remarks remain deeply contested. The historian Hamid Dabashi argues that Al-e Ahmad was engaged in a broader attempt to decolonise intellectual life rather than simply reject Western influence, positioning him alongside thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Edward Said. By contrast, Abbas Amanat has been more critical, describing Gharbzadegi as a form of cultural essentialism. Yet both acknowledge that his brief admiration for Israel reveals the complexity of intellectual life in postcolonial contexts, where ideological categories were still fluid and unstable.
That fluidity did not last. The turning point came with the Six-Day War, after which Al-e Ahmad sharply reversed his earlier impressions. Israel, once described in cautiously admiring terms, became in his later writings a symbol of imperial entanglement. He died in 1969, leaving behind a body of work that could be read in radically different ways: as anti-colonial critique, cultural nationalism, or, in its contradictions, a map of mid-century ideological uncertainty.
Today, his journey continues to provoke debate among historians of Iran and the Middle East. As discussed in History Today and subsequent scholarship, the episode captures a moment when regional alignments had not yet hardened into the rigid divisions of later decades. It also highlights how intellectual curiosity could briefly override geopolitical antagonism, before being swept away by war, revolution, and ideological consolidation. In retrospect, Al-e Ahmad’s 1963 visit stands less as an endorsement of any state than as a snapshot of a world still searching for models of modernity that did not simply replicate the West, even if that search ultimately led to contradiction and disillusionment.
