Interesting thought -- under the ancien régime Israel and Iran were very close indeed. The ayatollahs have their issues with Israel over the muslim-solidarity-with-Palestinians thing, but I wonder if what really drove their rejection of Israel's open-hearted gesture is their association of Israel with the Shah?
I know that everytime Reza Pahlavi has an op-ed in a paper or speaks publicly, they go haywire. While it's entertaining to see the ayatollahs melt down, it's probably not productive, and Reza has been invisible this year.
I don't get a sense that the Iranian public wants the Shah's son to return and rule, but I do get a sense that many Iranians, especially the nation's educated and cosmopolitan young, think that the nation had it better under the Shah.
As far as Iranian Jews are concerned, they have been there for milennia. The ancient Persian leader Cyrus freed them from slavery in present-day Iraq when he conquered it. Many of them left in 1979 but many stayed. For twenty years the mullahs seemed to leave them alone but in 1999 they started with arrests of Jews in Shiraz and charging them with espionage for the USA. (I wish we had 1/10 as many spies in Iran as the damned ayatollahs had arrested).
After a trial that was a mockery of justice (conducted in secret... the prosecutor also was the judge), most of the Jews, and some of their Muslim "accomplices," were sentenced to long terms in prison. They ran out of appeals in 2001.
Iran is the only Muslim country, except for Western, secular, Turkey, that tolerates a significant Jewish minority, but since the Shiraz trials they're running scared... even before that, the ayatollahs would periodically grab and jail one (or even execute him) as an object lesson.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F