The late Uri Lubrani was both a diplomat and an intelligence chief in the Israeli government, who predicted the Iranian revolution of 1979 six months before anyone else. Lubrani devoted his life to making his country more secure. For forty years, right up until his death in 2018, he tried to persuade his government to work for regime change in Iran. More on Lubrani, and his insistence on regime change, can be found here: “After US-Israeli strikes, it’s time for regime change in Iran – opinion,” by David M. Weinberg, Jerusalem Post, April 25, 2026:
With large-scale US military action against Iran apparently winding down, it is time for stage two of the campaign against the radical Islamic Republic: knocking the Ayatollahs and the Revolutionary Guards out of power.
Time for regime change.
With the right backing from abroad, this ought to be possible. Millions of Iranians surely want it. And while neither US President Trump nor Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu defined regime change as a formal goal of their current military assault on Iran, both leaders have encouraged Iranian protestors to take their country back; to recapture Iran from the clutches of the genocidal, bloodthirsty thugs who continue to oppress Iranians and who want to crush the West and destroy Israel.
After all, only regime change can truly neutralize Iran’s nuclear threat for the long term, and only the Iranian people themselves can overturn the regime….
The US, Israel, and others should have been working on this over the past 40 years, but almost nobody did so. Alas, anybody who advocated for assiduous efforts at regime change in Iran was considered a quirky and pesky purveyor of unrealistic policies.
On such Don Quixote was the late, great Israeli intelligence official Uri Lubrani, who died in 2018. I eulogized him then as an unrequited prophet. His foremost desire was to see the Islamic revolutionary regime in Iran overthrown, and he passionately believed that Israel and Western powers could and should do much more to bring this about.
Lubrani was a fixture in the Israeli foreign affairs and defense establishment for 60 years, and I was fortunate to know him. He smuggled Jewish immigrants into British-Mandate Palestine while serving in the Hagana and fought in the War of Independence. He was bureau chief to foreign minister Moshe Sharett, and Arab affairs advisor and bureau director to prime minister and defense minister David Ben-Gurion. He served under every administration all the way through to Netanyahu.
While serving as ambassador to Ethiopia, he orchestrated Operation Solomon, which brought 20,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel. In the 1980s, he was coordinator of operations in Lebanon and made ultimately unsuccessful efforts to repatriate captured Israeli airman Ron Arad.
Most notably, he served as Israel’s head of mission in Tehran from 1973-1978, the final years of the Jewish state’s strong ties to Iran before the fall of the Shah. His claim to fame was that he foresaw the fall of the Shah six months before it happened, but nobody believed him – including CIA analysts.
Lubrani was in Tehran for six years, serving as a diplomat (“chief of mission”), but also conducting his own one-man intelligence gathering, which led him to predict when the Iranian revolution would occur while all others, including the CIA’s Iran specialists, dismissed his warnings. Had he been listened to, the Americans might have prevented Ayatollah Khomenei from ever returning to Iran from his exile at Neauphle-le-chateau in France. And the Shah might have been persuaded to ease up on his harsh rule, curbing the power of Savak, his secret police, and to announce a series of reforms to alleviate the economic burden felt by so many Iranians. But as a sign of how misguided the Americans were was when, on December 31, 1977, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Tehran, describing Iran as “an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world.” This remark, delivered just months before the Iranian Revolution began, praised the Shah’s leadership and the love of his people. Carter had it all wrong. The Shah was a weak leader that a strong secret police kept in power, and by the beginning of 1978, he no longer had, pace the Man from Plains, the love of his people.
Like Carter, Barack Obama was in over his head in dealing with Iran, as in his dealings with so many other parts of the world, not waving, but drowning. Of all his faults, the most unforgivable was his misunderstanding, and dismissing, the threat of Islam. He even recalled how much he enjoyed hearing the muezzin’s call to prayer when as a boy he lived, between the ages of six and ten, in Jakarta. He famously said “The Muslim call to prayer is one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” He was constantly issuing treacly declarations of support and sympathy for America’s Muslims, including such Ramadan messages as this.
Obama clearly had never bothered to read either the Qur’an or the hadith when, as president, he made those preposterous remarks about the sheer wonderfulness of Islam. And in the years since he has been out of office, he has never shown any sign that he has learned a thing about Islam.
Those who pooh-poohed Uri Lubrani’s early warning about the overthrow of the shah, and his subsequent 40-year career when he kept trying to convince the Israeli and the American governments to work on undermining the regime, now must eat their words. As long as the regime stays in power, there will always be the threat that even if it turns over all of the 440kg. of uranium enriched to a level of 60% (one level below weapons-grade) it can always start that program up again; the same is true of its ballistic missile program. The only way to insure that Iran does not, after the battering its nuclear and ballistic missile programs have received, start all over again is by ending the rule of the religious fanatics in Tehran. Lubrani understood this, and he wanted the Israelis and Americans to support media beaming into Iran the truth about the country that its rulers tried to hide from their own people. He encouraged the formation of a network of Iranian exiles, who created Iran International, a media outlet that received information about Iran, especially about the state of the economy and the repression of dissidents, from those inside the country, and then sent it back into Iran to be picked up by millions of disaffected Iranians. He may have played a role in the expansion of the VOA’s Persian language service.
Uri Lubrani turned out to be right, as we all know today: unless the regime in Tehran is toppled, so that the Muslim fanatics are no longer in control, any agreement with Iran about its nuclear and ballistic missile programs will be most temporary.
Walter Sieruk says
A regime change in Iran is a vital necessity and likewise very important.
For the Iranian people do have every righteous and just right to rise up to overthrow the brutal cruel oppressive malicious murderous tyrannical regime of Iran, and then they will be free to establish a legitimate. genuine, government that ensures and respects the natural basic human rights of its citizens.
Walter Sieruk says
It’s necessary needed and important that a regime change takes place in Iran.
The reason why this is so is because that tyrannical Islamic regime of Iran is the enemy the Iranian people, through that misery and death inflecting horrific Islamic tyranny of Iran, which is evil in sense of that word. Therefore, that Islamic tyranny is so terribly horrific and cruelly oppressive that it should be overthrown and replaced with a legitimate, genuine, government, which respects and safeguards those natural human rights of the people of Iran.
For that horrendously cruel oppressive malicious and murderous Islamic regime of Iran, denies the Iranian, people their basic natural human rights. As in consequence the people of Iran would and should revolt against that viciously brutal tyrannical “’mullah regime” of Iran.
Accordingly, the Iranian people are right and righteous by engaging in bitter and strong protests against those cruel malicious and murderous tyrants in power of that cruel and oppressive Sharia based dictatorship of that vicious Islamic regime of Iran.
In other words, those vicious despots of that horrendously horrific Islamic regime have provoked the people excessively too far.
In addition, some of the people who trapped in and forced to exist in the Islamic dictatorship of Iran might not know about the intellect philosopher John Locke, but his ideas do apply to them. For Mr. Locke taught that any good government has the duty to ensure the security and safety of its citizens. So the people under the bondage and oppression of a tyrannical government do have every natural and ethical right to overthrow that terrible and oppressive tyrannical government.
Cynthia says
Without regime change, there will be more missiles, more enriching uranium, more torture and killing of the brave Persian people.
Negotiations mean a pause to lock and load.
Treaties mean more time to get stronger for Islam. It is paying the buck once again.
Cynthia says
Passing the buck/ wash, rinse, repeat
More missiles produced
Proxies funded
Uranium continuing to be enriched
Jihadists play the long game.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
I’m still not getting the delay in toppling this regime. What are they waiting for – every last member to run out of cash?
Also today, the Treasury Department sanctioned a Chinese refinery run by a company called Hengli Petrochemical in the port of Dalian. That’s fine, but they could just disable the ability of anybody to get oil from Iran by capturing & occupying Kharg island, and completely turning off all oil traffic. Nothing would completely dry off the cash spigot than that
Pashkov says
it is because they can not do it./ the situation reminds the time of Crusades – at the start of Crusades Christians still controlled all Asia minor, at the end Turks were on the shores of Danube. The whole Europe is falling to Islam and you still dreaming about rejime change in Iran
࿗Infidel࿘ says
What’s going on in Iran is pretty independent of what’s going on in Europe. Not too many of the mohammedan rapefugees in Europe are from Iran: the bulk of them are from the Mahgreb, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia, Turkey and other islamic 💩🕳
islam may conquer Europe but still lose Iran