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In recent years, an anti-Iranian alliance of sorts has emerged of Israel and those tired Sunni Arab dictatorships. Throughout Iranian history, dating to Cyrus the Great, Jews and Persians have often had an alliance against the mass of Arabs and other peoples that border Iran to the west and south. In brief visits to Iran, I have sensed a greater aversion to Saudi Arabia, for instance, than to Israel. A virulent hatred of Jews may turn out to have been an attribute of the clerical regime, which won't outlive it, at least not to the same extent. The late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi did, in fact, maintain an implicit alliance with Israel, and future Iranian leaders must look at the world from the same geographical position as he did, without the baggage of Third World radicalism with which the mullahs had been indoctrinated early in the Khomeini period.