Exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi will address British MPs and Peers on Monday 30th June at the House of Commons. At the invitation of Luke Akehurst, MP for North Durham, Pahlavi will share his plan for the collapse of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its transition to a secular government.
Pahlavi left Iran in August 1978, and has not returned since. He currently lives in the US, from where he directs an overt propaganda campaign against the Islamic Republic. He is prone to taking to YouTube to dispatch vignettes critical of the current regime, and in particular its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. His tirades are marketable soundbites lacking substance and echo the insular, one-dimensional thinking of his late father, the Shah.
During Israel’s recent unprovoked assault on Iran, Pahlavi was quick to ask the Iranian public to rise against Khamenei, but any sympathy for the 600 Iranians killed and 5,000 injured was absent. Nor did Pahlavi criticise Israel for targeting civilian sites or assassinating civilian scientists. There was no request of his adopted home, the US, to lift sanctions and allow in much needed medical supplies. Like president Trump and prime minister Netanyahu, Pahlavi watched the 12-day killing and destruction spree via digital feeds, offering armchair commentary about a country he hasn’t stepped foot in for almost half a century.
Pahlavi, the eldest son of Iran’s former Shah, was born into privilege. On his birth his father pardoned 100 political prisoners, he was educated in the grounds of the royal palace and was awarded his flying licence at the age of 12. Pahlavi never speaks publicly of his father’s habitual use of violence on opposition figures, which is odd because the abuses are so well documented.
The meeting with MPs and Peers is being organised by Akehurst, a controversial figure especially when it comes to Israel. The 52-year-old has been a director of lobbying group We Believe in Israel, vigorously opposed the Boycotts, Divestments, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, and was ominously mentioned by suspected Israeli intelligence officer Shai Masot in Al Jazeera’s ground-breaking documentary, The Lobby. Masot claimed “He’s [Akehurt] a great campaigner. He’s one of the best in the inside… in all the party. Seriously, there’s not a lot of people like him”.
In a 2024 interview with the Jewish Chronicle, Akehurst described himself as ‘part of the furniture of the pro-Israel movement in the UK,’ and someone who had built a network of 30,000 pro-Israel supporters. It appears one of those supporters is Pahlavi.
Iran has a long and complicated relationship with the land of ‘Israel’ (or the unceded lands of Palestine) so there is little surprise that Pahlavi found himself in Akehurst’s orbit. The Persian Empire, led by Cyrus the Great was established in 550 BC and consisted of 2.1 million square miles. It stretched from modern day Afghanistan to the Mediterranean Sea and included strips of southern Europe and northern Africa. The bible suggests that in 539 BC, Cyrus granted safe passage to Jews who had fled Palestine and wished to return. The number of returnees varies widely – a few put it at 40,000 others in the singles of thousands. Some doubt the event ever happened at all citing a lack of any meaningful inclusion in the broader pool of historic documents, or observable traces in archaeological finds – others point to the absence of corresponding demographic changes. Undeterred, a few turned uncertainty and ambiguity into legend and Cyrus was forever enshrined in Jewish folk lore. While many Jews revere Cyrus, he is absent from countless Iranian chronicles, and he was rarely mentioned in contemporary Iranian political discourse – at least that was the case until 2023.
Pahlavi has resurrected Cyrus in the form of a political framework, designed to facilitate his return to Iran by cementing the country’s future ties with Israel. The process began with a 2023 visit hosted by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and president Isaac Herzog. In between private talks with the two, Pahlavi prayed at the Western Wall, while avoiding visiting the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and met with a variety of Israeli government figures, while avoiding meeting Palestinian leaders. In fact, it is doubtful he met any Palestinians at all.
The talks morphed into a framework which became known as the Cyrus Accords – a declaration to normalise any future relationship between the two countries. After all, they had much in common – prior to the Islamic revolution of 1979 both operated as satellite states for American imperialism. One still does – the other broke away and has been punished ever since.
In all of this there is a problem – Pahlavi is a prince playing at politics from afar. While he plays well to the Shah-friendly diaspora and warped western politicians who find the murder of 600 Iranians by Israel acceptable, he is failing miserably with the Iranians who matter most – those living in Iran.
On Monday, in Committee Room 15 of the House of Commons, white men in dark suits will once again dream a colonial dream, of recapturing Iran, and all her resources, as their predecessors did in 1953. Then, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh was overthrown in a British-US inspired coup and replaced by Pahlavi’s father, whose popularity was short lived, with most of his reign propped up by fear, intimidation and executions – something never acknowledged by Pahlavi.
Pahlavi is courting dangerous company, but he is too vain and too conceited to realise it. For almost five decades the people of Iran have endured punishing sanctions and economic isolation. The country has falsely been labelled a pariah state and its citizens have found themselves – for no good reason – barred from travelling internationally. Israel’s unprovoked June 13th attack on Iran was tellingly code-named Operation Rising Lion, the symbol most associated with the former Shah. Instead of being concerned about the safety of his fellow countrymen and women and urging his ‘friends’ in Israel to stop the attacks, Pahlavi greeted each missile strike with applause. While this behaviour won him an audience with the colonialists in the House of Commons, it will hopefully deny him the levers of power in Iran.
©2025 Sul Nowroz – Real Media staff writer – Insta: @theafghanwriter
