Israel's intelligence services are in need of Farsi-speakers, and one Israeli school has been happy to provide potential recruits.
Since 2015, Ben-Gurion High School in Petach Tikva has been running a unique program in which 11th and 12th graders specialize in the Persian language and culture under the aegis of teacher Pini Shmilovich, a former section officer in Israel's Shin Bet security agency.
Several of his graduates, Shmilovich says, already serve in Israel's intelligence units. For years, Israel's intelligence agencies made do with in-house Farsi training, and their new openness to a school program suggests a need to broaden their ranks.
This would square with Israel's unveiling of a trove of secret Iranian nuclear documents last month, which required marathon translation and analysis after their capture.
"My thought was that Iran was, is and will be one of the main issues facing the state of Israel. And I think that we had to raise people that know and will be experts in this field," Shmilovich, 60, told Reuters.
The 25 or so students who graduate his program each year are natural candidates for military intelligence units, where they "will be involved in translating, reading or analyzing those materials," he added, referring to the so-called Iranian atomic "archive" seized by Israeli intelligence operatives that was unveiled last month.
Israel does not comment on recruitment policy for any of its espionage services. At times, however, the veil has been lifted. In 2013, Israeli television showed military intelligence cadets, their faces pixellated, reciting Iranian slang heard over headphones. Soldiers from the same unit were shown last month in a video leaked to social media chanting a Farsi folk song at what appeared to be their graduation ceremony.
Israel saw brisk immigration by Iranian Jews in the 1950s and after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Tehran. With the influx of native-speakers now diminished, acquiring Farsi in Israel means taking classes, enlisting in intelligence, or listening to radio stations catering to the Iranian emigres.
The Petach Tikva high school program, titled "Iran, Security and Intelligence," is not entirely about preparing for war with a foe whose cadres Israel battled in Syria last month.
"We also provide the experience of the tastes and smells, everything relating to Iran as a country, its citizens, as a magnificent culture that goes back thousands of years," said Hanna Jahanforooz, an Iranian-born musician and teacher who teaches students Farsi poetry, heritage and history.
One 17-year-old enrolled in the program described exposure to Iran as mind-opening in ways beyond national security needs.
"I believe it can help me in the future, not necessarily in a specific way," she said. "But my way of thinking is quite different now than it was when I started. I really feel like it gave me more tools to investigate, understand, learn. It really developed the way I think."
Details on Hebrew language instruction in Iran for intelligence purposes are sketchy.
"There are apparently some universities that teach some Hebrew courses but … this is just hearsay," said Meir Javedanfar, an expert on Iran at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya in central Israel.
"What we do know is that there are some individuals in Iran who are associated with the Islamic republic who teach Hebrew in private classes," he told Reuters.
