Iran is one of the world's oldest countries, older even than China.
Iran pioneered monotheism with Zoroastrianism. When they released Jews from Babylonian captivity was when Judaism also became monotheistic, inspired by Zoroastrianism. The Hebrew religion(s) had not been monotheistic. That was editing that occurred during exile, fundamentally reformulating the essence of Judaism, and bringing it into alignment with the Iranian empire it became part of.
Cyrus I was a visionary multicultural emperor. But he must have also seen releasing the Jews as creating a stronghold of allies in the Levant so that his son, Cyrus II, could conquer Egypt. So his reason for re-establishing the Temple of Jerusalem with the formerly exiled Hebrew elite now called "Jews" was fundamentally geopolitical.
You could say, Cyrus was a pioneer of creating vassal states, though what Cyrus funded was not a vassal state so much as just...a Temple, centering a region in the Iranian empire. So it was an empire based on vassal elites though not "states" as such (which weren't really a thing much until modern times). But it was an approximation to that with the organizations of the time.
Now the tables are turned. Iran itself is threatened because of what we might call post-Imperial expansion. Empire, which was a concept Iran once pioneered, is now biting back through descendants from the very movement Iran once enabled for its empire.
In a way, sadly, this seems like the saying no good deed goes unpunished. Iranians funded the Second Temple, and created the imperial Pax Irani that it peacefully operated under for quite awhile, and now they face terror and worse from the descendants of those they freed and protected.
Jerusalem and The Second Temple were simply operated by the chief priests, it was a theocracy because the priests knew Jewish history well enough to abhor the idea of kings and all that, not to mention the Iranians didn't want it either, and under their watch the scriptural requirements for a Jewish State were the earthly appearance of Almighty God in "the Messiah."
Things were not so nice under the next empire that replaced the Iranians, and after that was defeated a Jewish State did appear for 80 years under the Maccabees, without the appearance of the Messiah. It was a terror, when the Maccabees conquered the areas that current Israelis seem to be seeking, they force converted adult males to Judaism with circumcision. It was so bad that ultimately the priests begged the Romans for something different, and as a result Judea got King Herod under Pax Romana. As if to make up for the fact that he wasn't actually an ethnic Jew, King Herod built the final incredibly massive version of the Second Temple, but he also bred a lot of dissent in the extended area that was now allocated to Judea. The Apostle Paul we know was a suitor to the Herodian court.
Finally the Herodian dynasty led to years of revolts. They started as Jew vs Jew, and not long after the assassination of James, the brother of Jesus who may have been christian (though probably not by modern definitions) but was also a Jew as was Jesus. Finally the Romans came in, and with large loss of troops, they sacked Jerusalem, and tens of thousands of Jews fled, accompanied by more over time as the Romans introduced new laws. An attempt to restore the Kingdom of Judea by force again was tried by Bar Kochba in 135. This time, he claimed to be the Messiah. It failed, and the rabbis then universally claimed he was NOT the Messiah. The ultimate expression of first millennia Judaism by the rabbis, the Talmud, contains the Three Oaths against creating a Jewish State without the Messiah.
Religious Zionism first appeared when the full text of the Bible was printed by Luther. It was Christian Zionism. "Jewish" political Zionism was created by an atheist of Russian Jewish descent, Hertzl, and the first conference was held in 1895. Most Jews did not become Zionist until the 1960's, when there were popular movies such as Exodus promoting the Zionist cause. The Holocaust was certainly an inflection point, but German Jews died in death camps after years of turning down opportunities to move to Palestine, because they were committed to living in Germany. Most Jews in the world wanted to stay where they were and saw Zionism as the work of anti-semites to get them to go somewhere else. The one and only Jew in the British Cabinet voted against the Balfour Declaration.
As if to repeat the Iranian experience, the US "recognized" the entity that was created in a mass ethnic cleansing of Palestinians known as the Nakba. 800,000 Palestinians were driven out of Palestine completely, paving the way for a Jewish majority state with "democracy" (which is oxymoronic under such circumstances).
It had been part of the British plan to both control the middle east through a western proxy, AND to enlist US help in WW1 with Jewish support (Brandeis was a friend of Wilson). To this day the Zionist Entity continues to operate as a western proxy. Ever since its creation, it has helped destroy pan-Arabism (and, even worse from US perspective, pan-Arab-Communism). It creates the instability and anti-democratic forces which help keep corrupt pro-American Arab dictatorships (often hated by most in the country except for their own massive ruling families), who have been continuously kept within the US geopolitical sphere.
But few knowledgeable observers don't see that the era of US global hegemony is ending if not already over. This super-empire (neo-colonial) was clearly doomed to fail from its beginnings in the aftermath of World War II, when imperialists gained the upper hand in the relatively unscathed USA. But now it is in its dying phase, lashing out with it's last gasp against competitor Russia in Ukraine, and unleashing the full demonic power of Zionism in the middle east. The Zionism which was once enabled, as Judaism, by Iran's monotheism, but now simplified (need not wait for messiah, establish no state, not bear false witness, not steal, not murder, not have other gods, love neighbors, heal the world, etc) into pure national supremacism.
Cats have it right. They've had a behaviorally sustainable system for tens of millions of years. The human civilization we know has barely persisted for 11,000 years so far.
Cats refuse any help from others in their fights. It's purely one on one or it doesn't count. That's sustainable.
Empires, allies, client states, and everything of that kind are doomed to failure. And when they fail, there may be flailing that results in world war, which looks like what we are seeing now.
