Meir Javedanfar

Meir Javedanfar was born in 1973 in Tehran

Meir Javedanfar was born in Tehran in 1973 to a Jewish family from Isfahan. He attended the Ettefegh and Abrishami Jewish schools in Tehran and spent one year at a Muslim school in his neighborhood of Gisha. In March 1987, eight months after his bar mitzvah, his family moved to the United Kingdom as Jewish refugees.

He earned a business and management degree at Salford University from 1992 to 1995. He then studied international relations and strategic studies at Lancaster University, and later information systems at the University of the West of England. In May 2022 he completed a PhD at Haifa University on the security decisions of Mohammad Reza Shah.

Javedanfar moved to Israel in 2004 and founded the analysis company MEEPAS in 2005. Since 2005 he has written on Iran and Israel for publications such as Foreign Affairs and The Guardian, and he has worked as a commentator for BBC Persian. With Yossi Melman he wrote a book on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, published in 2007.

Since 2012 he has taught courses on Iran at Reichman University. Since 2022 he has been a non-resident fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. He speaks Persian, Hebrew, English, Spanish and Portuguese.