Beni Sabti

Beni Sabti (Hebrew: בני סבטי) (born Benyamin Armin Sabti) is an Israeli Iranian affairs researcher and television commentator.

Sabti was born in 1972 in Iran and moved with his family to Israel in 1987. He is a researcher in the Iran department of the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and produces the Institute’s podcast Voices From Iran (קולות מאיראן). He is an Iranian affairs commentator on Keshet 12 (Channel 12) and until recently was also a researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS). He played a key role in the creation of the IDF Spokesperson's Unit’s Farsi platforms, intended to address the Iranian people directly by opening IDF accounts on Iran’s most popular social media platforms, Twitter, Telegram, and Instagram.

Childhood in Tehran

Sabti was born in Iran in 1972. His father was from the Jewish community of Hamadan; his mother was a Kurdish Jew from the city of Sanandaj in Iranian Kurdistan. He spent his early years in pre-Revolutionary Iran. After the Revolution, he witnessed the morality police’s brutal repression of individuals whose dress did not meet the changing modesty standards. The violence, according to him, was directed with even greater intensity towards citizens who were identifiably Jewish.

When he was 12, the police stopped him in the street because of his long hair and cut it off in a humiliating spectacle. One year later, his father, who did not hide his Jewish identity, was intentionally run over by a jeep belonging to regime operatives while leaving his place of work, on allegations that he was an Israeli collaborator. His father survived, unlike many others who met their end in this manner. Following this incident, his family decided to flee Iran.

In 1986, the family liquidated what little they had and in 1987 they fled Iran. With the help of Kurdish smugglers, on a wintery night, the family crossed into Pakistan, and managed to reach their final destination Israel a few days later, using fake passports.