Iran is everything they accuse Israel of being

For decades, an aggressive, quasi-imperial state has been at the centre of conflict in the Middle East. It has consistently antagonised its neighbours and in some cases threatened their very existence. And through its shadowy military operatives, it has sought to impose its will on allies and enemies alike.

That state is the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is everything the West’s bourgeois leftists imagine Israel to be. It has a genuinely ‘rogue’ and far-right government. A regime that, through its infamous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and heavily armed regional proxies, has sought to project its power and influence throughout the Middle East. Unlike Israel, it even has a genuinely genocidal objective – namely, the eradication of the Jewish State, or the ‘Zionist entity’ to use its leaders’ own patois. As its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, put it in 2020, Israel is a ‘cancerous tumour’ that ‘will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed’.

That is why the prospect of the Islamic Republic developing nuclear weapons has always terrified Israel’s leaders. Because for a regime ideologically committed to the destruction of Israel, nuclear weapons are much more than a deterrent – they are a means to a Jew-annihilating end.

And that is why, early on Friday morning, the Israel Defence Forces carried out lethal aerial attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, scientists central to Iran’s atomic plans and several senior generals. Because Israel’s leadership was rightly concerned that Iran would soon be in possession of its own nuclear warheads.

Indeed, on Thursday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitors signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ruled that Iran had violated its treaty obligations. It claims Iran has amassed 400 kilos of highly enriched uranium, which is ideal for military use. Within hours of the IAEA’s announcement, Israel had started an operation designed, in the words of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to roll back ‘the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival’.

It really didn’t have to be this way. Indeed, it is only in recent decades that Iran has posed, as Netanyahu puts it, ‘a threat to Israel’s survival’. Indeed, after Israel’s founding in 1948, Iran under the Shah actually had a cordial relationship with the fledgling Jewish State. Iran was seen by Israel as a regional mediator, at points even an ally. And vice versa – the Iranian novelist and anti-Western critic, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, visited Israel in 1963 and subsequently praised the collectivist spirit of Zionism.

So, while anti-Semitic violence ravaged Arab nations like Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Syria during the 1950s and 1960s, there were no pogroms or purges in Iran. While an estimated 60,000 Iranian Jews did leave for Israel during its first three decades of existence, by 1978, there was still a thriving 85,000-strong Jewish community within Iran. It constituted perhaps the largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside Israel.

But that all changed in 1979, with the Iranian Revolution and the eventual ascendency of the Ayotallah Khomeini and his Islamist clique. With the foundation of the Islamic Republic, Iran’s relationship towards Israel became markedly hostile almost overnight. Its Islamist leaders, burning with anti-Semitic zeal, effectively turned the destruction of Israel into a raison d’être, and made life within Iran near enough intolerable for its Jewish population. Just 9,000 Jews live there today.

Despite the occasional election of so-called reformist presidents, Iran’s animus towards Israel has, if anything, only intensified in recent decades. In the words of the Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president between 2005 and 2013, the ‘Zionist entity’ was to be ‘wiped from the pages of history’.

This has always been more than mere words. Over 40 years, Iran cultivated a fearsome network of regional proxies. These large, powerful Islamist militias may have had their own local, particular causes, but their overarching objective under the aegis of Iran was the destruction of Israel. And they were backed in their endeavours by the Islamic regime’s military might, including its own 200,000-strong military protection force, the Revolutionary Guards.

In southern Israel, on 7 October 2023, the malignant, region-wide influence of Iran’s theocratic rulers was exposed to the world. Its proxy, Hamas, crossed over from Gaza and carried out the worst act of anti-Semitic slaughter since the Holocaust. And, as the Israel-Hamas war began, other Iranian proxies began attacking, from Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and assorted smaller militias in Syria and Iraq. Then, in October last year, Iran itself attacked, launching nearly 200 ballistic missiles Israel’s way.

What we have seen unfolding in the Middle East over the past 20 months has, in many ways, been the culmination of the Islamic Republic’s long-standing campaign against Israel. This has always been more than a war between Israel and Hamas. It is Israel’s war of survival in the face of an Islamist onslaught led and backed by Iran.

At the same time, the past 20 months have exposed something else, too. Not just the Iranian regime’s shadow war against Israel, but also the Iranian regime’s weakness. The proxy forces Iran has been using against Israel, from Hamas itself to Hezbollah, have been decimated. The Iran-backed Assad regime in Syria has crumbled. And Iran itself has been militarily degraded. Indeed, Israel’s destruction of Iran’s air defences during retaliatory strikes last October seemingly made this week’s air assault possible.

But the Iranian regime’s weakness is not merely military – it’s also political. In the context of a collapsing economy, ever-rising unemployment levels and a repressive, illiberal state, many Iranians are growing restive. We saw large-scale anti-regime protests in 2019, with demonstrators chanting ‘Death to the dictator’ at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and calling for an end to the Islamic Republic. And we’ve also seen repeated displays of courageous resistance on the part of women opposed to the mandatory hijab law, especially after the morality police’s killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022.

Most important of all, the Iranian regime’s war against Israel simply doesn’t command huge amounts of public support. Iranians want jobs, investment. They don’t want a theocratic regime supporting anti-Semitic militias with cash that could be used to address chronic domestic problems. Indeed, it has been telling that, over the past 20 months, most Iranians have shown little enthusiasm for the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon. There have been a few sparsely populated, stage-managed anti-Israel protests in Tehran since the war began, but they’ve involved at most a few thousand people.

As one analyst notes, the genuinely popular recent protests within Iran feature the revealing chant, ‘Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!’. Iranians are calling for a better life, not ‘Death to America’ and hijab laws. Arguably, there are far more Hamas supporters on Western university campuses than in the nation state that actually funds those genocidal lunatics.

No doubt, Israel’s attack on the Islamic Republic will mobilise more Iranians in support of their nation, if not the regime itself. But this remains an increasingly unpopular theocracy.

This could make the war now unfolding even more dangerous. An embattled Islamic Republic, attacked and militarily humiliated by the ‘Zionist entity’, has to respond. That could involve a missile and drone barrage against Israel that dwarves last year’s salvo. Or something even more drastic. It is also crucial that the war hawks of the West, who have been spoiling for direct conflict with Iran for decades, do not get their wish. If this awful regime is to fall, it should be toppled from within, by the people.

Either way, we should shed no tears for the wretched theocrats at the head of the Islamic Republic. They have squatted in the home of this great civilisation for far too long. The sooner the Islamic Republic is gone, and the Iranians are freed, the better.

Tim Black is associate editor of spiked.