As the escalation of the year-long conflict in West Asia in the wake of Iran’s recent ballistic missile attack on Israel increases the risk of an inter-state war, analysts debate over a plausible explanation for the ongoing confrontation between Israel and Iran. For the region’s two non Arab countries have no bilateral disputes over territory or over strategic resources like oil. Nor do they share historical animosity or unhappy memories of the past as in the case of Greece and Turkey, for instance. On the contrary, Iran was the second Muslim majority country after Turkey to recognise Israel two years after it was founded in 1948. What would then explain Iran’s unremitting hostility towards the Jewish state? The answer lies in the Islamist worldview of the post-1979 Iranian regime rooted in the ideological vision of its founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
For Khomeini, the 1979 revolution that ended the monarchical regime in Iran was the revolution with an Islamic goal. It belonged to the entire Islamic world; Iran was only the starting point. In other words what Khomeini envisaged was the revolutionary state of Iran playing a pivotal role in liberating the oppressed masses of Muslims and replacing the existing unjust and repressive international system by a virtuous Islamic order. Until the realization of what he called the ‘sublime universe’, the struggle of the oppressed against injustice (zolm) would continue, transcending the ethnic and sectarian divide and adopting all means of resistance including terrorism and martyrdom. Khomeini’s Islamist imagination represents a counter-hegemonic challenge to the West, identified as the ‘world of evil’ for its alleged subjugation of Muslims in West Asia, politically as well as culturally. In this broader ideological context, creation of the Zionist state on Islam’s sacred realm is viewed as a Western ploy to perpetuate oppression of Muslims, which has led Khomeini and a generation of adherents of his ideology to call for the eradication of Israel.
Their speeches, writings and pro no uncements have over the years injected religious values and symbols into the IsraelPalestine conflict to portray the Jewish state as an enemy of Muslims and justify resistance to a profane, alien entity as a sacred Muslim duty. Iran’s hardline former President Mahmud Ahmadi nejad, for example, once claimed that the Holocaust was a myth and the Zionist state “a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm” because its existence “has harmed the dignity of Islamic nations.”
Equally relentless in verbal attacks on Israel is the country’s supreme leader and Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Kha menei, who calls Israel a “cancerous tumour” that “will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.” The incendiary rhetoric apart, celebration of the last Friday of the month of Ramadan as Jerusalem Day and establishment of the Jerusalem Army underline the centrality of the Palestinian issue in the Iranian conception of the Islamist revolution. Thus, by embracing a confrontational posture and extending all-round assistance to the Islamist rejectionist forces, Iran’s clerical rulers seek to buttress the regime’s ideological identity.
Iran’s self-proclaimed role as a champion of the Palestinian cause, however, has not gone down well with several Arab states partly because of their historically embedded enmity, and partly because of regional power struggles as played out during the civil wars in Yemen and Syria recently. In any case, the issue of Palestine involves a territorial conflict between Arabs and Jews, not the Iranians. Ever since the establishment of the Jewish state, Arab countries have collectively fought three wars (1948, 1967 and 1973) against Israel for restoration of the occupied ‘Arab land’ and in the process lost parts of their own territory.
During those tumultuous decades when the Arab stakes were high, Iran not only chose to remain aloof but also became a mem ber of the Israeli-inspired Periphery Pact. More so, Iran did not support the 1973 Arab oil embargo on Western countries, and exploited the situation by hiking the oil price and earning over $7 billion without compunction. The post-revolution clerical regime has done even greater harm by reframing the Palestinian issue as an Islamic cause, which delegitimizes legendary Christian Palestinian nationalists like George Habash, Wadie Haddad and Hanna Mikhail. Despite all its bellicosity and ideological antipathy, Iran preferred to work through its nonstate proxies and agents in the region and avoided direct confrontation with Israel. Yet, the Israelis considered Iran’s involvement in the multifront campaign as an existential threat, thus transforming the ideological hostility into strategic rivalry.
For Israel, the rivalry has less to do with geopolitical changes and its hegemonic ambitions than the security of nearly 10 million Israelis. Its disproportionate use of force against Hamas and Hezbollah are, if anything, reflective of the security-first foreign policy of a country known for its siege mentality. Since the 7 October 2023 savage terror attack on Israeli civilians, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been sounding the klaxon of siege even louder. As long as there was a low intensity conflict, Iran’s behavior benefited it in terms of pursuing an ideological agenda, propping up its proxies and adding new allies like the Popular Mobilization Force (PMP) in Iraq and Houthi rebels in Yemen. It was the military victories of these forces on the ground, particularly in Yemen and Syria supplemented by the consolidation of Iran’s strategic influence amid the perceived US retrenchment from West Asia following the Chinabrokered rapprochement with Saudi Arabia that emboldened the mullahs to take on their ideological ‘Other’.
In sum, the current crisis in West Asia, though triggered by the Hamas terror strike killing over 1,000 Israelis, has its roots in the clerical regime’s ideological vision of Iran becoming the centre of an Islamic world power. As a renowned West Asia watcher and author of International Politics and the Middle East: Old Rules and Dangerous Game, L. Carl Brown has put it, in a region where everything is related to everything else, “rarely does a single political actor ~ whether outside great power or regional power ~ have the ability to impose its will or even to set in motion major new orientations.” The sooner the Iranian clerics realize the futility of their Islamist hegemonic ambitions given the regional complexity and fluidity, the better it will be for ordinary Arabs who continue to suffer most the destructive process of an armed conflict which is not of their making.
(The writer is former Dean, School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University)