A discursive look at the myriad of statements on Israel-Iran war issued across social media reveals the extent to which Israel has been criticized or vilified for attacking Iran. Besides condemnations cloaked in virulent antisemitism and anti-Zionism, many questioned Israel’s open war against Iran and its implications for President Donald Trump’s commitment to restore safety and security around the world. Similarly, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is accused of using the war to bolster public support for his own political career.
Stemming from various ideological backgrounds, these views have missed the central rationale of Israel’s war with Iran. It is a war of necessity! In fact, Iran’s theocratic regime has waged a political, ideological and military campaign against Israel since Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in 1979. For decades Netanyahu, among others, has claimed that a nuclear Iran would represent an existential threat to Israel and that military force is the only sure way to prevent it. This claim is fundamentally factual because the Iranian regime’s legitimacy rests with advancing a revolutionary foreign policy irreconcilable with the very concept of a Jewish state existing in Muslim lands. Central to this philosophy, which weds anti-Judaism and anti-Zionism, is the establishment of Israel as an imperialist Christian-Jewish conspiracy against Islam. Consequently, the existential threat to Israel has taken shape in the steady weaponizing of this philosophy, the ultimate component of which is the acquisition of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.
In the first page of Ayatollah Khomeini’s treatise on Islamic Government that guides Iran’s rule, he writes: “From the very beginning, the historical movement of Islam has had to contend with the Jews, for it was they who first established anti-Islamic propaganda and engaged in various stratagems…this activity continues down to the present. Later they were joined by other groups…more satanic than they. These new groups began their imperialist penetration of the Muslim countries about three hundred years ago.”
By citing controversial Koranic verses and adopting Western antisemitic views, Khomeini advocated the radical view of the Jew as a transgressor and wicked, intent on dominating the world. The heirs of his Islamic government, spearheaded by Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, not only endorsed Khomeini’s ideology and views but also operationalized them by designing plans to threaten the very existence of the Jewish state.
Echoing Khomeini, Khamenei scolded the Jewish nation: “What are you? A forged government and a false nation. They gathered wicked people from all over the world and made something called the Israeli nation. Is that a nation? All the malevolent and evil Jews have gathered there…Those [Jews] who went to Israel were malevolent, evil, greedy thieves and murderers.” Significantly, Khomeini’s views fashioned the ideologies of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Houthis, and Iraq’s Hashd al-Sha’bi.
Hezbollah’s open letter (1985), which formally declared the founding of the Shi’a Islamist party, emphasizes: “Our primary assumption in our fight against Israel states that the Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception, and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated.” The late leader of Hezbollah Sayyid Hasan Nasrallah repeatedly vowed to destroy Israel: “It is an aggressive, illegal and illegitimate entity, which has no future in our land.” In much the same vein, the Houthis adopted the slogan “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse the Jews, Victory for Islam.”
This dreadful ideology was not meant for public consumption to legitimate the Iranian regime and its proxies; it is a fundamental part of their raison d’etre. As such, the Iranian regime funded, trained and armed its proxies, while at the same time building its military power. The regime created the so-called axis of resistance linking all its proxies [Hezbollah, Houthis, Hashd, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Syrian Asad regime] into a “ring of fire” armed to the teeth with missiles and drones against Israel. This so called axis of resistance typified the limbs of Iran whose chest brandished a panoply of weapons targeting Israel.
Hamas’s barbaric attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, was the opening deadly salvo to put action into Iran’s ideology. Israel’s response has been nothing less than countering Iran’s existential threat to its survival as a refuge and a nation of the Jewish people.
Dr. Robert G. Rabil is a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University. His views do not necessarily reflect those of FAU. He can be reached at rrabil@fau.edu, @robertgrabil.