Section VI: Iran and Israel — A 46-Year Jihad Against the Jewish State

For nearly half a century, the Islamic Republic of Iran has waged an unrelenting campaign of hostility against the State of Israel — a campaign without parallel in modern international relations. No other regime has institutionalized the destruction of another sovereign state as a doctrinal pillar of its foreign policy for so long, so openly, and across so many fronts. What makes this hostility especially perverse is that it betrays Iran's own civilizational legacy. The Iranian people are heirs to Cyrus the Great, the Achaemenid emperor who in 539 BCE liberated the Jewish people from Babylonian exile and authorized the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem — a deliverance memorialized in the Book of Ezra and the Cyrus Cylinder. The regime that seized Iran in 1979 has spent forty-six years inverting that legacy, transforming a historic friend of the Jewish people into the world's foremost state sponsor of jihad against them. This section traces that reversal — from the Shah's quiet alliance with Jerusalem through Khomeini's ideological repudiation, the construction of a theological doctrine of annihilation, the architecture of proxy warfare, the first direct missile attacks on Israeli soil, and finally the existential nuclear threat that now confronts the Jewish state.

The Shah's Israel — Three Decades of Quiet Alliance

The relationship between Iran and Israel before 1979 stands as one of the most consequential and least appreciated alliances of the Cold War Middle East. In March 1950, only twenty-one months after Israel's declaration of independence, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's Iran became the second Muslim-majority country in the world, after Turkey, to extend de facto recognition to the Jewish state (Parsi, 2007). This recognition was deliberately understated — there were no ambassadors, no formal embassy — but the substance was real. Israel established a permanent diplomatic mission in Tehran. Iran maintained a quiet consular presence in Israel. The two nations conducted business as functional allies for almost three decades.

The strategic logic was sound. Both nations were non-Arab states surrounded by Arab neighbors hostile to their existence. Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion articulated the framework as the "Periphery Doctrine" — the idea that Israel's survival required alliances with non-Arab states on the geographical periphery of the Middle East: Iran to the east, Turkey to the north, Ethiopia to the south, and the Kurds within the Arab heartland (Bialer, 2007). Ben-Gurion publicly praised Iran as a model of moderation and modernization. The Shah, for his part, viewed Israel as a useful counterweight to Arab nationalism — particularly the Nasserist project that threatened his throne and the Sunni Arab world's pressure against Persian cultural distinctiveness.

The cooperation took concrete forms. Iran sold significant quantities of oil to Israel from the late 1950s onward, including throughout the Arab oil embargoes of 1967 and 1973, when most of the world cut Israel off (Sobhani, 1989). To move that oil to European markets, the two nations jointly built the Trans-Asian Oil Pipeline running from the Israeli port of Eilat on the Red Sea to Ashkelon on the Mediterranean — a strategic asset that allowed Iranian crude to bypass the Suez Canal entirely. The Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company was a joint Iranian-Israeli venture, the financial residue of which would generate litigation that continues into 2026 (Reuters, 2020).

Military and intelligence cooperation ran deeper still. Operation Tzur, launched in 1958 and continuing into the 1960s, provided Israeli military advisers to train Iranian forces (Parsi, 2007). Mossad and the Iranian intelligence service SAVAK coordinated extensively on regional matters, sharing intelligence on Arab states, Soviet penetration, and Palestinian terror networks. Most striking of all was Project Flower, a secret 1977 agreement under which Israel and Iran would jointly develop advanced ballistic missiles. Iran agreed to finance the project; Israel would provide the technology. The first phase covered six contracts worth approximately $1.2 billion in 1977 dollars (Segev, 2018).

The Shah himself made an unannounced visit to Israel. Senior Israeli officials, including Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan, traveled openly to Tehran. By 1978, the partnership had reached such depth that Israeli aircraft refueled at Iranian airbases and Iranian nuclear scientists trained alongside Israelis. The regime in Tehran today has systematically erased this history from Iranian textbooks. Iranian children grow up taught that Israel has always been an enemy. The historical record says otherwise.

Khomeini's Reversal — From Friend to "Little Satan"

Within seventy-two hours of returning to Tehran from his Paris exile in February 1979, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini moved to destroy thirty years of Iranian-Israeli cooperation. The reversal was so swift, so total, and so ideologically driven that it remains a case study in how a single revolutionary movement can override decades of strategic logic in days.

On February 17, 1979 — just five days after the revolution's victory — Khomeini's first foreign-policy act was to cut all diplomatic, commercial, and intelligence ties with Israel (Menashri, 2001). That same day, Yasser Arafat and a delegation of the Palestine Liberation Organization arrived in Tehran as the FIRST foreign delegation received by the revolutionary government. Khomeini personally handed Arafat the keys to the former Israeli embassy on Kakh Street in Tehran. The building was renamed the Embassy of Palestine. The Israeli flag came down; the Palestinian flag went up. The symbolism was deliberate — the Jewish state had not merely been derecognized; it had been replaced.

Khomeini's first weeks produced a cascade of further reversals. The Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline contract was unilaterally cancelled, and Iran defaulted on hundreds of millions of dollars owed to the Israeli company. Litigation between the Islamic Republic and the National Iranian Oil Company on one side and the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company on the other has continued in Swiss and French arbitration courts for forty-six years and remains unresolved as of 2026 (Reuters, 2020). Project Flower was unilaterally terminated — but Iran kept the missile technology already transferred and would, over the following decades, build it into the foundation of the ballistic missile program that today threatens Israel directly. The technology Israel sold to the Shah is the technology Iran now uses to try to kill Israelis.

In August 1979, Khomeini formalized the new posture by declaring the last Friday of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan to be "Quds Day" — Jerusalem Day — an annual occasion for state-organized demonstrations calling for Israel's destruction. Every year since 1979, on Quds Day, mass rallies in Tehran and across Iran feature burnings of Israeli flags, effigies of Israeli leaders, and chants of "Death to Israel" (Litvak, 2006). The day has been exported to Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, Houthi-controlled Yemen, and Shia communities worldwide.

Khomeini also fixed the rhetorical framing that has defined the regime's posture ever since. America was the "Great Satan"; Israel was the "Little Satan." Both, in the regime's eschatology, were doomed. The reversal was complete within months. The most strategically valuable bilateral relationship in the modern Middle East — built patiently over thirty years on shared interests and mutual benefit — was destroyed by ideological fiat in days. The destruction has never been undone.

The Doctrine of Hatred — Theological and Political Roots

The regime's hostility toward Israel is not a policy. It is a doctrine — embedded in the constitutional structure of the Islamic Republic, in the writings of its founder, and in the official statements of its current Supreme Leader. To understand the depth of the threat, one must understand that Tehran's leadership does not view Israel as a normal state to be opposed through normal statecraft. They view Israel as a theological abomination whose elimination is religious obligation.

The intellectual foundation is Khomeini's doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih ("Guardianship of the Jurist") — the framework that gives the Supreme Leader near-absolute authority over Iranian foreign policy and roots that policy in Twelver Shia eschatology. Khomeini's lectures and writings, particularly his Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist (1970), explicitly mark Israel as illegitimate — not merely as a political adversary but as a usurper of Muslim land that must be dismantled before the return of the Mahdi, the Twelfth Imam (Khomeini, 1981). The regime refuses to use the name "Israel," consistently referring to it as "the Zionist regime" or "the Zionist entity" in official communications.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency (2005-2013) brought the doctrine into the open in a way that even unsettled some within the regime. At the "World Without Zionism" conference in Tehran on October 26, 2005, Ahmadinejad delivered the speech that produced his infamous line. The official translation rendered by Iran's own state media at the time read: "Israel must be wiped off the map." Some Western scholars have contested the literal translation, but the version Iran itself published in English on IRNA and ISNA for years was unambiguous (MEMRI, 2005). Ahmadinejad followed with active Holocaust denial — sponsoring the International Holocaust Cartoon Competition in 2006 and again in 2015, in which Iran officially solicited and exhibited cartoons mocking the murder of six million Jews (Iran International, 2015).

Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has carried the doctrine forward in even more operational terms. On September 9, 2015, on his official website Khamenei.ir, the Supreme Leader declared: "I'd say [to the Israelis] that they will not see [the end of] these 25 years" — a 25-year countdown to Israel's elimination, broadcast on the official website of the Iranian state (Khamenei, 2015). In November 2014, Khamenei published on the same website a nine-point plan for the "elimination of Israel" through a referendum of "original Palestinians" — a plan that would have removed every Jew who arrived after 1917 (Khamenei, 2014).

The dehumanization rhetoric is institutional. Senior clerics including Khamenei himself have publicly described Israel as a "cancerous tumor" that must be excised. "Death to Israel" — Marg bar Esra'il — is not a slogan of fringe protests. It is etched onto IRGC ballistic missiles before they are paraded through Tehran. It is chanted at parliamentary sessions. It is painted on military installations. The annual Quds Day parades feature "Death to Israel" banners alongside "Death to America." This is not rhetoric. This is policy made theological, and theology made operational.

Proxy Warfare — Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Houthis

The Islamic Republic has not generally fought Israel directly. For forty-five years, it fought Israel through a constellation of proxies — armed, trained, funded, and ideologically formed by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its expeditionary arm, the Quds Force. This proxy architecture, often called the "Axis of Resistance," has been the principal instrument of Iranian power projection against the Jewish state.

Hezbollah is the crown jewel. The organization was founded in 1982 by Iranian Revolutionary Guards dispatched to Lebanon's Bekaa Valley in the aftermath of Israel's Operation Peace for Galilee — Israel's response to PLO attacks from southern Lebanon. From the outset Hezbollah was an IRGC project: its founding cadre were trained, armed, and indoctrinated by Iranian operatives, and its founding documents pledged allegiance to Velayat-e Faqih and the Supreme Leader in Tehran (Levitt, 2013). Hezbollah's first major operation was the October 23, 1983 simultaneous suicide bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks and the French paratroopers' barracks in Beirut, killing 241 American servicemen and 58 French paratroopers — one of the most consequential terror attacks against Western forces in modern history.

For four decades, Hezbollah served as Iran's deterrent shield. By October 2024, Hezbollah was believed to possess roughly 150,000 rockets and missiles arrayed across southern Lebanon — the largest non-state arsenal in history (CSIS, 2024). The 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War, a 33-day conflict, demonstrated that Hezbollah could absorb Israeli punishment and continue firing. That deterrent posture collapsed in September 2024. On September 17-18, 2024, Israel executed the pager and walkie-talkie operation — coordinated supply-chain sabotage that detonated communication devices Hezbollah had distributed to thousands of operatives. The operation killed dozens and wounded thousands in a single afternoon. On September 27, 2024, an Israeli airstrike on a Beirut bunker killed Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's Secretary-General of thirty-three years (Reuters, 2024). Hezbollah's strategic depth on Israel's northern border was substantially destroyed within ten days.

Hamas is the Sunni exception in Iran's Shia network. Despite the sectarian divide, Iran has funded Hamas since the early 1990s, with documented designations by the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control confirming material support from Tehran's IRGC-Quds Force (U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2018). Hamas militants have trained in IRGC-Quds Force camps in Lebanon and Iran for decades. The result was the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel — the worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas operatives killed more than 1,200 Israelis, including 364 young people at the Nova music festival, and took approximately 250 hostages back into Gaza (Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2023). Iran's exact foreknowledge remains debated, but the Islamic Republic celebrated the attack openly within hours, with Khamenei publicly endorsing it. Yahya Sinwar, the architect of October 7, was killed by IDF forces on October 17, 2024.

Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) is smaller than Hamas but more directly controlled from Tehran. Founded in 1981 in Egypt by Fathi Shaqaqi, an admirer of Khomeini, PIJ has from its inception aligned ideologically with the Islamic Republic. It is funded and trained directly by IRGC-Quds Force operatives, and unlike Hamas it has no meaningful political pretensions — it is a purely military organization dedicated to attacks on Israel from Gaza and the West Bank.

The Houthis (Ansar Allah) seized Yemen's capital Sanaa in 2014 and have since become the southernmost flank of Iran's anti-Israel posture. The IRGC has armed the Houthis with ballistic missiles, drones, and anti-ship cruise missiles. Beginning in late 2023, the Houthis launched attacks on Israeli-linked Red Sea shipping, effectively closing the Bab al-Mandeb strait to Israeli commerce. They have launched ballistic missiles directly at Israeli territory, including the Tel Aviv area, most of which have been intercepted by Israeli and American air defenses (U.S. CENTCOM, 2024).

Iraqi Shia militias — Kataib Hezbollah, Asaib Ahl al-Haq, and Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba — complete the encirclement. These IRGC-trained formations have fired rockets at U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, and in October 2024 conducted a drone strike against an Israeli military base. Together with Hezbollah, Hamas, PIJ, and the Houthis, they form a five-front strategic envelopment of Israel — every front built and sustained by Tehran.

From Rhetoric to Rockets — The Direct Attacks of 2024

For forty-five years, the Islamic Republic confined its war on Israel to the proxy domain. The regime's official posture was that Iran did not need to attack Israel directly — the proxies would do that work. That doctrine collapsed in April 2024, when for the first time in history, the Islamic Republic launched a direct military attack on Israeli soil from Iranian territory.

The trigger was Israel's April 1, 2024 airstrike on the Iranian consulate annex in Damascus, which killed IRGC Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi — the senior Quds Force commander responsible for the Lebanon and Syria theater — along with seven other Iranian officers (BBC, 2024). Tehran declared the strike an attack on Iranian sovereign territory and pledged a response. Twelve days later, on the night of April 13-14, 2024, Iran executed Operation True Promise I.

Approximately 300 weapons were launched at Israel: more than 170 Shahed-series drones, more than 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles (IDF, 2024). The strike package was designed to overwhelm Israeli air defenses through saturation. It failed. A coalition consisting of Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Jordan intercepted approximately 99% of the projectiles. One Israeli citizen — a seven-year-old Bedouin girl named Amina al-Hassoni — was wounded by falling debris. One Israeli airbase, Nevatim, sustained light damage. No Israelis were killed.

The strategic significance, however, vastly exceeded the physical damage. Iran had crossed a forty-five-year red line. The fiction that Tehran preferred to fight only through proxies was shattered. Israel had now been attacked directly, from Iranian soil, by a uniformed Iranian military force.

The pattern repeated on October 1, 2024, when Iran launched Operation True Promise II — this time approximately 180 ballistic missiles fired in a single wave. The trigger was again Israeli action against Iran's proxy network: the killing of Hassan Nasrallah on September 27, and before that the embarrassing July 31, 2024 assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh while he was a guest in a senior IRGC officer's residence in Tehran itself. Operation True Promise II again caused minimal damage — one Palestinian was killed in the West Bank by falling debris. Israeli and American interception was again largely successful.

Israel's response on October 26, 2024 — Operation Days of Repentance — struck Iranian air defenses and missile production facilities in Tehran, Khuzestan, and Ilam provinces. Israeli aircraft destroyed S-300 air defense systems, solid-fuel mixing facilities essential to ballistic missile production, and key components of Iran's nuclear weapons program infrastructure (Wall Street Journal, 2024). The damage was substantial. More importantly, the strike demonstrated that Israel could conduct precision operations deep inside Iran with impunity — that Iran's air defenses, the supposed shield of its nuclear program, were threadbare.

The strategic implication of 2024 is stark. Iran's deterrent posture is now demonstrably weaker than its rhetoric. Two waves of direct attack failed to inflict meaningful damage on Israel. Both invited retaliatory strikes that revealed Iran's air defenses to be vulnerable. The forty-five-year doctrine of proxy warfare ended in 2024 with Iran exposed, embarrassed, and degraded.

The Nuclear Existential Threat

All of the preceding — the doctrine, the proxies, the missiles — is prelude. The decisive question is nuclear. A nuclear-armed Islamic Republic is not merely a regional concern. It is the most direct existential threat to a Western democracy in the modern era.

Iran's nuclear program began under the Shah in the 1970s as a civilian power program with American assistance under the Atoms for Peace framework. The Shah's program was transparent, IAEA-safeguarded, and tied to Western reactor technology. The revolution interrupted that program, but the Islamic Republic eventually revived and weaponized it. In 2002, the dissident group Mujahedin-e-Khalq disclosed the existence of a previously secret uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and a heavy water reactor at Arak — facilities Iran had concealed from the IAEA in violation of its Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), agreed in July 2015, limited Iranian uranium enrichment to 3.67% (well below weapons-grade), capped centrifuge counts, and imposed an inspection regime. Critics argued the deal sunset its key restrictions, did not address ballistic missiles, and did nothing to curb Iran's regional proxy network. In May 2018, President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and reimposed sanctions.

Iran's response since 2018 has been a steady, deliberate escalation. By 2023, Iran was enriching uranium to 60% — a level with no civilian purpose and a short technical step from the 90% required for a weapon. The IAEA reported in February 2024 that Iran possessed enough 60%-enriched uranium that, if further enriched, would yield material for several nuclear weapons (IAEA, 2024). The technical gap from 60% to 90% is measured in weeks, not years. The breakout time has effectively collapsed.

Khamenei's much-cited 2003 fatwa "against nuclear weapons" deserves scrutiny. The fatwa has never been published in any verifiable original Arabic or Persian text, has never been entered into any official Iranian religious registry, and is contradicted by repeated statements from senior Iranian officials in 2023 and 2024 suggesting Iran could revisit its nuclear doctrine. It exists as a diplomatic talking point, not a binding religious ruling.

The existential dimension is geographic. Israel is the size of New Jersey — roughly 22,000 square kilometers. Its population is concentrated in the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem-Haifa corridor. A single nuclear weapon detonated over the Tel Aviv metropolitan area would kill hundreds of thousands and effectively end the Jewish state's existence as a viable nation. Iranian officials have explicitly contemplated this calculation. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, former president and chairman of the Expediency Council, said in a December 14, 2001 sermon at Tehran University: "The use of an atomic bomb against Israel would destroy Israel completely, while [a nuclear retaliatory strike] against the world of Islam would only cause damage" (Rafsanjani, 2001).

This is not deterrence theory. This is a state actor publicly contemplating genocide, with the rational conclusion that mutual assured destruction does not apply because Islam is too large to be destroyed but Israel is too small to survive. The October 2024 Israeli strikes on Iranian air defenses substantially weakened Iran's ability to defend its nuclear facilities from a future Israeli or American counterproliferation strike. The window in which Iran could be denied a weapon by military means may be open. It will not remain open indefinitely.

The Iranian people are heirs to Cyrus the Great. The regime that rules them is the inverse — a clerical dictatorship that has spent forty-six years pledging, planning, and arming itself to undo what Cyrus accomplished. The next move belongs to the free world.