Iran has been financing and equipping the Hezbollah militia and Hamas for years and is therefore behind many terrorist attacks on Israel. Both states once maintained close relations with each other.
Hatred and hostility towards Israel are part of the political DNA of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Almost no official demonstration in the country goes by without the battle cry “Marg bar Israil” (“Death to Israel”). In addition, the theocracy celebrates “Al-Kuds Day” (Jerusalem Day) every last Friday of the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan.
Then the mullahs call for the extermination of the “little Satan” Israel (parallel to the “Great Satan” USA) and deny him his right to exist. Because the “Zionist regime,” criticizes revolutionary leader Ali Khamenei, is a cancer that must be excised from the Middle East.
Formally a protected religious minority
The Islamic Republic’s hostility toward the Jewish state dates back to Ayatollah Khomeini. In the early 1960s, when he was still living in Iran, the Shiite cleric described the then Shah Reza Pahlavi as a “Jew in disguise” and “recipient of Israel’s orders.” The monarch maintained close and friendly relations with the government in Jerusalem.
During his exile in Najaf, Iraq, he repeatedly attacked the state of Israel. He often spoke in general terms the Jews. These verbal attacks, as well as the assassination of Habib Elghanian, the head of Tehran’s Jewish community, in May 1979, immediately after the revolution, caused more and more Iranian Jews to leave the country.
Their number fell from around 65,000 in 1979 to less than 10,000 today. According to Article 13 of the Iranian constitution, Jews are considered a protected religious minority and even have a representative in the Tehran parliament.
Officials say that the Islamic Republic is anti-Zionist, but not anti-Semitic. The fact that this phrase is essentially an anti-Semitic stereotype became clear at the Tehran “Holocaust Conference” in December 2006 at the latest. Former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad invited almost exclusively Shoah deniers to the meeting – including several from Germany.
With the return of Ayatollah Khomeini to Iran in February 1979, everything changed in the country – including relations with Israel.
Money and weapons for anti-Israel Militias
The fact that Tehran and Jerusalem are also political rivals became clear when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Iran sent several hundred revolutionary guards to the cedar country to protect the Shiites there. At the same time, Hezbollah was founded in the Iranian embassy in Damascus. The key figure was the then ambassador Ali Akbar Mohtasmi, a Shiite theologian and Khomeini partisan.
The Lebanese Shiite militia received military training and weapons from the Iranian Quds Brigades, an elite unit of the Revolutionary Guard specifically for foreign missions. Hezbollah now has an estimated 140,000 rockets aimed at Israel from southern Lebanon.
In addition to Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, also receives financial and military support from Tehran for the fight against Israel. Your guides are welcome guests in Tehran.
The enemy of my enemy
Both countries have the largest military capacities in the Middle East and compete for political dominance in the region. But when it came to fighting a common enemy, people also worked together.
Tehran repeatedly procured weapons from Israel during the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). Because both states wanted to eliminate the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Israel is also said to have had a hand in the Iran-Contra affair in the mid-1980s, when the USA undercover supplied weapons to the Islamic Republic in order to use the proceeds to finance the guerrilla fight against the left-wing Sandinista government in Venezuela have.
Iran commemorate the beginning of the war against Iraq every year with a military parade in September.
There is another way
The time before the Islamic Revolution showed that people can interact with each other in completely different ways. At that time, Iran was one of the first states to recognize Israel’s right to exist and its independence in 1948.
In the Middle East conflict, Israel viewed Iran as an ally against the Arab states, purchased plenty of oil from Tehran, and both states maintained friendship with the USA. In addition, Iran is said to have received Israeli support at a very early stage of its nuclear program.
Threats against Iran’s nuclear program
But that is a long time ago. Today, mutual hostility is also fueled by the Iranian nuclear program. Despite confessions to the contrary, Tehran is presumably aiming to acquire nuclear weapons. Israel, which is itself a nuclear power, fears that it will become a target of these weapons because of Iran’s anti-Semitic agitation and is threatening to destroy the nuclear facilities.
Iran, for its part, has moved some of them underground since 2009, where they are better protected from attacks. Apparently they expect Israel to carry out its threats. After all, it has already destroyed above-ground nuclear facilities abroad twice: in Iraq in 1981 and in Syria in 2007.
In addition, more than half a dozen Iranians working in key positions in the nuclear program have been killed in the past two decades. Jerusalem neither confirmed nor denied that Israel’s foreign secret service Mossad was behind these murders, as rumor has it.
If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had had his way, there would have already been a strike on Iran’s facilities. But in 2010, Yuval Diskin, the former head of the Shin Bet domestic intelligence service and ex-Mossad chief Meir Dagan, stood against the Israeli head of government and prevented the military confrontation.
However, since Netanyahu has made the Iranian nuclear program a top priority and Tehran is continuing to expand its capacities, the situation surrounding the mullahs’ uranium enrichment remains dicey.
Worry about a two-front war
But not just there. Observers are now looking with great concern at the escalation in Israel and the Gaza Strip. After the terrorist attacks by Hamas, there could not only be a ground offensive by Israel, but also a large-scale attack by the Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon. Then Iran would definitely become the gray eminence in the background of a two-front war, the consequences of which would be unforeseeable for the entire region.
After all, at the beginning of the week, the Iranian Foreign Minister formulated threats towards Jerusalem at a meeting with Hamas boss Ismail Haniya in Qatar, the patron of the Muslim Brotherhood: Should Israel “continue its attacks on the defenseless population of the Gaza Strip,” said Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Nobody can guarantee that the conflict will not spread.