The Ayatollahs’ Antisemitism Has Undone Iran

Opinion|The Ayatollahs’ Antisemitism Has Undone Iran

Notable among the slogans being chanted by the protesters flooding Iran’s streets is this one: “Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran.” That’s more than a repudiation of the regime’s foreign policy. It’s a reminder that a policy of antisemitism has a way of eventually destroying the antisemite.

Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the regime has had a singular obsession with Jews. The suppurating hatred of Israel is downstream from that.

The foundational political text of the regime, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s “Governance of the Jurist,” is shot through with antisemitism. As in: “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.” Iran’s current leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is an avowed Holocaust denier. Though Iran officially tolerates its dwindling Jewish community, the vast majority of Iranian Jews have fled the country, often under perilous circumstances.

Iranian foreign policy freely mixes anti-Israel furies with anti-Jewish ones. It has supported Hezbollah, sworn to Israel’s destruction, to the tune of billions of dollars over four decades. It has ordered antisemitic terrorist attacks at long range, including the 1994 bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people. It has supplied weapons and training for Hamas, along with ballistic missiles for Yemen’s Houthis. It has repeatedly courted international outrage by hosting a conference of Holocaust deniers and antisemitic cartoon contests.

The regime also spent decades assembling the elements needed to build a nuclear weapon. One motivation was deterrence and self-defense. Another was given away by this chilling cost-benefit analysis from Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president, in a 2001 speech: “The use of one atomic bomb in Israel leaves nothing left, but in the Islamic world, there will only be damage.”

All this might at least be intelligible if Iran and Israel had ancient grievances or territorial disputes. There are none. Iran was among the first predominantly Muslim states to de facto recognize Israel, and Jerusalem and Tehran maintained close ties while the shah was in power. Even today, ordinary Iranians themselves are markedly less antisemitic than people in other Middle Eastern states, according to surveys published by the Anti-Defamation League. The current regime’s obsession is purely a function of Islamist ideology, not national interest.