 "As Israel & Iran stand on brink of war, here's how Islamic Revolution turned partners into enemies")
The Israel-Iran conflict is engrained such in popular consciousness that one may believe the two are natural enemies with bad blood going back generations, but that’s not the case.
The enmity that the world is all too aware of today is much shorter than the Israel-Arab conflict. It began in 1979 with the Islamic Revolution of Iran.
Prior to the Islamic Revolution, Iran was run by a liberal, pro-West monarchy and had deep economic and military cooperation which benefited both sides.
The Islamic Revolution ended such a relationship and replaced the monarchy with a hardliner Islamist regime which declared the United States and Israel as its primary foes.
Islamic Revolution of Iran laid foundations for enmity
The Islamic Revolution of Iran refers to the movement that overthrew the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, in 1979 and established a Shia Islamist regime in Iran.
The regime would be headed by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and would rebrand the territory as the Islamic Republic of Iran. Ali Khamenei, the current Supreme Leader, took over in 1989.
Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution fused the most extreme forms of Marxism and Islamism to create an ideological regime envisioned as the leader of the world’s Muslims.
While the Islamic Revolution may have been distinctly Shia in its apparent origins, its ambitions were global, drawing on Islamic history as well as a rich heritage of Iranian universalism which one might even describe as an imperial mentality, note Ali Ansari and Kasra Arabi in the paper ‘Ideology and Iran’s Revolution: How 1979 Changed the World’ for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
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More Shorts“These concepts were married to a Marxist inheritance that sought to appeal to the oppressed of the world. Indeed, Khomeini’s division of the world into the oppressed and the oppressors arguably owed as much to Marx as to Islam, while his description of the United States as the ‘Great Satan’ —that great tempter of material indulgence— was an astute rendition of anti-capitalist rhetoric in sacral terms,” note Ansari and Arabi.
The Islamic Republic serves the Islamic Revolution — not the other way around. The Islamic Revolution has pan-Islamism at its core and the Islamic Republic is merely a tool to serve it.
“Another important distinction, which is often missed by more sympathetic observers in the West, is between the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic Republic. The revolution does not exist to perfect the state; the state —the republic— is simply a means to support and perfect the revolution. Where the two conflict, the revolution is prioritised,” note Ansari and Arabi.
The two scholars emphasise that the Supreme Leader is not the leader of the Islamic Republic, which is commonly interpreted as the Iranian nation, but the leader of the Islamic Revolution — an ideological framework fusing extreme Islamism and Marxism.
From ‘Great Satan’ to ‘cancerous tumour’ — Iran’s new enemies
As the Islamic Revolution fused Islamism with Marxism in the garb of anti-imperialism, it justified the hostility to the West from the points of view of justice and injustice — central themes of the Islamic Revolution.
As early as the 1960s, the Islamic Revolution’s leaders dubbed the West in general, and the United States in particular, as imperialists and enemies of Islam. Khomeini in 1963 said that “all the troubles of the Iranian and Muslim nations originate from the foreigners, from America”.
Later, Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution declared the United States as the ‘Great Satan’ and Israel as the illegitimate imperial outpost of the United States in the Musmil world. The Islamic Revolution has been committed to the destruction of the State of Israel from the onset and has declared Israel as a “cancerous tumour” that must be eradicated. Even as much of the world has refused to take note of such overt ideological hostility, Iran has never shied from saying it.
In 2018, Khamenei posted on his official X (then Twitter) account: “Our stance against Israel is the same stance we have always taken. Israel is a malignant cancerous tumour in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen.”
Our stance against Israel is the same stance we have always taken. #Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated: it is possible and it will happen. 7/31/91#GreatReturnMarch
— Khamenei.ir (@khamenei_ir) June 3, 2018
The two crucial themes of the Islamic Revolution are therefore anti-Americanism and anti-Israelism in the guise of anti-imperialism, which is further explained as the core injustice plaguing Iran and the Muslim world — thus necessitating the Islamic Revolution.
While the Islamic Revolution declared enemies under the theme of injustice, it also declared solutions under the theme of justice.
Islamic governance, pan-Islamism, and Islamic Revolution’s brand of Shia Islam are the bulwark of justice against the United States and its outpost Israel, according to the Islamic Revolution’s tenets.
“Anti-imperialist and anti-Western sentiments play on populist notions that establish a binary of us vs. them. This creates a sense of victimisation that creates community around a common enemy. At the time of the revolution, this ‘enemy abroad’ narrative was fundamental for gaining support from a broad spectrum of political stances, but over the years its effectiveness has waned,” notes Arabi in another paper, ‘The Fundamentals of Iran’s Islamic Revolution’.
Iran’s convenient adoption of Palestine
In recent decades, as Iran has become the principal backer of armed groups fighting Israel in the name of Palestine, one might lose sight of the fact that Iran is not an Arab nation and was not a supporter of the Palestinian cause until after the Islamic Revolution.
Iran’s conflict with Israel is rooted in the fundamental ideological commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state — not the support to Palestinian cause. It is not even rooted in geopolitical conflict as, from a geopolitical perspective, Israel and Iran should be partners — as they were before 1979.
The Iranian adoption of the Palestinian cause serves twin goals of destroying Israel and exporting the Islamic Revolution. This is visible in how the Palestinian movement has evolved under Iranian sponsorship.
The Palestinian movement was an Arab ethnic self-determination movement in the beginning and the Israel-Arab conflict was an ethnic conflict as two ethnic groups with roots in the same land were fighting each-other. Over the course of time, however, as Iran took up Hamas’ sponsorship and Hamas took over the Palestinian movement, the movement as well as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict acquired a religious dimension. As a result of Iran’s takeover of the movement, the Palestinian movement transformed from an ethnic Arab movement into an Islamic movement.
Understandably, the rise of Hamas, supported by Iran, as the principal Palestinian faction struggling against Israel coincided with the decline of influence of Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), the original group leading the Palestinian cause.
Khomeini’s most vital strategy was to transform the Palestinian struggle into an Islamic cause and internationalise the Palestinian question beyond the Arab territories, notes Seyed Ali Alav in his paper ‘Iran’s Relations with Palestine: Past, Present, Future’.
Khomeini and his followers depicted the destruction of Israel and the liberation of Palestine as an Islamic duty, and this has not changed since 1979, as Iranian leaders continue to propagate a religious dimension to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, notes Arabi in his paper ‘The Fundamentals of Iran’s Islamic Revolution’.
In recent years, former Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has articulated such an approach best. In 2017, he called the “cooperation among Muslims in confronting Zionism, supporting the [Palestinian] resistance, and restoring the issue of Palestine as the first issue of the Islamic world”. Such a pan-Islamist interpretation fits into Iran’s aspiration to be the leader of the ‘ummah’, the world’s Muslim community, and highlights that the support of the Palestinians is a means to an end.
In his paper for the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS), Alav notes that the support of Palestine “serves Iran’s strategic interests of projecting its power and expanding its ideological and political influence throughout the Muslim world”.
“The Palestinian cause has thus become strategically advantageous to the Islamic Republic for enabling Iran to communicate its political discourse of resistance and emancipation throughout the region, and accentuate Iranian power and influence,” notes Alav.
Once Israel & Iran were partners — even briefly after Islamic Revolution
Prior to the Islamic Revolution, Iran was part of Israel’s ‘Alliance of the Periphery’ along with Turkey and Ethiopia. The idea was to make friends with non-Arab countries in the region — the enemy’s enemy being your friend’.
These countries had a number of convergences, such as the fear of the creeping Soviet Union and pan-Arabism led by the then-Egyptian ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser.
In his book ‘The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World’, Avi Shlaim called Iran the “jewel in the crown of the Alliance of the Periphery”.
“Its common border with the Soviet Union made Iran a front-line state in the Cold War. Traditional hostility between Iran and the Arab world also facilitated cooperation with Israel. In March 1950, Iran recognised Israel de facto and permitted it to maintain an unofficial low-level representation in Tehran. Iran also supplied oil to Israel. In the aftermath of Suez this low-level economic relationship was transformed into a close political and strategic partnership,” notes Shlaim.
The cooperation was such that Israel helped Iran in propping Kurdish insurgency against the Iraqi regime — a common adversary. They were also part of a trilateral intelligence-sharing arrangement with Turkey.
Israel helped Iran improve agricultural practices. The ties were such that Israeli companies came to have many contracts for many public works in the country. They also jointly set up an oil pipeline between the two nations.
Such pragmatic geopolitics largely —but not completely— ended when Khomeini took over Iran in 1979 as he ushered in a regime where ideology would be supreme. However, the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88) ensured that even the Khomeini regime cooperated with Israel.
Despite ideological hostility, Iran continued to see Israel as a valuable counterweight to Baathist Iraq whereas Israeli leaders hoped that Iran would serve as a counterweight not only to Iraq but to the wider Arab world, note Dalia Dassa Kaye, Alireza Nader, and Parisa Roshan in their report ‘Israel and Iran: A Dangerous Rivalry’ for Rand Corporation.
However, the cooperation was a whiff of smoke compared to the Shah’s time and even that was over by 1990 as the Iran-Iraq War concluded.
While Israel’s support of Iran against Iraq may appear to be the case of the enemy’s enemy being your friend, a lot depended on it. A now-declassified US intelligence assessment says that Iraq at the time had a formidable military and was in a position to field five divisions and six air force squadrons for Arab war-efforts against Israel. Tying Iraq into a protracted war with Iran that degraded both adversaries’ military strength served Israel’s interests.
The assessment, prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), said that the Iraqi victory against Iran “would pose the greatest eventual threat to Israel”. Any other outcome, whether a stalemate or an Iranian victory, would ensure that both Iraq and Iran would be weakened and the comprehensive Arab strength against Israel would also be weakened.
Kaye, Nader, and Roshan wrote that the Israel-Iran enmity is completely a result of Iran’s position.
“Israel has no religious or territorial disputes with Iran; it is the Israeli perception of the Iranian regime’s own hostile rhetoric and ideology that has inspired Holocaust symbolism and framing of the Iranian challenge. If such ideology and rhetoric were to change, Israeli leaders’ existential framing of the Iranian threat could also conceivably shift,” note the co-authors.
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