On a sunny afternoon on February 1, 1979, in Tehran’s Shahyad Square (now Meidan-e-Azadi), a loud, jubilant crowd in excess of a million greeted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as he descended from his helicopter after being flown in earlier from the Parisian suburb of Neauphle-le-Château.1 Among the throng that welcomed Khomeini and the hope of a new dawn that he brought with him after the end of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s autocratic regime were two senior Israeli officials, Yitzhak Segev (Israel’s military attaché to Iran) and Eliezer Tsafrir (chief of Mossad’s Iran office).2
Those two officials directly bore witness to the beginning of a swift end to the deep cooperation between Iran and Israel under the Shah. In those tumultuous days of February, Israel’s El Al was at one point the only foreign carrier operating flights to and from Iran, until it too halted operations.
For 37 years under the Shah (a Shia himself)—touted as the most stable West Asian leader just in 19783—Iran had been a crucial US ally. But more importantly, it had also acted as a crucial pillar of support to Israel amidst the Arab Sunni monarchies. As the Shah had kept under wraps the deep security ties between Tel Aviv and Tehran to prevent upsetting these monarchies (who had just waged a global oil war to pressure Israel in the Yom Kippur War of 1973), Israel needed Iran more than Iran needed Israel, as Eirik Kvindesland of Oxford University also notes.4
In turn, the Shah and his security apparatus relied on Israel for expertise: the Iranian SAVAK, or secret police, relied heavily on the Mossad for interrogation techniques against anti-Shah dissidents. For opposition activists (which included a myriad blend of communists, Islamists, and liberal democrats), the SAVAK was the most direct and personal manifestation of the Shah’s oppression through its routine brutality.
This, and many other variables, equated popular opposition to the Shah with opposition to any state that supported and enabled his oppression. So reliant was the Iranian monarchical bureaucracy on the Mossad that at one point—when protests against the Shah were reaching their zenith in 1978—the Iranian military successfully lobbied the then Israeli Foreign Minister, Moshe Dayan, to talk to the Shah, who was evidently out of touch with the resentment on the streets. Dayan, after meeting the last Pahlavi monarch, rightly concluded that the Shah had become incapable of effective decision-making.5
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As Iran’s Ayatollahs triumphed in becoming the most efficient channel of anti-Shah resentment and quickly manoeuvered to gain a monopoly on force, Israel went from staunch Iranian ally to most hated opponent in a single year.6 As it consolidated power, the new Iranian theocratic regime under Khomeini seized on a long-held pro-Palestinian position to portray itself as the unifier of Muslim opposition to Israel’s colonialism in Palestine.
As early as 1963, Khomeini, from the pulpit in the Qom Seminary, had spoken of the Pahlavi regime’s oppression in the same breath as he warned about the dangers presented by Israel, which sought to “destroy Islam, the Quran, and religious scholars”.7 Naturally, Iran ended oil exports to Israel and severed all ties as the revolution reached its climax, with Khomeini declaring the last Friday of every Ramzan to be marked as “Youm-al-Quds/Roz Jahani Quds” (Jerusalem Day, with Quds meaning Jerusalem).8 Shias mark this day globally in varying degrees, including in India.
Burnished through the sword
The political, religious, and cultural support to Palestine and resistance to Israel that Khomeini and his new officialdom propounded found a new military avenue in the long and bloody war of attrition that the nascent Islamic Republic of Iran was forced to fight against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (the latter feared a spillover of the revolution across the border). That war—replete with high-casualty battles that oscillated between favouring Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988—helped in cultivating a fierce generation of post-revolutionary leaders in Iran who would use Iraqi aggression to further consolidate their hold over the nation. It arguably took care of the usual post-revolutionary concern about the disloyalty of the traditional military, which could wage a counter-coup (a threat that revolutionaries are historically wary of), and instead became the trial by fire of a new force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).9
What the war also allowed was for the Iranian regime to use the military fervour that the war generated to entrench the resistance to Israel. As the war ground on, the IRGC stepped up its efforts to make a march to Jerusalem. From lobbying for support to raise a “Jerusalem Army (Sepah-e-Quds)” in 1982 that draws from all Muslim nations, the IRGC used the war to declare the liberation of Jerusalem from Zionist occupation as the “greater victory” and defeating Iraqi troops standing in the way as the “lesser victory”.10 For the IRGC, using the trope of emancipation and the idea of “exporting the revolution” that its ideologue (Ayatollah Montazeri) had popularised, delivering Jerusalem became the “task before all tasks” in its war propaganda. While fervent in spirit, the actual effect of the appeal was to infuse its troops with new energy and boost morale by diminishing the nature of the Iraqi threat.
Iranians in German exile protest on the second anniversary of a nationwide uprising against the death penalty in their home country and for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to be declared a “terrorist organisation”, in Berlin, Germany, September 14, 2024. | Photo Credit: NADJA WOHLLEBEN/REUTERS
By the time Iran exited a war that took anywhere between 1,00,000 and 5,00,000 Iranian lives, the IRGC had successfully established a Quds Force, designed to spearhead the anti-Israel charge. While the force ultimately became a more generalist instrument to support resistance movements in neighbouring states and provide military training, its Jerusalem-centric etymology has had enduring effects.
It underwrote the larger philosophy that the nascent Islamic Republic had woven into the social fabric of post-revolution Iran: resistance against Israel’s occupation of Palestine. As a theme, it was perceived as being powerful enough to bridge sectarian gaps within the Muslim community and to appeal as a broader Islamic goal. And here was a new Shia theocratic regime to push towards the goal in a way that the Sunni monarchies in the Gulf had not been able to.
Today, resistance to Israel is as strong a political imperative for the regime under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei as it was for Khomeini. Unlike the latter, the former is today the longest-serving West Asian leader and deals with very different threats. While being overtly pro-Palestinian and anti-Zionist oppression, his reign has also been occupied with self-preservation of the Iranian regime.
Across the past two decades, the Iranian regime has conflated the threat from “Great Satan” (US) and “Little Satan” (Israel) to undermine the legitimacy of popular protests that began brewing against the Iranian regime’s own oppression. For instance, as early as 2009, after an infamously tainted and rigged election that prevented a liberal democratic candidate from taking the presidency, a popular Iranian slogan went: “No to Lebanon, No to Palestine, my life only for Iran.”11 It at once represented the cyclical nature of history, as three decades ago the Shah’s ties with Israel and his own oppression had generated the reverse charge against Israel.
For Iran’s Ayatollahs and the IRGC, the Israeli threat (which is not unjustified objectively, given the large number of Israeli subversive activities in Iran, including assassinations) is historic, enduring, and necessary to maintain power at home. The sustenance of this external threat is a powerful and convenient instrument that enables the regime to undermine protest movements. Khamenei’s official website regularly publishes literature against Israeli colonialism and the vitality of the resistance.12
Highlights
- For 37 years under Reza Shah Pahlavi (a Shia himself), Iran had been a crucial US ally. It had also acted as a crucial pillar of support to Israel amidst the Arab Sunni monarchies.
- As early as 1963, Khomeini, had spoken of the Pahlavi regime’s oppression in the same breath as he warned about Israel, which sought to “destroy Islam, the Quran, and religious scholars”.
- The hostility to Israeli actions in Gaza and Lebanon among the Iranian people coexists with the domestic resentment towards Khamenei and the IRGC that harass and oppress Iranians.
Over the past two decades, popular resistance to the Iranian regime has burgeoned as Iran reels under continuing economic sanctions. Among other things, what this has meant is an exhaustion among the Iranian people with the anti-Israel/anti-US tropes that the regime megaphones while arresting, torturing, and executing its own people. Arguably, as the economic downturn continued, the regime was forced to focus on economic issues at home by late 2023, with its anti-Israel fight relegated to the local forces the IRGC had been training, funding, and sustaining in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen.
The October 7 effect
Between the Abraham Accords of September 15, 2020, and the October 7, 2023, terror attacks, the Iranian regime found itself swimming against the politico-cultural tide in West Asia. Facing increasing protests at home and with Arab states drifting towards Israel, Iran licked its ideological wounds and shifted focus to repairing relations with regional states, going on to normalise ties with Saudi Arabia and Sudan in 2023. Taking on Israel alone serves Iran’s Islamic revolutionary purpose, but it goes against the pan-Islamic cross-sectarian unity that Iran envisages. The Hamas attack on October 7 came as an inflection point. While Iran was not involved in its planning and execution, its aftermath and Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza did two things: it compelled Iran to not only put its money where its mouth was in the anti-Israel fight but also allowed it to take advantage of the tremendously uncomfortable position the Arab states were forced into.
Today, even as Iran manoeuvres to bring the US to the table for talks and control escalation with Israel, it is viewed as the only large West Asian power that is fighting Israel. Seen from the perspective of Khomeini’s vision from the late 1970s, today’s Iran is showing the Arab street how to unify against Israel before it decimates the Palestinian state. The Arab states, while closer to Israel than ever before, are wary of this perception. To illustrate this, here is a quote from an essay by Alireza Komeili, Secretary of the Iranian Islamic NGO International Union of Unified Ummah, published on Ayatollah Khamenei’s website just days after the October 2023 terror attacks, titled “Time to establish an independent nations belt”.
“‘Ummahism’ is like a macro-strategy of the current era, which should be transformed from dialogue and conference into operational ideas. The Zionist enemy… proposes ideas like the ‘IMEC’ (India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor), which has the function of creating a unified identity…. So it should be easier for us and the countries of the region, who have many real and realisable needs and commonalities. This ‘shared destiny’ is so real and intertwined that even the sand storms of our deserts create a common crisis for us, paving the ground for mutual cooperation,”13 he wrote.
This image posted on Twitter reportedly on October 26, 2022, shows an unveiled woman standing on top of a vehicle as thousands make their way towards Aichi cemetery in Saqez, Mahsa Amini’s home town in the western Iranian province of Kurdistan, to mark 40 days since her death, defying heightened security measures as part of a bloody crackdown on women-led protests. | Photo Credit: AFP
Here, the Iranian regime is speaking more to its Arab/English audiences abroad than to its domestic audience. It is the point of manifestation of Iran’s resistance to Arab-Israeli normalisation and the projects that it entailed, including the India-led IMEC. Now, with Israel’s war in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon causing casualties exceeding 50,000, Iran’s fight against Israel—even as it officially repairs ties with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states—increases its stock on the Arab street.
This along with the election of Masoud Pezeshkian (a relative liberal), Khamenei’s signals for dialogue with the US to ease sanctions, and the continued support to its formidable proxy groups all align with Iran’s efforts to stabilise itself while adhering to its anti-Israel character. For instance, since its October barrage of missiles on Israel, Iran has made an organised and focussed effort to lobby Arab states to prevent them from supporting Israel’s response, while it backchannels with the US to prevent attacks on Iranian oilfields and (ostensibly) civilian nuclear sites.
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It is tempting to make a distinction between the Iranian people’s and the regime’s view of Israel today, with some arguments harking back to the historic connect between the Persians and the Jews, unlike the Arabs. This premise, while historically accurate, undervalues the depth of the sentiment of “resistance to oppression and humiliation” (Hayhaat minna zillah) that is woven into the Shia faith.
The hostility to Israeli actions in Gaza and Lebanon that this sentiment generates among the Iranian people coexists with the domestic resentment towards Khamenei and the IRGC and its “shock troops” that regularly harass and oppress Iranians. What is true, however, is that resistance to the regime has dominated,14 undermining the manifestation of pro-Palestinian sentiments. In any case, the Iranian regime can be characterised as more anti-Israel than pro-Palestine, with Khomeini famously having deep issues with Yasser Arafat’s nationalistic militant politics as opposed to the more global fight in anti-imperial/pro-Islamic terms that the Ayatollahs envisioned.
The Iranian hostility to Israel, which simmered in protests against the Shah, was made official under Khomeini, was burnished into the Iranian military psyche in the years of war, and has, since then, been generously nourished as a modular trope (for domestic and foreign audiences) by successive governments under Khamenei. Where Iran-Israel ties go from here will depend as much on Iran’s ties with Arab states as it will on how the Pezeshkian government is able to placate the people on its streets.
Bashir Ali Abbas is a research associate at the Council for Strategic and Defense Research, New Delhi, and a South Asia Visiting Fellow at the Stimson Center, Washington, DC.
FOOTNOTES
- https://www.lemonde.fr/en/m-le-mag/article/2023/02/05/the-french-town-still-disturbed-by-the-memory-of-ayatollah-khomeini_6014472_117.html
- Trita Parsi (2007), ‘Treacherous Alliance’, Yale University Press<, pages 79-82.
- https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1mjqv32
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/6/iran-and-israel-from-allies-to-archenemies-how-did-they-get-here
- Treacherous Alliance.
- https://ict.org.il/ayatollah-khomeinis-approach-to-the-palestinian-israeli-conflict-and-its-longstanding-ramifications/
- https://english.khamenei.ir/news/9054/Imam-Khomeini-and-the-Palestinian-cause
- https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/496701/Ayatollah-Khamenei-s-perspective-on-Quds-Day-Empowering-Palestinian
- https://frontline.thehindu.com/world-affairs/iran-islamic-revolutionary-guard-corps-quds-force-proxies-hezbollah-hamas-hashd-al-shaabi-and-houthis-shaping-west-asia-landscape/article67792143.ece
- Afshon Ostovar (2016), ‘Vanguard of the Imam’, Oxford University Press, pages 109-112.
- https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-hamas-israel-little-public-support-palestinian-cause/32654903.html
- https://english.khamenei.ir/news/11174/The-last-settler-colonial-state-committing-genocide-under-the
- https://english.khamenei.ir/news/11186/Time-to-establish-independence-of-nations-belt
- https://www.stimson.org/2024/why-are-so-many-iranians-seemingly-indifferent-to-the-war-in-gaza/
