On the roots of the Iranian regime’s enmity towards Israel

In recent years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has championed the most radical anti-Israel stance in the Middle East. This hostility is epitomized by state rhetoric labelling Israel as a “cancerous tumour” that has to be removed, and the “Little Satan,” alongside the ubiquitous official slogan, “Death to Israel”. Because Iran shares no border and no economic rivalry with Israel, the essence of this enmity is purely religious.

While Shiite Islam has historically shown less tolerance toward Jews than Sunni Islam, the current fervour is rooted in the teachings of Ayatollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic. In his foundational text, Islamic Governance, Khomeini claimed that Islam had been afflicted by the Jews who conspired to foil the mission of the Prophet Muhammad. In modern times, he added, the Jews colluded with the “West” against Islam, because they knew that Islam, thanks to its laws and moral system, was the major obstacle to their designs to take over the world. According to the Ayatollah, this collusion is the root cause for all the calamities which had befallen the Muslims in modern times. To Khomeini, Zionism represented the ultimate culmination of this ancient and modern Jewish opposition to Islam, compounded by the “crime” of occupying a Muslim land and displacing the Muslim Palestinians. His successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamene’i, continued this legacy, describing Zionism as the 20th century’s greatest moral injustice.

Though Iran officially claims to distinguish between Judaism (a recognized monotheistic religion) and Zionism (which they view as a racist imperialist movement), the state’s discourse is heavily suffused with antisemitism. Senior clerics often conflate the two, anachronistically referring to Jews from centuries ago as “Zionists”. More ominously, the state has published the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious antisemitic forgery frequently cited by official media. It has also ‘modernised’ ancient blood libels by accusing Israeli doctors of harvesting Palestinian organs for profit or use.

A common antisemitic trope involves attributing Jewish origins to enemies; for example, claiming the Saudi royal family descends from the Jewish tribe of Banu-Qainuqa` that had fought the Prophet Muhammad. Ironically, this charge was also raised against modern current Iranian politicians by their rivals, most prominently against notorious former Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad.

A particularly problematic aspect of this conflation between Judaism and Zionism has been the denial of the Holocaust, most notably by Khamene’i himself. The resort to Holocaust denial was based on the premise that since Israel has no moral or historical legitimacy, it had enjoyed international support only because of the Holocaust. Therefore, refuting it would deprive Israel of any legitimacy and support and hasten its demise. Occasionally, denial was accompanied by implied justification of the Holocaust. Thus, former president Akbar Rafsanjani, a renowned ‘reformist’, who charged that Israel was worse than Hitler, claiming the Jewish state had killed over one million Palestinians whereas the Nazi leader had killed no more than 200,000 Jews in his attempt to save Germany from Zionist domination in Europe.

A more recent theme presented the Jews as historical enemies of Iran, from the supposed genocide that the Jews had perpetrated against Iranians on Purim, through Jewish alignment with the British in exploiting Iran during the 19th Century, and culminating in blaming the Jewish Rothschild family for the1919 famine in Iran. These charges sought to appeal to younger Iranians, who no longer adhered to the regime’s Islamic ideology but were Iranian patriots.

Finally, as many clerics describe the Jews as an inherently corrupt people, they predict that Israel’s future violent demise will fulfil the Qur’anic prophecy on the divine punishment meted upon the Jews. The ideological circle is often closed by eschatology, with clerics predicting a final apocalyptic battle where Iranians fight the Jews alongside the Shii messiah, the Mahdi. Tragically, this is not merely theoretical; Iran has sought to manifest these ideas through direct action, most notably by assisting Hamas in its 7 October 2023, attacks against Israel.

For many Iranians who do not support the regime, however, the efforts of the Ayatollahs to create and foster this antisemitic narrative are often viewed with contempt. In February, a prominent Iranian singer, Mehdi Yarrahi, released a song called ‘Auschwitz’, about the regime’s brutality in crushing January’s protests. By its very name, the song rejects the regime’s Holocaust denial narrative. Yarrahi, the singer, received 75 lashes last year for another song critical of the regime. Hossein Shanbehzadeh, who wrote the words, is currently serving a 12 year prison sentence after he responded to a tweet from Ayatollah Khamenei with a single dot – a dot which received more likes than Khamenei’s original post. He was accused of spreading anti-regime propaganda and being an Israeli spy.

While it is not yet clear whether the regime of the Ayatollahs will survive the coming weeks, it is to be hoped that if Iran is free of that baleful influence, it will reject the antisemitic propaganda narrative which has been pushed for the last few decades, and instead embrace a future without such malignity.

Professor Meir Litvak is director of the Alliance Centre for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University