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by: Kate Norman, BFP Writer
“The Zionist regime is a deadly, cancerous growth and a detriment to this region,” Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini declared in a speech in 2020. “It will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.”
In May 2024, Khameini attended the funeral of late Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash. While there, Khameini bumped into the chief political leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh, who had come to Iran to pay his respects to the late “Butcher of Tehran.”
Khameini told Haniyeh, as quoted by the Times of Israel: “The divine promise to eliminate the Zionist entity will be fulfilled and we will see the day when Palestine will rise from the river to the sea.”
Khameini’s two threats are not isolated incidents. The calls of “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” frequently ring out from Tehran.
But Iran was not always screaming for the destruction of Israel.
Relations between ancient Israel and Persia—modern-day Iran—got off to a relatively good start. In 597 BC, Israel was conquered by the Babylonian Empire, and the Jewish people lived in captivity until 539 BC, when Persian King Cyrus crushed the Babylonian rule. Cyrus then opened the door for any of the Jewish people who wished to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the Temple, as described in Ezra 1:1–4. The Jewish people to this day honor Cyrus the Great as a “righteous king.”
Fast forward nearly 2,500 years to the rebirth of the modern State of Israel. When the fledgling Jewish state was reestablished in 1948, Turkey was the first Muslim-majority state to recognize its sovereignty—followed by Iran. In fact, in 1948, Iran boasted a Jewish population of 100,000, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, the second largest Jewish population in the Middle East after Israel.
Relations between the two states remained friendly under the rule of the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who governed the nation until the Islamic Revolution of 1979, when he was ousted and was forced to flee with his family.
Prior to 1979, Iran was reportedly Israel’s main oil supplier. Israel in turn supplied Iran with agricultural produce, weapons and technology, Firstpost reported.
But alas, out with the shah went the friendly bilateral relations between Israel and Iran.
In with the new regime in 1979 came the new clarion call: “Death to America. Death to Israel.” When the ayatollahs overthrew the shah and plunged Iran into the Islamic Revolution, the new supreme leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, began referring to the United States as the “Great Satan” and Israel as the “Little Satan,” monikers still in use today.
The Iranian bitterness toward the US traces back to 1953, when Washington and the United Kingdom supported a coup that overthrew the elected prime minister, gave the shah complete control and secured Western oil interests in Iran. However, the hatred toward Israel seems to boil down to religious motives.
Ruhollah Khomeini penned a diatribe called “Islamic Government,” upon which much of the Islamic Republic’s ideology is founded. In this document, the ayatollah wrote of the Jewish people: “We must…make the people aware that the Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very foundations of Islam and wish to establish a Jewish domination throughout the world. Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that—[Allah] forbid—they may one day achieve their goal and that the apathy shown by some of us may allow a Jew to rule over us one day.”
To prevent this unthinkable catastrophe, the regime went to work to undermine and attack the Jewish state indirectly.
Iran began pouring its resources—billions of dollars, weapons and military expertise—into proxy groups to expand its reach and influence across the Middle East.
Ruhollah Khomeini established the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in 1979 following the revolution. The US, Israel, other Western nations and Saudi Arabia designate the IRGC as a terrorist organization.
In 1982, the IRGC helped found, fund, train and arm Hezbollah, the terrorist organization in Lebanon that has been launching cross-border attacks against Israel nearly every day since October 7, when the Hamas terrorist group in Gaza launched a brutal attack on Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 240 hostages.
In fact, Iran funds and arms Hamas as well as the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) in Gaza, supplying both groups with money, weapons and training. Israel and other nations—including Saudi Arabia—have blamed Iran for October 7, though the regime denies involvement.
Tehran also supports militia groups in Iraq and Syria, particularly backing the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and turning the war-torn country into a shipping route for weapons from Iran to Hezbollah.
The IRGC also extended its reach south into Yemen with the Houthi rebels, particularly in their attacks against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, but also with sporadic strikes on southern Israel since October 7 as well as targeting the important shipping route through the Strait of Hormuz. In fact, the Houthis have a slogan that rings particularly familiar: “Death to America, Death to Israel, Cursed be the Jews, Victory to Islam.”
Iran has been engaging Israel in a shadow war for decades, using these terrorist groups as puppets to launch indirect attacks against the Jewish state.
Iran also stands on the Palestine soapbox, with the top brass in Tehran constantly declaring their support for the Palestinian people and their quest for an independent state. Khameini echoed the popular pro-Palestinian slogan to Haniyeh in Iran: “from the river to the sea”—a call to push the Jewish state into the ocean and replace it with a Palestinian state.
However, Iran’s hatred for Israel “should not be confused with concern for the well-being of the Palestinians,” Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a recent New York Times article.
“Iran’s goal is not to build a Palestine [state] but to demolish Israel,” Sadjadpour wrote.
In fact, the regime leaders’ words and actions show that Iran is a rarity in that its priority is the downfall of another nation rather than the wellbeing of its own nation, he explained. “‘Death to Israel’ is the regime’s rallying cry, not ‘Long live Iran.’”
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