The Iranian leadership has for a long time struck out at Israel, by proxies as well as directly.
I do get the political benefit to a ruling elite, in Iran and other middle eastern countries of professing antisemitism and anti-zionism. You get an useful external enemy and you can blame part of what goes wrong on that enemy (see the Zionist sharks snacking on tourists on the Egyptian Red Sea Coast).
What I do not get is the benefit of elevating enmity to acts that make Israel do something about it.
Would the cause of the regime staying in power, and extending Iran’s influence in the region by proxies (e.g. in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon), possibly establishing hegemony in Iran’s neighbourhood, have been better served by vigorously denouncing Israel and theoretically advocating its destruction, but not practically arming for its destruction and getting in a shooting war?
Keep in mind that governments are made up of people. The current people in power were raised their whole lives being told that Israel was the Great Satan that must be destroyed. If the propaganda works on the common folks, why wouldn’t it have also worked on the current VIPs? And so, now that they can destroy Israel (or at least, they think they can), they’re trying to do it.
Remember, the Jews and the Arabs share the same Old Testament, and Abraham is their common ancestor. The story says that Abraham’s son, Isaac, was Abraham’s second son, born to his wife Sarah when Abraham was 100 years old. He is the child of the covenant, through whom the Israelite people descended. He is legitimate and chosen by God. Ishmael, born to Abraham’'s maid Hagar, was conceived because Abraham didn’t have faith in God’s promise. He is, therefore, illegitimate and not heir to anything. He was cast out, and is considered the father of the Arab nation. The animosity created by that created an ever lasting hatred.
Yes, but so were the current people in power in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Jordan, Egypt, etc. And yet the Arab states managed to reach a state of peaceful coexistence with Israel. Not that I have a better hypothesis.
Yes, but they do consider themselves NOT to be a part of “God’s Chosen People”; i.e., Israel. Remember, as such, Israel attacked and defeated the indigenous people associated with the acquisition of “the fertile crescent”.
But then you run into the problem of, “Sure, sure, everyone always talks about destroying Israel, but no one ever does anything about it!” People will eventually notice that you’re full of shit, and that risks losing your power base. Someone has to believe in you, even in a dictatorship.
Having some actual fighting going on every now and then legitimizes your rhetoric, and a few Iranians getting killed never bothers the Iranian leadership, as we’ve seen time and time again. The trick is to find the right balance of enough war to keep the people in line behind the authorities who are “Fighting the enemy”, but not enough war to get yourself curb-stomped.
Again, I would point to the present day Arab states as an example that this is incorrect. They learned their lesson after the Arab Israeli wars, and decided that yes, it is possible to be at peace with the gun while simultaneously being at war with the word.
This is absolutely not what Jews believe, nor does it in any way reflect historical reality. For almost all of the last 1500 years, Jews were safer and more respected as a minority in Muslim countries than in Christian ones. Even today when antisemitism is very common among Muslims, and Islamophobia among Jews, nobody on either side, AFAIK, cites Abraham’s treatment of Ishmael as a reason for the hatred, because it would make no sense theologically.
Both traditions agree that God commanded Abraham to abandon Hagar and Ishmael in the desert. The Muslim version has Abraham specifically assuring Hagar of this, and Hagar is reassured, knowing that God will provide for her son. In the end, a miraculous well of water appears to save their lives. In the Muslim version, this well becomes the site of Mecca.
There is no suggestion that, prior to this, Ishmael was considered in any way “illegitimate”. The practice of using a surrogate mother to produce offspring who would be legally regarded as the child of the infertile wife was completely accepted at that time; Isaac’s son Jacob had six of his twelve sons that way. Sarah comes off badly, since she first urged Abraham to have a child with Hagar, then resented Ishmael once her biological son was born. Abraham, in contrast (at least in the Jewish version) is clearly devastated to be instructed to do this horrible thing to his son (foreshadowing!). But everyone agrees that the decision wasn’t Sarah’s or Abraham’s, it was God’s, so you can’t really criticize it if you’re a religious Muslim or Jew.
Why would you assume ANY government is intelligent?
I mean, yes, the current U.S. government has a significantly higher proportion of idiots than usual. No argument there. But there are idiots present in every government in every country in the world; always have been. Why would you think that the Iranians, of all people, happen to be the ones who “cracked the code” to keep the idiots out?
Thats not accurate. 80-90% of the Iranian people oppose the regime, and support for Israel is fairly widespread among average Iranians.
A majority (69%) believed “Iran should stop calling for the destruction of Israel,” while 20% opposed this idea.
Accountability emerges in GAMAAN survey, as 45% point fingers at the government for igniting the deadly spark through provocative policies.
Regarding favorability of countries, the United States received the most positive ratings (53%) and the least negative (37%) among Iranians; Israel ranked second with 39% positive and 48% negative views.
The Iranian people support the US and Israel far more than they support their own regime.
I don’t know the answer, but currently Iran is the only official government providing any real resistance to Israel, which is going to get a lot of approval from Arab muslims looking for a racially and religiously pure ethnostate free of Jews.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are fighting for dominance in the middle east. Saudi Arabia is seen as a US lackey and they are on the brink of signing a peace treaty with Israel. Iran being anti-Israel increases their support among average people in the middle east. I would assume that is part of their motivation. When Iran gets involved in proxy wars in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, etc having approval from the population there probably helps them gain influence in those regions.
Also my understanding is Iran has organized their military and paramilitary forces to function without central command. So even if their government falls, they just declare guerilla war against the new government until they take over again like the Taliban did.
Also there is an unofficial Israeli-Arab alliance to curtail Iran. The Israeli government and the governments in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE, etc cooperate to keep Iran in check. When Iran fires missiles at Israel, Saudi Arabia and Jordan help shoot the missiles down before they hit Israel. So Iran probably feels like they are fighting the entire Arab world and Israel at the same time.
Also Iran being able to lock down the strait of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb gives them massive leverage over the global oil economy. This war let them show the world the cards they hold over international commerce. This situation also gave Iran (and Israel) a real world opportunity to test how good Iran’s missiles are at bypassing the anti-missile defense efforts of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the US, UK and French warships parked in the Mediterranean.
…this thread is predicated on the assumption that the State of Israel doesn’t have agency and they are only doing what they are doing because “somebody else forced their hand.”
I don’t buy that at all.
Isreal and America decided they wanted to make this a shooting war when they killed the Ayatollah along with most of Iran’s political leadership in a sneak attack. They got Pearl Harbor-ed. And they bombed a school full of little girls while they were at it and still haven’t even said sorry for that.
If you are going to wonder what is going to fuel ongoing hatred in the region for the next decade: its going to be this.
Much of it is simply that the Iranian-allied Shia in Lebanon were the first to violently oppose the 1982 Israeli invasion. Hezbollah was the first external child of the Iranian Revolution and the the Iranian theocracy has adopted that group’s animosity to Israel as an act of revolutionary brotherhood.
Whether or not the attack on Khamenei was a wise move, it had already been a shooting war for some time before it happened. Israel may have started that round of combat, but Iran still started the war.
The first to oppose the Israeli invasion were, of course, the PLO - whose attacks were the reason Israel invaded in the first place. Hezbollah was founded by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, who sent hundreds of agents into Lebanon during its civil war. The Shiites were hostile toward Israel because Israel had sided with the Christians in the civil war, but the organization took the role as Israel’s sole antagonist in the conflict at the orders of Tehran. Treating Hezbollah as anything more than an Iranian proxy is deeply misguided. Iran didn’t adopt anything from them; it created them.
…it wasn’t just an “attack”; it was an assassination. When you go around assassinating world leaders, that will have global consequences. Of course it wasn’t “wise.” I live on the other side of the planet, and things are pretty much screwed now. It was STUPID with a capital S.
And as we’ve discussed before (and I’m not keen to take this thread off track), this was what started the war.
Bolding mine. Isreal and America started this round of combat with a sneak attack that killed the Ayatollah, politicians, scientists, and a whole lot of schoolgirls. There is a reason why they hate. And it isn’t as simple as the OP makes it out to be.
What I do not get is the benefit of elevating enmity to acts that make Iran do something about it.
The Iranians could have decided that the consulate attack was not an attack on their soil - it was by any definition an edge case. Instead, they decided to launch an attack by their own regular forces from their soil to Israel’s soil, a massive escalation and a clear and incontrovertible act of war. Their choice, not ours.
It seems as you are the one making the assumption that the Republic of Iran doesn’t have agency and they are only doing what they are doing because “somebody else forced their hand.” Iran’s enmity toward Israel since 1979 has been bottomless, unrelenting and inexplicable. They’ve been spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives to make our lives miserable for decades. We night as well give them a reason to hate us - it’s not as if it’ll change anything.
Iran can end it conflict with Israel tomorrow. It chooses not to.