by Amir Taheri
In 1960, the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel nasser, architect of pan-Arab nationalism, created a special unit for a massive propaganda war against the shah’s regime in Iran. The state-owned radio Sowt al-Arab (Voice of the Arabs), broadcasting from Cairo, launched a special Persian-language program to attack Iran and alert its people to the “crimes committed by Jews in Palestine.” Egyptian secret services established contact with Iranian opposition figures both inside and outside Iran with offers of financial and political support. Emissaries visited Qom to sound out the mullahs, some of whom had never forgiven the shah’s father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, for having banned the hijab and the turban and curtailed the influence of the clergy in the 1930s. At least one emissary also contacted Muhammad Mossadeq, a veteran politician who had served as prime minister under the shah on two occasions but ended up as a symbol of opposition to the Pahlavis. (Mossadeq angrily turned down nasser’s offer of money and support.)
Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, too, had altered its initially friendly policy towards Israel and increasingly identified the Jewish state as an active member of the “enemy camp” led by the United States. As a result, the Iranian left, which had been ambivalent towards Israel, also adopted a hostile position. By the time Israel had defeated its Arab enemies in the Six Day War of 1967, it had become a prime target of attack by both Islamist and leftist anti-shah groups in Iran. As far as the small number of radical anti-shah mullahs was concerned, Israel provided a convenient excuse for presenting their deep-rooted anti-Jewish sentiments as nothing but political opposition to a Jewish state that had usurped the rights of the Palestinians.
The anti-Israel position of Iranian opposition groups, both Islamist and leftist, hardened over the years. Hundreds of young Iranian radicals enrolled in special courses in guerrilla warfare and urban sabotage run by various Palestinian groups, including Yasser Arafat’s Al-Fatah (Victory). The more leftist opponents of the shah received training in camps run by George Habash’s Marxist People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in Lebanon. (The program ended in 1975, when the PFLP was put on the shah’s payroll on the advice of Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal Ibn Abdul-Aziz.)
When Khomeini launched his first revolt against the shah’s social and political reforms in 1962, he used hatred of Israel as a major theme in his campaign. He claimed that the shah was working for the Jews and Baha’is and against Islam. Forced into exile, first in Turkey and later in Iraq, Khomeini had greater opportunities to meet Arab, especially Palestinian, emissaries who offered him support. From 1970 onwards, Colonel Muammar Kaddhafi’s regime in Libya emerged as a major source of support for Iranian opposition groups, including the Khomeinists. In 1971, the Soviet-sponsored Tudeh (Masses) Party concluded a tactical alliance with Khomeini, then in exile in Iraq. The Tudeh emissary, Reza Radmanesh, underlined “joint opposition to the existence of Israel” as a key factor in the unity of Marxist and Islamist opponents of the shah. The informal alliance was later expanded to include an even more surprising partner, the cashiered general Teymur Bakhtiar, a former head of the shah’s secret service who, motivated by personal ambition, had turned against his former patron. A refugee in Lebanon but a frequent visitor to Iraq, Bakhtiar had to adopt an anti-Israeli profile to please his Arab protectors.4
Faced with the combined opposition of the Soviet bloc and its radical Arab allies in the context of the Cold War, the shah and his advisors soon identified Israel as a strategic ally. Like Iran at the time, Israel did not want a Middle East dominated by pan-Arabism, from which Iranians, Turks, Kurds, Christians, and Jews would be excluded. The pan-Arab regimes called for the destruction not only of Israel but also of Iran as a nation-state. nasser invented the term “Arabian Gulf” to replace “Persian Gulf,” the historic and universally recognized name for the body of water that separates Iran from the oil-rich Arab monarchies. He and his counterparts in Syria and Iraq also called for the secession of Iran’s oil-rich province of Khuzestan, which they dubbed Arabistan (Land of the Arabs). By 1965, Iranian intelligence services had ample evidence that radical Arab regimes were financing and training members of several Iranian opposition groups. In 1968, Arab radicals also launched the so-called People’s Front for the Liberation of Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), a Marxist guerrilla outfit whose members were trained in Cuba, north Korea, East Germany, and South Yemen, with the aim of toppling the Sultan of Oman and seizing control of the strategic Strait of Hormuz, the chokepoint of Iran’s oil-based economy. Seen from Tehran, it was obvious that Iran and Israel shared the same enemies.
Because Israel was perceived as a friend of the shah, his opponents had no difficulty in regarding the Jewish state as an enemy. While the left tried to present its opposition to Israel in secular terms, Khomeini, emerging as the principal spokesman for radical mullahs, seized every opportunity to foment hatred of Jews as a whole. In a sermon in Qom on April 13, 1963, he told his supporters: “I know that you do not want Iran to lie under the boots of the Jews.” Later he called the shah “a Jew in disguise,” accusing him of taking orders from Israel. He claimed that the central political theme of contemporary life was an elaborate and highly complex conspiracy by the Jews—“who controlled everything”—to “emasculate Islam” and dominate the world thanks to the natural wealth of the Muslim nations. In 1963, he told a crowd of theological students that their fight was not just against the shah but also against the Jewish state. “Israel does not want the Koran to survive in this country,” Khomeini said. “It is destroying us. It is destroying you and the nation. It wants to take possession of the economy. It wants to demolish our trade and agriculture. It wants to grab the wealth of the country.” Always careful to trace his current hatred of Israel to Islam’s deep-rooted suspicion of the Jews, Khomeini accused them of having tried to falsify the Koran “just as they had falsified the Torah.” He also accused them of leading a global campaign against Islam. Later, in his first openly political work, Islamic Government, the ayatollah claimed that Jews wished to dominate the world, adding that since “they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that . . . they may one day achieve their goal.” Then in September 1977, he declared, “The Jews have grasped the world with both hands and are devouring it with an insatiable appetite; they are devouring America and have now turned their attention to Iran and still they are not satisfied.” In August 1978, as the Khomeinist revolution gathered momentum, a Persian translation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious anti-Semitic tract forged by the Russian tsar’s secret services in the nineteenth century, was printed and widely circulated in Iran. The man who financed it was a certain Haji Mahdi Araqi, a close associate of Khomeini.5
In 1980, soon after the start of the Iran-Iraq war, official propaganda began to portray Khomeini as the leader who would realize the Arab dream of wiping Israel off the map of the Middle East. For some fourteen centuries, Iranians had known Jerusalem as Beit al-Muqaddas (House of the Holy). The Khomeinist regime abandoned that name in favor of Quds (Holy), the Arab name for Jerusalem.6 It also launched the slogan “Through Karbala to Jerusalem,” to underline its claim that the war was really aimed at liberating Palestine and destroying Israel.
To back this claim, the traditional machines for fabricating hadiths were set in motion. Here is one hadith as narrated by Ayatollah Mahdi Rezvani, deputy chairman of the Islamic Majlis’s Defense Committee, in July 1982:
His Holiness Imam Jaafar Sadeq spoke thus: Before the rise of His Holiness the Mahdi ( May Allah hasten his return), a man from the noble progeny of the Prophet will rise in Iran. His soldiers will fight for eight or eighteen months, weapons in hand, heading for Beit al-Muqaddas [Jerusalem]. There is also a saying from the pulpit by the Commander of the Faithful [the first Imam, Ali] that at some point Jews coming from the West will conquer Palestine and set up an Israelite state there. On such a day, Muslims are bound by the chains of colonialism. Again, His Holiness Imam Jaafar Sadeq said: When Israel spreads corruption on earth, God the Most Hig
h will dispatch His most ardent special believers who are inflexible and war-seeking from Qom to Iraq. These will first conquer Iraq and then ally with Arabs to liberate Palestine. When they enter Palestine, they will go house to house and bunker to bunker in search of Zionist Jews to pull them out and cut their heads like buffaloes until not a single Jew is left alive in Palestine. The Holy Prophet Himself said: I see a people who start a war in the context of a revolution, earning divine victories from beginning to the end. The leader of this revolution is Iranian and sends his forces to Jerusalem.7
Rezvani’s forecast that the war would last eight to eighteen months proved wrong. The Iran-Iraq war, provoked by Khomeini but started by Saddam Hussein, lasted eight years, claiming a million lives and ending in a draw. The ayatollah’s “Volunteers for Martyrdom” got nowhere near the Iraqi city of Karbala, let alone liberating Jerusalem.
The “cursed Jew,” however, came to Iran’s support whenever he found an opportunity. In 1981, Israeli bombers destroyed Iraq’s French-built nuclear center at Osirak, south of Baghdad, preventing Saddam Hussein from making the bomb that he had always said he needed to make up for his country’s geographic and demographic disadvantages against Iran. (That Saddam Hussein would not have hesitated to hit Iran with nuclear weapons was later illustrated by his decision to use banned chemical weapons that killed over 50,000 Iranians and maimed more than 100,000 others.) In 1985 and 1986, Israel also helped persuade the Reagan administration in Washington to ease a U.S. ban on the sale of arms to Iran. In an operation designed by Israel, a large quantity of U.S.-made antitank missiles were shipped to Iran, helping the Iranians neutralize Saddam Hussein’s superior armored divisions and taking the war into Iraqi territory. Israel had to stop its military aid, however, when a Tehran faction led by Ayatollah Montazeri leaked details of the secret deals, also involving the Reagan administration, to discredit the faction led by Khomeini who had approved the scheme. (This led to the so-called Irangate scandal.) Ahmadinejad, then serving in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was among the first Iranian troops to enter Iraqi territory, partly thanks to weapons shipped from Israel.
nevertheless, as Israel celebrated its sixtieth birthday on May 8, 2008, Ahmadinejad described the Jewish state as “a dead rat.” Addressing members of the Islamic Majlis, he said: “The Zionist regime, having been slapped by the nation of Lebanon, is like a dead rat that has reached the end of the road.” Mocking Israel’s birthday celebrations, he added: “Today, the very philosophy of the Zionist regime’s existence is being questioned. This usurper and fake regime is destined for decline and fall.” Referring to President Bush’s decision to attend Israel’s birthday party, Ahmadinejad said: “Those who think they revive this stinking corpse with birthday festivities are badly mistaken. And those who take part in such festivities should know that their names will be registered in the list of criminals. They should know that regional nations hate this fake and criminal regime, and if the smallest and briefest chance is given to regional nations, they will destroy [it].” In the same speech, he linked the “elimination of Israel” with his own “mission” to prepare the world for the return of the Hidden Imam. He said: “Our mission in the arena of foreign affairs is to present the idea of Pure Islam as the only path for the salvation of mankind to all nations. We have to smash the existing models in the world.”8
Indeed, soon after his election as president, Ahmadinejad had grabbed world headlines by describing Israel as “a cancerous tumor” that had to be wiped off the map. Addressing a conference called “The World Without Zionism” held October 2005 in Tehran, he described the creation of Israel as “a move by the Oppressor of the World [the United States] against the Muslim world.” He said, “The clashes in the occupied land are part of a war of destiny. The outcome of hundreds of years of war will be defined in Palestinian land.” He then recalled that Khomeini had said: “The usurper regime that occupies Jerusalem must be wiped off the slate of time.”
Ahmadinejad predicted that “the annihilation of the Zionist regime will come” with events that he did not specify. “The Muslim ummah will not allow its historic enemy to live in its heartland,” he said, claiming that the Israel-Palestine conflict was part of a bigger war between Islam and the United States. He warned Palestinian and other Arab leaders that making peace with Israel could expose them to “the seething wrath of Muslim masses.” “Anyone who signs a treaty that recognizes the entity of Israel has signed the surrender of the Muslim world,” he shouted.
Reviving Khomeini’s bellicose rhetoric, Ahmadinejad promised “full and total victory” in what he called a “historic war” over who would set the agenda for mankind: Islam or the oppressor infidels led by the United States as manipulated by the Jews. This war, he said, “dates back hundreds of years. Sometimes Islam has advanced. Sometimes nobody was winning. Unfortunately, over the past three hundred years, the world of Islam has been in retreat,” he lamented. “One hundred years ago the last trench of Islam fell, when the oppressors went towards the creation of the Zionist regime. They are now using it as an advance base to spread their aims in the heart of the Islamic world.” At the same time, he assured his audience, “There is no doubt that the new wave [of attacks] in Palestine will soon wipe off this spot of dishonor [Israel] from the face of the Islamic world.”9
Ahmadinejad’s comments stirred up a storm of protest all over the world, including within Iran itself. In an attempt to cool things down, the Supreme Guide Ali Khamenehi came out with a statement apparently distancing the regime from the president. Speaking in november 2005, Khamenehi implicitly ruled out any Iranian attack on Israel:
We hold a fair and logical stance on the issue of Palestine. Several decades ago, the Egyptian statesman Gamal Abdel nasser, who was the most popular Arab personality, stated in his slogans that the Egyptians would throw the Jewish usurpers of Palestine into the sea. Some years later, Saddam Hussein, the most hated Arab figure, said that he would set half the Palestinian land on fire. But we would not approve of either of these two remarks. We believe, according to our Islamic principles, that neither throwing the Jews into the sea nor setting the Palestinian land on fire is logical and reasonable. Our position is that the Palestinian people should regain their rights. Palestine belongs to Palestinians, and the fate of Palestine should also be determined by the Palestinian people. . . . We have suggested that all native Palestinians, whether they are Muslims, Christians, or Jews, should be allowed to take part in a general referendum before the eyes of the world and decide on a Palestinian government. Any government that is the result of this referendum will be a legitimate government.10
It was not hard to see that Khamanehi’s “fair and logical” solution to the Israel-Palestine problem, if implemented, would achieve the same goal as set by Khomeini and Ahmadinejad: the destruction of the Jewish state. Palestinians from all over the world as well as those in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza would be allowed to decide whether or not the Jewish state should live. non-Israeli Jews, however, would be excluded from the proposed referendum. Khamenehi’s formula was not original. It was first proposed in 1989 by the Libyan dictator Muammar Kaddhafi, who called it “the democratic way to end the life of the Zionist enemy.”
In any case, Khamenehi’s statement may have been little more than a tactical move to ease international pressure on the Islamic Republic. Soon after the Supreme Guide had spoken, his senior representative, Muhammad-Hassan Rahimian, told an audience of Khomeinist mullahs in Tehran that a war with Israel was inevitable. “The Jew remains the most obstinate enemy of the pious,” he said. “And the main war shall determine the destiny of mankind. . . . The reappearance of the twelfth imam will lead to a war between Israel and the Shiites.”11
More importantly, Ahmadinejad himself did not seem to take much notice of Khamenehi’s pirouette. In several interviews with the world media, including American television networks, he refused to deny that he desired Israel’s destruction. To underline his determination to
put the fight against Israel at the heart of his presidency, Ahmadinejad devoted most of his speech at an Islamic summit conference hosted by King Abdullah Ibn Abdul-Aziz of Saudi Arabia in Mecca in December 2005 to what he called “the Zionist threat to Islam.” He claimed that most Israelis were European Jews who had no place in “the heart of Islam.” He then dismissed the Holocaust as a myth invented by the West:
Why have they come to the very heart of the Islamic world and are committing crimes against the dear Palestine using their bombs, rockets, missiles, and sanctions? . . . The European countries have imposed the illegally established Zionist regime on the oppressed nation of Palestine. If you have committed the crimes, then give them a piece of your land somewhere in Europe or America and Canada or Alaska to set up their own state there. They have invented a myth that Jews were massacred and place this above God, religions and the prophets. The West has given more significan ce to the myth of the genocide of the Jews, even more significance than to God, religion, and the prophets; [it] deals very severely with those who deny this myth but does not do anything to those who deny God, religion, and the prophets. If you have burned the Jews, why don’t you give a piece of Europe, the United States, Canada, or Alaska to Israel? Our question is, if you have committed this huge crime, why should the innocent nation of Palestine pay for this crime?12