Israel's Conflict With Iran Is Existential

It was on 7 October 2023 that Netanyahu understood that Hamas represented the same existential threat to Israel that the clerical regime in Iran did.

- M.D. NALAPAT

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of the only Jewish majority state in the world, has his faults, but is aware of the fact that the struggle against those individuals and entities denying the right of the Jewish people to exist is existential. In 1979, exiles such as Abol Hassan Bani Sadr, who had tended to Ayatollah Khomeini in Paris, brought him back to Iran once the Shah was deposed.

The exiles did not take seriously the written and spoken words of Ayatollah Khomeini that Iran should be ruled by a hierarchy of clerics led by himself. They saw such ideas as the harmless prattling of an ageing cleric rather than take them as his long-held conviction.

Bani Sadr was made the first President of post-Shah Iran, but was swiftly removed by the Ayatollah once he sought to establish not a theocracy but a democracy in Iran.

Ayatollah Khomeini had the courage to publicly abuse the Shah, and he did so frequently. Rather than get him tortured and executed as was standard practice during the reign of Reza Pahlavi, the Shah made the mistake (for himself) of allowing the cleric to go into exile in Paris.

His rants were ignored by the French authorities, who joined Bani Sadr in not taking the Ayatollah seriously.

The Ayatollah seldom moved out of his room, but spent his time making tape recordings and writing poisonous tracts against the "wretched Shah" (his description) which were laboriously cyclostyled and smuggled to Iran, where he built up an immense following.

The crowds that welcomed him back to Iran at Mehrabad International Airport were delirious with joy. Had they known the future that was in store for the country, they would not have been.

The Ayatollah took to himself all the despotic powers of the deposed Shah, and soon after his return, welcomed rather than condemned a pile of students who stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took the US citizens within, including diplomats, as hostages.