Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, recently published an entire book calling for the destruction of Israel. Ofra Bengio argues that its release was timed to celebrate the nuclear deal, “Iran’s victory over the ‘Great Satan,’ the United States, and more specifically the ‘Little Satan,’ Israel.” Bengio places this in the context of the millennia-old history of Persian-Jewish relations, with its many ups and downs:
Among all Muslim sects, the treatment of Jews was the worst under Shiite rule, especially in Iran, the only place where Shiism has been the religion of the state since the 16th century and where Shiites came to represent 93 percent of the population. In Shiite Iran the Jews were persecuted and had to wear a special badge on their clothing to distinguish them from the Muslims. There were also occasions of massacres of Jews or forcible conversion to Islam. . . .
While, [before the 1979 Islamic revolution], the government of the Shah nourished the peripheral alliance with Israel, the [current] clerical regime is nourishing new dreams of its destruction. . . . [A]s long as the clergy rules Iran, the prospects for its accepting the legitimacy of Israel are dim.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/193732/iranian-clerics-eliminating-israel