When Iran Says, “Death to Israel,” It Means It

This winter, when Vladimir Putin made clear his intent to renew his war against Ukraine, many observers—including some of the most intelligent—concluded that he was making empty threats. Behnam Ben Taleblu notes how often the same flawed logic is applied to the murderous rulers of the Islamic Republic:

Despite the sheer volume of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic statements emanating from the country’s two supreme leaders in the 43 years since the Islamic revolution in Iran, the notion that Tehran’s Islamist rulers seek the destruction of Israel has often been caveated, belittled, or politically recast.

Perhaps most famous is the case of the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who called for Israel’s destruction in 2005 when paraphrasing a line from the founding father of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Quite literally, Ahmadinejad said, “The occupying regime of Jerusalem must be disappeared from the page of time.” His quote became the subject of a translation controversy and political debate following its popularly rendered but more figurative translation as calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map”—which not just American, but Iranian state-run English-language outlets employed. . . .

Predictably, the dispute over verbiage obscured what could have been an important opportunity to see the connective tissue between generations of political elite in the Islamic Republic and their consistent views on Israel. Worse, the translation debacle needlessly divorced Ahmadinejad’s comments from his role as the president of a state that materially supports groups (and has only grown bolder about) seeking to expedite exactly what the conference he spoke at was titled: “A World Without Zionism.”

The Ahmadinejad quote isn’t an isolated example, either. . . . For every anti-Israel utterance from the mouths of Iran’s Islamist elite, [moreover], there is equal chapter and verse, if not more, said about America.

Read more at Atlantic

More about: Anti-Semitism, Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF