Since it came to power, the dictatorial bourgeois-clerical regime in Iran has promoted Jew-hatred and planned for the destruction of Israel, where nearly half the world’s Jews live. This reactionary regime consolidated its power through a counterrevolution in the early 1980s that dealt blows to gains won by millions of working people who rose up and overthrew the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran in a popular revolution in 1979.
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shiite cleric who gained support for his opposition to the shah, was promoting anti-Jewish conspiracy theories well before he came to power as the country’s Supreme Leader.
“We must protest and make the people aware that the Jews and their foreign backers are opposed to the very foundations of Islam and wish to establish Jewish domination throughout the world,” Khomeini declared in 1970.
Khomeini founded international Quds (their name for a Jerusalem without any Jews) Day — on Aug. 7, 1979, ostensibly in “solidarity” with the Palestinian people. “We shall reject Israel and shall have no relations with it, for it is a usurper state and is our enemy,” he said.
This has been the fervent course of the Iranian regime ever since. Israel is a “cancerous tumor that should be cut, and will be cut,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in 2012. After Khomeini’s death in 1989, Khamenei was appointed Supreme Leader, a position he held for 37 years until he was killed at the start of the U.S. war on Iran Feb. 28.
To extend its reactionary influence throughout the region the regime in Iran organized what became known as the “axis of resistance.” This included creating, training and funding Hezbollah in Lebanon and pro-Iranian “militias” in Iraq, and backing the Houthis in Yemen.
Hamas in Gaza had a different origin, coming out of the Muslim Brotherhood and the tradition of Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who had collaborated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis in targeting Jews during the Holocaust. But over time Hamas began closely collaborating with the rulers in Tehran, especially on the murderous Oct. 7, 2023, anti-Jewish pogrom in Israel.
The goal of the Tehran-led alliance is to be able to attack Israel from all sides and lay the basis for eliminating the Jews who live there.
Extending its operations to Latin America, Hezbollah, supported by Tehran, bombed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1994, killing 85 people. Two years earlier it killed 29 people in an attack on the Israeli Embassy there.
By the 1990s the Khamenei regime had succeeded in restarting Iran’s nuclear program. He repeatedly claimed it was intended to generate power. “We do not need weapons and have decided against nuclear arms,” he said. But it rapidly became clear its main purpose was to build nuclear weapons to use against Israel.
“The use of one atomic bomb in Israel leaves nothing left,” Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of Iran, declared in a 2001 speech, “but in the Islamic world, there will only be damage.” Just “one atomic bomb” would be enough to obliterate the Jewish population of Israel and destroy the only state dedicated as a refuge from Jew-hatred and pogroms in the world. As far as the effects of such a bomb on the region — the slaughter of millions of Palestinians in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, immigrant workers and Arabs in surrounding countries would just be “collateral damage.”
Echoing the same theme in 2010, Khamenei advisor Mohammad Hassan Rahimian boasted, “We have manufactured missiles that allow us, when necessary to replace Israel in its entirety with a big holocaust.”
Holocaust denial
The regime also champions Holocaust denial. The fact that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews during World War II is an “unprovable and mythical claim,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared in 2010, after he had won election with Khamenei’s support.
In 2006 Ahmadinejad organized a Holocaust denial cartoon exhibition that drew 1,200 submissions from over 60 countries. Some were put on display at the Palestine Museum in Tehran. A similar exhibition was organized by Iranian authorities in May 2016.
Despite the regime’s efforts, there is little Jew- or Israel-hatred among working people in Iran, outside of the regime’s organized thugs and supporters.
Increasingly unable to convince working people and oppressed nationalities in Iran to back the regime and its goal of eliminating Israel and the Jews, the regime has arrested or killed thousands of its opponents, accusing many of being agents of Israel.