Fighting Israel to the Last Palestinian
Tehran’s campaign to destroy Israel has immiserated the people it purported to help and strengthened the Israeli right.
In the hours after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, only one world leader publicly celebrated it. “God willing,” wrote Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s then–supreme leader, “the cancer of the usurper Zionist regime will be eradicated.”
Three years later, the balance sheet of what the Iranian regime calls “resistance” looks grim. Gaza lies in ruins. Hamas’s senior leadership is dead. Hezbollah has been decapitated. Bashar al-Assad has fled to Moscow. Iran is still fighting the second of two wars with Israel and the United States—a misbegotten conflict whose enormous costs to the U.S. may never be vindicated, but in which Tehran has hardly emerged a winner. The two wars have destroyed much of Iran’s military, crippled its economy, and killed Khamenei himself.
Yet Benjamin Netanyahu still governs Israel. And the very people Tehran’s Axis of Resistance ostensibly set out to help have paid the highest cost of all: An estimated 74,000 Palestinians have been killed. A net assessment of the Islamic Republic’s nearly half-century campaign against Israel yields an inescapable conclusion. It has inflicted far more suffering on Palestinians, Arabs, and Iranians than on Israelis. And its chief political beneficiary has been the Israeli right.
For three generations, the cause of destroying Israel has attracted the support of dictators, militias, and movements far more readily than the cause of building Palestine. Being anti-Israel is not the same as being pro-Palestine. Too often, it has been the opposite. Saddam Hussein sent checks to the families of suicide bombers. Muammar Qaddafi expelled thousands of Palestinian workers from Libya to protest the Oslo Accords. Bashar al-Assad starved Palestinians in Yarmouk. Tehran’s official chant has always been “Death to Israel”—never “Long Live Palestine.”
More than a decade ago, at a Track II diplomacy meeting in Liechtenstein, an Iranian official explained his government’s vision for the region to me with unusual candor. He complained about U.S. militarism. I asked him, in turn, whether the billions of dollars Tehran had spent arming Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad might have better advanced the Palestinian cause had it been used to train tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese to become doctors, lawyers, and engineers.
“What good would that have done for us?” he responded matter-of-factly. “Do you think if we sent them abroad to become doctors, lawyers, and professors, they would return to southern Lebanon and Gaza to fight Israel?” He himself had a doctorate from the U.K. But he understood that his government’s agenda for the region depended on chaos, misery, and the absence of social mobility.
The conflict between Iran and Israel is neither ancient nor natural. Unlike Israel and Palestine, or Russia and Ukraine, or China and Taiwan, Iran and Israel have no border, no direct land dispute, and no competition over resources. Twenty-five centuries ago, the Persian king Cyrus the Great freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity, and the Hebrew Bible calls him God’s anointed. For decades before the revolution, the two countries were quiet partners.
All of this changed in 1979, when Iran transformed into a revolutionary Islamist theocracy, led by a militant cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who made no secret of his anti-Semitism. Khomeini’s 1970 treatise, “Islamic Government,” the blueprint for the Islamic Republic’s constitution, is laced with tirades and threats against “wretched” and “satanic” Jews.
“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 wrote. “Since they are a cunning and resourceful group of people, I fear that—God forbid—they may one day achieve their goal, and that the apathy shown by some of us may allow a Jew to rule over us one day.” The same text all but endorses ethnic cleansing. “Islam,” Khomeini wrote, “has rooted out numerous groups that were a source of corruption and harm to human society,” citing the Prophet Muhammad’s “elimination” of a “troublesome” Jewish tribe in Medina.
Khomeini’s successor, Khamenei, shared these views. Virtually every major speech he gave over his four-decade tenure as supreme leader drew on his hatred for Israel, and he backed his words with tens of billions of dollars in Iranian resources. Under Khamenei, the Islamic Republic invested in corrupt, repressive militias throughout the region, some of which have been involved in the illicit drug trade and piracy, even while pledging that they were seeking justice for Palestinians. “We will support and assist any nation or any group anywhere,” Khamenei once said, “who opposes and fights the Zionist regime.”
Many Palestinians have come to recognize that this means Tehran is prepared to fight Israel down to the last Palestinian. The office of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas—a rival to Hamas—has said that Khamenei’s “goal is to sacrifice Palestinian blood and thousands of children, women, and the elderly, and to destroy Palestinian land.” In a 2024 public-opinion poll, only 28 percent of Palestinians surveyed held a “favorable” view of Iran; a May 2025 poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 54 percent of Palestinians believed that Iran’s role was harmful to the Palestinian cause, compared with just 32 percent who considered it beneficial.
Critics of Israeli and American military action against Iran have frequently said that the use of force strengthens Iran’s hard-liners, who thrive on insecurity. Less noticed is the reverse: Tehran’s threats have strengthened Israeli hard-liners. Indeed, when Israelis and Palestinians have pursued peace—whether in Madrid and Oslo in the 1990s, or in Camp David and Annapolis years later—Tehran has supported armed groups determined to derail it.
The greatest political winner of Iran’s war against Israel has arguably been Benjamin Netanyahu: In 1996, a wave of suicide bombings by Iranian-backed Hamas and Islamic Jihad helped bring him to power for the first time. He defeated the incumbent prime minister, Shimon Peres—an architect of the Oslo peace process who was pursuing a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians—by fewer than 30,000 votes. “What really endangered election victory,” Peres warned on the eve of the election, “was not Netanyahu but Iran and Islamic fundamentalism.”
For the next three decades, Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, Holocaust denial, threats against Israel, and regional militias provided Netanyahu with an ideal foil. “It’s 1938 and Iran is Germany,” he warned. “Iran is racing to arm itself with atomic bombs.” Tehran helped Netanyahu stoke Israeli fears, divert attention from the Palestinian question, and persuade Arab governments fearful of Iran toward normalization with Israel without securing Palestinian statehood.
Tehran and Netanyahu agree on little. But the Islamic Republic has helped make Netanyahu the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history, and in doing so has undercut the very Palestinian independence it claims to champion. Iran has one of the few governments in the world whose aspiration to abolish another state has eclipsed its ambition for its own country.
Policies should be judged by their outcomes, not their slogans. Nearly five decades of “Death to Israel” have deepened Palestinian suffering and left Iran—a nation rich in human and natural resources—mired in chronic conflict, isolation, and brain drain. A wise government would take stock. Tehran’s revolutionary dictatorship will double down.