Beyond Jerusalem: Mecca
The war beneath the slogans of anti-Zionism
The Islamic Republic of Iran has pursued a more ambitious and more dangerous design. Its hatred of Israel is real enough. Yet it is also useful. It is the mask worn by a regime whose appetite is not satisfied by Jerusalem and whose revolutionary imagination has always extended beyond the Jewish state.
For the ayatollahs, Jerusalem is the first checkpoint; the slogan of anti-Zionism has allowed Tehran to present itself as the sword of the Muslim world. Its nuclear programme, its missile arsenal, its financing of militias, and its cultivation of proxy armies are not disconnected eruptions of ideological rage. They form a system. Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and the Shia militias embedded across Iraq and Syria are not merely instruments against Israel. They are pressure points against the Sunni Arab order, and above all against Saudi Arabia, the guardian of Mecca and Medina.
Iran’s revolutionary theocracy has never reconciled itself to a regional order in which the holiest sites of Islam remain under Sunni custodianship. The rivalry between Tehran and Riyadh is a struggle over legitimacy, sanctity, inherited authority, and command. The Islamic Republic has always understood that power in the Middle East is never purely military. It must dress itself in theology.
Israel, in this argument, plays a role very different from the one assigned to it by its enemies, and indeed by many of its more dreamy critics in the West. Iran shouts “Death to Israel” because the phrase is useful, exportable, and intoxicating. It flatters every grievance, recruits every fanatic, and distracts every useful fool. Yet behind the noise lies a colder ambition: the weakening of the Sunni bloc that currently stands between Tehran and a far wider religious empire. Every missile launched towards Israel is also a message to Riyadh. It says: we can reach them, and one day we may reach you.
The Houthis’ attacks on Red Sea shipping illustrate the point with almost comic clarity, though the joke is a bitter one. A movement armed and encouraged by Iran can threaten global commerce, menace Saudi Arabia’s southern flank, and present itself as acting in the name of Palestine. Hezbollah can hold Lebanon hostage while pretending to be the conscience of the Arab street. Militias in Iraq and Syria can entrench Iranian influence while claiming merely to resist America or Israel. The stated cause is Palestine. The practical effect is encirclement.
Tehran’s threats against the Strait of Hormuz, its arming of militias, its exploitation of sectarian divisions, and its revolutionary language are heard in the Gulf as a direct warning. The Sunni governments know the danger Iran represents. The Jewish people, too, know what such warnings mean. They know that annihilationist language cannot be treated as rhetoric when spoken by men trying to acquire the means to act on it. Israel exists because Jewish history produced a people who would no longer leave survival in the hands of others.
That is why the defence of Israel is a defence of political sanity against the romance of fanaticism. It is a refusal to let the oldest hatred be repackaged as anti-imperial virtue. It is also a warning to those who imagine that the fire lit for the Jews will stop at the Jewish frontier.
The ayatollahs may begin with Jerusalem because Jerusalem burns in the imagination of nations, and because its name carries a fire older than their slogans. Yet power, once clothed in sanctity, does not halt at the border of its first hatred. It teaches conquest to speak as destiny. Iran speaks of Jerusalem because Jerusalem can set the world aflame, but Mecca remains the deeper thirst, the coveted city beyond the first cry. If Iran’s project is permitted to ripen, the question will not be whether Israel stood too firmly or struck too deeply. It will be whether the region understood, before the chants had fallen into dust, that Israel stood between the spoken city and the coveted city, a small nation holding back a vast hunger.
