Israel, Iran, and the Right to Exist

One may spend hours arguing over the legitimacy of Israel’s recent strike on Iran — debating whether it breaches international law, long buried under Russian aggression, or whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu torpedoed U.S.-Iran negotiations just to cling to power. Each of these questions can be answered differently, depending on one’s political views.

But there is one question that allows for no ambiguity: the ultimate aim of Iran’s foreign policy. Since the so-called Islamic Revolution, no Iranian leader — whether “reformer” or “hardliner” — has ever concealed their view that Israel is not a legitimate state and should be wiped off the map.

A glance at Iranian or pro-Iranian media makes this clear. The word “Israel” is either placed in quotation marks or omitted entirely in favor of euphemisms like “occupied Palestine.” Yes, this is historical nonsense. Jews and Persians coexisted in the Middle East long before most modern nations or even the Roman Empire — whose emperor coined the term “Palestine” — ever existed. But this nonsense has been weaponized into a genocidal ideology.

For Israel, there is no real choice: either it undermines Iran’s nuclear program and convinces Tehran that its ambitions to destroy the Jewish state are futile — or it ceases to exist. And what that means, Israelis know not in theory, but from lived history: the grandparents of many Israelis disappeared in the Holocaust.

In this way, the Israeli-Iranian conflict mirrors the Ukrainian-Russian war. In Moscow, they do not even bother to hide the true goal: the eradication of Ukrainian statehood. If Vladimir Putin speaks of Ukraine as an “artificial” entity, if Russian state media call the occupation of each Ukrainian city a “liberation,” one must ask — liberation from whom, and for whom? The answer is simple: liberation from Ukrainians. And for Russians.

No, the occupied are not all executed. They are “filtered,” expelled, intimidated. But that is merely the historical difference between Persian and Russian imperial traditions. The end result is the same: If Russia wins, Ukraine — and Ukrainians — vanish.

And what it means to vanish, Ukrainians also know not in theory. Their grandparents disappeared in the Holodomor.

So the world now faces a stark choice. Either it compels regimes like Iran and Russia to respect others’ right to exist — or it continues spinning in circles, explaining away aggression, organizing empty negotiations, and fantasizing about the profits of a peace that will never come.

But cannibals don’t make deals.

They feed.