The Iranian theocracy’s never-ending “resistance”
Since 1979, there has been one shining example of steadfast “resistance”: the Islamic Republic of Iran. Interestingly, though, it is actually a theocracy, despite its pretensions about being a republic. It is a bit like the North Korean Kim dynasty pretending to be a “democratic people’s republic” – authoritarians always like to speak and rule on behalf of “the people.” So, this post will be devoted to the ever-glorious “resistance” the Iranian theocracy has been offering the region, since its inception. The fact that most countries in the region consider this Iranian interference or even aggression does not matter.
Zarif at the Doha Forum
One key topic on the agenda at the recent Doha Forum was Israel. The majority of sessions focused on the Jewish state and the discussion concerning Iran was not different. Moderated by Trita Parsi, it included the Gulf Cooperation Council’s Secretary-General Jasem Mohamed Al Budaiwi, the former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, and Italian political scientist and former top-level adviser to the European Union Nathalie Tocci. The session was remarkable, because it perfectly demonstrated the Iranian theocracy’s continued obsession with Israel.
Parsi repeatedly wanted to discuss the emerging Israeli threat; Tocci had a few remarks to make about Israel as well; and Budaiwi argued that Israel was acting ridiculously in the region. Indeed, the Palestinians and their supporters were allowed to make appearances in Doha. But while everyone liked to talk about and criticize Israel, the popular topic of conversation could not defend itself, because it is never invited to such gatherings – it does not have to be a government representative, any Israeli expert would have sufficed. The session about Iran, however, was comical, because of the star of the show: Zarif.
Zarif used interesting oratory skills. He shouted, paused for effect regularly, stared at his audience with wide eyes, and gave a brief history lesson about how Iran had been the victim of attacks and occupation for seven millennia. It is true, Iran has suffered from attacks and occupation, but I believe that King Leonidas did not invite the Achaemenid Empire to come to Thermopylae. Anyway, despite multiple challenges Iran is facing, Zarif was certain that anyone in the region could now finally see that Israel was the source of instability. Why, he asked, did Iran need to be blamed for the problems caused by the Jewish state? After all, Iran had no territorial ambitions on its friends in the region.
Ironically, Budaiwi mentioned Israel briefly, but tried to steer the conversation in another direction: the Iranian threat. He requested that Iran address its occupation of three islands claimed by the UAE, that it would stop interfering with Shia minorities in Gulf countries, that it would cease implementing policies that destabilized the region, and that it would refrain from exporting the Islamic revolution. Of course, Zarif would have none of it and it almost descended into bickering between both men. Sometimes, Israel does not factor into regional security concerns, apparently. But Zarif returned to one thing on which the Iranian theocracy continuously prides itself: “resistance.”
Regional “resistance”
According to Zarif, it is rather simple: the United States is always imposing, while the ayatollah regime is always “resisting.” Well, it clearly was resisting Saddam Hussein’s invasion which created the Iran-Iraq War. But, as Pierre Razoux pointed out in his history of the war, it was Iran that contributed to the war’s continuation for many more years. After successfully repelling the Iraqi invasion, it demanded the removal of Saddam Hussein from power, as a condition to end the war. That demand was understandable, yet it also wanted to install an Islamic revolutionary regime, while trying to gain territory as well. Indeed, it launched a massive assault on the city of Basra, carried out by using crude human wave tactics that sacrificed thousands of men. Moreover, it had no qualms sending children into battle, as religious zealotry was used to drive young boys to attack Iraqi positions carrying nothing more than grenades and pistols. And, of course, Hussein used chemical warfare against Iranian forces. It was a brutal war that lasted eight years.
However, after the Iran-Iraq War, the Iranian theocracy would continue to “resist.” So, it needed to create Hezbollah to resist Israel’s presence in Lebanon. That seemed to make sense, but Hezbollah kept “resisting,” after Israel retreated in the year 2000. What was it resisting now? Lebanon? And what was it “resisting” when its forces were ordered by Tehran to cross the border and aid Bashar al-Assad’s regime? Was it “resisting” Syrian resistance to the last Ba’athist dictatorship? How about its other proxies that it decided to support? Was it an act of “resistance,” when Iran started backing Hamas in the 1990s, as the latter tried to derail negotiations about the Oslo Accords with suicide bombings? What about its decision to “resist” Saudi Arabia, by backing the Houthis on the kingdom’s southern border? And, of course, Iran needs to “resist” Iraqi governance, by backing heavily armed Shia militias on the territory of its western neighbor. Coupled with its promise to export the Islamic revolution – which is enshrined in its constitution – it is not altogether odd that the Gulf countries would interpret Iran’s regional “resistance,” as a serious security threat.
Internal “resistance”
Next to the regime’s interference in other countries, it is involved in never-ending “resistance” against the diverse communities that inhabit Iran. Indeed, Sunni Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Mandaeans, and Baha’i need to be treated with suspicion to varying degrees.
Supposedly, Sunni Muslims should be considered equal in the Islamic theocracy of Iran. However, that is not the case in practice, nor in terms of the law. Government authorities claimed in 2023 that 10,000 Sunni mosques existed in Iran. Yet, this claim was disputed by the Zahedan Baloch Sunni cleric Molavi Abdolhamid Ismaeelzahi, who argued that these are temporary prayer halls. Furthermore, Sunni Muslim institutions do not receive government support, while Shia institutions do. And Sunni Muslims are legally barred from entering high political offices. Moreover, the Sunni Muslims in the southeastern province of the country are ethnically Baloch. Complaints about neglect and discrimination by Tehran have existed for years. Tensions rose during protests in 2022, when government forces decided to “resist” Baloch protesters, by killing over 100 people and wounding hundreds more. This has become known as the Zahedan massacre, yet the government recently issued a few light sentences to a small number of suspects, charging that authorities had worked to restore calm, by suppressing “terrorists” and “rioters.”
Christians are a recognized minority in Iran and their value has been proven by the opening of a Christian-themed subway station in Tehran, an example of religious coexistence, according to the regime. However, on the same day that the station was opened, deported Iranian Christian converts who had arrived from the United States were detained at the airport in Tehran, interrogated, and forced to make confessions against their faith. Indeed, converts need to be “resisted” even more. Next to this, Christian communities generally suffer from discrimination and their status deteriorated further after the Israel-Iran War, as many have been accused of spying for Israel or maintaining contact with the Jewish state.
Zoroastrianism, an indigenous religion, is recognized by the Iranian constitution. And yet, in 1979 the first wave of Zoroastrians fled Iran, the result of the confiscation of Zoroastrian property and businesses, as well as the limitations imposed by Islamic law. While Zoroastrianism was once the state religion in the pre-Islamic era, the community today numbers roughly 30,000. Economic hardship and discrimination contribute to the willingness of members to leave Iran. During Donald Trump’s first term in office, several hundred chose to move to the United States. And this year, the Zoroastrian Sadeh festival was banned from being celebrated in public, once again.
While the recognized minorities continue to be “resisted,” the Iranian theocracy intensifies this when it comes to unrecognized minorities. Take the Mandaeans, for instance. This is an ethnoreligious group whose culture and belief system dates back 2,000 years. Its members bear names that are officially permitted by the Iranian theocracy. However, in private, Mandaeans refer to each other by the Mandaean names given to them by their parents. This dual identity is the product of the authorities’ refusal to recognize Mandaean names. In addition, legal discrimination hampers the community’s development, while its heritage – artefacts and cemeteries, for example – are under threat and have been partially destroyed. Due to this, the community is in decline and many Mandaeans have fled their ancestral homeland.
The minority most fiercely “resisted,” is the Baha’i community. Also not recognized by the Iranian theocracy, it is subject to legal discrimination and persecution, a process which started in 1979. A faith that emerged in the nineteenth century, it was already then declared an example of apostasy by parts of the Shia clergy. After the Islamic revolution, 200 members of the Baha’i community were executed in 1980. Afterwards, the theocracy embarked on a systematic campaign of persecution to block the community’s development. The accusations are varied, ranging from accusing the Baha’i of being anti-nationalist to anti-religious. But the most severe accusation that resurfaces constantly is that the Baha’i are Israeli spies. The tragedy is that the spiritual and administrative center of the faith can be found in Haifa and Acre – and that is an important reason to vilify the community. Recently, prominent media figure Ali Shirazi argued that Israel and the Iranian Baha’i community were one and the same. Naturally, such statements provide legitimacy to continued persecution of the community. Due to the severity of the persecution, the European Parliament has recently adopted a resolution calling for action against the persistent repression of the Baha’i community, which suffers from arbitrary detention and property confiscation, among others. In addition, the resolution called for sanctions against all Iranian government officials contributing to the persecution of the Baha’i.
Israel: the ultimate target of “resistance”
The main focus of the theocracy’s “resistance,” is the existence of Israel. While Western experts, usually the ones very critical of the United States and Israel, like to point to the fact that the largest Jewish community in the MENA region outside of Israel lives in Iran, they always forget to mention that roughly 80 percent of that community has fled, since 1979 – many of them rebuilding their lives in Israel. Because, despite its recognition of Judaism, the Iranian theocracy is fueled by antisemitism.
In 2020, Stephan Grigat articulated the three pillars of the antisemitic agenda of the Iranian theocracy: traditional Jew-hatred, the denial and relativization of the Shoah, and the regime’s commitment to the destruction of Israel.
The traditional Jew-hatred had begun long before 1979, but the influence of Nazi ideology is clear. In his book Islam and Nazi Germany’s War, David Motadel describes how a young Ruhollah Khomeini used to listen to Radio Berlin and the BBC. He argues that Khomeini would write his first political statement in 1942, in which he actually denounced the “Hitlerite ideology.” However, the same Khomeini was mentored by the head of a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, called the Devotees of Islam, as explained by Lyn Julius in her book Uprooted; and when Khomeini was living in exile in France, he was financed by François Genoud, one of the most important figures in the Underground Reich.
Next to this, Khomeini’s pre-revolutionary writings were laced with traditional Jew-hatred – it was never limited to Israel alone. Indeed, he usually referred in his polemics to the Shah as a Jew taking his orders from Israel. And he was convinced of the existence of a Jewish world-state, which is derived from the classic Nazi trope of a Jewish conspiracy ruling the world.
The influence of Nazi ideology on the theocracy’s views comes to the fore in other ways, too. Ali Khamenei translated the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideologue Sayyid Qutb’s writings, including his Nazi-inspired conspiracy theory called Our Struggle against the Jews into Farsi. Next to Khamenei, others have repeatedly denounced Jews as the enemies of Iran and Islam in general. So, in 2019, for example, Ebad Mohammabtahar, an Iranian cleric, argued that the arrival of the Hidden Imam would unite all Muslims against Jews, whom he considered to be the biggest enemies of Islam.
The persistent denial and relativization of the Shoah has a long history as well. In 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Shoah a “fairy tale,” as mentioned by Jeremy Black in his book The Holocaust: History and Memory; Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was a Shoah denier, as was the presumed “moderate” Mohammed Khatami; and Iran organized a number of international competitions focused on Holocaust cartoons.
The desire to destroy Israel has never been denied either. Usually, officials use the most vitriolic terminology when referring to the Jewish state. For example, Khamenei constantly refers to Israel as a “cancerous tumor”; in 2017, Hassan Rouhani referred to Israel as a “tumor” as well; in Doha, Zarif called Israel a “malady”; and in a recent article published by Tasnim, the former spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry Nasser Qan’ani also referred to Israel as a “tumorous growth,” next to calling it an “evil and satanic” regime and the “stench of its corruption” as intolerable to the nations of the world. Also, the Iranian theocracy considers its Jewish community to be dhimmi. For instance, Jews cannot be ministers, judges or teachers in regular schools.
And yet, Western experts and politicians have tried to accommodate the Iranian theocracy for years, applying the theories taught in International Relations programs to explain the regime’s desires. Yet, these schools of thought are oblivious to or simply disregard the ideological underpinnings of the Iranian revolution. It is not empty rhetoric, as the regime has consistently called for Israel’s destruction.
“Resistance” as a way of life
This is the essence of the Iranian theocracy. While Tehran is literally sinking into the ground and Iran suffers from various serious problems, the regime continues to “resist” the existence of the State of Israel; it continues to “resist” the United States and calling for its death; it continues to “resist” the Gulf countries; it continues to “resist” the minorities in Iran, including Sunni Muslims; it continues to “resist” popular protests which erupt periodically, calling for more freedom and a better life; it continues to “resist” reality.
At Doha, Zarif argued that everyone wanted Iran to go “down the drain.” But Budaiwi countered and explained that Iran was a part of the region, praising its history, art, and music; in the past, he had visited Iran in 1978. But that year is significant. After that, the Iranian decline has been engineered by the religious dictatorship that has ruled the country, since 1979. A regime that has systematically discriminated against and persecuted its own minorities, exported the revolution across its borders, and zealously pursues the destruction of Israel. A regime that fears its own people and, in turn, is willing to violently oppress them. But, Iran has provided the world with an example of what disastrous leadership entails; how religious dictatorship couched in the rhetoric of “resistance” in fact harms its own people.
I truly hope that Iranians will one day enjoy a better life and future, free from the oppression imposed by the Iranian theocracy. In addition, the majority of Iranian Jews live in Israel today. The message to the Iranian religious dictatorship is clear: in Israel, Jews are free from the dhimma.
