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........

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