On Saturday night, the Islamic Republic of Iran confirmed what hours of silence had already telegraphed: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic for 37 years, was killed in a targeted strike on his compound, alongside his daughter, son-in-law, granddaughter, and several senior advisors.

In Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, crowds poured into the streets in spontaneous celebration – not for a death, but for the removal of the man who had spent four decades architecting their encirclement, who had built and funded the axis of resistance that armed Hezbollah with missiles pointed at Israeli cities, financed Hamas’s tunnel networks beneath Gaza, equipped the Houthis with the drones that struck at international shipping, and turned Iran’s proxies into the most sophisticated non-state military infrastructure in modern history. For Israelis, Khamenei was not a distant adversary; he was the spider at the center of every web that threatened their existence, and his death felt less like a military achievement than an existential exhale.

President Donald Trump had described Khamenei as “one of the most evil people in the history of the world.” For the United States, the strike was framed as the elimination of a man who had exported terror to five continents and held his own people hostage to a medieval theocracy. American flags appeared alongside Israeli flags and the Lion and Sun flag of Persia in demonstrations across Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, not in triumphalism, but in the belief that the architect of four decades of regional destabilization had finally met the consequences his own theology had long promised to others.

But perhaps the most poignant celebrations were those of Iranians themselves – particularly the millions in the diaspora scattered from Los Angeles to London to Toronto, who had fled the very system Khamenei personified. For them, this was not geopolitics; it was liberation by proxy. They danced in the streets of Westwood, wept in the cafés of Paris, and flooded social media with a single refrain that distilled decades of exile into five words: a noble people, freed at last.

Because the Iranian diaspora has always insisted – with a grief that only the children of great civilizations reduced to theocratic captivity can understand – that Iran is not the Islamic Republic, that the heirs of Cyrus and Hafez and Ferdowsi cannot be reduced to the regime that censored their poetry, hanged their daughters for removing a headscarf, and turned their ancient nation into a pariah synonymous with enriched uranium and proxy warfare.

And for many – particularly in the Jewish world – the timing carried a weight that transcended strategy and entered the realm of the providential. The strike fell on Purim, the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)