Introduction

The Israeli regime, buttressed by transatlantic media consensus and securitised Western discourse, casts itself as the eternal victim, besieged by fanatical adversaries in Tehran, and targeted by the theological militancy of Hamas and Hezbollah. This narrative, rehearsed in parliamentary speeches, policy briefings, and think tank reports, has sedimented into a geopolitical truism: Israel is under siege; its enemies are irrational; its violence is pre-emptive. On the surface, the proposition is not wholly without merit. The Islamic regime’s anti-Israeli (incorrectly designated as 'anti-Semitism' [1]) demagoguery, Hezbollah’s ideological rigidity, and Hamas’s performative nihilism do indeed undermine the possibility of civic Palestinian nationalism. Their slogans should not be recycled; their ideological programmes deserve no romanticism; their methods, especially when sectarianised or suicidal, cannot be defended.

 

And yet, it is precisely this constellation of enemies, declarative, reckless, and theatrically hostile, that furnishes the Zionist state with its most powerful ideological resource: perpetual victimhood. Tel Aviv does not merely withstand the aggression of its adversaries; it feeds on it. Each Hezbollah rocket, each Hamas communiqué, each Iranian slogan referencing ‘the cancerous tumour’ becomes not a threat to Israel’s survival, but a mechanism for its geopolitical expansion, juridical exceptionalism, and colonial permanence. What ought to be threats are, in reality, assets. They legitimate occupation as ‘defence’, recast apartheid as ‘security’, and transform a settler-colonial state into a besieged redoubt of liberal democracy.

 

This is not a glitch in the logic of regional enmity; it is its architecture. Far from existential antagonists, the Islamic regime and its armed clients function as indispensable antagonists, enemies whose ontological extremism absolves Israel of proportionality, diplomacy, or reform. Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah thus serve a paradoxical function: their very opposition, however genuine or grotesque, consolidates the Zionist state. This is the dramaturgy of enmity. The theatre in which each actor performs hostility, yet all participate in sustaining the very structures they claim to combat.

 

This paper proceeds from a refusal to participate in that theatre. It interrogates the convergence masked by conflict, the structural mimicry beneath rhetorical antagonism. It does not relativise violence or indulge in the illusion of equivalence. Rather, it exposes how the clerical regime in Iran has strategically co-authored the Zionist security narrative by weaponising Palestine not as a cause, but as a performative proxy for its own domestic authoritarianism. It reveals how Hamas and Hezbollah, far from advancing Palestinian self-determination, have become functionally complicit in perpetuating Israel’s siege grammar, a grammar in which opposition is always reactive, fractured, and easily caricatured. Most provocatively, the paper explores how the Islamic regime has not resisted Zionism so much as mirrored its method: its siege logic, its theological absolutism, its mobilisation of historical grievance to justify present repression.

 

What follows is not a neutral historiography, nor a policy analysis. It is a political intervention: an attempt to dismantle the false dialectic between Zionist statehood and clerical resistance, to puncture the sanctimony of anti-Zionist spectacle, and to reclaim a future for anti-colonial critique that is neither hostage to Tel Aviv nor Tehran. The theatrics must end. The task is not to choose sides in a curated opposition, but to disentangle liberation from its captors.

 

 

The Theatre of Enmity

It has become intellectually untenable to accept at face value the choreographed hostility between the Israeli regime and the clerical state ruling Iran. What parades as enmity, loud, gestural, televised, is better understood as an enduring performance of antagonism, a dramaturgy of opposition that, in substance, shields convergence. The political theatre of Iran–Israel hostility, endlessly repeated in official speeches, proxy conflicts, and diplomatic posturing, functions not as resistance, but as mutual reinforcement. What emerges is not the clash of civilisational adversaries, but a strategic entanglement between two post-colonial security states whose survival is, at times, parasitically dependent on the continued fiction of their opposition.

 

This is not to suggest that Tehran and Tel Aviv share tactical goals or ideological aspirations; rather, their antagonism is structured through what can be called strategic mimicry, a pattern of oppositional interdependence where each mirrors, enables, and occasionally validates the other's political architecture. The clerical state’s monopolisation of the Palestinian cause has, for over four decades, served not to liberate Palestine but to domesticate dissent, discipline Iranian society, and authorise militarism under the banner of Islamic solidarity. Similarly, Israel’s invocation of an ‘Iranian existential threat’ has delivered precisely what its military-industrial complex demands: perpetual mobilisation, Western financial indulgence, and a licence to normalise apartheid under the pretence of survival.

 

That this mutual antagonism is maintained by spectacle rather than substance becomes evident in the disjuncture between declared ideology and material practice. Tehran’s denunciation of Zionism has never translated into the severance of all strategic engagement. The shuttering of the Israeli consulate in 1979, while symbolically potent, did not amount to a formal withdrawal of recognition; and as subsequent arms deals, oil shipments, and intelligence collusions during the Iran–Iraq War demonstrate, the anti-Zionist rhetoric served more as revolutionary theatre than geopolitical rupture. Indeed, the Islamic regime’s interactions with Israel have been consistent with a logic not of resistance but of manoeuvred proximity, masked by sanctimonious sloganeering and choreographed burnings of the Israeli flag.

 

This text proceeds from a refusal to treat clerical declarations at face value. It interrogates not only the contradictions of Iranian foreign policy, but the ideological convenience of a permanently mobilised anti-Zionist posture, one that, far from threatening Israel, entrenches its security narrative. The argument unfolds not as a defence of Israeli exceptionalism, nor as a relativisation of the occupation, but as a counteroffensive against the false grammar of regional politics, in which resistance is often engineered, and enemies are curated to fit the logic of state survival.

 

There is no intellectual sanctuary for those who refuse to interrogate power when it is garbed in familiar ideology. The anti-Zionism of the Islamic regime is no exception. To critique it is not to serve the Zionist state, but to puncture the sanctimony that cloaks betrayal. One must reject the colonial fantasy that Iran’s liberation requires alignment with Tel Aviv, just as one must reject the clerical delusion that Palestine is being defended by those who, in practice, reinforce the very structures they claim to oppose.

 

 

Iran–Israel Relations before the 1979 Engineered Islamic Revolution

The relationship between Iran and Israel prior to the 1979 engineered Islamic takeover was neither incidental nor informal. It was strategic, deliberately cultivated, and embedded within the broader doctrine of Iranian civilisational centrality and regional stabilisation pursued by the Imperial Iranian Government under the Pahlavi dynasty. Far from clandestine, the cooperation between Tehran and Tel Aviv was part of a pragmatic statecraft designed to balance Soviet influence, counteract pan-Arabist militarism, and secure West Asia’s fragile political architecture against ideological subversion.

 

What emerged during the reign of His Imperial Majesty Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Shahanshah of Iran, was a doctrine of geopolitical realism, a refusal to indulge in sentimental alignments and a commitment to advancing Iran’s national interest within a volatile post-colonial region. Israel, for its part, viewed Iran not merely as an ally but as a linchpin in the periphery alliance strategy advanced by David Ben-Gurion: a foreign policy doctrine seeking partnerships with non-Arab states, including Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia, to encircle the hostile Arab nationalist bloc (Sela, 2002).

 

The intelligence cooperation between SAVAK, Iran’s national intelligence and security organisation, and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, was neither accidental nor marginal. It was foundational. Declassified documents confirm extensive bilateral training, intelligence sharing, and security coordination stretching back to the early 1960s (Black and Morris, 1991). Israel benefited from Iranian logistical corridors, especially during its early state-building years, while Iran secured access to military technology, tactical surveillance, and critical water and agricultural expertise, particularly in arid-zone reclamation and desert agriculture (Alvandi, 2012).

 

Critically, the Pahlavi state never engaged in ideological theatrics against Israel. Unlike the Arab regimes that leveraged Palestinian suffering for rhetorical capital while offering little substantive support, Iran maintained a dual-track strategy. On the one hand, it upheld Palestinian national aspirations through diplomatic channels and multilateral forums; on the other, it refused to allow that solidarity to be hijacked by pan-Islamist demagogues or Soviet-aligned guerrilla groups. Iran’s Palestine policy was thus defined by lucidity, not hypocrisy.

 

The Imperial Iranian Government also resisted the sectarian entrapments that would later be weaponised by the totalitarian theocratic regime post-1979. During the Pahlavi dynastic empire, the state did not treat Judaism as a political fault line. Iran’s Jewish community, among the oldest in the world, was integrated into national life with legal protections and civic representation. Zionism was not equated with Judaism, nor was anti-Zionism weaponised to conceal domestic failure. The distinction was precise, and the policy was stable.

 

To frame Iran’s pre-1979 relations with Israel as ‘secret’ or ‘controversial’, a trope favoured by Western liberal historiography and clerical propagandists alike, is to retroactively impose the language of present-day ideology onto the past. The facts remain unambiguous: Iran never formally recognised Israel, but engaged with it as a de facto regional actor. This was not inconsistency; it was sovereign realism. The Islamic regime, by contrast, indulged in the symbolic theatre of anti-Zionism while replicating the very patterns of covert engagement it publicly condemned, a duplicity to which we shall return.

 

What the pre-revolutionary era demonstrates, then, is the capacity of a civilisational state to navigate geopolitical complexity without resorting to ideological excess. The Imperial Iranian Government's foreign policy was calibrated to maximise national agency in a region increasingly polarised by Cold War proxies and post-colonial volatility. Israel, during this period, was treated not as a messianic partner nor an existential threat, but as a tactical interlocutor, engaged when useful, held at arm’s length when not.

 

It is only in the aftermath of the revolution that this mature realism gave way to a spectacle of militant posturing, as the clerical apparatus sought to rebrand Iranian identity itself around the axis of anti-Zionist rhetoric. The historical record exposes this rupture as not a moral awakening but a strategic regression, a substitution of performative ideology for statecraft.

 

 

Recognition and Diplomatic Performance

The Islamic regime’s hostility towards Israel has long been interpreted, both by its apologists and detractors, as absolute, unyielding, and structurally irreconcilable. This reading is not only analytically lazy; it is strategically convenient. It absolves the regime of accountability, inflates its revolutionary credentials, and preserves the illusion of ideological clarity in a theatre governed by opacity. Yet once unshackled from propagandistic habit, the facts reveal a more sordid truth: the clerical state never formally revoked Iran’s de facto recognition of Israel. The Israeli diplomatic mission may have been shuttered after 1979, but no legal or juridical act nullified the framework that underpinned prior engagement.

 

Diplomatic recognition is not an emotional declaration. It is a legal act involving the acceptance of statehood, sovereignty, and international legal personality. The Islamic regime, despite its loud repudiation of Zionism, neither invalidated the existing recognitions nor expelled Israeli nationals en masse, nor declared war. Even the replacement of the Israeli diplomatic mission with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation's outpost, largely symbolic, did not entail any formal abrogation of Iran’s previous state-to-state protocols (Ramazani, 1982). The clerical apparatus understood full well that abrogating de facto recognition might trigger retaliatory recognition of internal Iranian separatist groups by Israel or its allies, something the regime, already facing foreign back Kurdish, Arab, and Balochi insurgencies, could ill afford.

 

Indeed, Iran’s clerical establishment maintained, and at times expanded, its capacity for indirect engagement with Israel through intermediaries, third-party states, and covert channels. During the Iran–Iraq War, Israeli arms found their way into Iran via obscure trading firms and shadowy diplomatic routes, all under the approving gaze of the same regime that branded Zionism a ‘cancerous tumour’. This was not an aberration, but a method: anti-Zionism for domestic mobilisation, covert engagement for strategic continuity (Segev, 2006).

 

Recognition, then, operates not only as legal status but as a performance of legitimacy. The Islamic regime opted not for sovereign rupture, but for ritualised denial, a diplomatic choreography in which Israel’s existence would be denied publicly, but never confronted structurally. To date, Iran participates in international organisations and treaties in which Israel is a member state. It observes airspace protocols, maritime navigation rules, and trade classifications that presuppose Israel’s juridical reality. It has neither exited nor attempted to reshape these mechanisms.

 

This selective engagement is not a tactical inconsistency; it is a deliberate posture of symbolic antagonism that preserves the regime’s revolutionary veneer while insulating it from the geopolitical costs of actual confrontation. In this theatre, denunciation substitutes for diplomacy; incendiary slogans for international law. But the structure holds: Israel is not delegitimised, only denounced; the regime’s rejection is vocal, not legal.

 

The stakes of this performance are not limited to foreign policy. They extend into the internal grammar of the Islamic regime’s legitimacy. Anti-Zionism has become the regime’s most reliable alibi for repression. Dissent is framed as treachery, protest as collaboration, and any demand for reform as a plot hatched in Tel Aviv. This logic, morally vacuous, strategically dull, has paralysed Iran’s revolutionary imagination. It has inverted the Palestinian cause into a disciplinary mechanism for clerical survival.

 

To interrogate this choreography is not to endorse the Israeli regime, but to expose the political cynicism of its mirror. A state that refuses to recognise Israel only in word, but reproduces its logic in governance, cannot claim revolutionary purity. It can only posture, ever more desperately, before a generation no longer willing to suspend disbelief.

 

 

Proxy Warfare and Manufactured Resistance

Resistance, once a moral commitment grounded in national liberation, has, under the stewardship of the Islamic regime, become a simulated currency, minted, circulated, and weaponised to serve clerical consolidation. Nowhere is this more visible than in the regime’s entanglement with paramilitary organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas, presented to the world as organic instruments of Palestinian and Lebanese self-defence, but operating in strategic synchrony with the very forces they claim to oppose. These groups function not as autonomous expressions of resistance, but as instruments of engineered conflict, carefully managed theatres of asymmetric warfare whose utility lies not in liberation but in prolongation.

 

The Islamic regime has, since its inception, cultivated proxies as buffers against direct confrontation. This is neither novel nor accidental. The use of surrogate militias, whether under religious, ideological, or nationalist banners, has long served colonial and post-colonial powers as a low-cost, deniable method of projecting influence. British counterinsurgency in Kenya and Malaya, the French use of harkis in Algeria, and Israel’s own alliances with Christian militias in Lebanon all speak to this lineage. Iran’s clerical establishment, though cloaked in revolutionary discourse, follows the same blueprint.

 

What sets the Islamic regime’s model apart, however, is its deliberate mimicry of Israeli strategy. Just as Israel utilises the spectre of Hamas to rationalise its military expansion and securitisation of civil society, the regime in Tehran relies on Hezbollah and affiliated factions to justify its regional militarism, its ideological hegemony, and the internal repression that masquerades as defence. In both cases, the enemy is indispensable. The continuation of hostilities ensures the continuation of power. Peace would be politically catastrophic.

 

Hamas, in particular, embodies this logic of manufactured resistance. Ostensibly a Palestinian liberation organisation, its trajectory reveals deep structural incoherencies: religious sectarianism over civic nationalism, tactical nihilism over strategic vision, and rhetorical militancy offset by periodic complicity. Scholarly and journalistic investigations, even prior to 2013, had begun to expose its foundational permissiveness by the Israeli state, which found in Hamas a counterweight to the secular and more politically sophisticated Palestinian Liberation Organisation (Mishal and Sela, 2000; Levitt, 2006). By encouraging the rise of a fragmented, Islamist opposition, Israel succeeded in fracturing Palestinian political coherence and legitimising its own ‘counterterrorist’ posture. In short, Hamas was not simply tolerated, it was functionally cultivated (Abu‑Amr, 1993).

 

The myth of Hamas as a spontaneous eruption of grassroots resistance obscures a far murkier genesis, one shaped, in no small part, by Israeli strategic indulgence. As Jean‑Pierre Filiu (2012) meticulously documents, the organisational infrastructure that birthed Hamas was not forged in opposition to Israeli occupation but incubated under it. The Islamic charity networks, religious institutes, and socio‑educational arms tied to Gaza’s Muslim Brotherhood, many later subsumed into Hamas, were, for years, tolerated, recognised, and at times quietly facilitated by Israeli intelligence as a counterweight to the secular nationalism of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. This was not a diplomatic oversight but a calculated containment strategy: to fracture Palestinian political coherence, dilute revolutionary secularism, and manufacture a more ideologically pliable opposition. Hamas, then, did not emerge in spite of Israel’s security apparatus; it was cultivated in its blind spots, or worse, its laboratories. This genealogical complicity unsettles the official Israeli narrative of Hamas as an alien ideological pathogen. It is, rather, a creation of consequence, an unintended consequence perhaps, but one whose utility has long served the Zionist state’s siege dramaturgy. Every Hamas provocation, every doctrinal intransigence, becomes retroactively useful, repurposed to reinforce the myth of eternal Jewish victimhood beset by irrational enemies.

 

These actors do not require daily instruction from Tel Aviv. Their utility lies not in command but in consequence. Once cultivated, through toleration, manipulation, or strategic neglect, they function independently yet obedient to the structural logic of their own inception. They are not puppets; they are programmed. A beast once loosed into the field does not need a leash. Its instincts, bred through conflict, sustain the dramaturgy without rehearsal. This is not conspiracy but choreography: unconscious, patterned, and ideologically productive. Their violence is not an aberration, it is a function. And when the performance threatens to spiral or stagnate, Israel intervenes, not to end the spectacle, but to recalibrate it. Periodic assassinations of Hamas leadership, selective strikes on operatives, or staged incursions serve not as acts of strategic conclusion but as theatrical punctuation. The aim is never collapse, only continuity, just enough blood to renew the narrative of siege, never enough to end it. For the show must go on, until the settler-colonial project achieves its longue durée objective: the total removal, by annihilation or deportation, of the Palestinian people from their homeland, and the sacralisation of that territory as the exclusive dominion of ‘Eretz Israel’.

 

The liquidation of Palestinian diplomacy did not begin with Hamas; it began with Oslo. When the PLO renounced armed struggle and entered negotiations, it forfeited not only territorial claims, but its capacity to be caricatured as irrational. For Israel, this was intolerable. What followed was not engagement but erosion: a policy of assassinations, land grabs, and bureaucratic fragmentation designed to render the Palestinian Authority illegitimate by design. The very act of moderation, of negotiating within the grammar of international law, was met with punitive escalation. Between 1993 and 2000, illegal settlement expansion more than doubled, while the matrix of control intensified across every register: physical, economic, administrative (Tilley, 2009). Rabin’s assassination, carried out by a Zionist extremist in 1995, marked not merely a domestic fracture but a signal: peace would not be permitted to proceed unmolested (Sprinzak, 1995). Israel’s deep state, through successive governments, treated the PLO’s turn to diplomacy as strategic vulnerability. The ‘generous offer’ mythology surrounding Camp David in 2000 collapsed under scrutiny, revealing instead a proposal that enshrined fragmentation, denied sovereignty, and codified Bantustanism (Said, 2001; Finkelstein, 2003). By sabotaging the only plausible interlocutor for a negotiated settlement, Israel created the vacuum into which Hamas would be funnelled. That vacuum was not accidental. It was designed. And so, The genius of this arrangement lies in its inversion. Every act of violence carried out by Hamas or Hezbollah, however futile or reckless, is instantly transmuted into evidence of Israel’s eternal victimhood. A suicide bombing, a rocket fired, an abduction at the border, each serves not to weaken Israel but to strengthen its alibi. These organisations, far from threatening Israel’s existence, guarantee its narrative. Their every move confirms the Zionist claim of a nation under siege, persecuted without respite, forever compelled to kill in order to survive. In this theatre, Palestinian blood becomes the raw material for Israeli victimhood, weaponised to expand settlements, entrench occupation, and secure Western indulgence. The Islamic regime’s support for these factions thus serves not Palestine, but the Zionist state it claims to oppose, for the theatre only works if the beast continues to attack on cue.

 

The Islamic regime’s financial and logistical support for such organisations is then not an act of solidarity, but of strategic entrenchment. It extends Tehran’s influence into Arab politics while exporting the burdens of revolutionary legitimacy onto others. Hezbollah and Hamas become avatars of resistance that cost the regime little and deliver much: regional leverage, sectarian polarisation, and a perpetual enemy with which to dance.

 

What passes for ‘resistance’ in the practices of Hamas and Hezbollah is not only strategically incoherent but structurally corrosive to the Palestinian national project. These formations, presented as vanguards of defiance, have instead fractured the very architecture of Palestinian political legitimacy. Their sectarianisation of liberation, their recourse to spectacular violence over diplomatic leverage, and their consistent instrumentalisation by regional powers, chiefly Tehran, have disfigured the struggle for self-determination into a theatre of managed conflict. They do not advance a two-state solution; they sabotage its plausibility by rendering Palestinian agency synonymous with theological maximalism and tactical despair. Israel could not have engineered a more convenient opposition. A divided, Islamist front is precisely what the settler-colonial state requires to invalidate its interlocutors and preclude a negotiated settlement. This is not failure; it is systemic betrayal. Hamas and Hezbollah do not represent Palestine. They caricature it.

 

Even if Hamas or Hezbollah were to abandon performative militancy and instead adopt a coherent diplomatic strategy, recalibrated along the lines of the PLO’s shift towards negotiation, it is far from clear Israel would permit the transition to survive first contact. The idea that Zionist statecraft rewards moderation is a fiction sustained only by those unacquainted with its operational grammar. A de-escalated, unified Palestinian political front, civic, secular, strategically literate, would pose a catastrophic threat to Israel’s dramaturgy of siege. It would undercut the narrative scaffolding upon which the settler-colonial state relies: the irrational, anti-Israeli, Islamist antagonist from which it must eternally defend itself. Tel Aviv cannot afford that collapse. It requires not an enemy, but a grotesque one. In such a scenario, the likely response would not be dialogue but liquidation. Assassinations masked as counterterrorism, incursions misframed as pre-emption, and political delegitimisation laundered through compliant media channels would follow as predictably as nightfall. The aim would not be to engage but to provoke, to elicit a retaliatory rupture that could restore the familiar spectacle: Hamas returning fire, Hezbollah issuing threats, and Israel, re-anointed as the eternal victim, proceeding with its cartographic violence under cover of necessity. Diplomacy would not be permitted to gestate; it would be strangled in the crib.

 

This proxy paradigm serves Israel no less effectively. With each exchange of fire, each rhetorical escalation, Tel Aviv secures its status as a state under siege. It converts Palestinian suffering into international indulgence and neutralises dissent by collapsing criticism of Zionism into accusations of antisemitism. Meanwhile, the Islamic regime reaps its own dividends: a distraction from economic decay, an alibi for cultural repression, and a justification for the militarisation of Iran’s political imaginary.

 

That both states, Zionist and clerical, derive sustenance from this circuit of managed hostility should alarm, not surprise. The use of armed non-state actors to perpetuate permanent insecurity is a well-worn tactic of colonial politics. In Iran and Israel alike, it is not the enemy who threatens the regime’s survival; it is the absence of one.

 

 

The Manufacture of Antisemitism as a Zionist Strategic Asset

Antisemitism, a historically embedded pathology of European Christendom, has been politically refunctioned by Zionist strategy into an asset, weaponised not against its perpetrators, but against its critics. This reversal, whereby the trauma of genocide is repurposed to shield a settler-colonial state from scrutiny, marks one of the most insidious triumphs of post-war propaganda. Antisemitism, once a European crime, is now deployed as a rhetorical trapdoor: those who interrogate Israeli state violence are collapsed into the same category as those who enabled Auschwitz.

 

This is no accidental logic. It is doctrinal. Zionist thinkers from Herzl onwards understood that persecution could serve a dual purpose: to justify the necessity of a Jewish state, and to delegitimise all political alternatives. Theodor Herzl himself noted, with a clinical detachment, that antisemitism was not merely inevitable, but useful (Herzl, 1896). What follows in the twentieth century is the strategic reordering of antisemitism from existential threat to political currency.

 

By the 1970s, this strategy had matured into institutional infrastructure. International organisations, lobbying networks, and transatlantic policy circles aligned to equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, collapsing historical, moral, and political registers into a single prosecutorial discourse. The definition of antisemitism, once rooted in racialised hatred and structural discrimination, was redrawn to include opposition to Israeli occupation, criticism of Zionist historiography, and support for Palestinian self-determination (Finkelstein, 2005; Klug, 2004).

 

This semantic expansion was not pursued to protect Jewish communities, but to immunise the Israeli state from critique. The rise of this logic coincided not with new waves of anti-Israeli violence, but with Israel’s deepening colonisation of Palestine, particularly after 1967. Each intifada, each act of protest, each appeal to international law, was reframed through this apparatus of pre-emptive defamation. Resistance became delegitimised not through argument, but through accusation.

 

The clerical regime in Iran, while appearing to stand in defiant opposition to this logic, has in fact served it spectacularly. Through crude sloganeering, Holocaust denialism, and the conflation of Zionism with Judaism, the Islamic regime has gifted Israel its most effective alibi. By reproducing the very anti-Israeli tropes that the Zionist state claims to combat, Tehran has lent credence to the Zionist mythos of perpetual Jewish victimhood under siege. Every cartoon, every speech, every conference designed to deny Jewish suffering has functioned not as defiance, but as collaboration.

 

In doing so, the Islamic regime has sabotaged the Palestinian cause. It has handed to Israel the ideological ammunition it needs to silence legitimate dissent, to portray every critic as a fanatic, and to collapse centuries of Jewish–Muslim coexistence into a caricature of eternal hostility. Far from defending Palestine, the clerical elite has participated in the epistemological strangulation of its struggle.

 

To manufacture antisemitism where it does not exist, or to amplify it through state media and sectarian propaganda, is to act not against Zionism, but in its service. It confirms its premises, justifies its paranoia, and secures its exceptionalism.

 

The Palestinian cause, rooted in international law, anti-colonial resistance, and historical justice, cannot be advanced by regimes that reproduce the very discourses Zionism thrives upon. It requires a political grammar untainted by the bigotries of Europe’s past or the ideological grotesqueries of Iran’s present. Any struggle that indulges in the language of religious hatred, even under the banner of resistance, ceases to be resistance and becomes complicity.

 

 

Clerical Zionism: The Mirror Image

The totalitarian theocratic regime ruling Iran today does not oppose Zionism; it mimics it. Beneath its incendiary rhetoric and sectarian posturing lies a state-form uncannily similar to the Zionist model: an exclusionary political theology wedded to historical grievance, deployed to justify militarism, suppress dissent, and manufacture the enemy as a permanent fixture of domestic life. The clerical regime, much like its Zionist counterpart, governs not by consent but by siege logic, staging national cohesion through the choreography of existential crisis.

 

The clerical elite invokes the Palestinian cause not as a revolutionary duty, but as a disciplinary mechanism. In this theatre of borrowed resistance, Palestine functions less as a geopolitical priority than as a floating signifier, activated when the regime requires ideological mobilisation, silenced when it demands tactical expediency. This is not solidarity; it is simulation. Every empty slogan about Jerusalem, every staged rally, every manufactured provocation against Zionism serves only to animate a closed political circuit in which resistance is performed, not pursued.

 

Structurally, the regime’s model of governance is Zionism’s ideological echo. Like the Zionist state, the Islamic regime roots its legitimacy in a mythologised past, sacralised, racialised, and rendered immune to critique. It rewrites history to fit its theology, polices identity through ideological orthodoxy, and constructs citizenship as a function of religious conformity. Where Israel demands loyalty to the ethnonationalist project of Jewish sovereignty, the Islamic regime demands submission to a clerically curated Shi’ite exceptionalism. In both, heterodoxy is treated as treason, and pluralism as sedition.

 

At the level of statecraft, the parallels intensify. Both regimes maintain systems of juridical apartheid: Israel through its bifurcated citizenship laws and territorial dispossession; the Islamic regime through its gendered legal codes, religious hierarchies, and suppression of non-clerical cultural expression. Both wield paramilitary proxies under the guise of national defence while deploying internal security apparatuses to extinguish political imagination. And both rely on a global network of diaspora operatives, whether lobbyists or ‘cultural centres’, to project influence, manage narrative, and police external critique.

 

What binds these two regimes is not shared theology, but shared method: the instrumentalisation of trauma, the codification of enmity, and the reduction of political life to a militarised struggle against the Other. Zionism, as an ideology, emerged to recode Jewish survival through territorial sovereignty; clericalism, as deployed by the Islamic regime, recodes Iranian survival through sectarian guardianship. The result is the same: a securitised national identity, insulated from internal reform, forever engaged in external antagonism.

 

To name this structure is not rhetorical provocation; it is political diagnosis. The Islamic regime constitutes a clerical Zionism, not because it inadvertently supports the Zionist project, but because it has internalised its logic. It offers a religiously inverted facsimile of the garrison state: theology in place of patriotism, velayat-e faqih in place of democracy, and a parallel machinery of exception, mobilisation, and ideological foreclosure, redeployed in clerical vernacular but patterned on the same architecture of permanent siege.

This internalisation is not merely tragic; it is treasonous. It represents the betrayal of Iran’s civilisational legacy, in which pluralism, cultural depth, and philosophical inquiry were once constitutive. The clerical regime has replaced those traditions with surveillance, censorship, and paranoid theatre, borrowing the vocabulary of liberation only to enact its opposite. And it has done so under the cover of anti-Zionism, even while mirroring Zionism’s most toxic instruments.

 

To expose this mimicry is to reclaim the space for a future Iranian politics uncorrupted by occupation, whether foreign or domestic, religious or secular, overt or concealed. The Islamic regime’s appropriation of resistance, like Israel’s appropriation of Jewish suffering, must be unmasked as the ideological fraud it is. Nothing less than the decolonisation of the political imaginary depends on it.

 

 

Conclusion

What has passed for resistance in the Islamic regime’s foreign policy since 1979 is a dramaturgy of deflection, less a confrontation with Zionism than a co-dependence upon it. The regime’s performative antagonism, strategically curated and theatrically deployed, does not challenge the Zionist state; it secures it. Each rhetorical escalation, each ritualistic denunciation, serves to reaffirm the illusion of enmity while concealing a deeper structural symmetry.

 

Tehran’s invocation of Palestine is not the articulation of solidarity but the deployment of a proxy discourse. The cause is not served, it is exploited. Worse, it is corrupted. By tethering Palestinian liberation to clerical authoritarianism, the regime has sabotaged the ethical and strategic coherence of anti-Zionist struggle. In doing so, it has not weakened Israel’s position in the region; it has fortified it, providing the Zionist state with both an ideological counterpoint and a permanent excuse for militarised continuity.

 

One objection arises at this point, predictable and rehearsed: where is the proof that actors such as the Islamic regime in Tehran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, or the Taliban in Afghanistan receive their marching orders from Tel Aviv? The objection mistakes the mechanism. These movements do not need daily instruction. Their creation, cultivation, and containment was enough. Once engineered, they function like a beast loosed into the field: it does its work instinctively, relentlessly, in accordance with the purpose for which it was bred. It need not sit by its master’s side for every command. The structure of its being is already the command. Its leash is invisible but effective, ensuring that while it lashes out, it does not turn against those who enabled its existence. And as the beast devours, sucking out the lifeblood of the nations it inhabits, its master howls, crying wolf, victimising itself, and weaponising the chaos. The theatre is complete: the beast ravages, the master feigns terror, and in the name of ‘defence’ launches invasions, massacres, and occupations, sanctified as survival.

 

This is why every reckless act by Hamas or Hezbollah, every poorly aimed rocket or suicidal provocation, strengthens Israel rather than weakens it. Their violence is the raw material of Israeli victimhood, immediately weaponised to justify expansion, occupation, and slaughter. Israel counts on its enemies to play their part; their resistance is its licence. And the Islamic regime, by bankrolling and brandishing such groups, is not striking at Zionism but collaborating with its most enduring strategy.

 

The Islamic regime’s anti-Zionism is not only hollow; it is derivative. It mimics the Zionist grammar of exceptionalism, siege logic, and ideological absolutism. It borrows from the settler-colonial playbook while posturing as its opponent. And like all imitations of power, it disfigures the very traditions it claims to defend. Iran’s civilisational inheritance, philosophical, pluralistic, cosmopolitan, is nowhere in this equation. In its place stands a militarised theocracy performing revolution while executing repression.

 

To name this theatre is to exit its script. It is to reject the false binaries of colonial cartography, where opposition is manufactured, dissent criminalised, and liberation made conditional upon subordination to clerical or colonial power. The task is not to choose between Zionism and its mirror, but to dismantle both. Neither the Israeli regime nor the Islamic regime offers a future worth preserving. Their enmity is real only in spectacle. Their convergence is structural.

 

Those who remain tethered to this false antagonism, intellectually, politically, or emotionally, are not resisting occupation. They are reinforcing it. Real resistance demands clarity, not choreography. It demands truth untethered from theological posturing and political theatre.

 

What follows must be a new grammar of opposition: one that rejects clerical Zionism as resolutely as it rejects the Zionist state; one that does not confuse noise with substance, nor slogans with liberation. The end of this theatre begins with a refusal to perform it.

 

Yet, what remains latent in this dramaturgy, however, is the prospect of its full detonation. For now, a Democratic administration such as Barack Obama’s, though unwaveringly pro-Israel, is compelled to maintain the illusion of constraint. Its liberal imperial grammar demands a minimal choreography of ‘balance’, a nod to diplomacy, a condemnation of excess. But if power in Washington were to shift decisively, towards a Republican warmonger or, worse, a demagogue indifferent to international norms, Israel would no longer need to manage its pretences. It could unleash what it has long prepared for: a provocation so spectacular, so brutal, carried out by Hamas or Hizbollah, with or without direct orchestration, that it would provide the ideal pretext for ethnic cleansing on an unprecedented scale. Massacres would be reframed as ‘security operations’, annexations as ‘counter-terrorism’, and the final liquidation of Palestinian presence as a ‘defensive necessity’. This is not political fiction. It is the logical terminus of Zionist statecraft wedded to unrestrained power. The beast does not merely perform; it is always waiting to be unchained. And once unchained, it will not stop at Gaza. It will march, ideologically and militarily, toward the borders envisaged in Theodor Herzl’s imperial blueprint (1904) and reiterated by Rabbi Fischmann before the United Nations in 1947, an arc of conquest from the Nile to the Euphrates.

 

 

 

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