Ayatollah’s War

MOURNING THE ASSASSINATION of Hassan Nasrallah, leader of the world’s largest and most lethal non-state militia, Iran launched a missile attack on a sovereign state. In the post-Gaza metaphysics of reciprocal justice, Iran firing 181 ballistic missiles at Israel was, in the aftermath of the inevitable death of Tehran’s dearest proxy and a cult Shiite guerrilla in Beirut, a shock-resistant distraction in polite liberal circles. On the eve of the first anniversary of October 7, the day Jews suffered the horror of genocidal hate after the Holocaust, that was in tune with the prevalent moral order in which Israel is a geographical error in the history of Palestinian homelessness. It was also just another official confirmation, if one was required, of where the axis of the Middle East war lies.

Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Houthis in Yemen—they are the “freedom fighters” directly reporting to freedom’s supreme arbiter, Iran. And they are the proxies who keep Iran’s neighbourhood in a state of chaos that suits the kind of revolution Ayatollah Khomeini’s inheritors want to pursue nearly half-a-century after he declared war on history and launched the export of god’s terror to far-flung ghettos. If an all-out regional war looks increasingly possible, it is a crime against truth to pretend that it is all the making of a paranoid Jewish state that transfers its existential anxieties to the brutalised communities in Gaza and elsewhere. Iran’s presidency in the confederacy of Islamist terror sustains the violent instability of the Middle East. Keeping Israel on its toes forever is a strategy, even if it costs a series of defeats and humiliations.

Iran, which is closer than ever to realising its nuclear dream, patronises the art of denial-and-destruction that sells widely in the marketplace of bespoke victimhood. On this canvas Israel is an abstraction that restricts the real, or a lie that was dropped on a terrain of only one historical truth: the homelessness of the Palestinian people. Everything else, whether it is the Islamisation of a nationalist struggle or the improbability of a peace formula in which Israel’s right to exist is negotiable, is derivative and dismissible. Iran needs this canvas of chaos to prevail because the remnants of the revolution cannot be sustained without the looming threat of the enemy. And the enemy itself has evolved with geopolitical exigencies: the old shaitan that is imperialist America is no longer unmanageable, but the Jewish enemy, by its very existence, has hardened its will. The war that widens is not Netanyahu’s war. It is the Ayatollah’s war.

IN ANY WAR, the defender has the right to strike back. After its latest missile provocation, an aerial memorial service to Nasrallah, Iran has earned its right to be punished. Tehran is confident about deferred retribution as the old shaitan has already accepted the uses of accommodation. Biden supports Israel more as a historical obligation, and his support comes with limited commitment to Israel’s defence. He is not unduly worried about Iran’s commitment to a nuclear bomb, which has only one destination and that is Israel, and subscribes to his former boss Obama’s aversion to sanctions. Even as Iran makes the case for an Israeli strike on its nuclear installations more realistic than ever, America, as ally and enemy, has become morally soft. Israel, for the first time in its life, is let down by its benefactor. Which doesn’t necessarily avert an Israeli retaliation, especially at a time when Iran’s foremost proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, have been weakened.

In the Middle East’s cycle of blood feuds, there is only one constant: Israel’s refusal to modify its argument for being Israel. In its neighbourhood and beyond, Israel as a nation has not ceased to be a dispute. When the dispute was just about a homeland for Palestinians, it was the PLO leadership that walked away from a resolution; and today, Palestine may be the most resonant slogan of freedom on the streets and campuses of the West, but the struggle on its real battlefields answers to the Book. In this struggle, freedom is viable only if the argument against Israel, the nation as a lie, is won. Iran, with arms and money to its vassals, keeps the struggle alive. Israel is a lost revolution’s last straw.

Israel has been at war since its birth, and what is threatening to become another all-out war today shows that the passage of time has only made its existential ordeal harder and lonelier. What is raging in the Middle East is literally a war of life and death. Life has only one defender as death has god and martyrs on its side, led by the last exhausted revolution.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

S Prasannarajan is the Editor of Open magazine

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