Top Iranian military and political officials have reiterated their enmity towards both the United States and Israel recently, specifically singling out the Jewish State for threats of destruction.
“If the Supreme Leader’s orders [are] to be executed, with the abilities and the equipment at our disposal, we will raze the Zionist regime in less than eight minutes,” Ahmad Karimpour, a senior adviser to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ elite Quds Force, boasted last week.
“We consider the US and Israel as the main enemy and we prepare ourselves to confront the Great Satan,” said Iran’s Ground Force Commander Brig. Gen. Ahmad Reza Pourdastan on Sunday.
On Monday, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC’s Quds Force, declared that Iran “has triumphed in all arenas in the region” and foiled American goals in the Middle East.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel. “This barbaric, wolflike & infanticidal regime of #Israel which spares no crime has no cure but to be annihilated,” he tweeted in November 2014. He also put out a table outlining a plan to destroy Israel, entitled “9 key questions about the elimination of Israel,” the following day. In September 2015, he declared that Israel will not exist in 25 years.
Iran has tested at least five ballistic missiles since the nuclear agreement was reached last July. One of the missiles tested in March was stamped with the phrase “Israel must be wiped off the Earth” in Hebrew. IRGC Commander Maj. Gen. Mohammad Ali Jafari stated at the time that “[since the] Zionist regime is within reach of Iranian missiles, it is quite natural that they should be more concern.”
The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has published a series of reports documenting the threats against Israel issued by Iranian political and military leaders. A JCPA report from January 2014 noted that the election of President Hassan Rouhani, who is sometimes portrayed as a moderate, did not lead to a softening of the regime’s genocidal anti-Israel rhetoric. “The 1948 Genocide Convention lists incitement to commit genocide as a war crime. Much of the Iranian language regarding Israel can certainly be legally defined this way,” the report observes.
A JCPA report compiled last year and published just after the conclusion of the nuclear deal warned:
In short, Iranian leaders, first and foremost its Supreme Leader Khamenei, keep preaching for the destruction of Israel, escalating anti-Israeli armed struggle and internationally delegitimizing Israel. They have not moderated their anti-Israel and anti-Zionist rhetoric, even during the critical stages of the nuclear talks with the West, as if the nuclear talks were completely dissociated from Iranian foreign policy, Moreover, Iran went as far as to argue that the talks do not indicate any Iranian-American rapprochement.
Accepting Iran as a nuclear threshold state capable of launching a military nuclear program, should it decide to, will allow it to intensify its direct anti-Israel aggression and its subversive activity against moderate Arab states, such as Egypt and the Gulf states, now under a nuclear umbrella.
[Photo: Youtube ]