Opinion
The late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini speaks from a balcony of the Alavi school in Tehran, Iran, during the Islamic Revolution, in February 1979. Photo: Reuters / Stringer / File.
In adopting the ideology of Ayatollah Ruhollah Mustafavi Khomeini upon its establishment in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran replaced the country’s millennia-old monarchy with a radical Shiite theocracy. The regime has always openly expressed its antisemitism, which cannot be expunged, because it is indivisible from the Khomeinist thinking on which the Islamic Republic is predicated.
In the 1950s, as part of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion’s “periphery doctrine,” Israel began to cultivate relationships with non-Arab states and ethnic minorities. On July 23, 1960, the Shah of Iran granted Israel