What Is the Islamic Republic of Iran During a Genocide?

There is a debate over the extent of Islam's influence on Iran’s strategic thinking and behavior. The state’s relative restraint during Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians has renewed this debate.

by Karim Abadani

“You advocate prudence. Prudence is a virtue. But there are other virtues that belong to princes.”

“Fortitude.”

“Yes. Cost that out.”

“It doesn’t mean courage in battle.”

“Do you read me a lesson?”

“It means fixity of purpose. It means endurance. It means having the strength to live with what constrains you.”

– Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, Wolf Hall (2009)¹

If you are weak, the world will not acknowledge you, nor will it protect, or defend, or cry for you […] What will protect you is your power, your courage, your fists, your weapons, your missiles, and your presence on the battlefield. If you are powerful, you will command respect from the world.

– Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah²

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Iran’s next steps in West Asia will help determine where it fits not only in the nascent multipolar world order, but also in the global Muslim imaginary. There is a perennial debate over the extent to which Islam influences the Islamic Republic of Iran’s strategic thinking and behavior. Some accounts dismiss the notion that Islam is a meaningful factor determining its foreign and defense policies, pointing to Iran’s pragmatism and caution in the international arena. The state’s relative restraint during Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians has renewed this debate: is the strategic calculus being made in Tehran a betrayal of its revolutionary Islamic ideology?

In discussions such as these, it is assumed that pragmatism cannot be accommodated within an Islamic ideological framework. The trade-off of short and long-term interests is, in fact, consistent with patterns of strategic thinking dating back to the life and leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Such patterns were evident during the 1980s and can be observed in the Islamic Republic’s military and foreign policy doctrines today. Yet while Islam has consistently helped guide decisions in the Islamic Republic regarded by outsiders as self-interested or pragmatic, the calculus of these decisions is often still constrained by rules and norms that are dictated by the United States. It is Iran’s tendency to maneuver within this set of rules and norms—particularly while these same rules and norms help enable Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians—that creates a more fundamental problem for the Islamic Republic as it seeks to project its sincerity and credibility as an “Islamic” power.

Why is Najaf So Sound Asleep?

For decades prior to the 1978–79 Revolution, Khomeini had revived legal opinions within Twelver Shi‘ism arguing that a “just ruler” was possible in the absence of the Twelfth Imam. Crucially, this duty fell to those recognized as the “most knowledgeable” of Islam: the ulama. Such political authority was aimed not merely at ensuring laws were derived from Islamic sources, but also that state institutions be used to protect Islam and Muslims from external threats. Khomeini’s earliest experiences of empire will have certainly influenced him in this respect. Khomeini took up arms as a teenager during the Russian occupation of his home city of Khomeyn in the First World War. The British also occupied the country at around the same time, plundering Iran’s oil wealth, leading several coups to prop up Reza Shah Pahlavi, and essentially controlling Iranian affairs from 1918 until 1942.³ This context helped plant notions like sovereignty and self-determination at the center of his worldview and were as much of a motivation for his political project as any legal imperative. It also influenced his reading of international affairs and his desire to see a Muslim state act as a hegemonic counterweight to Western imperial powers:

most of the Ottoman rulers were incompetent […] some of them were corrupt, and they followed a monarchical system. Nonetheless, the existence of the Ottoman State represented a threat to the imperialists.⁴

Despite this worldview, Khomeini was also a cleric operating within an institution—the hawza (seminary)—where those “most knowledgeable” did not see themselves as having a substantive role in political matters. The competitiveness within this institution for followers and recognition by peers necessitated that he be patient and operate within the constraints of its power structures. It also cultivated long-term thinking among its students and teachers. Though he begun consolidating his thoughts on velayat-e faqih⁵ during the 1940s,⁶ Khomeini became politically active only after the death of his teacher and mentor, the quietist Ayatollah Sayyed Hossein Ali Tabatabaei Boroujerdi, in 1961. By the time he was exiled to Najaf, Iraq in 1965, Khomeini’s political activism was well known, but he promoted his ideas neither hastily nor recklessly. He was viewed with suspicion by more senior scholars like Ayatollah Mohsen al-Hakim. Cast as an outsider during this early period of exile,⁷ the cleric struck a balance of adhering to the old traditions of the hawza by deferring to Najaf’s most senior scholars, while quietly pressing them to exert political influence. He succeeded in forcing the hand of Ayatollah al-Hakim to press Iran’s Pahlavi regime to release Hossein-Ali Montazeri—another proponent of velayat-e faqih—from prison in 1966.⁸

Khomeini saw an opportunity to challenge the power structure of the hawza following al-Hakim’s death in 1970, becoming bolder in his political proclamations, particularly in relation to events and circumstances abroad. He began articulating the failure of the “most knowledgeable” to use their power and authority to help the mostazafan (oppressed). Only a year later, he castigated his peers and even teachers in Najaf—albeit indirectly—for their lack of activism in the context political repression in his home country:

Why is Najaf so sound asleep? Why is it not trying to help the wretched and oppressed people of Iran? Is our only duty to sit here studying the principles and details of religious law? Should we pay no attention to the disasters that afflict the Muslims? Should we do nothing to help them? Do we not feel any duty and responsibility in the face of God and the nation?⁹

While the scholar had a duty to help defend the umma, particularly against imperialism and Western hegemony, Khomeini’s approach to achieving this goal was complex, embracing a twin-track of tactical activism and careful navigation within established power structures. He also held a certain type of religious scholar culpable for the subjugated state in which Iran and the rest of the Muslim world found themselves: apolitical, excessively legalistic, and uninterested in using their authority to help alleviate the suffering of other Muslims.

The Revolution and Darura

If the pragmatism of the Islamic Republic was born in the seminary, it reached maturity during the turmoil of a revolution and one of the twentieth century’s longest wars. These experiences consolidated in an inward-looking propensity within Iran’s leadership;¹⁰ defining the contours of the global power structures within which the Islamic Republic would need to operate to survive. Soon after the victory of the Revolution in 1979, Iran was thrust into an eight-year war against Iraq. “Sacred defense” (defa-e moghaddas) was pivotal in influencing the ideology of the Islamic Republic, as leaders, including Khomeini, prioritized galvanizing a defense against the Iraqi invasion while Iran lacked parity in military capability. In contrast, Iraq enjoyed the support of Western and Gulf states and, eventually, the USSR. With many Iranian politicians having served in frontline roles, including in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, this experience influences strategic thinking in Iran to this day. As a worldview honed by the extreme diplomatic isolation of Iran from the revolution’s inception, it has created a sense that the Islamic Republic stands alone in a battle against several enemies on multiple fronts.

Despite this perception of an existential threat, the Islamic ideology central to the revolution had driven Iran’s leaders to believe that they had a duty to use the modern state’s powers and capabilities to defend the interests all Muslims, not just Iranians or even Shi‘a. Khomeini in particular held on to this notion consistently, saying in 1985, “we cannot consider Iran to be our country […] our country includes all of the Muslim world, and therefore defense of all Muslims is incumbent on us.”¹¹ At the heart of this is support for Palestine and opposition to Israel as a settler-colonial state and enforcer of American hegemony (the lesser shaytan to America’s greater shaytan). Many Muslim activists and organizations outside the country hoped Iran’s revolutionaries would utilize state power in this way. In this moment of Islamic ideological internationalism, Iran’s leadership had anticipated support from the Muslim world as it defended itself against Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime. Such support would help Iran capitalize on its revolutionary momentum and compensate for its relative military weakness.

The prevailing power structures of the time—namely, American sponsorship of Gulf monarchies, and the consequent systems of violent repression (or co-option) of Muslim activists within these states—prevented this from becoming a reality. Many Muslim states—particularly those in the Arab world; some fearing potential domestic Shi‘i revolts—lent economic and/or political support to Iraq during the conflict. Among the prisoners of war taken by the Iranians were Arabs who had volunteered from abroad to fight for Saddam. Iraq, which had a majority Shi‘i population, did not rise up in sufficient numbers to overthrow Saddam Hussein during the war. Those who did were, for the most part, brutally suppressed. Though the issue of Palestine would persist to be a central and preeminent Islamic cause for the Iranians, the war forced Iran to take decisions prioritizing its own survival, both as an Islamic Republic and as a territorial entity. Darura (necessity) came to define its strategic doctrines during this period, ushering in a new phase of pragmatism and expediency. Iran struck up strategic relations where it could—notably with Hafez al-Assad’s Syria, in an alliance which endured to the regime’s fall earlier this month. The alliance with Syria brought with it huge strategic benefits at the time. During a single raid on a base in Anbar in 1981, only made possible thanks to the use of Syrian airspace, Iran destroyed 15–20% of Iraq’s air force.¹² Syria also acted as a proxy for Iranian arms purchases from the USSR and states within the Soviet sphere of influence while it was subjected to an embargo on arms and spare parts.

These strategic benefits came at a cost. One was to sacrifice its relationship with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and, consequently, its standing in the eyes of many other Sunni Muslim activists. The group had lobbied the Islamic Republic early on to change its thinking about the Assad government but were rebuffed outright. In response, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood announced its support for Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran. Iran’s official reaction to the 1982 Hama Massacre, in which tens of thousands were killed, was to question the intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood in operating in Syria, given the latter’s purported anti-Zionist stance.¹³ It invested in this strategic relationship even as its closest allies bore the brunt of Syria’s armed forces. For example, as Iran was mired in the Siege of Basra in 1987, the Islamic Republic was left with no choice but to defuse a situation in which 23 members of Hizbullah and five women were rounded up and executed by Syrian troops in West Beirut. Iran was forced to deescalate because its leadership conceded that Assad’s military could, at any point, crush its allies in Lebanon if it so wanted.¹⁴ Escalation here would have jeopardized its incubation of an early iteration of the “Axis of Resistance,” its primary route into the Levant, and, ultimately, its strategy towards Palestine.

By the mid-1980s, Iran had reined in much of its effort at exporting its revolution abroad. Mehdi Hashemi, who had allegedly led a clandestine effort to export the Revolution through his own networks, was tried by a revolutionary court and executed in 1987.¹⁵ While there were many charges levelled against Hashemi—including sedition, the murder of a cleric, and drug smuggling— it is likely that his leak of the Iran-Contra affair to a Lebanese news publication was also a factor in his downfall and eventual execution. The close relationship between Hashemi and Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri—Khomeini’s heir apparent—helped solidify pragmatic thinking in Iran. Montazeri was characterized as someone who could be easily misled by those around him.¹⁶ This contributed to an amendment of the Iranian constitution, permitting lower-ranking clerics to become vali-ye faqih so long as they had other skills and experience to compensate for their relative lack of standing as “most knowledgeable” in Islamic law. Khomeini designated Seyyed Ali Khamenei, rather than the more senior cleric Montazeri, as his preferred successor. With this move, Islamic government became contingent on a leader being able to see the world “as it was, rather than how one wishes it to be,” and on their ability to act pragmatically within limitations set by preexisting power structures to achieve longer-term strategic goals.

At a Time and Place of Our Choosing

These examples show patterns of thinking about leadership, power, and expediency that endure today. Within this calculus, the Islamic Republic of Iran is considered a unique and fundamental node of power in the Muslim world upon which the overriding cause of the umma—Palestine—depends. In this logic, the Islamic Republic’s demise would create a knock-on effect that would extinguish the Palestinian cause once and for all. Such a conceptualization is not new. Mohammad-Javad Larijani—a prominent politician and advisor to Ayatollah Khamenei—deployed the Qur’anic concept of Umm al-Qura in defining the need to secure Iran as the “mother of all settlements” in the Muslim world. This idea postulates that the long-term interests and independence of the Muslim world hinge on Iran’s survival as an Islamic Republic. Within this framework, it is implied that the pursuit of certain narrower interests can be justified only if they help create conditions in which the Islamic Republic can, when the time is right, intervene to protect the broader interests of the Muslim world. Throughout the tenure of Ayatollah Khamenei as leader, the reference point for Iran’s foreign policy has thus been a gradual shift in regional and global balances of power to help entrench the Islamic Republic.

While this provides some ideological coherence and continuity to pragmatism in the Islamic Republic, and has helped make Iran resilient in the face of many external threats, it has more recently proved self-defeating. Iran has at times struggled to convey sincerity, credibility, and usefulness as an Islamic Republic during the current genocide of the Palestinians. The pace of the genocide, live-streamed in graphic detail, has shocked people the world over. An overriding sense of powerlessness has forced even Iran’s biggest critics to show some desire—out of despair, and revulsion at the complicity of many Arab states—that it intervene directly to stop the killing. Some of the Islamic Republic’s most blatant acts of expediency, including its alliance with Syria, have been rationalized with reference to the ultimate goal of confronting Israel and US hegemony in the region. Thus, now would be the time to show sincerity and demonstrate the pay-off.

Despite its mass destruction, Israel has never looked weaker, or less like its image as a superior strategic actor. Video footage of operations against Israel’s military—ranging from the destruction of Merkava tanks at close range, all the way to sophisticated ambushes using booby traps and underground tunnel networks—has shown the world the immense bravery and ingenuity of ordinary Palestinians resisting the genocide and occupation of Gaza. Elsewhere, in Yemen, Ansarallah have refused to cease their embargo on shipping to and from Israel even as they have endured bombardment by the United Kingdom and United States. The killings of Hizbullah’s Secretary-General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar—the former in the Beirut suburb of Dahiyeh and the latter in an iconic final act of defiance against Israel in Rafah—have exposed the cowardice of leaders in neighboring countries. This new reality of resistance and Muslim solidarity has raised the bar about what to expect of an Islamic Republic.

Although Iran has no doubt provided considerable support to help sustain several resistance fronts against Israel, it has also restrained itself to avoid being drawn into a protracted war with Israel and the United States. Iran did not participate in any direct action against Israel until it killed Iranian military personnel stationed in Damascus, Syria, in April 2024. In retaliation, Iran launched Operation True Promise, which included missile strikes and the largest drone attack in history. While this did demonstrate Iran’s willingness to use direct military force against Israel, it provided several indicators that the Islamic Republic was still operating within the West’s red lines. Iran justified its attack on the basis that senior IRGC officials were killed in an attack on its sovereign territory in Damascus—its consulate. This constituted a casus belli relying on principles of the Vienna Convention rather than any responsibility to protect the Palestinians. Notifying the West in advance of the attack, Iran choregraphed its launches to ensure the operation did not result in any Israeli casualties. The timing of the retaliation was also noteworthy. Iran launched its attack after a drawn-out campaign on social media emphasizing its intention to retaliate “at a time and place of our choosing.” Here, Iran’s posture, intended to underline its freedom to act on its own terms, reinforces the notion that the genocide in Palestine, and its own conflict with Israel, are two separate theatres of conflict.

Only months after the IRGC Chief Commander announced that a new equation had been set in the region following Operation True Promise, the leader of the Hamas politburo, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in Tehran on July 31 as he attended the inauguration of Masoud Pezeshkian as President. While officials again promised that Iran would retaliate at a time and place of its choosing, Haniyeh’s killing proved to be a huge embarrassment for the Islamic Republic. Protesters in Iran demanded the country’s leadership abandon the doctrine of strategic patience and take immediate revenge. On September 27, the Israeli bombing of Lebanon which killed Nasrallah, and Qods Force Commander Abbas Nilforoushian, had confirmed beyond doubt that Iran had failed to establish deterrence with Israel. As a result of Iran maintaining strategic patience during such an exceptional moment in history, Israel has become emboldened to not only continue carrying out its genocide in Palestine, but also extend its mass destruction to Lebanon and kill an ally Iran had hitherto considered untouchable. With this, Iran’s cautiousness has endangered both its own security and that of its allies in the “Axis of Resistance.” Given the scale of destruction in Palestine—which one Lancet study estimates could result in over 186,000 deaths (7–9% of Gaza’s population)—Iran’s restraint has also undermined the idea that its survival as an Islamic Republic is inextricably linked to the survival of the Palestinians and the Palestinian cause.

Iran’s attacks on Israel have also shown that, while Iran possesses the capability to target Israeli military assets with a high degree of accuracy, it rarely exploits such capabilities effectively to change the military dynamic of the region in service of causes beyond its own survival. . During the 1980s, it was clear that Iran pursued pragmatic policies and unconventional military tactics while it lacked certain military capabilities to adequately confront Iraq—and by extension its western allies—on the battlefield. Operation True Promise II, which was launched on October 1, 2024, altered the world’s understanding of Iran’s military capabilities in a way that forces us to question the relevance of this strategic calculus today. Iran was able to successfully overwhelm Israel’s missile defense systems with hypersonic and ballistic missiles, even as its American and Arab allies came to Israel’s aid. Footage of the operation, as well as images of jubilant Palestinians celebrating the extraordinary sight of Israel’s vulnerability, proliferated across social media. All of this served to demonstrate that many people in the region are desperate for a state to distinguish itself from the others by creating a genuinely new military equation in the region that can hold Israel to account. It took the Islamic Republic a year to act in such a way—longer, if one considers the more extensive history of Israel assassinating Iranian officials inside and outside the country. This, in turn, amplified the sense that while Iran does in fact possess a certain operational military edge over Israel, it has held back for perceived strategic reasons. Revealing itself to be a credible military power, it has also demonstrated a reluctance to use this power to fundamentally change the status-quo.

Changing the Equation

“Seeing the world as it is, rather than as one wishes it to be,” has amounted to working within a power structure designed to enable Israel to carry out a genocide in Palestine with impunity. The Islamic Republic will not find a more critical moment than now to change perceptions in the region about its sincerity. Iran, through the Axis of Resistance, has provided a greater level of support for Palestine’s liberation than other countries in the region. Even more basic than that, it is one of the few countries in the region not collaborating, or seeking deeper relations, with Israel. Yet this is too low a bar for the Islamic Republic during a genocide. Indeed, the standard has been raised by resistance groups, as well as by Iran’s own demonstration of a high degree of military credibility.

While the Islamic Republic has proven to be willing to act pragmatically in the defense of its interests, and even—in the case of Syria—at the expense of Muslims abroad, it still abides by many red lines drawn (and crossed) by the United States and its allies. Despite the steady erosion of norms against preemptive military action since the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran has restricted itself to only planning for future retaliations against Israel. It does not fathom, in any serious sense, preemptive military action as part of a responsibility to protect the Palestinians, or a willingness to pursue foreign policy objectives that do not always clearly overlap with its national interests. It appears to have distanced itself publicly from the policy of assassination even as its officials, closest allies, and even military generals have been assassinated. Ayatollah Khamenei has, thus far, retained his fatwa forbidding nuclear weapons even while Iran already pays the price for them in sanctions, and is threatened with nuclear strikes which it would not be able to reciprocate. Iran has, thus far, deliberately chosen to avoid human casualties in its retaliations against Israel, despite its own casualties and Israel’s deliberate targeting of civilians in Palestine and Lebanon. It is, therefore, a pragmatism whose casualties are most commonly perceived to be Muslims, rather than those perpetrating the “crime of all crimes” in Gaza.

The Islamic Republic has thus come full circle: compelled by conflict to reconsider its strategic preferences; this time, in assessing the purpose of its commitment to pragmatism. This will test its rhetoric that its own fate is linked to that of the Palestinians. Iran was, like most states and resistance groups, caught off-guard by Operation al-Aqsa Flood and by Israel’s response. Nevertheless, Iran’s approach of strategic patience has weakened its pursuit of deterrence and has put the Islamic Republic in an awkward position. It is now perceived as neither revolutionary enough to directly intervene to prevent a genocide, nor bold enough to change the regional and global order. Recent unprecedented public debates on revising Iran’s nuclear doctrine hint at growing pressures on Khamenei and the defense and security policymaking nexus. It is argued that strategies based on rules and norms adhered to by neither the United States nor Israel, which serve only to entrench Iran’s own insecurity and the mass killing of Palestinians, must be abandoned. It is noteworthy that Yahya Sinwar also wrote in 2004 of a need to “change the equation” with Israel, arguing that the time had come—due to the failure of all other methods—to shatter the existing paradigm by forcing a direct confrontation with it. There was a possibility that Iran could be coming around to this way of thinking after its launch of Operation True Promise II. Israel’s unabated genocide however, along with several other developments—Iran’s lack of immediate response to the killing of five Iranians by Israel; the election of Donald Trump as US President; the fall of Bashar al-Assad; and victory of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria—suggest that the Islamic Republic may come to regret its commitment to pragmatism from the perspective of both Islamic ideology and realpolitik.

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Notes

1. An exchange between Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII, in Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: HarperCollins, 2009), 182.

2. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (@SH_NasrallahEng), “If you’re weak, the world will not acknowledge, protect or defend you. […],” X, October 22, 2024, 2:05pm, https://x.com/SH_NasrallahEng/status/1848787654147772526.

3. Mohammad Gholi Majd, Great Britain & Reza Shah: the Plunder of Iran, 1921-1941 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).

4. Ruhollah Khomeini, Islam and Revolution I: Writings and Declarations of Imam Khomeini (1941-1980), ed. Hamid Algar (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1981), 49.

5. “Guardianship of the jurist” in English; the governing system of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

6. Yasuyuki Matsunaga, “Revisiting Ayatollah Khomeini’s Doctrine of Wilayat al-Faqih (Velayat-e Faqih),” Orient 44 (2009): 77–90.

7. Elvire Corboz, “Khomeini in Najaf: The Religious and Political Leadership of an Exiled Ayatollah,” Die Welt des Islams 55, no. 2 (2015): 229.

8. Corboz, “Khomeini in Najaf,” 240–241.

9. Khomeini, Islam and Revolution I, 203.

10. I use the term leadership broadly here to refer to the web of clerical and non-clerical sources of power attached to Iran’s decision-making bodies, and the Supreme Leader himself.

11. Khomeini, quoted in Mehran Kamrava, “Khomeini and the West,” in A Critical Introduction to Khomeini, ed. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 162.

12. Jubin M. Goodarzi, Syria and Iran: Diplomatic Alliance and Power Politics in the Middle East (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2006) 45–46.

13. Hamid Algar, “Foreword,” in Umar F. Abd-Allah, The Islamic Struggle in Syria (Berkeley: Mizan Press, 1983), 11.

14. Goodarzi, Syria and Iran, 203.

15. Hashemi was also accused of orchestrating the abduction of a Syrian diplomat in Tehran in 1986 on behalf of Yasser Arafat. His supporters, however, said that this act was done on the orders of an intelligence official in Iran, based on a concern that the Syrian diplomat was promoting secular nationalist ideas in Iran. See Lebanese magazine Al-Shira‘’s report: Hasan Sabra, “Bayna manṭiq al-dawla wa-manṭiq al-thawra: hādhā mā jarā fī Ṭihrān,” Al-Shirāʿ, November 3, 1986, 24–26.

16. Sussan Siavoshi, Montazeri: The Life and Thought of Iran’s Revolutionary Ayatollah (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 154–155.