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Iran has never made its intentions regarding Israel secret. In Nov. 2014, Iran’s Supreme Leader codified and made public the strategy Iran had been pursuing to destroy Israel when he released a chart entitled “9 key questions about elimination of Israel” on Twitter.

The first question was: “Why should the Zionist regime be eliminated?” The chart gave this answer, in marginal English: “During its 66 years of life so far, the fake Zionist regime has tried to realize its goals by means of infanticide, homicide, violence and iron fist while boasts about it blatantly.”

Next was: “What does elimination of Israel mean in the viewpoint of Imam Khomeini?” The answer: “The only means of bringing Israeli crimes to an end is the elimination of this regime. And of course the elimination of Israel does not mean the massacre of the Jewish people in this region. The Islamic Republic has proposed a practical & logical mechanism for this to international communities.”

That mechanism? “All the original people of Palestine including Muslims, Christians and Jews wherever they are, whether inside Palestine, in refugee camps in other countries or just anywhere else, take part in a public and organized referendum. Naturally the Jewish immigrants who have been persuaded into emigration to Palestine do not have the right to take part in this referendum.”

Such a referendum, stacked against Jewish Israelis, would result in the formation of a government that would “decide whether the non-Palestinian emigrants who have immigrated to this country over the past years can continue living in Palestine or should return to their home countries.” How they would be compelled to return to their “home countries,” and what would happen if they would or could not do so, the ayatollah did not say. In the meantime, in any case, there will be jihad warfare: “Up until the day when this homicidal and infanticidal regime is eliminated through a referendum, powerful confrontation and resolute and armed resistance is the cure of this ruinous regime.”

To this end, “the West Bank should be armed like Gaza and those who are interested in Palestine’s destiny should take action to arm the people of the West Bank so that the sorrows and grieves of the Palestinian people will reduce in the light of their powerful hands and the weakness of the Zionist enemy.” This weaponry, however, should not be supplied for the purpose of a conventional war: “We recommend neither a classical war by the army of Muslim countries nor to throw migrated Jews at sea and certainly not an arbitration by UN or other international organizations.” Here again, however, Khamenei did not explain what would happen to Israeli Jews who wanted to stay, or had no means to leave.

The Supreme Leader let slip a hint that he was aware that Israeli’s war is defensive, while that of the Palestinians is one of conquest, genocide and annihilation, when he took the trouble to deny that “the rockets of Gaza led to the crimes of Israel,” calling it “a wrong conclusion.” He didn’t explain why.

Despite Khamenei’s rejection of a “classical war by the army of Muslim countries against Israel” in 2014, in November of the next year, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps conducted a war game involving direct conflict between Iran and Israel. Thousands of IRGC paramilitary forces stormed a model that was supposed to represent the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem (it was actually a replica of the Dome of the Rock, also on the Temple Mount, which dominates the Jerusalem skyline with its gold dome). One IRGC member went to the top of the replica dome and placed there two flags: one of Iran, and one of the color red, signifying martyrdom.

In a book he published in the summer of 2015, Khamenei expanded upon his plan to destroy Israel, revealing his grand strategy regarding the Jewish state. Iranian-born journalist Amir Taheri revealed that shortly after the nuclear deal was concluded Khamenei had published, in Farsi only, a lengthy book entitled Palestine. The jacket copy hailed the Supreme Leader as “the flagbearer of Jihad to liberate Jerusalem.” In the book, Khamenei once again called Israel a “cancerous tumour” and discussed its imminent “annihilation”—which he said must be brought about because of “well-established Islamic principles,” such as the proposition that any land once ruled by Muslims belongs by right to Muslims forever, and must not be ruled by non-Muslims, as the Qur’an directs, “drive them out from where they drove you out” (2:191).

Israel, Khamenei says in Palestine, is a foremost “ally of the American Great Satan” and a principal exponent of the Americans’ “evil scheme” to control “the heartland of the Ummah”—that is, the global Muslim community.

According to Khamenei, Israel’s wars against Muslim countries have made it into a “kaffir al-harbi,” that is, an infidel at war with Islam. The Supreme Leader revealed one of his “most cherished wishes”: to pray in Jerusalem after Israel had been conquered and destroyed.

This conquest would not, he said once again, occur by means of “classical wars,” nor would it result in a new genocide of the Jews. Rather, noted Taheri, “what he recommends is a long period of low-intensity warfare designed to make life unpleasant if not impossible for a majority of Israeli Jews so that they leave the country. His calculation is based on the assumption that large numbers of Israelis have dual nationality and would prefer emigration to the United States and Europe to daily threats of death.”

This “low-intensity warfare” would feature regular jihad terror attacks from Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank. This would lead to victories on the order of previous ones for which, Khamenei said, Iran was responsible: “We have intervened in anti-Israel matters, and it brought victory in the 33-day war by Hezbollah against Israel in 2006 and in the 22-day war between Hamas and Israel in the Gaza Strip.”

This constant pressure on Israel, Khamenei wrote, would lead to “Israel fatigue” in the United States and among Israel’s other supporters in the international community, who would then cast about for “a practical and logical mechanism” to betray Israel into the hands of its enemies. “The solution,” he wrote, “is a one-state formula,” a State of Palestine that would be ruled by Islamic law but would allow non-Muslims—including even Jews if they have what the Supreme Leader called “genuine roots” in that area—to live there as dhimmis, the subjugated “People of the Book” under Islamic rule, denied basic rights.

Iran has been working to implement this plan for over ten years now. The fruits of its labors can be seen everywhere.