Passover and the Crisis of Jewish Identity
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Iran-backed terrorists and their supporters pose grave threats to Israel and the West.
On October 7, 2023, while Hamas’ deadly attack on Israeli civilians was still going on, Hamas’ military leader Mohammed Deif issued a call to a loose amalgamation of terrorist supporters throughout the Middle East: “Our brothers in the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, Iraq, and Syria, this is the day your resistance unites with your people in Palestine.” Deif’s call was successful: over the past year, armed forces in Lebanon, Iran, Yeman, Iraq, and Syria have launched deadly missiles into the Jewish state, attacking and killing Israelis, Americans, and others.
They are part of an Iranian-funded coalition which Iran calls the “Axis of Resistance” which opposes Israel and the West. Here are seven facts about this noxious group.
In 1979, radical Islamists overthrew the secular, Western-backed government of Iran and installed a radical government ruled by the Ayatollah, the supreme religious leader in Iran. Since the 1979 revolution, Iran’s clerics have defined their nation in opposition to the West, particularly the United States and Israel. (In official addresses, Iranian leaders often refer to the US as the “Great Satan” and to Israel as the “Little Satan”.) An official plank in the 1979 Iranian Constitution is to export similar revolution around the world.
Iran soon established the Quds Force to spread its interests outside of Iran. “Quds” means Jerusalem in Arabic, and from the beginning, the elimination of Israel has been a core tenet of this secretive new military organization. The Encyclopedia Britannica puts it pithily: the Quds Force’s “activities have centered on organizing, supporting, and at times leading local forces abroad in ways favorable to the interests of the IRGC (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps - Iran’s army) and Iran’s clerical establishment.”
Members of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) standing in formation in the capital city of Tehran
Over the past 55 years, Iran’s Quds Force has cultivated a network of proxy terrorist groups which they fund and help direct. The US has classified the Quds Force (sometimes also known as IRGC-QF) as a terrorist organization since 2007. Around 2002, Iran began openly referring to its network of proxy terrorists as the “Axis of Resistance.” It’s thought it started as a joke, a reference to US President George W. Bush’s remark about an “Axis of Evil” that year. Whatever the impetus, the name stuck. Today, Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” spans much of the globe, spreading mayhem, violence and hatred.
The Quds Force’s first major foray into international terrorism came in 1982, when it began backing the Shi’ite Islamist militant group Hezbollah (literally, “Party of God”) in the midst of Lebanon’s brutal civil war and Israel’s invasion of Lebanon that year.
The two main denominations within Islam are Sunni Islam and Shi’ite Islam. Sunni Islam is dominant, particularly in the Middle East, where approximately 90% of all Muslims are Sunni. Shi’ite Muslims, in contrast, make up about 10% of the population. Iran is predominantly Shi’ite Muslim, and in Hezbollah it cultivated a proxy Shi’ite force which fought not only Sunnis, Christians and Israelis, but also rival Shi’ite armed groups. Hezbollah’s manifesto, adopted in 1985, pledges fealty to Iran’s supreme leader, holds up destroying Israel as its core value, and is implacably opposed to the West.
Iran is Hezbollah’s principal backer, providing weapons, military training, and sending the group hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Hezbollah - and through it, Iran - has carried out scores of terror attacks. A very partial list includes: bombing the US Embassy in Beirut in April 1983 and September 1984 (with 86 deaths); bombing the US and French Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983 (299 deaths); hijacking TWA flight 847 in 1985; bombing the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1986; bombing the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in July 1994 (95 deaths) assassinating former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Haririr in February 2005; kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in July 2006 (precipitating a huge escalation of hostilities with Israel); and exploding a bomb on a bus carrying Israeli tourists in Bulgaria in July 2012 (5 deaths).
Hezbollah controlled both the weapons cache that exploded in downtown Beirut in August 2020, killing over 200 Lebanese civilians, as well as the port where the explosion occurred. Since Hamas’ deadly October 7, 2024 attack on Israel, Hezbollah has launched over 8,000 rockets into Israel, forcing 70,000 Israeli civilians to flee their homes.
In a sign of just how high links between Iran and Hezbollah run, when Israel exploded the pagers of Hezbollah members across Lebanon on September 17, Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon, Mojtaba Amani, was injured by his very own Hezbollah-issued pager too.
In the 1980s, Iran’s Islamist rulers had close links with the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization), a terrorist group established by the Arab League in 1964 as a way to oppose the Jewish state. Even before Iran’s revolution, the PLO provided armed guards for the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini when he lived in wealthy exile in Paris. Iranian revolutionaries trained in PLO military camps; PLO leader Yasir Arafat was the first foreign dignitary to visit Iran following the 1979 revolution.
Yet in the 1980s, the PLO began negotiating with Israel to establish a Palestinian state. Even though in 2000 Arafat eventually rejected a deal that gave him everything he’d been requesting throughout the negotiations, this willingness to sit down with Israelis cost the PLO Iranian support.
Hamas terrorists
Instead, Iran began cultivating more radical groups in Gaza and the West Bank. The largest and most established of these were Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, both of which have the destruction of Israel - not negotiations - as a core tenet in their ideology.
The European Council of Foreign Relations sums up what they call this “Persian-Palestinian marriage of convenience”. By the early 1990s, Iran was already giving money and other support to the Islamic Jihad group. “Since then, these Palestinian groups (Islamic Jihad and Hamas) have grown stronger thanks to Iranian weaponry smuggled via Yemen and Sudan, through the Egyptian desert with the help of Bedouin smugglers, and finally into Gaza via cross-border tunnels built by Hamas. Iran has also trained Palestinian engineers to manufacture weapons locally, which accounts for a large part of Hamas’ total arsenal today. Other Iranian-backed groups in Gaza have likely also benefited from these arrangements. It is unlikely that the October 7 attacks could have happened without this decades-long support.”
Iranian support extends into other countries as well. In Yemen, it provides material support and training for the Houthis, an armed faction that was founded by Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi. Houthis are Shi’ite, which makes them natural allies of Iran. For most of the past decade they’ve been engaged in a bitter civil war which they started in 2014 with Yemen’s official government, which receives backing from Saudi Arabia, Iran’s sworn enemy.
It’s estimated that about 20,000 Houthi soldiers control western Yemen, including its Red Sea shore. The Houthis’ slogan is copied from Iranian anti-Western propaganda: “God is great, death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.”
After Hamas’ October 7 attacks, the Houthis announced they were joining the war. Since then, the US Government has documented, “the Houthis have attacked commercial vessels dozens of times and have posed risks to naval vessels in dozens of other incidents….Maritime threats compel many firms to divert vessels from the Red Sea to the lengthy and costlier voyage around Africa, but some vessels continue to transit the area, with some suffering successful Houthi strikes.” In March 2024, three sailors died when their commercial ship was hit by Houthi rockets.
Houthis have sent drones and missiles into Israel over 200 times since October 7, 2024. In July, one Israeli was killed and eight people were injured when a Houthi drone hit an apartment building in Tel Aviv. On September 15, 2024, the Houthis sent what they described as a “new hypersonic ballistic missile” that triggered air raid alarms throughout central Israel. Israel’s air defenses blew it up before it could land; shrapnel caused damage on the ground.
Increasingly, Iraq and Syria are members of the “Axis of Resistance.” Iran supports several militias in Iraq, including several that are designated terrorist organizations by the US: Kata’ib Hizballah (KH), Harakat al-Nujaba, and Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq. A recent US Government report found that Iran provides these and other armed groups “with sophisticated weapons - including increasingly accurate and lethal unmanned aerial systems (UAS) - support, funding, and training.”
Iranian-backed Iraqi groups have attacked US forces and their Iraqi allies over two dozen times since 2021. They launched rockets against the American Embassy in Baghdad twice in 2020, and tried to assassinate Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi in a drone attack on November 6, 2021. Katherin Zimmerman of the American Enterprise Institute noted in January 2024 that since Hamas’ October 7 attack, “Iraq-based groups have attacked US forces at least sixty-six times in Iraq and Syria…injuring over sixty troops.”
In Syria, Iran has cultivated President Bashir al-Assad as another member of its Axis of Resistance. Soon after Syria’s bloody civil war broke out in 2012, Iran positioned itself as Assad’s ally, pouring money and military technology and expertise into Assad’s army. A US Government report sheds some light on why Iran’s religious leaders regard Syria as such an important member of the Axis of Resistance: “Iran views the Assad regime in syria as a crucial ally and Iraq and Syria as vital routes through which to supply weapons to Hezbollah, Iran’s primary terrorist proxy groups. Iranian forces have directly backed militia operations in Syria with artillery, rockets, drones, and armored vehicles.” Iran also recruited fanatical Islamist fighters from Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight on Assad’s side during Syria’s civil war.
Russia is increasingly a member - or at least a cheerleader - of the Axis of Resistance, cooling its diplomatic relations with Israel while it warms up to Iran and helps prop up Iran’s puppet in Syria, President Bashar al-Assad. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin now relies on Iranian-made drones and short-range ballistic missiles from Iran to keep his war effort in Ukraine going. Russia’s partnership with Iran doesn’t only rely on arms transfers: the two nations are deepening their “economic, media, military, and political cooperation” too, according to the Washington DC based Institute for the Study of War.
On December 25, 2023, Russia and Iran signed a major new free trade deal, allowing both nations to circumvent Western sanctions. Trade between Russia and Iran is rising rapidly, making Russia - which holds a permanent seat on the UN Security Council - a potent political ally of Iran’s as well as a major trading partner.
China is also increasing its trade with Iran, allowing it to evade Western sanctions. China is the world’s largest importer of crude oil, and is more than willing to import both Iranian and Russian oil in defiance of Western sanctions. (In fact, some observers estimate that China has saved $10 billion since 2023 by buying sanctioned oil.
International trade analysts Kimberly Donovan and Maia Nikoladze note that “Iran, Russia, and China have created an alternative market of sanctioned oil, wherein payments are denominated in Chinese currency. This oil is often carried by ‘dark fleet’ tankers that operate outside of maritime regulations and take steps to obscure their operations… Oil revenue from China is propping up the Iranian and Russian economies and is undermining Western sanctions. Meanwhile, the use of Chinese currency and payment systems in this market restricts Western jurisdictions’ access to financial transaction data and weakens their sanctions and enforcement efforts.”
There are signs that Russia, China, and Iran are now conducting similar disinformation campaigns online, posting false and incendiary items in American and other Western social media in an attempt to divide the US and make us turn against one another and against our allies. Iranian officials told The New York Times that their goal is “to sow unrest, deepen polarization, and place Iran in the echelon of Russia and China as a geopolitical power.”
Writing in The Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch summed up Iran’s long-term strategy in cultivating an Axis of Resistance: “Iran knows that it cannot win a direct confrontation with the United States; however…it believes that it won’t have to. The pressure of encirclement and relentless harrying will, in its view, erode Israel’s military, divide its democracy, drive away its entrepreneurs and investors, and demoralize its population….Meanwhile, tied down by Iran’s unpredictable and relentless proxies and reluctant to strike directly at Tehran, the United States will become exhausted and look to exit the region….the way will be clear for Tehran’s mullahs to dominate the region, and the impotence of modern liberal democracy will be exposed.”
This cannot be allowed to happen. In the past decades, Iran has propped up, created, and aided some of the most violent, nihilistic, hateful actors the world has ever seen. Iran’s puppets and proxies cause misery across the Middle East and beyond. We in the West have to stand resolute for Western values and against the tyranny that Iran exports. Iran is gearing up for a long battle; it’s imperative that we do the same.
Clearly Iran has led, and continues to lead, a decades long evil fomenting drive to destroy Israel. Thus, I (a non-Jewish American citizen who's eyes have been fully opened to the importance of Israel, the Jewish people, and even the Torah) am genuinely confused why so many Jews continue to support the American democratic political left. Obama himself handed over billions of dollars to Iran. Harris refused to be present for Netanyahu’s recent speech before Congress. What am I missing here?
I am genuinely trying to understand what I may be missing or not understanding as to why so many Jews continue to support a political party that clearly no longer supports them.
Agreed 💯