Tehran University professor says most Iranians don’t want to destroy Israel
The conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors is not Iran’s business, he says
A professor from Tehran University says most Iranians oppose the Islamist ayatollah regime and Iran’s stated commitment to Israel’s destruction.
“You people say that you are on a mission to annihilate Israel. Who gave you this mission? The Quran? God? The Prophet? The constitution? Who?” asked Prof. Sadegh Zibakalam during a panel discussion posted on March 14.
The Tehran-based academic said he believes only a minority of Iranians support the idea of destroying Israel. He also stressed that the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors is not Iran’s business.
“Let’s have a public opinion poll. IRNA, ISNA – all those regime outlets – can conduct it. If 50%-plus-one person of the Iranians say ‘yes,’ then, by all means, we should annihilate Israel. But I completely believe that not even 10% would say they want to annihilate Israel, Zibakalam stated.
“[The regime] says that we should annihilate Israel, but 90% of the Iranian public says: ‘Why? How is this our business? This is a conflict between the Palestinian Arabs and the Israeli Jews. What does this have to do with us?’”
Prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran and Israel had full diplomatic relations and close military and intelligence ties. Modern Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion advocated strong ties with Iran and Turkey as a counterweight to the hostility from the surrounding Arab states.
In July 2021, Iranian dissidents urged former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to support Iran’s burgeoning democracy movement and to stop the ayatollah regime’s state-backed terrorism, which operates both inside Iran and far beyond the country’s borders.
In a letter to Bennett, Iranian dissidents emphasized that the Jewish nation and the Iranian people have both been victims of the Islamic regime’s aggression.
“For more than four decades, threatening the existence of the State of Israel and hatred of the Jewish people has been an inseparable component of the Islamic Republic’s rule,” the dissidents wrote. “In addition to its promotion of international terrorism, the regime has produced nothing but poverty, economic bankruptcy, suppression and a myriad of social problems for the people of Iran.”
The All Israel News Staff is a team of journalists in Israel.
