The phrase long used by the Israeli Mossad to describe its relationship with Iran — ‘a friendly enemy is better than a hostile friend’ — sprang to mind as I read Junaid S. Ahmad’s recent Middle East Monitor article, ‘Real men go to Tehran — The Zion-Con fantasy of regime change in Iran’. This phrase was never just an intelligence quip; it encapsulated the truth of the functional relationship between Tel Aviv and Tehran for forty years, preceded by an even closer relationship between Israel and the Shah’s regime. This relationship did not begin with the Shah nor end with Khamenei; it has consistently operated on the principle that Iran is not Israel’s existential enemy, but a tool to be used when needed.
This reality is nowhere to be found in Ahmad’s piece, which reads as if it were written about an imagined Iran rather than the Iran that has shaped the region for decades — an Iran whose project of regional domination has been anything but subtle.
The Iran that Ahmad describes is not the Iran that Israel armed during the Iran–Contra affair; nor is it the Iran that cooperated with Israeli intelligence throughout the 1980s; nor is it the Iran that facilitated the American occupation of Iraq both practically and strategically, and then inherited Washington’s influence in Baghdad through its militias. This is an entirely different Iran: the Iran of slogans, rather than the Iran that turned four Arab capitals into arenas of open Iranian influence.
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Ahmad quotes the sentimental line ‘real men go to Tehran’, overlooking the fact that it was Iraqis who confronted Iran — men who fought for eight long years against Khomeini’s project, which marched under the revealing slogan ‘The road to Jerusalem passes through Karbala’. And when Iraq fell under American occupation and then Iranian domination, the true meaning of that slogan became painfully clear: Jerusalem was never the target, Baghdad was.
Iran must have been delighted when Israeli jets bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at the height of the Iran–Iraq War, as if an outside force had intervened to achieve what Iran could not on the battlefield.
While Ahmad speaks of the ‘Zion-Con fantasy’ of regime change in Iran, he ignores the most crucial truth: that Iran is ready to offer every concession to Donald Trump — or indeed any American president — in exchange for one guarantee: the survival of its theocratic regime. The Islamic Republic is not afraid of sanctions, isolation or limited strikes; it fears only a threat to its own existence. Its thunderous anti-American rhetoric is political theatre. When pressure mounts, Tehran returns to the negotiating table on its knees, as it did during the first nuclear deal and every time the regime felt endangered, rather than its regional interests.
The same regime that chants ‘Death to America’ in the streets negotiates with Washington in secret whenever its throne is threatened. Its slogans are loud, but its survival instinct is louder.
The Iran that Ahmad portrays as a victim of ‘Zion-Con fantasies’ is the same Iran whose highest security and intelligence institutions teach the doctrine of ‘Qom as the Mother of Cities’ (Qom Umm al-Qura) — a strategic vision aimed at shifting the centre of the Islamic world from Mecca to Qom and redefining spiritual and political leadership in the region through a Persian-Shi‘i lens that places Iran at the heart of a new ‘sacred capital’. This doctrine is not just academic theory; it is the ideological engine that justifies Iran’s interventions across the Arab world, giving its expansionist project a religious veneer that is reminiscent of old imperial ideologies.
Understanding this doctrine clarifies why Iran does not want to go to war with Israel. What it requires is the dismantling of the Arab sphere and its reconstruction in a manner that aligns with the ‘Qom Umm al-Qura’ vision. Every Iranian intervention, whether in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon or Yemen, is part of a single project: the region’s demographic, political and cultural re-engineering. Although Iran has not fired a single shot at Israel from its own territory, it has fired thousands of rockets at Arab cities through its proxies. It has not opened any fronts against Tel Aviv, yet it has opened every front inside the Arab world. It has not threatened Israel’s existence, yet it has threatened the existence of entire Arab states.
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Nevertheless, Ahmad writes as if Iran were a besieged nation rather than a regional power that projects influence through militias, exploits chaos and weaponises sectarianism.
What further weakens Ahmad’s argument is his selective reading of history. He fails to mention Iran–Contra, the intelligence cooperation of the 1980s, Iran’s role in enabling the American occupation of Iraq or the devastation Iran has inflicted on the region. This is not an oversight, but a structural bias that turns his article into a political defence rather than an analytical critique. History is not just a decorative backdrop; it is key to understanding Iran’s deep-seated grievances towards the Arab world since the early Islamic conquests — grievances that the Islamic Republic has never ceased to exploit.
In his article, Ahmad perpetuates the myth that Iran is in an existential confrontation with Israel and that neoconservatives are deluded to imagine regime change in Tehran. However, anyone familiar with the history of the region knows that Iran and Israel are not existential enemies, that Iran’s project is primarily directed against the Arabs, and that the Iranian regime will make every concession to Trump — or any other American president — to guarantee its survival. It is the men in the trenches who matter, not the slogans.
Myths do not survive long when confronted by history, and history in this region spares no one.
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The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.