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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