Dan Diker and Yossi Kuperwasser
Jewish Policy Center, Winter 2025
“We are really facing jihad; we are facing Holy War, as Iran has reminded us time and time again since 1979, with the return of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris.”
inFOCUS: This issue assesses Iranian policy and the future of the Tehran regime, mostly from the American perspective. Give us an Israeli perspective, please.
Dr. Dan Diker: The chessboard is being reset in the Middle East and it is important to connect everything.
BG Yossi Kuperwasser: The situation is becoming more complicated; the Iranian regime faces challenges it has never faced before. First of all, the regime’s perception of itself and also the perception of the Iranian people of their regime is in shambles because it was proven that it cannot cause the kind of damage to Israel it proclaimed it could. It cannot defend itself and cannot defend its most strategic assets, including the nuclear program.
It was further proven that the Ring of Fire [Ed. Iranian proxy forces] that it has built around Israel is falling apart. It was not built well enough to withstand the Israeli reaction to an attack by one of the members – Hamas. And its economic situation is terrible, and Donald Trump is coming, and “maximum pressure” is going to be imposed again. And the people of Iran can’t stand the regime any more anyhow, regardless of anything else, because of the economic difficulties – which are, to some extent, the result of sanctions, but mostly have to do with the corruption and the ineffectiveness of the regime.
Its treatment of its own people is despicable; we have learned recently of the growing number of executions, including of women. So, from the point of view of the regime, the situation is extremely dangerous.
What is happening in Syria exacerbates the situation. It’s almost a doomsday scenario for Iran. And everybody understood. Everybody saw how weak the regime was. That’s why the opposition in Syria decided to go on the move.
So, if the question is whether the Iranian regime can fall, yes, the regime can fall.
iF: But there are two possibilities. One is immediate large-scale military offensive activity to try to shake off their enemies. The other is to collapse. Do you think there’s any possibility that Iran will say, “Look, if I’m going to go down, I’m going to go down and take Israel with me”? ….SOURCE