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Khamenei long obstructed peace for Israel. But his influence was waning before his assassination.
(JTA) — Six days after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized power in Iran on Feb. 11, 1979, he hosted his first foreign dignitary: the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat.
Arafat, seen then by the Americans and the Israelis as a terrorist, was an ardent opponent of the emerging Israel-Egypt peace deal. Khomeini expelled Israeli diplomats and handed the embassy building over to the PLO.
Arafat relayed the message he got from Khomeini: After the new Islamic regime consolidated its hold over Iran it would turn to “victory of Israel.”
“Today Iran, tomorrow Palestine,” Arafat told reporters.
The symbolism was not lost on the Egyptian, Israeli and American negotiators hammering out the peace deal in Camp David: According to reports at the time, they redoubled their efforts to get to a peace deal before the new Islamist regime in Iran could scuttle it.
Keeping Iran from getting in the way of peace has been a preoccupation of Israeli and U.S. governments from then until the Israeli strike Sunday that killed Khomeini’s successor as Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, a key aim of the latest U.S.-Israel war against the country.
The regime’s hopes of stymying peace scored successes at time, particularly in the 1990s, when the terrorist group it backed, Hamas, undermined the peace process with repeated and massive terrorist attacks on Israeli targets. More recently it spectacularly backfired, when Sunni Muslim states fearful of Shia Iran’s adventurism in the region shed years of resistance to peace with Israel and forged ties under the Abraham Accords.
Iran, with its massive military capabilities, its oil wealth, its appetite for regional hegemony and its obdurate Islamism may have been the foremost obstacle to Israel’s integration into the region since 1979.
“Iran was a continually negative actor trying to prevent any normalization of Israel in the Middle East,” Joel Rubin, a former deputy assistant secretary of state during the Obama administration, said in an interview.
Khomeini had since the early 1960s cast Israel as an enemy of Islam and deplored the young Jewish state’s relationship with Iran and the monarchy he cast aside in 1979. In a landmark 1980 speech he listed four “world devourers” as the United States, communism, Israel and Zionism.
Khomeini lost little time in making good on his pledge to Arafat to seek Israel’s defeat. In 1982, after Israel invaded Lebanon, Iranian agents cultivated ties among fellow Shia who resented Israel’s presence. Within a year, Hezbollah was established, becoming one of Israel’s most implacable enemies.
Working with Iran, Hezbollah delivered some of the bloodiest attacks on Israelis and on Jews in the subsequent decades, among them the bombing of Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires in March 1992, killing 29, and then the bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in the same city in 1994, killing 85 people, the deadliest attack in Argentine history.
“May this news bring relief to the families and contribute to the acknowledgment of responsibility and to the fight against terrorism and impunity,” the pro-Israel Argentine government said Sunday after Khamenei’s assassination was confirmed.
The timing of the Argentina attacks was not coincidental: The George H.W. Bush administration had in 1991 convened talks in Madrid, bringing around the table for the first time Israel and most of the Arab states in the region. Two years later, Israel and the Palestinians, under the aegis of the Clinton administration, launched the Oslo peace talks.
Arafat by then had done a famous 180-degree turn, embracing peace with Israel and appearing with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn. Iran, wary of Arafat since he first expressed openness to peace talks in 1988, had begun to cultivate ties with Hamas, the Islamist group that rejected any accommodation with Israel.
By 1994, Iran’s support for Hamas, according to officials of Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, was in the tens of millions of dollars. The money funded terrorist attacks that undermined Israeli confidence in the peace process, propelling Oslo skeptic Benjamin Netanyahu to the prime ministership in 1996. The attacks included suicide missions — a method that Hamas operatives had learned from Hezbollah trainers in Lebanon.
Oslo petered out in the late 1990s and then exploded into the Second Intifada in late 2000. In 2006, when it appeared that the second Bush administration was making strides in getting the Israelis and the Palestinians back to the table, Hezbollah, backed by Iran, launched a war against Israel.
Khamenei, who succeeded Khomeini in 1989, only intensified the country’s focus on confronting Israel, spending billions of dollars on terrorist proxies including Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthi militias and investing in his own Islamic Revolutionary Guard Forces and its Quds Force, which both trains proxies and conducts its own operations abroad.
Khamenei periodically posted on social media his “plan for the elimination of Israel.” When Arafat died in 2004, Khamenei reviled him as “a traitor and a fool.”
Khamenei’s hostility to Israel was ideological: He would periodically deride Arab and Palestinian leaders who said the conflict should be left primarily to the Palestinians to resolve. Palestine was an “issue for the Islamic world,” he said.
“Khamenei was critical” to obstructing peace with Israel, said Trita Parsi, an Iranian-born analyst who is the executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “There were others in the system that were more amenable to the idea of adopting a more flexible position on Israel in order to resolve their problems with the United States.”
Confronting Israel was also a means of stemming U.S. influence in the region. A key rationale for U.S. and Israeli peacemaking in the 1990s was to placate other conflicts and focus on Iran.
“The view was that Iran was the bigger threat, and so for Israel’s peace camp it was, ‘Let’s get over the Palestinian issue, to consolidate support in the Arab world, to enable us to deal with that bigger Iranian threat,’” Rubin said.
Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the progressive leader, said Iran was able to exploit resentment against American and Israeli influence in the region because at times the influence was itself toxic.
“Iran supported terrorist groups that supported violence against civilians, horrific violence, both against its own people and people in the region and elsewhere,” he said. “Iran clearly exploited anger at both Israel and the United States for its own political ends. It did not invent that opposition. It did not invent those grievances. It successfully exploited and weaponized them.”
Parsi, too, noted that Iran did not operate in a vacuum: It at times exploited existing tensions stoked by Israeli actions.
“If there wasn’t a problem at the outset, there’s no way for an outside power to be able to take advantage of it and be able to push for it, and we’ve seen that as long as the situation on the ground between Israel and Palestine remains what it is, and you have more settlements being built and disregard for international law,” he said.
Iran was influential but not instrumental in inhibiting peace, said Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a top Middle East peace negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations.
Iran looked askance at Israeli talks with Iran’s ally, Syria, in the 1990s, but ultimately it was Syrian President Hafez Assad’s obduracy that scuttled those talks, Miller said.
“The major determinant was the inability, in my judgment, of Assad to understand that if he wanted more than Sadat got, he would have to give at least as much as Sadat got,” Miller said, referring to Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president assassinated in 1981 for making peace with Israel.
“Assad was not willing to do nearly as much on the issue of personal diplomacy, public diplomacy, as what Sadat did,” Miller continued. So, no, Iran was not the major constraint or the major reason why we don’t have an Israeli-Syrian agreement.”
Iranian backing, training and funding for terrorist attacks inhibited popular support for peace, said Shira Efron, the Pentagon-aligned RAND Institute’s Israel policy chair.
“It was tangible in the sense that you see Iran’s different ways of altering the security situation” with terrorist attacks. Iran’s hand and this was always their plan,” she said. “Khamenei was talking about it, this idea of creating the ‘ring of fire’ around Israel — it originated in Tehran.”
The “ring of fire” — the threat to Israel composed of militias in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and as far afield as Yemen and Iraq — was the construct that Hamas hoped would trigger a massive multi-front war when its terrorists raided Israel on Oct. 7, launching the conflict that culminated this weekend with the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran.
Khamenei hoped that the ring of fire would prevail in a looming conflict with the United States, tweeting just weeks before his death, “The Americans should know if they start a war, this time it will be a regional war.”
But Israel and the United States launched the current war without fear of igniting the region, in part because of the Abraham Accords, the normalization agreements with Arab countries near Iran. Those accords came about in part because those countries saw working with Israel and the United States as the most effective means of stemming Iran’s hostile adventurism.
Some of those countries are now reaping consequences of allying with Israel, taking blows from Iranian missiles and drones. Some are emphasizing that they reserve the right to join the fight against Iran.
“Look at the proximity between the Islamic Republic of Iran and key Gulf states which have either made peace with Israel or want to,” Miller said. “How could anybody in their right mind argue that Iran has been the major constraint, or even a constraint?”
Iran’s regime, Rubin said, was ultimately the author of its own diminishment. “Imagine Iran had said, ‘We’re going to back peace. We’re going to respect the Palestinians whatever they decide. We’re not going to undermine their politics. We’re not going to support Hamas in the case that they blow up Israelis and kill Palestinians who talk to the Israelis. We’re going to actually be a constructive player.’”
With Khamenei assassinated, the question is whether Iran’s future leadership might take more of that approach. That’s the hope of the United States and Israel, which have urged the Iranian people to take hold of their destinies following the war. But the Islamic Republic swears that it is strong and has said it would name a successor to Khamenei imminently. According to reports that emerged after his death, the CIA has assessed that it is likely that a hardliner, perhaps with ties to the IRGC and certainly with opposition to Israel, is the most likely to take his place.
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What It’s Like in Israel — During ‘Operation Lion’s Roar’
An Israeli air defense system intercepts a ballistic missile barrage launched from Iran to central Israel during a missile attack. Photo: Eli Basri / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
I haven’t been sleeping much.
It starts with an (intentionally) obnoxious screech on your phone that overrides all your “leave me alone” settings, and harangues you that a missile alarm has gone off. The radar and satellite tech behind this disruptive howl is almost magical, but in the moment, no one cares.
Then the promised air raid sirens sound all around: you have 90 seconds to reach a bomb shelter.
Fortunately, there’s a bomb shelter in my building. Some aren’t so lucky: they run down the block to public shelters, or to Tel Aviv’s new underground subway, which was built with this exact scenario in mind.
The attacks come in waves of an hour or two.
Imagine having a baby that wakes you up all day and night, except instead of a baby it’s a homicidal Islamist regime, and instead of wanting to be changed or fed, it wants to kill you.
Emergency notifications from the Israeli Home Front Command indicating the approach of Iranian missiles. Photo: Daniel Pomerantz.
Israel has the most advanced, multi-layered missile defense system in human history, but it’s only about 88% effective — and that remaining 12% takes out entire apartment buildings. Iran already claimed its first victims in Israel and across the region.
This war is horrible, but there are many reasons Israel needed to wage it:
1. Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
This isn’t some Iraq era claim of “WMDs” — we know this is true because (among other reasons) Iran essentially says so. The regime very publicly insists on enriching uranium up to levels that have no possible use other than making warheads, all while paradoxically claiming “peaceful purposes.”
And if all that weren’t enough, Iran hides its “peaceful” nuclear program hundreds of feet under a mountain. Make of that what you will.
2. Iran is also developing ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles) capable of reaching the United States. We know this because (again) the regime says so. A lot. They brag about it. This is not a question mark.
3. Iran’s terror proxies have killed thousands of Americans, Israelis, Europeans, and Arabs, including the Beirut barracks bombing that took the lives of 220 US Marines, and the unimaginable October 7 Massacre in Israel. Claiming that the work of proxies isn’t “really” Iran’s doing this is like hiring a hitman and then claiming that you didn’t “personally” murder anyone.
4. Of course, the greatest victims are the Iranian people, 80% of whom want to overthrow the regime — after 47 years of unimaginable suffering. This regime murdered thousands of its own people just last month, most for protesting, some for using Star Link terminals.
We seem to forget that military might can be used appropriately and effectively.
For every nightmare of intervention, such as Iraq or Afghanistan, there are also success stories, such as Libya, Kosovo, and most recently, Venezuela. And this isn’t even “intervention,” this is self defense. The regime’s President Masoud Pezeshkian declared in December, “we are in a full-fledged war with America, Israel, and Europe,” as Iranian officials continued to scream “Death to America” in the halls of Parliament, and on the streets.
And Iran puts its money where its mouth is: backing up its homicidal rhetoric with actual homicide. Lots of it.
Iran is now spreading a distorted history, claiming that all of its problems can be traced to America. That isn’t true: it’s a psyop, designed to weaponize our democracy against us. One can debate whether America should have helped affect a coup in Iran in 1953, but the leadership America helped bring to power back then (the “Shah”) is the very same leadership whose return the Iranian people are now risking their very lives to demand. America and the Iranian people are completely aligned in this, and the death of Ayatollah Khamenei was met by cheers and celebrations.
Genocidal maniacs have a way of telling us exactly what they plan to do: we ignored Hitler in the run up to World War II, we ignored Al-Qaeda in the years before 9/11, and we now ignore Iran at our peril.
But we’re not ignoring Iran.
We must hope that the people of Iran are ready to take back their country, and institute a new, organized government. It is entirely possible that Iran, the Middle East, and the world at large are on the verge of greater peace and stability than we have seen, or even imagined, in any of our lifetimes.
But we aren’t there yet, and we need the united support of all our allies, and our entire democracy, in order to succeed.
Daniel Pomerantz is the CEO of RealityCheck, an organization dedicated to deepening public conversation through robust research studies and public speaking.
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Family of Former FBI Agent Robert Levinson Demands Iran Be Held ‘Accountable,’ Return His Remains
People walk near a mural featuring images of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, on a street in Tehran, Iran, Feb. 17, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
The family of former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared in Iran in 2007 and is believed to have died while in Iranian custody, is calling on the Trump administration to make sure Tehran returns his remains and is held “accountable” for its actions following this weekend’s US-Israel airstrikes on the Islamic Republic.
Washington has maintained that Levinson, a retired FBI special agent, was taken by Iranian officials on March 9, 2007, while working as a private contractor for the CIA on the Iranian island of Kish, where he had traveled to meet a source. His family was never informed of what officially happened to the American citizen, but in 2020, the US government officially concluded he had died while in Iran’s custody. The details and circumstances surrounding his death remain unknown. Levinson was a father of seven children.
Levinson’s family issued a statement, shared on social media, following Saturday’s killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the US-Israel airstrikes.
“For nearly 19 years, Iran has lied, obstructed, and refused to answer for the kidnapping, detention, and death of our father, Robert Levinson,” the family said in its statement. “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei led the regime responsible for these crimes. His death does not erase what Iran did to our father, and it does not end our fight for accountability. But it is a significant moment for our family and for every family that has suffered at the hands of this regime’s hostage-taking and wrongful detention.”
“Now Iran must do what it has refused to do for nearly two decades: provide full accountability for what happened to our father, return his remains to our family, and disclose the truth about his kidnapping, imprisonment, and death,” they added. “Our family will not stop demanding the truth. And we will not stop demanding justice.”
The family also expressed gratitude to US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio “for using the power of the United States to confront Iran and to hold it accountable, including by recognizing and addressing Iran’s long-standing practice of wrongful detention.”
Levinson’s son, Dan Levinson, talked to “Fox & Friends” over the weekend about the need for the Trump administration to pressure Iran to take accountability.
“We’re just looking for answers. We still don’t know what exactly happened to him,” the younger Levinson said of his father. “There was no person more responsible for my father’s fate than Ayatollah Khamenei. At any time he could have waved his hand and had my dad released. He chose not to. We begged and pleaded. We sent so many letters. I went over there twice asking for a meeting and his people rebuffed us. Ignored us.”
Levinson said there is still a $25 million reward for information leading to the recovery and return of his father’s remains.
In March 2025, the United States imposed sanctions on three Iranian intelligence officers for their alleged involvement in Levinson’s disappearance.
In December 2020, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned two other Iranian officials who are accused of authorizing Levinson’s 2007 abduction. The FBI released posters seeking information about them last year.
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The Jewish space lasers are real — well, kind of
Everyone made fun of Marjorie Taylor Greene when she said that Rothschild-funded space lasers had caused forest fires.
But, as it turns out, the space lasers are real. Well, sort of. They aren’t starting forest fires or causing major weather events, as Greene claimed in her post. Israel does, however, have a laser that shoots in the general direction of space. But that’s enough for some conspiracy theorists to feel vindicated.
“No longer a ‘Conspiracy Theory.’ Israel just used a Directed Energy Weapon (DEWs),” reads one viral tweet about the lasers. “During Biden’s term the media worked relentlessly to Fact Check these weapons as conspiracy theories.”
Indeed, as Israel and Iran exchanged missiles over the weekend, videos circulated online purporting to show Israel shooting down missiles using a laser. In the video, missiles launched by Hezbollah from southern Lebanon, near the border with Israel, appear to flame out moments after taking off. (Israel has yet to officially confirm that the rockets were shot down by lasers, and the videos aren’t definitive; the missiles could have been defective and burned out on launch.)
But it is true that Israel has been working on defensive lasers for years. In 2022, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said, “We have successfully completed a series of tests on our new ‘Iron Beam’ laser air defense system. This may sound like science fiction, but it’s real.” The laser system was reportedly delivered and deployed across Israel in December.
“It has nothing to do with the ‘Jewish space laser’ conspiracy theory,” said Mike Rothschild, a researcher on extremism and author of Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories. “Conspiracy theorists often take real or in-development technology and twist it around for their own purposes.”
The laser works by shooting a grouping of small beams toward the projectile it is attempting to destroy, explains a report on the system’s development in National Defense Magazine. When one hits its target, the beams concentrate on the target until it is incinerated.
The lasers are less effective than the existing Iron Dome system, which works by intercepting missiles with other missiles and exploding them before they hit the ground. The laser can only reach missiles within about a 10 kilometer range, and, like any beam of light, can be blocked by terrain or atmospheric conditions like haze or clouds. On the other hand, the lasers are cheap to use, since they don’t require a ballistic missile for each engagement, and, for the same reason, they cause less collateral damage from falling debris.
The existence of the laser and its first — or first public — deployment has plenty of people joking about Jewish space lasers being real, and apologizing to Greene, though the Iron Beam has little to do with Greene’s allegations of a laser used to start targeted forest fires for government profit.
Conspiracy theorists may be crowing about the supposedly huge secret they’ve uncovered. But the laser isn’t secret at all. The Iron Beam is a well-funded and well-publicized project that has been in development for years, funded by both the U.S. and Israel. The first model was unveiled in 2014 at the Singapore Air Show. Smaller versions have been used to shoot down drones at close range for the past several years.
The aura of secrecy is key to the world of conspiracy theories. If antisemites can frame anything done by Jews or Israel as an underground, hidden project, it gains an undertone of corruption and danger.
The Iron Beam, however, has its own Wikipedia page. It features 40 sources — which means there are at least 40 other articles, going back over a decade, about the laser defense device. If you think that’s a secret, you’re just not paying attention.
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