In a Radio Jai op-ed, B’nai B’rith Director of Latin American Affairs Eduardo Kohn traces Iran’s decades-long campaign to destroy Israel—from Khomeini’s 1979 declaration to today’s proxy violence. He warns that the campaign has entered a new and dangerous phase, enabled by global indifference and growing complicity.

Read more in Radio Jai in Spanish. Read below in English.

Iran declared and launched a war to exterminate Israel and the entire Jewish nation 46 years ago. When the radical Islamic theocracy came to power under Ayatollah Khomeini, he immediately proclaimed: “Israel is a malignant tumor that must be uprooted from the region.” His successor to this day, Ayatollah Khamenei, has repeatedly said that Israel must disappear within 25 years. There’s no doubt he has done everything in his power to make that happen—through the arms of the hydra: Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Assad, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq. Beyond calling for the extermination of the Jewish nation, Khomeini described Jews as “impure, infidels, dogs, and pigs.” No one in the international arena pushed back. The ayatollahs could spout their antisemitic rhetoric dressed in theological language and stand at the U.N. podium with impunity. Under Khamenei, nothing changed.

Khomeini also publicly stated nearly 50 years ago that “eliminating Israel is a matter of life and death for Iran.” The declarations of war against Israel have not ceased in five decades.

In 2001, Khamenei declared that “Iran’s eternal issue is the elimination of Israel from the region.” In 2013, he called Israel a country “doomed to failure and annihilation,” labeling it an “illegitimate regime” led by “rabid dogs who cannot be considered human.”

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad served as president of Iran from 2005 to 2013. At a 2005 conference titled “A World Without Zionism,” he proclaimed: “Our dear Imam Khomeini ordered that this regime occupying Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time. Israel is a disgraceful stain that must be wiped from the face of the earth.” A year later, in 2006, Ahmadinejad reiterated: “The Zionist regime will be annihilated, and humanity will be liberated.”

Ahmadinejad found two friends who became unconditional allies of Iran: Hugo Chávez and Lula da Silva. After Chávez’s death, Nicolás Maduro deepened the alliance—since Iran had chosen Venezuela (and Bolivia) as bases in Latin America.

In 2009, Brazilian President Lula received Ahmadinejad and endorsed “Iran’s right to develop a nuclear program for peaceful purposes.” One of Lula’s long-time political advisers, Marco Aurelio Garcia, said at the time: “We’re aware of the criticism we’ve received for welcoming Ahmadinejad, but we reject it, because our stance is, once again, one of dialogue to find common ground that contributes to the international community.” Contribute it did. He never said a word about Iran’s brutal human rights abuses: the persecution, stoning, and torture of women; the extermination of homosexuals; the crushing of dissent; and the supply of weapons to terrorist movements across the globe—including in Latin America. That contribution, proudly announced 16 years ago, remains steadfast. Last Friday, as war broke out with Israel, Brazil wasted no time in publicly backing Iran. It wasn’t alone—Maduro, Ortega, and Petro joined in.

Ahmadinejad also introduced Holocaust denial into the regime’s official narrative of extermination. Some political analysts—those who have refused to see Iran’s aims toward Israel despite Tehran never hiding them—likewise brushed off Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial, which persisted even after he fell out of favor (as usually happens in dictatorships). Two and a half years ago, then-President Ebrahim Raisi renewed Holocaust denial efforts, hosting events—like Ahmadinejad before him—where European and other deniers could speak and amplify the grotesque lies of figures like David Irving, who was rightly sanctioned in democratic countries.

Kenneth Jacobson, Deputy National Director of the ADL, wrote in October 2022: “There is a dangerous and irrational level of Holocaust denial in Iran. It’s a manifestation of a belief system that views Jews as all-powerful and poisonous. The ayatollahs ask: How is it possible that books have been written, films made, museums created, and proclamations issued to commemorate the murder of six million Jews, when it never happened? Iran’s answer: Jews control all the world’s media and managed to impose this fantasy on the international community to gain support for the illegitimate entity known as the State of Israel.”

Since 1979, then, Israel has faced a publicly declared, existential threat—one supported across continents, not only by allied dictatorships. Along the way, Iran’s creations—the hydra’s heads—like Hamas from Gaza, Hezbollah from Lebanon, Assad in Syria, and more recently the Houthis, have attacked Israel at will. Yet Israel’s right to defend itself has always hit the wall of the United Nations, which has issued one empty resolution after another—always against Israel.

Not content to destabilize the region, Iran destroyed the Israeli Embassy in Argentina and, two years later, the AMIA Jewish community center. More than 30 years of total impunity.

One of the perpetrators of these attacks is now among the top military commanders Iran has left following this week’s war with Israel.

On Tuesday of this week, four events unfolded simultaneously: Israel struck Iranian military targets; Iran bombed residential neighborhoods in Israel; Russia bombed civilians in Ukraine; and the UN Security Council convened—only for the war between Israel and Iran.

Russia’s offensive Tuesday included over 440 drones and 32 missiles. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the destruction in Kyiv “one of the most horrific” since the war began. Twenty-seven sites in Kyiv were hit in successive nighttime attacks, damaging residential buildings, schools, and critical infrastructure. A video showed a Russian missile slicing a residential building nearly in half, killing at least 15 people and injuring many others. This has been the reality throughout Russia’s three-year war.

Killing civilians. Bombing hospitals with patients and staff inside.

What makes this latest atrocity any different from the many others Russia has committed with impunity? Nothing. But something else happened in parallel.

Last Saturday, Vladimir Putin personally called Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and said: “Russia condemns Israel’s actions against Iran, carried out in violation of U.N. statutes and international law.” Then on Tuesday, Russia was the only permanent Security Council member with veto power to speak. While Russia slaughtered civilians in Kyiv, its U.N. ambassador, Vasily Nebenzya, said Israel’s strike on Iran was “a gross violation of the U.N. Charter.” He added: “One gets the impression that Israel’s leaders believe they have carte blanche in the region and that they can bypass any norms and international bodies—including this Security Council.”

This is a direct result of the Western powers’ complacency. For months, deliberately and systematically, they have been feeding anti-Iran hysteria at the U.N. Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Every Council member who has never shown empathy for Israel now quietly acknowledges—with silence or veiled comments—that after half a century of Iranian threats to destroy Israel, and with nuclear weapons potentially imminent, Israel must defend itself—or disappear. Meanwhile, Russia kills and lectures.

Not only Russia, and the Latin American allies already mentioned, are embracing Iran and thus complicit in nearly five decades of its genocidal doctrine—but others, with a façade of civility, are joining in. Weeks ago, this column asked: What is Qatar? We gave our answer. Now Qatar has proven us right. Last Friday, the Qatari government “condemned Israel for violating Iran’s sovereignty and security and urged the international community to act urgently against Israel.” That is Qatar.

For Iran, nothing and no one in Israel is civilian. Everything—every building and every person—is an infidel marked for extermination, as Khomeini decreed 50 years ago. That’s why they bomb everything.

The countries and leaders who back Iran—whether they like it or not—are partners not only in this current war, but in the Ayatollahs’ ideology since they came to power. They are complicit in every massacre committed in the name of that ideology—including, of course, the murder of Jews around the world, such as the atrocities carried out in Buenos Aires.

There is no legal cause more legitimate than defending oneself from threats and attacks.

The time for waiting has passed.