Iran’s ‘Ring of Fire’ Strategy Aims to Annihilate Israel

Iran is about a thousand kilometres from Israel, with Syria and Iraq in between. The countries have no territorial, economic or other ‘rational’ disputes between them. Nevertheless, the Iranian regime has branded the Jewish state as a mortal enemy to be destroyed.

That Israel must be destroyed has been official Iranian government policy since the Iranian revolution under Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. Its background is Islamic, and to carry out the death sentence, Iran and a series of allies have created a ‘ring of fire’ around Israel.

‘Little Satan’
Iran’s death sentence on Israel is rooted in Shiite-Islamic end-time doctrine. In it, the United States is the ‘Great Satan’ and Israel the ‘Little Satan’, that need to be destroyed by Muslims, after which Islamic world peace can be imposed. In the original Shiite dogma, which is much older than the United States, only Israel is the focus of destruction. Israel must be exterminated by an international Islamic force commanded by the mysterious ‘hidden’ Twelfth Imam, the so-called ‘Mahdi’. This Muslim leader, persecuted by other Muslims, is said to have disappeared in an Iranian well some 1150 years ago but will resurface in the end times.

Genocidal Announcement
The Shia death sentence on Israel (and the Jewish people) is irrevocable and dovetails perfectly with similar doctrines in Sunni Islam. One of the best-known of these is this genocidal announcement, based on a statement by Islam founder Mohammed and used by Hamas and other sections of the Muslim Brotherhood: “The time of judgement will not dawn until the Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them; in consequence of which the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees. And every tree and [every] rock will [then] say: ‘O Muslim, O slave of Allah, behind me, is a Jew, come here and kill him!’”

The Islamic death sentence on Israel and the Jewish people have been openly and unabashedly propagated for decades, in particular by Iran and all known Islamic terror organisations, but also from mosques in the Western world. Since 7 October last year such propagation has been voiced at numerous US and European universities, with countless non-Muslim ‘useful idiots’ loudly endorsing the antisemitic verdict. However, the announced murder of the Jewish state and its inhabitants has not received the international censure and punishment one would expect in the post-Auschwitz era.

The EU and Hamas
In some cases, concrete Islamic-terrorist violence directed against Israel and/or Jews has admittedly been punished by the international community with sanctions. But the underlying unwavering genocidal intentions have generally been disregarded.

For instance, the EU placed the ‘terrorist wing’ of Iranian-backed Hamas on the European list of terrorist organisations in 2001, after an endless series of horrific bombings of Israeli civilian targets. Only two years and another long series of bloody attacks later, the so-called ‘political wing’ of the terror organisation was also listed, the ideological wing that preaches and exports genocidal ideology. But that was not mentioned, let alone condemned, when sanctioned.

The European door always remained and remains ajar for Hamas. For instance, if Hamas were to reconcile with the PLO and take its place in a Palestinian national unity government to lead a yet-to-be-founded (second) Palestinian state. The openly genocidal Hamas programme, which incites Palestinian Arabs against Jews and the Jewish state through education and the media, among others, was left untouched in practice. Its propagation and operationalisation was and is even generously sponsored by the EU and its member states, as in the case of the work of the Hamas-collaborating UN agency UNRWA.

Iran Also Went Unpunished
Iran’s official genocidal intentions towards the Jewish state were also virtually uncriticised and completely unpunished by the international community. UN and EU sanctions did emerge because of Iran’s illegal nuclear weapons programme, as it threatens regional stability and international interests. The EU also imposed sanctions because of the human rights situation in Iran itself and Tehran’s supply to Moscow of suicide drones used en masse against Ukrainian civilian targets.

But Iran’s death sentence on the Jewish state and its inhabitants has never been put on the agenda for debate or resolution by the UN or the EU. The EU claims to be a ‘community of values’ and the UN was created to prevent international aggression and genocides. With great regularity, Tehran is visited by European foreign ministers. However, there is no indication that even the slightest displeasure was expressed during those visits by the moral heirs of Holocaust guilt about Iran’s intention to finish the job that once begun in Europe.

Indifference
In that climate of international indifference, Iran, by arming and activating Islamist militias, has been able to create a ‘ring of fire’ around Israel almost unhindered, with the ultimate aim of eliminating the currently militarily and technologically superior Jewish state. Not overnight, but through a relentless war of attrition from all sides that the Jews in the Land of Israel will simply not be able to sustain militarily, politically and economically.

The continued burning of the ‘ring of fire’ must lead to severe and lasting disruption of the Israeli political and social order, to the depopulation of parts of the country (as has already been the case in the north since October 2023) and ultimately to a mass Jewish exodus and the dissolution of the ‘Zionist project’. According to the same plan, an operational Iranian nuclear weapon should prevent Israel from attacking the Iranian director of the elimination plan.

The plan was hatched by Iranian general Qassam Suleimani, commander-in-chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which can best be compared to the German SS of the time. Suleimani was eliminated with a targeted missile strike by the United States on 3 January 2020. But in the meantime, Suleimani’s successors implemented his encirclement plan.

Peaceful Solution Impossible
The ‘ring of fire’ is formed by Hezbollah in the north; Iran and a number of Tehran-controlled Syrian and Iraqi militias in the east; Hamas and Palestinian Jihad in the south; the Yemeni Houthis in the southeast; and the PLO and Hamas in the heart of the Land of Israel. This uncompromising coalition arrayed against Israel receives political, financial and organisational support from two state actors: NATO member Turkey and Qatar.

The Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement is the most formidable component of the ‘ring of fire’. Founded over 40 years ago by the IRGC, Hezbollah is the de facto ruler in Israel’s northern neighbour.

Despite UN resolutions demanding that Hezbollah be disarmed and removed from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah has transformed southern Lebanon into a giant above- and below-ground military stronghold in recent decades. This while under the watchful eye of the UN peacekeeping force UNIFIL, whose sole task was to prevent that from happening. Hezbollah has some 100,000 well-trained and armed men and an arsenal of between 150,000 and 200,000 rockets capable of shelling all of Israel. Like Iran, Hezbollah has exclusively ideological/religious reasons to destroy the Jewish state as well as wanting to commit genocide against the entire Jewish people. Significant is the 2002 statement by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah: “If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel it saves us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

All things considered, therefore, there is no peaceful solution to this conflict. To survive, Israel is condemned to put out the ‘ring of fire’ by force and cut off the Iranian head of the snake before Tehran will be able to have operational nuclear weapons.