Is it Certain That Iran Aims to Eliminate Israel’s Jews?

While it’s uncertain how long Iran’s current leadership will remain in power, it is certain that this leadership is fanatically determined to eliminate the Jews in Israel. Among evidence supporting this view is one item generally overlooked: The very name of the regime’s elite “Quds Force.”

Iran’s venerated Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of its Islamic revolution, is credited with naming the organization. Khomeini’s “founding vision [was] the eradication of Zionism [as] an inevitable precondition for redeeming contemporary Islam” (The Nuclear Deal: No Pause in Iran’s Vow to Destroy Israel, by Michael Segall, Aug. 16, 2015, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs). According to Segall , Khomeini’s obsession “keeps guiding the current generation of Iran’s religious, political and military establishment. To him the destruction of Zionism was an axiom never to be questioned or strayed from and an objective to be perpetually and actively pursued. According to this vision, Israel should be fought as part of a protracted global struggle between Islam and the West, which ‘planted intentionally the Zionist Entity in the heart of Islamic World.’ ”

In the Islamic world, Jerusalem, Israel’s ancient and modern capital, is most commonly known by a word transliterated as “Al-Quds” meaning “The Holy” or “the holy Sanctuary.” Al-Quds is an Arabic phrase that may reflect the earlier Hebrew beit ha-Mikdash, or “the holy house”— the First and Second Temples.

The Quds Force operates as Iran’s military special forces arm. Any of countless other names could have been applied to the unit if not for Tehran’s central obsession, elimination of the Jewish state of Israel — Allah’s Force, Allah’s Commandos, perhaps the Warriors of Ali (Shiite Islam’s original martyr) or something similar.

Jerusalem (or any variation of the word) is not mentioned anywhere in Islam’s holy book (attributed to Islam’s prophet, Mohammed or Muhammad), the Quran (Koran). The phrase transliterated as “Al-Quds,” mentioned several times in the Quran, is taken in the Islamic world to refer specifically to the Al-Aqsa mosque located on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Temple Mount is the site of the ancient Jewish Holy Temples of Israel mentioned prominently in the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament. Al-Aqsa was constructed in 711 C.E. after the Islamic conquest, on the remains of the Byzantine Church of St. Mary of Justinian.

How important is the Quds Force? A news item currently reports the defiance of an international travel ban by the head of the organization, Qassem Souleimani, in traveling to Russia to discuss the delivery to Iran of surface-to-air missiles and other weapons. Such missiles could help protect Iran’s presumed nuclear armaments facilities.

Quds Force reports directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei, Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor as Iran’s ultimate boss, who recently published a book called Palestine on the destruction of Israel.