U.S. should have assassinated Khomeini in France in ’79 — and other not-so-friendly advice from Israelis

As Joe Biden pushes for a U.S. withdrawal from endless wars in the Middle East and says he wants to restore the Iran deal, the alarm bells are going off for Israel and its friends. They look on Iran as an existential enemy, or in any case as a good distraction from the Palestinian issue, and as always, they want the U.S. to confront Iran militarily.

Mike Pompeo now accuses the Biden administration of a policy of “appeasement” of Iran. Pompeo has been cultivating donors with an eye to running for president in 2024, and issuing apocalyptic pronouncements about the destruction of Israel is his political lane. He lately spoke at the neoconservative Hudson Institute and has claimed that Al-Qaeda has found a home in Iran — which was of course one false pretext for the invasion of Iraq that worked out so well for the U.S.

Next week Pompeo will be accepting an award for “Peace through Strength” at former Trump ambassador David Friedman’s new organization in Jerusalem. Pompeo shared his complex, subtle thoughts about the Iranian regime with Jewish Insider:

They are on a religious jihad for the destruction of the State of Israel and the big devil [the U.S.] as well. The leaders are evil.

Of course this talk is not extreme in Israel, it is typical of the politics. Here are two advice columns from Israel advocates that should make the hair stand up on your neck– and one of them was published by a liberal Zionist organization.

In a display of arrogance and amorality, Yossi Alpher, the weekly political/security analyst at Americans for Peace Now, says that the U.S. or Israel should have assassinated the Ayatollah Khomeini in France back in 1979 when it had a supposed chance to preserve the Shah’s rule in Iran.

The hardboiled Alpher begins by deploring the supposed American “intelligence failure” over the collapse of the regime in Afghanistan and expresses the fear that American intelligence agencies will miss the “evolution of Iran’s nuclear program.”

Alpher, 79, then moves on to his war stories and the “intelligence failure” of not killing Khomeini when we all had a chance.

In 1978-79 I was the Mossad’s Iran analyst. In late January 1979 the Head of the Mossad, General [Yitzhak] Hofi, called me to his office and informed me that the caretaker head of the Shah’s government in Tehran, Shapour Bakhtiar, had asked us to assassinate Khomeini, then still in exile in France. “I oppose political assassinations,” Hofi told me. “But the stakes are very high, so leave that aside for a moment. What’s your response to this request?”

I thought for a long moment, running various scenarios through my head, then said, “We don’t know enough about Khomeini for me to have an informed opinion.” Discussion over. The rest is history. The Islamic Republic that was founded so brutally by Khomeini within weeks now casts a long shadow over the entire Middle East. I have relived that moment of Intelligence failure again and again ever since. So have my contemporaries from the CIA and British MI6, who had a similar experience.

This commentary is not just immoral, it is foolish. The Iranian people rose in some of the biggest demonstrations history had ever witnessed to push the corrupt Shah out of power in 1979. Does Alpher really think that the U.S. or Israel could have retarded that social movement by killing someone in France?

The arrogance doesn’t end. Alpher goes on to call for an Israeli spying regime across Africa and Asia to prop up dictatorships.

In my book, Periphery: Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies, I analyzed Israel’s 1979 Iran Intelligence failure and suggested that Israel should, without ruffling any feathers and assuming the stakes are high, find under-the-radar ways to gather serious intelligence regarding opposition activities that might endanger friendly yet dictatorial regimes — the kind that would not tolerate their friends openly spying on them — in parts of Asia and Africa.

And you wonder why Israel says that it lives in a tough neighborhood? Surely it bears some responsibility for the lawlessness, including by its illegal assassination program, celebrated in the New York Times.

Then there’s Daniel Gordis, the Israeli author who is noted for his work on the chasm between American and Israeli Jews. Gordis used his weekly column on October 4 to urge American Jews to rally the United States to war against Iran.

Gordin concedes that the relationship between American Jews and Israel is “atrophying.” He also admits that U.S. Jews increasingly don’t accept Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. But Iran is the next Nazi Germany, Gordis says — and in the 1930s American Jews didn’t act.

[D]efending Israel against Iran, defending the Jews against a hate-filled venomous threat—surely, on that, at least, we can all agree and once again work together? . . . Israel’s only sin as far as the Iranians are concerned, the reason it must be destroyed, is that it is a Jewish State.

A century ago… Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, and nonetheless, the following decade, Germans elected him. He had hidden nothing about his plans . . . While Europe burned, Britain closed the borders to Palestine. America, too, closed its own borders, and with the exception of one protest of mostly Orthodox rabbis, American Jews were mostly silent. That historical record is clear.

We’re about to find out if we’ve learned anything since then. In just a handful of years, more than half the world’s Jews will live in Israel . . . And just as it’s about to happen, is the world going to allow Iran—which also hides nothing about its plans—to go nuclear, with the express intent of destroying what will without question be the center of the Jewish world?

This time, will American Jews get America to do the right thing? Will they at least try? Can Israeli leaders mend fences with American Jews to help make that happen? Do sufficient numbers of young American Jews care enough to make this a priority? Does the sense of mutual responsibility that has long been the core of Jewish peoplehood still mean enough to sufficient people?

These hysterical attitudes are not unusual in Israel. The country’s president, Isaac Herzog, has also lately urged American Jews to restore their sense of “Jewish peoplehood” so they can defend Israel.

While Naftali Bennett used his UN General Assembly speech last week to ignore the Palestinian issue and go on at length about Iran for spreading “carnage and destruction” across the region and planning “to blanket the skies of the Middle East with drones.” Iran’s “regime is rotten,” Bennett said, suggesting that it should be brought down.

In his latest cabinet speech, Bennett deplored the “unceasing criticism of the State of Israel” for slaughtering people in Gaza.

I think that there is no Israeli who did not feel frustrated at home over the fact that all those who hate us managed to do so freely.

The global hatred of Israel and plans to destroy the Jewish state are ceaseless themes of Israeli hasbara, or propaganda, used to justify war crimes and human rights violations. You’d think Americans would see through it by now. But sadly there are many purveyors here.