Iran is an ancient great country. Contrary to public perception in sub-saharan Africa, Iran is Persian not Arabian. They speak predominantly Farsi. Iran is the country of Cyrus the Great in the Bible, who ordered that the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem should be rebuilt. This was in line with the recognition of the fundamental rights of human beings to freedom of religion and worship. Most of our current fundamental human rights trace their origin to the proclamation in 539 BC of Cyrus the Great who was the King of the ancient world then. Although Iran is not Arabian, it’s majorly Islamic of the Shiite order of worship. It declared itself an Islamic Republic after the Iranian revolution of 1979 which installed the Grand Ayatollah Ali Khomeini as the Supreme Leader.
Since the revolution, Iran gradually started moving to a religious, rather than a secular state, in which a woman can be brutally and publicly assaulted for not covering her hair. Fundamental freedoms started taking back seats. Apart from the rescission of fundamental rights in Iran, the government of Iran started projecting its powers internationally and wished to become the undisputed Middle East regional power. In this journey, Iran clashed with Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel, United States of America, etc.
The fundamental problem Iran had with Iraq was the presence of another power drunken Sunni Leader, Saddam Hussein, who took over power in a predominantly Muslim Shiite Iraq and was also interested in projecting his power throughout the entire Middle East. Both countries clashed in a protracted war that caused considerable damages on both sides. Saddam Hussein used some chemical and biological weapons of war against Iran that forced Iran to accept a ceasefire to avoid its people from exposure to Saddam Hussein’s dangerous weapons.
The grouse with Saudi Arabia was mainly religious. Saudi Arabia hosts the most holy Islamic sites of Mecca and Medina. They are predominantly Sunni and regards all other sects and Islamic denominations as unbelievers. Saudi Arabia, being the custodians of the most holy sites, lays claim to a natural right of the leadership of the Middle East. In this regard, it had clashes with Iran for a long time.
The age-old friction between Israel and their Palestinian neighbours with regard to who owns the Palestinian territories was the main cause of friction between Israel and Iran. The fraternity between Palestinians and Iran was basically religious and Iran believes that if it engages as a frontline state in the liberation of Palestine, it will enable it project its powers in the region and also spread the gospel of Shiitism among the Palestinians and its environs. It actually succeeded in part as it established some non-state actors in Lebanon called Hezbollah and state actors called Hamas in Gaza. It supported the Assad regime in Syria.
This meant that Iran had its proxies cast around Israel. To worsen the apprehension of its presence around Israel, Iran, through its then President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, proclaimed that Israel should be wiped out of the earth. As if to acquire the capacity to fulfill such threats, Iran embarked on a quest to develop nuclear weapons. This was a red line for the United States of America, who vowed as one of its international policies that Iran would never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. In this American policy, Israel was an ally in total agreement.
Unfortunately for Iran, after the catastrophe of the dropping of atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima which introduced the fear upon the whole world that the earth could be blown away by any errant country which arbitrarily uses it against perceived enemies, no country has been allowed to legally acquire nuclear weapons, not even the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. Nuclear weapons were outlawed as weapons of warfare in international law. Nations, however, in disobedience to the non-proliferation treaty with regards to nuclear weapons proceed to illegally acquire nuclear weapons under the guise that they are not to be used as offensive weapons but for deterrence.
Same argument was made by Iran, which believed that it needed to acquire nuclear weapons for deterrence. Although Iran never publicly declared it as a policy to acquire nuclear weapons, it however exceeded the uranium enrichment level needed for peaceful nuclear programs. United States under President Obama initiated a diplomatic negotiation with Iran to persuade them to abandon their nuclear weapons in exchange for some financial benefits and lifting of certain categories of sanctions against it. The deal was struck and Iran’s uranium enrichment programme was diverted to peaceful purposes only. However, when Trump was elected the first time, he pulled United States out of the uranium enrichment US-Iran deal, leaving Iran to unilaterally continue its uranium enrichment programme upon which it had spent about $500b.
President Biden was not able to stop this enrichment, fueling the apprehension on Israel that this enrichment poses existential threat to its existence. Israel was bidding its time to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat but was restrained because of the danger any military action against Iran might pose on its security as the Iranian proxies around Israel would jointly attack Israel from all quarters. Israel slowly and surreptitiously embarked on high powered espionage on all the nuclear activities of Iran while waiting for any chance to hit the nuclear sites in Iran and take them out.
From the blues came the Hamas October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel which claimed more than 1200 Israeli lives including children and women. About 250 Israelis were taken hostage. The attacks reminded the Israelis of the holocaust which claimed about six million Jews. The manner the innocent Israeli women and children were beheaded and slaughtered reminded them of the gas chamber in which millions of them were gassed to death during the second world war. All gloves came off and a declaration of war ensued.
The level of brutality in Israelis defence and offence against Gaza and Hamas was as fierce and unconscionable as the October 7 attacks. It was as if the two neighbours were competing to know who will be more wicked in its atrocities against each other. At the end of almost two years into the war, more than 50,000 Palestinians were killed and many more injured. Famine has taken over the land. Hezbollah in Lebanon tried to intervene to assist Hamas against Israel but was destroyed with Nasrallah, their leader, killed. Israel chased the Hamas leaders everywhere they went, and eventually killed Ismail Haniyeh, their leader, in Iran on 31 July, 2024. This triggered an exchange of some measured blows and missiles between Iran and Israel.
With the destruction of Hezbollah, the Assad regime in Syria fell because Assad was largely supported by Hezbollah and Russia which were embroiled in wars presently. This meant that the Iranian proxies around Israel were destroyed. With the re-election of Donald Trump, Israel appeared to hold all the aces. It didn’t waste time to utilise them. Donald Trump gave Iran a window of opportunity to escape bombs by abandoning the pursuit of nuclear weapons to no avail. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) concluded Iran in violation of the agreement on the level of uranium enrichment it ought to have. The time was ripe for Israel to move.
The bombs came landing on Iran on 13 June, 2025, and by the 12th day of the war top Iranian military and nuclear scientists, with about 900 of its citizens, were dead, and the nuclear facilities substantially damaged, especially with the assistance of Americans, who dropped bunker blowing bombs on the most sophisticated nuclear sites. Iran agreed to a ceasefire after killing about 28 Israelis in rocket attacks on Israeli homeland.
Iran must act now by abandoning every quest for a nuclear weapon for the sake of its people. The quest in itself is unnecessary. The argument that nuclear weapons deter enemies is spurious, and unsustainable. Israel is presumed to have nuclear weapons yet it has not dissuaded Hamas and Hezbollah’s continual attacks on Israel. India and Pakistan are nuclear neighbours who acquired nuclear weapons to deter each other, yet they have fought three major wars and other minor but deadly skirmishes since then.
Nuclear weapon is an unnecessary expensive venture which denies the country the opportunity to use the money for other infrastructures of priority, especially when one considers that there’s no other country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons. Iran didn’t get any nation to support it in this war because Israel and America sugar-coated the war as a war against the nuclear weapons not against Iranian people. No country on earth wants to have one additional country with nuclear weapons. This has brought unnecessary economic, social, and political trauma on Iran.
Iran must join the other modern Islamic States in returning to the Cyrus the Great days when Iran projected its power throughout the world by the promotion of respect for human rights. There’s no reason Israel and Iran cannot be friends again, after all, in international relations, there’s no permanent friends or enemies but interests.