ZEALOTRY ALWAYS ENDS IN RUIN

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This past week has been nothing short of historic. On June 12–13, Israel launched its first strikes deep inside Iran, targeting the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz and multiple other sites tied to the regime’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

In addition, Israel conducted precision strikes against leading Iranian military officials and nuclear scientists, effectively decapitating Iran’s senior military command and scientific elite, seriously hampering Iranian efforts to respond.

Prime Minister Netanyahu called it a preemptive move against an existential threat. Iran responded with missile attacks of its own, breaching Israel’s much-vaunted air defenses and hitting residential areas, including a hospital in Beersheba.

And now—just days after this all began—President Trump has signaled his readiness to involve America directly in a war that, until recently, most believed was more fantasy than reality.

As I write these words, the situation remains highly fluid. By the time you read this, American B-2 bombers may well have already dropped 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on Fordo, Iran’s most deeply buried nuclear facility.

But while military pundits and geopolitical analysts have been working overtime, parsing missiles and political statements, I’ve been thinking about something almost no one is addressing: What explains Iran’s religious stubbornness in the face of overwhelming hatred for its regime—both at home and abroad? Where is the reality check? Where is the ability to set aside ideological absolutism and protect the people of Iran?

Here is a country whose economy is in ruins, whose streets are teeming with young people who openly despise the ruling clerics, and whose neighbors—Sunni Arab states like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the UAE—have shifted from cold neutrality to quiet coordination with Israel, united by a shared fear of Iran’s reckless ambitions.

The Islamic Republic is isolated, reviled, and increasingly cornered. And yet, its leaders plow ahead with terrifying conviction—as if righteousness alone will shield them from the consequences of their actions.

The answer is this, and it’s chilling: they genuinely believe they’re doing God’s will. And once someone believes that—with absolute certainty—they become very, very dangerous.

To understand this intransigence, you must go back to 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile—inexplicably enabled by France and U.S. President Jimmy Carter—and ignited the Islamic Revolution.

Unlike Gamal Abdel Nasser, the secular nationalist leader of Egypt, who envisioned a pan-Arab future bound by language and culture, Khomeini offered something far more radical and dangerous: a transnational theocracy. In Khomeini’s worldview, there was no such thing as a “Persian” identity. There was only Islam—and only those committed to his uncompromising Shi’a vision of it.

“We do not worship Iran,” he declared. “We worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism.” In other words, faith erased nationhood. Resistance to the regime’s theology wasn’t merely political dissent—it was apostasy. And apostasy, in a system like Khomeini’s, is punishable by death.

Khomeini didn’t want to be the president of Iran, he wanted to be the guardian of a global Islamic revolution – a return to the early days of Islam when the Prophet Muhammad’s successors swept across the Middle East and beyond, to conquer with the sword and forced conversions.

The Iranian revolution was never meant to stop at Iran’s borders. In fact, borders were an annoying inconvenience. From the very beginning, the goal was to export this fundamentalist ideology—first to the Shi’a populations of Lebanon, Iraq, and Bahrain, and then to the wider Muslim world.

In that sense, Iran under Khomeini was less a state than a divine mission. The IRGC wasn’t merely a national military force—it was the revolutionary guard of a new Islamic order. And while his opponents talked about democracy and reform, Khomeini was focused on martyrdom, submission, and a mystical messianic destiny. He believed—as does his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—that if the regime stood firm in its theology, God would ensure its success, even against impossible odds.

This is the belief that animates Iran today. The leaders of the Islamic Republic are Khomeini’s ideological heirs, and they continue to behave as though religious certainty can substitute for military capability, economic solvency, or diplomatic credibility.

They believe they are right—and everyone else, including the entire global order, is wrong. And so, no matter what you throw at them, they persevere, they grandstand, they deny reality, and they wrap themselves in a cloak of religious righteousness, as if that alone will save them.

This delusional fusion of faith and fantasy is not new. In fact, according to several biblical commentators, it appears in Parshat Shlach, which tells the story of the twelve spies – meraglim – sent by Moses to scout the land of Canaan.

Ten of them return with a bleak, terrifying report: the land is unconquerable, and rather than embark on the conquest of the Promised Land, they insist the nation must remain in the wilderness. The people panic, and God responds by condemning that entire generation to die in the desert.

The commentaries debate the spies’ motives, with some suggesting that the meraglim were actually driven by religious conviction. According to the Sfas Emes, the meraglim were not defying God, rather they believed they were defending Him.

The meraglim were convinced that Torah could only be lived in the rarefied, otherworldly atmosphere of the desert—free from the political and material distractions that statehood would inevitably bring. They were not denying God’s plan—they were trying to improve on it. They were, in effect, trying to out-God Him.

Rabbi Tzadok HaKohen of Lublin takes it one step further. In his Pri Tzaddik commentary, he explains that the meraglim actually saw the future—they foresaw a decline in religious observance, followed by exile, suffering, and destruction—and they wanted to delay it.

In a sense, they were trying to protect the Jewish people from pain by rejecting history itself. But in doing so, they substituted their own vision for God’s will. It wasn’t prophecy—it was hubris dressed up as holiness.

Which brings us back to Iran. Just like the meraglim, Iran’s leaders genuinely believe they are carrying out a divine mandate: to preserve religious purity, to confront falsehood, and to build an Islamic world order. But in doing so, they defy not only international norms, but Divine moral norms as well.

For spirituality and faith to thrive, there must be space for human freedom—the freedom to err, to choose, to engage. True divine service requires grappling with the world, not fleeing from it.  Iran’s extremism doesn’t align with God—it usurps Him. And just like the meraglim, that hubris is destined to fail. Because God’s plan for the world includes the messiness of engaging with those who don’t meet your standards, and with the divine image that resides in every human being.

In the mid-1990s, while studying at UCL in London, I wrote my Jewish history dissertation on the Dead Sea sectarians—Jewish religious absolutists who withdrew to Qumran to escape what they saw as the contaminating halachic flexibility of the Pharisees in Jerusalem. They viewed compromise as heresy and nuance as betrayal. Their community thrived briefly, but ultimately vanished without a trace—destroyed by its own inability to adapt, doomed by the very purity it so zealously protected.

The same fate now threatens the Islamic leadership of Iran. Blinded by ideological certainty, impervious to reality, they cling to a vision that can only end in ruin. Let us pray they don’t take their entire country down with them.