What does Khamenei want for Israel and the region?

What are those goals and ideals?

For those who followed the region's politics in the mid-2010s, this question was often answered with one word: sectarianism. The supposedly eternal enmities between Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam gave an easy but lazy framework for outside analysts and a self-affirming lens for the sectarians with which they thought they could explain every conflict in the region.

As Iran did manage to mobilise tens of thousands of Shiite soldiers, from Afghans and Pakistanis to Iraqis, Syrians and even Nigerians, and to form them into a powerful multinational army that protected the nominally Shiite president of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, there did seem to be something to this analysis. Even Iran's staunch alliance with the Sunni Palestinian militant group Hamas was frayed when the latter supported the Syrian opposition against al-Assad and gave up its Damascus headquarters in the process.

But this framework was never satisfactory, and anyone who looked deeper into the history and ideology of Khomeini and Khamenei could see that their ambitions went much beyond leading a sectarian camp in the Muslim world. As a Grand Ayatollah, Khomeini was, of course, committed to the fundamentals of the Shiite branch of Islam, but his politics was one of internationalist Islamism with ambitions to reconfigure the global order.

Having been a Khomeinist revolutionary all his adult life, Khamenei has long been committed to this vision. It might seem out of place in today's world, but Khomeinist politics were forged in the heated years of the 1960s and 70s when a variety of revolutionary movements offered radical visions, and so Khomeini's strange Islamist version of global revolution was not entirely out of place.

But had Khomeini or Khamenei simply tried to throw everything at this vision, they wouldn't have lasted long as heads of state of a country of tens of millions—one with a strongly patriotic population. Shortly after 1979, it became clear that they had to compromise and take their time if they wanted to survive. This is where their strategic flexibility came in.

Khomeini decided early on that keeping the Islamic Republic in power came before any other religious ruling. Even ordinary rules of Islam could be broken to safeguard the republic. Using the same idea, the regime has no problem lying, killing, and torturing its opponents, even though these all violate the rules of Islam.

The destruction of Israel

One goal that has always been central to this vision is the destruction of Israel. This was also a goal with which a Shiite Iran could prove its revolutionary mettle against its Sunni-majority neighbours. The Islamic Republic had been born at an opportune moment for such a goal: In 1979, shortly after the Arab world's leading country, Egypt, made a historic turn in its orientation by signing the Camp David Accords with Israel and the United States.

When Egypt was subsequently expelled from the Arab League, Iran tried to inherit the mantle of anti-Zionism. Things got muddied during the 1980s when Israel's leading Arab opponent, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, fought an eight-year with Iran in which Israel covertly helped Iran. But in the same decade, another dynamism prepared the road for the coming Iranian-Israeli conflict: Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 just when its southern Shiite population was being organised by IRGC's agents, soon founding Hezbollah, which has long become Israel's main bugbear on its northern borders.

Hezbollah initially wanted to export Iran's system of Wilayah al-Faqih (Guardianship of the Jurist) to Lebanon, but how could a system so closely tied to the Shiite clergy work in a multi-confessional country much of whose population was not only non-Shia but also non-Muslim?

Instead, it defined its identity around anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel, something that came to also mark most of its allies in the IRGC-led Axis of Resistance. Yes, many of these forces were Shiite and during the sectarianisation of the 2010s, they acted in gruesomely anti-Sunni ways in places such as Iraq and Syria. But their broader agenda remained centred around opposition to Israel. Put differently, all that has now remained of the Khomeinist global revolution is a mix of occasional opportunist sectarianism and persistent anti-Zionism.

Khamenei thus bides his time as he builds up the forces of the Axis. He knows that, at 85, he can't expect to see the supposedly final victory over Israel in his lifetime. He has predicted that Israel will be destroyed by 2040. Unless he is to live 110 years, Khamenei won't be alive then, so this is a comfortable prediction that he knows he won't live to see occur or not occur. Of course, a Khomeinist revolution wouldn't be complete just by destroying Israel. Ideals of this vision have long included the upturning of the political order in other countries of the region as well, hence Iran's support for militias in many countries.

Such a vision and its long-term nature define Khamenei's dual ambitions. He wishes to stay in power and keep his regime intact for as long as he is alive and to doggedly pursue its goals of destroying Israel and completing the Khomeinist revolution—and make sure it's pursued even after. Thus, he attacks Israel to ensure the mantle of wanting to destroy it is still in his hands, but he also makes sure he can avoid getting into a direct confrontation with it so as not to destroy his regime prematurely.