If anything, the latest preemptive strikes on Iran by Israel indicate that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going beyond the country’s “Begin Doctrine”. He wants a change in Iran’s 46-year-old Islamic regime, following the so-called revolution in 1979.
The ‘Begin Doctrine’ has been Israel’s standard policy of pre-emptively striking nuclear facilities and weapons of mass destruction in any country that Tel Aviv considers a threat to its very survival.
Named after Israel’s former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, the doctrine was first applied in 1981 during “Operation Opera” to destroy Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad in a targeted attack.
It was applied again in 2007 to covertly destroy Syria’s Al-Kibar reactor in an operation that neither Israel publicly acknowledged until 2018 nor Syria revealed, as then-President Bashar al-Assad denied the existence of the site to avoid domestic and international pressure.
Thus, the strikes on June 13 against Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructures, known as the “Operation Rising Lion,” are the third time that Israel seems to have invoked the Begin doctrine.
But alongside this, Netanyahu has also appealed to the people of Iran in a video, encouraging them to “stand up” against “an evil and oppressive regime.”
He said, “Israel’s fight is not against the Iranian people. Our fight is against the murderous Islamic regime that oppresses and impoverishes you …. The time has come for the Iranian people to unite around its flag and its historic legacy, by standing up for your freedom from the evil and oppressive regime “, adding, “This is your opportunity to stand up and let your voices be heard.”
In fact, over the last year, Netanyahu has appealed to the Iranian people on four different occasions to change their regime. Soon after the Assad regime fell in Syria, the Israeli Prime Minister said in a video message (December 12, 2024) aimed at the Iranian people how “the Iranian axis” was crumbling due to a “chain reaction” set off by Israel, and expressed his hope that Iran can “be free” and make peace globally. He pointed out that Iranian leaders “spent over 30 billion dollars supporting [Bashar] Assad in Syria” before his regime “collapsed into dust.”
He then added, “Your oppressors spent billions supporting Hamas in Gaza. Today, their regime lies in ruins. Your oppressors spent over 20 billion dollars supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon. In a matter of weeks, most of Hezbollah’s leaders, its rockets, and thousands of its terrorists went up in smoke.”
For Netanyahu, “reality in the Middle East today is due to a chain reaction — a chain reaction to the pounding of Hamas, the decimation of Hezbollah, the targeting of [Hezbollah chief Hassan] Nasrallah, the blows we delivered to the Iran regime’s axis of terror”.
He said that while Iran’s leaders “seek to conquer other nations, to impose fundamentalist tyranny on the Middle East,” Israel is seeking only to “defend our state. But in so doing, we’re defending civilization against barbarism.”
He then addressed Iranian citizens, saying how he believes that “just as we want peace with you, you want peace with us. But you suffer under the rule of a regime that subjugates you and threatens us. You know what this regime is truly terrified of? It’s terrified of you, the people of Iran. And one day, I know that, one day this will change. One day Iran will be free.”
Netanyahu cited the chant “Women, Life, Freedom,” which became the rallying cry of mass anti-government protests in Iran in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s so-called morality police after she was detained for not fully covering her hair.
“That is the future of Iran,” he added. “That is the future of peace. And I have no doubt that we will realize that future together – a lot sooner than people think. I know and I believe we will transform the Middle East into a beacon of prosperity, progress, and peace.”
In a similar video message issued in November 2024, Netanyahu had said that the money the Iranian government spent on attacking Israel in October “could have added billions to your transportation budget. It could have added billions to your education budget. But instead, [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei exposed the regime’s brutality and turned the world against your country. He robbed you of money that should have been yours.”
And in late September, just days after an Israeli airstrike in Beirut assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime head of Iranian proxy Hezbollah, Netanyahu issued a video saying that Iran’s “puppets” were being eliminated, and that there was “nowhere in the Middle East Israel cannot reach. There is nowhere we will not go to protect our people.” He called on Iranians not to “let a small group of fanatic theocrats crush your hopes and your dreams.”
Will the Iranians respond to Netanyahu’s call?
It is a very difficult question to answer, given the recent history of failed attempts at regime change in Tehran.
But it cannot be denied that the Islamic regime under the supreme leadership of Ali Khamenei, who is 85 years old and in poor health, is beset with many serious problems.
According to reports, there is high inflation, with the prices of some essential household commodities, such as rice, rising by nearly 100 percent. There has been a steep fall in the value of Iran’s currency.
In recent months, Iranian state media have reported on more than 200 demonstrations across the country, involving retirees, workers, healthcare professionals, students, and merchants, largely focusing on economic hardships, including low wages and months of unpaid salaries. All this has led to the ruling regime attempting to impose draconian social rules and censorship laws.
There are serious allegations that the fundamentalist regime continues to harass and prosecute women in the country, even two years after crushing the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement.
Going by a report published by the Iran Human Rights NGO in January, in 2024, the Islamic Republic recorded its highest annual number of women executed in 17 years, with 31 women hanged in Iranian prisons. Nine of the women identified were child-brides, three of whom were also child offenders, meaning they were under 18 at the time of their alleged offence.
According to Dr. Fariba Parsa, an Iranian scholar specializing in Political Islam, democracy, and human rights, Iran today has many internal fault lines.
A 2022 survey by the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran GAMAAN found that nearly 90% of Iranians do not support the Islamic Republic as a system of governance.
Additionally, 73% of respondents favor the separation of religion from politics, directly opposing the regime’s theocratic foundations. Calls for secular democracy and respect for human rights transcend ideological boundaries. Opposition comes from a wide range of constituencies—women’s rights activists, students, laborers, ethnic minorities, monarchists, secular republicans, and even traditional religious groups.
Also noteworthy is the fact that electoral participation, howsoever restricted, has also plummeted. The 2021 Presidential election saw official turnout fall to 48%—its lowest since 1979—with many voters spoiling their ballots in protest.
According to Dr. Parsa, independent research suggests that the actual turnout may have been closer to 20%.
“Years of tightly controlled elections, in which only regime-approved candidates can run, have rendered voting meaningless for most citizens. Each election cycle now reinforces cynicism rather than hope. What remains is a regime with no credible democratic mandate and a leadership structure that commands neither trust nor respect”, she says.
Against this background, the latest round of attacks, on the close heels of the weakening/collapse of Iran’s proxies such as the Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon that was hitherto the largest non-state army on Earth, and the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria could not have come at a worse time for the Iranian regime.
Incidentally, there have been three principal identified Iranian groups that have been known in the recent three decades to have attempted a change in the Mullah-led regime in Tehran.
One is the People’s Mujahideen, also known as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) or People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), which is primarily based in exile. It began in the 1960s as an Islamist-Marxist student militia, which played a decisive role in helping to topple the Shah during the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-American, MEK fighters had killed scores of the Shah’s police in often suicidal street battles during the 1970s. The group targeted US-owned hotels, airlines, and oil companies, and was responsible for the deaths of six Americans in Iran.
“Death to America by blood and bonfire on the lips of every Muslim is the cry of the Iranian people,” went one of its most famous songs. “May America be annihilated.”
Such attacks helped pave the way for the return of the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but he quickly identified the MEK as a serious threat to his plan to turn Iran into an Islamic republic under the control of the clergy.
The well-armed middle-class guerrillas, although popular among religious students and intellectuals, proved to be no match for Khomeini’s organisation and ruthlessness.
Khomeini used the security services, the courts, and the media to choke off the MEK’s political support and then crush it entirely. After it fought back, killing more than 70 senior leaders of the Islamic Republic – including the president and Iran’s chief justice – in audacious bomb attacks, Khomeini ordered a violent crackdown on MEK members and sympathisers. The survivors fled the country.
For almost two decades, under their embittered leader Massoud Rajavi, the MEK staged attacks against civilian and military targets across the border in Iran and helped Saddam suppress his own domestic enemies. But after siding with Saddam, who indiscriminately bombed Iranian cities and routinely used chemical weapons in a war that cost a million lives, the MEK lost nearly all the support it had retained inside Iran.
After the US invasion of Iraq, the MEK launched a lavish lobbying campaign to reverse its designation as a terrorist organisation, despite reports implicating the group in assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists in 2012.
In 2009, the UK delisted the MEK as a terror group. The Obama administration removed the group from the US terror list in 2012, and later helped negotiate its relocation to Albania.
However, in Albania, the MEK is struggling to hold on to its own members, who have begun to defect. No strategic analyst thinks that the MEK has the capacity or support within Iran to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
The second has been the Green Movement that emerged during the contested 2009 presidential elections that ended with hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent reelection. The movement, characterized by peaceful demonstrations and a focus on democratic reforms, aimed to challenge the Iranian regime and advocate for greater freedoms and human rights.
The Green Movement progressed apace with mass demonstrations and civil disobedience until February 14, 2010, when its attempt to stage a rally in support of the emerging Arab revolutions was brutally suppressed.
Its leaders were systematically arrested, subjected to kangaroo courts, and jailed. But Mir Hossein Mousavi, who became universally recognised as the symbolic leader of the movement, valiantly stood his ground, and in a series of public statements that culminated in the Manshur-e Jonbesh-e Sabz [the Charter of the Green Movement] joined the Iranian people in writing a new chapter in their long and tumultuous struggle for democracy.
But he was put under House arrest, and the movement faded away over the years, with some of its supporters saying they had faith in the institutional foundations of the Islamic Republic and only wanted democratic reforms.
They also made it clear that they were not advocating the Western style of democracy and would never tolerate Western interference in Iran’s domestic politics.
Thirdly, there are monarchists who fled the country during the 1979 revolution. One of them happens to be the former Shah of Iran’s son, Reza Pahlavi, who currently resides in the United States and could theoretically return to Iran to reclaim his father’s throne.
In fact, when Donald Trump won the Presidency for the first time in 2016, Shah had asked him to engage with secular and democratic forces in Iran.
Soon after Trump won the election for a second time last year, Pahlavi gave an interview to Newsweek magazine, sketching out a vision of a democratic Iran that would prosper from ties with the West, be at peace with Israel, and be in harmony with its neighbors.
“My only goal in life is that the Iranians can finally go to the election polls and vote their conscience and decide their fate,” he said while talking of a “constitutional monarchy”.
According to him, the current regime in Tehran is loathed by at least 80% of the population, who not only would prefer Western-style freedoms but also look to countries like the United Arab Emirates and see the prosperity that has eluded them.
He also believes that once the people rebel, under the right circumstances they might be joined by key parts of the regime apparatus, including not only the military but also, critically, some parts of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps – a sort of all-powerful Praetorian guard with a strong presence in the economy which he characterized as corrupt.
They would need to believe they would not be hounded by the new regime and might even play a role in the reconstruction.
Pahlavi said even many Muslim clergy dislike the regime and are “feeling threatened or weakened, as a result of this regime that in the name of Islam has done so much harm.” Islam, he said, “has become not people’s priority.”
However, all said and done, Pahlavi, like the MRK and Green Movement, does not seem to have much support within Iran strong enough to topple the regime.
And this being the case, can Israel lead either a covert or overt operation taking out key figures within the regime, including the “Supreme” Leader Ayatollah Khamenei?
But for that to happen, Israel should be in a position to win the war against Iran decisively without any compromise, something one cannot be sure of in the absence of American support and approval. Besides, Iran’s military is still potent enough to push back Israel, as has been seen through its missile counter-attacks on Israeli cities on June 14 that penetrated its formidable Iron Domes.
Secondly, there is also a possibility of the attacks uniting all the Iranians against Israel. After all, even Pahlavi in the aforesaid interview has argued against any military moves or “presenting Iran’s leadership with an ultimatum to stop nuclear enrichment and hand over enriched materials, halt missile development, and withdraw support for proxy militias – or else face blockades of its ports and destruction of oil installations and nuclear sites, for starters”. That could boomerang.
The moral of the story, thus, is that though the Khamenei regime in Tehran looks more vulnerable than ever before, its immediate collapse is not a foregone conclusion.
- Author and veteran journalist Prakash Nanda is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the EurAsian Times and has been commenting on politics, foreign policy, and strategic affairs for nearly three decades. He is a former National Fellow of the Indian Council for Historical Research and a recipient of the Seoul Peace Prize Scholarship.
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