It is always disheartening to see people you admire fall to such an obvious trick, but that happens to all "experts" who deal with the Middle East. Here is a striking example.
In what many "experts" in the West are calling a "surprising speech", an Iranian senior official revealed an unexpected vision of the concept of resistance, emphasizing that the goal is not war, but to continue and persevere.
He emphasized that the Islamic Revolution did not aim for an open war with the Israeli enemy, but rather to build a resistance front that would span generations, where patience and true jihad would become tools for dealing with tyranny.
Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Ali Akbar Ahmadian defined the goal of resistance as “continuing resistance,” because “the war may end, but the resistance will not.”
According to the Iranian news agency ISNA, Ahmadian participated on Monday in the 23rd educational-organizational course of the “Great Jihad” of the Union of Islamic Associations of Independent Students in Iranian Universities in the city of Mashhad, from where he pointed out the need for elites to be properly aware of the current situation.
He added: “Today we see some who claim that there has been a war for 40 years between Iran and Israel, while the conflict was not an open war, but a continuous resistance. The goal of the Islamic Revolution was and still is to build a resistance front against Israel, not to engage in conventional war.”
He noted that the end of Israel, according to the vision of the Islamic Revolution, “does not mean its military destruction, but rather the loss of its legitimacy and political functioning until its automatic collapse, just as happened to the Soviet Union.”
NEWSRAEL EDITOR EXPLAINS:
While many see this statement as something "new" or "surprising" - it is far from that. All he is saying is that they prefer to use Lebanese Shiite under the flag of Hezbollah and Palestinians to die while "whittling down" Israel until Israel falls by itself.
Iran doesn't want to fight Israel. Iran, like is crudely said many times in the Middle East, is willing to "fight Israel to the last Arab".
In any way - there is nothing in what Ahmadian said that is new in this respect.
In fact, if anything, what he said is, more or less: We may have lost this battle, but our fight will go on, even if we have to wait hundreds of years. Iran's Arab proxies can warm themselves by the fire Ahmadian conjures and feel good about the destruction they reaped in their attacking Israel.
Their sacrifice has harmed, they feel, Israel's standing in the world, bringing them further in their aim, according to Ahmadian - for Israel to collapse on its own.