Still, for politicians in Israel there are few downsides to demonizing Iran, whose leaders for 31 years have described the Jewish state as a “cancerous tumor” which will one day “vanish from the face of time” – or in one rendering of those remarks, be “wiped from the map.”
“For Israelis, [being] anti-Iran is a consensus. You don’t have to be a neoconservative to wish for the destruction of Iran,” says Haggai Ram, of the Ben Gurion University of the Negev, in an interview in Tel Aviv.
‘Iranophobia’In his recent book “Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession,” Dr. Ram wrote that “there’s something utterly irrational and exceedingly disproportionate in Israeli understandings of the Iranian threat –even if that threat is, in certain respects, very real.”
Ram states that “acute Iranophobia” has led most Israelis to “argue that, should Iran be allowed access to weapons of mass destruction, the ‘nuclear ayatollahs’ will quickly turn them against Israel so as to achieve their apocalyptic ambitions.”
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