Croatian historian Dario Spelic spoke in an interview about the history of Iran’s nuclear program and the current conflict between this country and Israel.
“It became clear that this conflict would happen at the moment when the Israeli security, military, and also political establishment concluded that the Iranian nuclear program had become so large that it represents an existential threat to Israel,” he said.
The greatest enemy of Israel
“Iran’s nuclear program is long-standing and dates back to the time of Shah Reza Pahlavi. That was a civilian nuclear program and more or less no one paid attention to it, the shah was friendly to the United States (U.S.),” he added. The key point, according to him, in the genesis of the conflict he found in the last century.
“The key thing begins in 1982, when the new leader Ruhollah Khomeini wanted to revitalize the nuclear program. The reasoning was related to Iraq’s attack on Iran. They reasoned: ‘If we had had an atomic bomb, they would never have attacked us,'” he explained.
“That nevertheless remained under the radar until the beginning of the 2000s, when that program became so large that Israel saw it as a threat,” he added.
He pointed out that Iran over the years created a very strong regional network of allies. “The very fact that there is the so-called Shia Crescent, or what was called the Axis of Resistance, best shows how resilient and strong the Iranian regime is,” he emphasized.
“Let’s not forget that one of the first guests of the new Iranian regime after 1979 was Yasser Arafat, who in the empty Israeli embassy raised the Palestinian flag. So, the network that Iran developed from ’82 up to Hamas’s attack in 2023 was fascinating. It stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. That made Iran the greatest enemy of Israel,” he stated.
The conflict will continue
He claims that the Iranian bloc of resistance is weakened, but not eliminated. “Today it is different. All of Iran’s allies, like Hamas and Hezbollah, have suffered heavy blows, but that ‘Axis of Resistance’ still is not broken. Syria is no longer in it, but that does not mean it has completely disappeared. The question is what will happen in five to seven years,” he said.
“The Iranian regime has gone through all sorts of things in its history: decades of sanctions, secret wars with Israel and the U.S., so it seems to me that this conflict will continue,” he added, N1 writes.
