In 1987, with Khomeini still calling for Israel’s destruction, Israel’s defense minister called Iran its best friend. Today every candidate for prime minister wants the Islamic Republic gone. Israel’s leaders have changed their minds about Iran’s rulers, but seldom disagreed.
That is the thread through 47 years of Israeli policy toward the Islamic Republic, and it runs straight into next Tuesday’s election. Whoever wins, the goal will be the same. What changes is how hard, how openly and with whom Israel pursues it.
The Shah’s friend
Before 1979, Iran was Israel’s most important partner in the region. Under David Ben-Gurion’s “periphery doctrine,” Israel courted non-Arab neighbors to outflank hostile Arab states, and the Shah’s Iran was the prize.
Tehran recognized Israel de facto in 1950, sold it oil through a jointly owned pipeline, and let its intelligence services work with Israel’s Mossad. Israeli engineers, farmers and arms dealers worked across Iran. The relationship was discreet, profitable and close.
The revolution ended it overnight. Islamic Republic's founder Rouhollah Khomeini cut ties, and Israel’s mission in Tehran was handed to the Palestine Liberation Organization.
The enemy of my enemy
Israel’s first leaders after 1979 did not try to bring the new order down. They sold it weapons.
When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, Menachem Begin’s government shipped arms to Tehran, and Israeli sales ran to an estimated $500 million between 1981 and 1983, according to Tel Aviv University’s Jaffe Institute. Saddam Hussein was the threat, and Iran was the counterweight. In 1985 and 1986, under Shimon Peres, Israel was the go-between in the Iran-Contra affair, passing American missiles to Tehran.
Yitzhak Rabin, then defense minister, explained the logic in October 1987. “Iran is Israel’s best friend and we do not intend to change our position in relation to Tehran, because Khomeini’s regime will not last forever,” he said. The expectation that the Islamic Republic would fall was already there. Israel simply did not think at the time that it was its job to hasten it.
The threat is named
Rabin was also the one who turned. Back as prime minister in 1992, he received the first intelligence reports on an Iranian nuclear program and concluded, aides recalled, that only a nuclear Iran could pose an existential threat Israel could not answer. Part of his case for peace with the Palestinians and Jordan was to clear the near front before facing the far one.
Ariel Sharon took the same view further. In November 2002, as the United States prepared to invade Iraq, he told The Times of London that Iran should be put under pressure “the day after” Baghdad fell, calling it a center of world terror.
As prime minister he carried aerial photographs of Iranian sites to George W. Bush and said Israel “cannot accept” a nuclear Iran. Ehud Olmert, his successor, kept the military option on the table while, according to later reporting, the first cyberattacks on Iran’s centrifuges were set in motion with Washington.
None of them spoke of regime change. Their target was the bomb.
The man who talked to Iranians
Benjamin Netanyahu made Iran his signature cause. Across 15 years in office before 2021, he drew a cartoon bomb at the United Nations, addressed the US Congress against the 2015 nuclear deal, and displayed an archive of Iranian nuclear documents his agents had smuggled out of Tehran.
He also began speaking past the government to the people. He recorded messages to Iranians, offering water technology during the drought and insisting that Israel’s quarrel was “not with the Iranian people.”
The message was new: the problem is not Iran, it is the people who rule it.
The head of the octopus
Naftali Bennett, prime minister in 2021 and 2022, turned that view into a doctrine. Israel, he argued, had spent decades fighting the arms of the octopus, Hezbollah and Hamas, while leaving the head untouched.
He said he launched about 30 operations against the Islamic Republic with the Mossad and other agencies, not all of them military, and predicted it would collapse like the Soviet Union.
Yair Lapid, who succeeded him for six months, spent his term lobbying against a revived nuclear deal.
Saying it out loud
Since returning to power at the end of 2022, Netanyahu has moved from hoping to aiming. In June 2025, as Israeli jets struck Iran in the 12-day war, he told Iranians that “as we achieve our objective, we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom.”
The war that began on February 28 this year, fought with the United States, killed former Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Last week Netanyahu went further than any Israeli leader before him: “This regime must fall and I will topple it.”
What the candidates say
Netanyahu, leading Likud, has made bringing down the Islamic Republic his campaign’s primary objective and says he has told the security services to work toward it. He has also said he opposes a preemptive strike before the vote.
Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief whose Yashar party is Likud’s main rival, says the Islamic Republic’s fall is necessary but cannot be achieved by force. “This must come from within the Iranian people,” he said, and he would strike again only if Tehran raced for a bomb.
Bennett and Lapid, running together on the Together list, want to hit harder, not softer. Bennett says attacks by Tehran’s allies should be answered on Iranian soil. Lapid has called for striking Iran’s energy infrastructure, including the Kharg Island oil terminal.
Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beiteinu has long called for overthrowing the Islamic Republic and says past efforts fell short. Itamar Ben-Gvir of the far-right Jewish Power backs military operations until Israel’s goals are met. Mansour Abbas, whose Ra’am party draws Arab Israeli voters, has set out no position on Iran.
From Rabin’s prediction that Khomeini’s rule would not last to Netanyahu’s promise to end it himself, the conclusion has barely moved. What Israelis will choose on Tuesday is not whether to want the Islamic Republic gone, but how loudly to say it and how much to risk to get there.
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