There are clear signs that the Islamic regime is collapsing, according to Dr. Einat Wilf, a leading Israeli strategist, commentator and founder of Israel’s Oz Party.
“The signs are clearly there,” Wilf told the ILTV Podcast. She said, “the economy is in a collapsing situation. There's no navy, there's no air force, even their ability to launch rockets in Israel and other Gulf states is diminished. So in that respect, it's clearly towards the end of the Islamic Republic.”
Wilf said the downfall of the regime started long before October 7, if one looks at it from a historical perspective. The countries that chose to be the main sponsors of what Wilf calls “Palestinianism,” an ideology that prioritizes the destruction of the Jewish state, all ended up in the dustbin of history. This includes the Nazis, the pan-Arabists and the Soviets.
She said, “The Islamic Republic is going to be no exception.”
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For Wilf, the bigger question is timing. She said she cannot discount the “terrible possibility” that the United States will be pressured to return to negotiations with the Iranian regime, giving it time to breathe and rebuild and thereby delaying its demise.
“Making it sooner rather than later should be the priority,” Wilf said.
She added that there is a reason the United Arab Emirates has been attacked more than Israel. The UAE represents the ideological mirror of the Islamic Republic. It represents what Islam could look like when it seeks to be future-looking and moderate, inclusive and focused more on building for its own people than destroying what other people, especially the Jews, have built.
“It’s no coincidence that these are the people that are being attacked,” Wilf said.
Moreover, she said that when the Islamic regime falls, so too will its proxies, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. These groups receive not only ideological support, but also money, military support, training and legitimacy. Without that backing, they will become isolated and eventually disappear.
She said that process may already be starting in Lebanon, where Hezbollah was forced by the Islamic Republic to attack Israel, revealing that it is not truly fighting for Lebanon’s interests.
According to Wilf, Lebanon now appears ready to assert its sovereignty after decades of suffering. She called on Israel to be willing to enter direct negotiations with the country.
“We hear some voices from Lebanon saying that direct negotiations for full normalization should pass in parliament by all the factions, because we can't afford to have one more Lebanese leader signing an agreement and then being assassinated,” Wilf noted. “The way of asserting Lebanese sovereignty is for the parliament of Lebanon to pass a unanimous, barring Hezbollah, kind of agreement or resolution by all the factions in parliament to normalize with Israel. This is how you isolate the extreme elements.”
In the meantime, however, there will likely be more rockets and more war.
The Islamic Republic has shown in the last two weeks what it does when it becomes desperate. It fires in every direction, endangering the Gulf states and not just Israel. This desperation, Wilf contended, is creating even greater resolve for the United States and Israel.
“This has to end with the fall of the Islamic Republic, because anything that lets them live under the idea that they're desperate, they'll take desperate moves,” Wilf said. She added that “this cannot be afforded or allowed. Every day that passes that they become more desperate is another day that shows that they have to go.”
When the regime does fall, Wilf said she believes Iran could move toward some type of constitutional monarchy, perhaps led by the son of the former shah, Reza Pahlavi, in a symbolic role.
“Iran is a much more coherent historical, national kind of civilizational entity,” Wilf said. “It has a clear sense of collective self and history. Iran is as close as you come in textbooks to having the elements for successful democratic transition: a highly educated population, a strained but substantial middle class, no youth bulge.”
She said that “even though those are very, very limited candidates, they have the experience of parliaments, of democracy, they actually have everything that will move to successful secular, pro-Western democracy.”
Wilf argued that Iran is the one place in the Middle East that could succeed in a democratic transition and that for the first time the United States is not betraying the Iranian people in helping bring it about.
“President [Barack] Obama said that his greatest foreign policy mistake was that after inspiring the people of Iran to go to the streets with his speech in Cairo, he betrayed them,” Wilf said. “Finally, America is not betraying the people of Iran, which means that it will have to go all the way in making sure that the Islamic Republic doesn't have coercive abilities. And once that's clear, the transition can actually be very quick.”
And what about the people of Israel?
Wilf believes Israelis are willing to sacrifice, to “run back and forth like zombies to the shelter,” if they believe this is not just another round of fighting but the final one, the one that brings down the Islamic Republic.
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