As its joint attack with the United States on Iran continues, Israel sees its task as the culmination of a longstanding policy on: ushering in regime change from within.<\/p>\n
Taking to the airwaves in the wake of the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Iranian people directly, calling on them in Farsi to \u201ccome to the streets, come out in your millions, to finish the job, to overthrow the regime of fear that has made your lives bitter\u201d.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n \u201cYour suffering and sacrifices will not be in vain. The help you wished for \u2013 that help has now arrived,\u201d he said of the US-Israeli air strikes, which have already killed more than 555 people in Iran, including 180 at a girls\u2019 school in the country\u2019s south.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Israeli authorities don\u2019t spell it out, but it is clear that what they want to see is a regime change in Iran,\u201d said Ahron Bregman, a senior teaching fellow at the Department for War Studies at King\u2019s College London, who had returned to Israel to research a book before the latest round of strikes took place.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m stuck in Tel Aviv and spend many hours with Israelis in a local shelter. I\u2019m taken aback by the strong support among these \u2013 mainly liberal \u2013 Israelis of the war,\u201d he said. \u201cThey, like their leaders, believe that if you only topple the Iranian regime, the Middle East will totally transform for the better, which is, of course, nonsense.\u201d<\/p>\n But there is a question of how invested Netanyahu and his allies are in ensuring that regime change in Iran is smooth.<\/p>\n Israeli officials know that Iran, including its opposition, has a diverse array of views and backgrounds.<\/p>\n Many Iranians who have taken to the streets, including in the large protests that took place in January, are united only in their hostility to the government, with various factions calling for everything from the restoration of the monarchy to a full democracy. Others, however, are rallying on the government\u2019s side after the attacks on their country and Khamenei\u2019s killing.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there\u2019s a public opacity to Israel\u2019s war aims,\u201d former Israeli government adviser Daniel Levy told Al Jazeera. \u201cMy sense is that Israel has no real interest in smooth regime change. I think most [Israeli leaders] regard that as a kind of fairytale, though that\u2019s not something Netanyahu and allies might be ready to admit publicly.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIsrael\u2019s more interested in regime and state collapse,\u201d Levy noted. \u201cThey want Iran to implode, and if the spillover from that takes in Iraq, the Gulf and much of the region, so much the better.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019ll have removed a significant regional counter to their freedom to act, leaving Israel and its allies free to remake the regions and, critically, to continue both killing Palestinians, and possibly even move against Turkiye, which is the next logical step,\u201d he said, reflecting a recent rise in anti-Turkiye rhetoric in Israel, with politicians even characterising the country as the \u201cnew Iran\u201d.<\/p>\n However, while public appetite for the war may be high, there is an understanding that the duration of that war might not be of Israel\u2019s choosing.<\/p>\n The bulk of Israel\u2019s military spending is underwritten by the US, where the attack on Iran is proving less than popular. Equally, in a world where many states had belatedly grown critical of Israel\u2019s genocidal actions towards Palestinians \u2013 in particular in Gaza \u2013 US diplomatic heft has been vital in protecting its ally from criticism, and even wider sanctions.<\/p>\n How long the US\u2019s allies in the Gulf are ready to withstand Iranian assaults on their territory in response to a war they had repeatedly cautioned against is far from clear. Equally, how long it might be before regional diplomatic pressure on US President Donald Trump begins to have an impact is also hard to predict, Levy warned.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s fitting that this is the holiday of Purim, which also marks the survival of the Jewish people over a threat from Persia 2,500 years ago, and we still celebrate it today. People understand that,\u201d Barak said.<\/p>\n \u201cIsrael going to war in tandem with our greatest ally and the world\u2019s greatest power is unprecedented,\u201d Barak continued. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to make any predictions, but Trump has his own priorities and his own endgame, which might not be the same as ours. It could be that Trump pulls out and leaves Israel holding the bag. What happens then, I don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n Iranian missiles may be hitting Israel, but analysts there say the general sentiment among the public is supportive of active hostilities against Iran, with the backing of the US.<\/p>\n It stems from years \u2013 if not decades \u2013 of messaging that Iran and its allies are the main threats to Israel.<\/p>\n From Netanyahu\u2019s repeated warnings that Iran is on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons, to the predictions from politicians of all stripes that Israel\u2019s destruction at the hands of Iran is imminent, the outbreak of a conflict that many Israelis see as the final showdown with their enemy has almost been welcomed.<\/p>\n Politicians from the right to the centre-left have backed the US and Israeli decision to attack Iran.<\/p>\n Yair Golan, the leader of the centre-left Democrats, who, in May last year, outraged many Israelis by saying that the endless killing of Palestinians risked reducing Israel to a \u201cpariah state\u201d, welcomed the war, saying the Israeli military had his \u201cfull backing\u201d in \u201cremoving the Iranian threat\u201d.<\/p>\n Other opposition politicians, such as the centrist Yair Lapid and the right-wing Naftali Bennett, have all fallen into line behind Netanyahu in his confrontation with Iran.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople here know Iran is a threat. They know it because Iran keeps telling us,\u201d said Mitchell Barak, a political pollster who was an aide to Netanyahu in the early 1990s. \u201cThey [Iran] have the weapons, the will, and we know they\u2019re ready to attack. Everyone is happy that the war is under way, and this time, it will be finished.<\/p>\n \u201cIt gives Israelis a great sense of pride that it is a fully joint operation with the United States,\u201d Barak, who spoke from a shelter in West Jerusalem, said. \u201cThe aim is regime change and protecting Israelis. They understand that. Israelis are hunkering down and resolved to see this through.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As its joint attack with the United States on Iran continues, Israel sees its task as the culmination of a longstanding policy on: ushering in regime change from within. Taking to the airwaves in the wake of the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13709,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-us-canada-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/13709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.aljazeera.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/AFP__20260302__99KK27N__v1__HighRes__IranIsraelUsConflict-1772453369.jpg?w=770&resize=770%2C513&quality=80\")
Questions remain<\/h2>\n
Public backing<\/h2>\n
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