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Comment by mlmonkey | Hacker News Reader

I have no idea what tf Iran's leadership is doing.

Israel/Palestine is not their battle anyways; just ignore it and move on! Make peace with Israel, stop supporting Hamas/Hezbollah and just focus on your own problems. What does Iran have to gain from fighting with Israel? It can't be that they hate all Jews, when Iran is one of the few Muslim countries with any Jews left [1].

Just drop it guys, and learn to live in peace. There's a lot more to this world than continuously fighting with each other.

/rant

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Jews

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I think a lot of geopolitics makes more sense if you treat the ethnic divides as "excuses" and instead look at what the parties hope to achieve in terms of power and dominance.

Too many people fall on the confusion between justifications, explanations, and excuses. In particular, it can be hard to find what moves something from one to the other of those terms for a lot of people. It often blurs between perspectives, agreed enemies, agreed allies, and inclusion or omission of extra details.

I think the story is especially clear in Iran, though.

Totally fair. I mainly meant my point as calling out the obfuscations I typically see to confuse people. Even in situations that don't seem like they should be used.

They do have things to gain - credibility with the Arab and Sunni Muslim world for fighting against Israel and perhaps defeating it and excuse to operate their proxies and allies. Not to mention they are true believers, and even if they weren't, it doesn't have to be fully rational from your perspective; just from their own.

As for the Jews in Iran, there used to be 150,000 Jews in Iran before the revolution today there are ~9,000. Furthermore IRGC are very much the ideological inheritors of the type of folks who did the Allahdad (God's Justice) Massacre in Mashhad in 1839.

But Iran are Shia! They don't seek Sunni approval; they've been at each other's throats since the beginning!

All of this seems to so insane to me. This region has lots of wealth (dino juice just coming out of the ground), and they're frittering it all away on buying more and more weapons and destroying each other.

Like the USA, Israel and Russia? All China need do is watch...

They can't gain credibility with the Sunni world; Sunni Arabs are pretty close to their mortal enemies --- not in some dumb religious way, but in a modern geopolitical sense --- and that conflict is far more salient than Israel/Iran.

Iran trying to gain favor with the Sunni Arab world is somewhere in the same ballpark as Russia trying to gain favor with ethnic Ukrainians.

Both they don't want Israel to be too powerful and at the same time, the war is a good way to keep tight control on their population and kill any rebellion. You ensure that western ideas would not go into the head of the population by enjoying peace and seeing how it is going well in free neighbor countries, it give you a common enemy that you can accuse of everything.

The existence of a Jewish state in the region also undermines the theological basis of an Islamic republic.

How?

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