PHILADELPHIA – June 1, 2026 – The Summer 2026 Middle East Quarterly (MEQ) features three new research studies on Iran examining the motives behind its drive to destroy Israel, the antisemitic theology that fuels it, and the digital tools it now turns on its own citizens.
Yossi Mansharof dissects the religious and ideological rationale behind Tehran’s ambition to destroy the Jewish state in “Behind Iran’s Ambition to Destroy Israel” (click here). He traces five related motives: an antisemitism rooted in Khomeini’s writings, an anti-imperialism that casts Israel as a forward outpost of the United States, a bid for regional leadership built on the Palestinian cause, a religious-legal claim that Israel’s territory is an inviolable Islamic endowment, and a drive for historical revenge. Mansharof sees little prospect of change under the regime’s new leadership, arguing that “the various motives underlying Iran’s actions toward Israel—antisemitic, anti-American, geopolitical, religious, and historical—create a complex web in which each layer reinforces the others.”
Ofira Seliktar and Farhad Rezaei trace the religious roots of that hostility in “Iran’s Islamist Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism” (click here). They locate its core in what they call “neo-Shiism, or Khomeinism,” a “radical revision of traditional Shiism.” In their account, Khomeini rewrote Shiite eschatology so that the hidden imam returns only after Jerusalem and the Temple Mount are back in Muslim hands, making the destruction of Israel a precondition for redemption. They note that Iran has become the world’s largest state producer of antisemitic material, circulating it in some 36 languages. The article is part one of two; part two appears in the next issue.
Paola Maria Raunio and John Hatzadony show how the regime turned control of the internet into an instrument of political control in “From Coercion to Code: Iran’s Digital Security Transformation” (click here). They track the shift from the brute force of the 2009 Green Movement, when the government won the streets but lost the information war, to a layered system of digital repression built on a national internet, facial recognition, and selective access. During the 2026 war with the United States and Israel, the authors write, connectivity for ordinary Iranians fell to roughly 1 percent of normal levels while senior officials kept the access they needed to speak to the outside world.
The issue also recovers a buried chapter of history. In “From Bosnia to Palestine” (click here), Vuk Damnjanović documents how Bosnian and Albanian Muslims who served in the Waffen SS came to fight against the creation of Israel. Thousands joined the 13th SS Handschar Division and related units raised with the personal backing of the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini. Some did not stop fighting when the war in Europe ended. “These Muslim SS formations are still a strangely underexplored chapter of the war,” Damnjanović writes. “And they come with one more striking postscript: After Nazi Germany collapsed in Europe, a number of these ex-Handschar men did not hang up their uniforms. Thanks to existing contacts in Syrian and Palestinian circles, some of them resurfaced in the Middle East and picked up rifles again,” joining Arab armies that fought to prevent the founding of the State of Israel in 1948.
The Summer 2026 issue also reviews seven new books (click here). Among these, Daniel Pipes reviews Syria, Revolt and War in the Digital Age, edited by Cécile Boëx and Agnès Devictor. Dexter Van Zile reviews Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis, by Danny Burmawi. Other reviews include freed hostage Eli Sharabi’s account of his captivity in Gaza, Hostage, reviewed by A. J. Caschetta; Charles Glass’s Syria: Civil War to Holy War?, reviewed by Jonathan Spyer; and a review by Efraim Karsh of Mustafa Aksakal’s history of the Ottoman collapse, The War That Made the Middle East.
The Summer 2026 issue is available now at https://www.meforum.org/meq.
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