For Israel, the killing of Iran’s former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was a very welcome development.
In the nearly 40 years he was in power, Khamanei was responsible, through proxies such as Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, for the deaths of thousands of Israelis and Jews worldwide.
He was the architect of a strategy designed to encircle Israel with armed proxies that, he believed, would one day strangle it. He advanced Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He preached Israel’s destruction. He denied the Holocaust.
Or, as IDF Spokesman Brig.-Gen. Effie Defrin put it on Sunday, “We killed the arch-terrorist and the father of the program to destroy Israel.” Khamenei, Defrin said, “led the Iranian terror regime for decades and advanced terrorist operations against the State of Israel and the entire Western world.”
Defrin described Khamanei as the head of the “Iranian octopus,” spreading its terrorist tentacles throughout the Middle East, with hands stained by the blood of those massacred on October 7.
Western media remembers Khamenei's past
The New York Times headlined its obituary: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Hard-Line Cleric Who Made Iran a Regional Power, Dies at 86.
The Wall Street Journal’s headline, under a photograph of an avuncular-looking supreme leader, read: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei Dies. The subhead described him as the “undisputed head of post-revolutionary Iran” who “nurtured the country’s global ambitions but struggled at home with a withering economy.”
The Journal piece made no mention of his vow to cleanse the world of what he called the “Zionist cancer,” nor of his Holocaust denial.
Despite Khamanei’s backing of terrorist action from Lebanon to Argentina, the word “terrorist” appeared only once in the over 4,000-word obituary and in a very curious manner.
“Before Israel’s military campaign to destroy its nuclear facilities and kill senior military leaders and scientists, the Islamic Republic under him had provided relative safety for its citizens from the wars and terrorist attacks that ravaged neighboring countries,” the obit read.
That’s it, no other reference to terrorism in an obituary about the world’s No. 1 sponsor of terror.
The New York Times obituary did mention his Holocaust denial and threats against Israel, but it too read like an even-handed account of an influential global leader. Moral judgment was flattened into description.
That may be the convention of obituary writing. To Israeli ears, however, it was jarring.
Or, as Eli David, an Israeli social media personality, wrote on X in response, parodying the tone of the NYT piece, “Führer Adolf Hitler, Hard-Line National Socialist Who Made Germany a Regional Power, Dies at 56.”
The divergence between how Israelis viewed Khamenei and how much of the world framed him did not end with the obituaries. It carried over into the reaction of governments around the globe.
For Israelis, Khamenei was not merely a “hard-line cleric.” He was the strategist of encirclement, the patron of Hezbollah and Hamas, the man who funded and armed the forces that struck on October 7. He was not an abstract sovereign leader but the architect of a campaign aimed at wiping the Jewish state off the map.
Much of the international reaction, however, was filtered through a different lens: sovereignty, legality, escalation, and fear of a wider regional war.
A small circle of countries stood firmly behind the joint operation against Iran.
Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney said his country supported the US in acting to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, reaffirming Israel’s right to defend itself and describing Iran as a principal source of instability and terror in the Middle East.
Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese likewise backed the effort to thwart Iran’s nuclear program, while urging steps to avoid wider escalation.
In these capitals, the emphasis was clear: Iran must not obtain nuclear weapons, and force, if necessary, was legitimate to prevent that outcome.
But that circle was relatively small.
Far larger was the group of governments that acknowledged the Iranian threat yet distanced themselves from the method used to counter it.
Britain made clear it had played no role in the strikes, even as Prime Minister Keir Starmer described Iran’s regime as “utterly abhorrent” and insisted it must never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron warned that the operation carried “serious consequences for international peace and security,” urging diplomacy. And Germany aligned to stop Iran’s nuclear program while stressing it did not participate in the strikes.
The Gulf monarchies, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and Jordan, focused their condemnations on Iran’s retaliatory missile attacks against their territories and US bases. They labeled those strikes violations of sovereignty and international law and affirmed solidarity with one another. But they stopped short of publicly endorsing the original US–Israeli operation itself.
Then there were the governments that went further, framing the strikes as illegal aggression.
Turkey criticized the attacks as violations of Iranian sovereignty, while also condemning Iran’s missile salvos against Gulf states.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, not exactly a paragon of respect for international law, said the killing of Khamenei was “a cynical violation of all norms of human morality and international law.”
China stressed that Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected. Brazil, South Africa, and Pakistan argued the operation violated international law, with South Africa explicitly rejecting the notion of preemptive self-defense under the UN Charter. Spain rejected unilateral military action, and Chile condemned the strikes outright.
The global picture that emerges is stark.
Beyond a narrow circle of close partners, few governments were prepared to explicitly endorse the military action, even against a regime that has openly called for the destruction of another UN member state and built a network of armed proxies across the region to carry out that program.
There was widespread agreement that Iran must not acquire nuclear weapons. There was condemnation of its retaliatory strikes. But there was deep discomfort, and in some capitals, outright opposition to the preemptive use of force to counter thatthreat. It is reminiscent of those countries that say Israel has a right to self-defense, then always protest loudly when Israel actually employs that right.
This contrast is jarring to Israelis who view Khamenei’s killing through the prism of lived experience: decades of rocket fire from Hezbollah, suicide bombings, support for Hamas, relentless rhetoric about Israel’s destruction. Khamenei was not simply the leader of a sovereign state; he was the leader of the camp intent on destroying the Jewish state.
Abroad, he was described in certain quarters after his assassination in a sterile manner as a powerful regional figure whose death risked destabilizing an already volatile region. Not that he was the destabilizing figure in the region, but that his death would lead to its destabilization.
That is not merely a difference in tone. It reflects a fundamental gap in threat perception. Israel sees the strike as the thwarting of a long-running campaign aimed at its elimination. Much of the world sees it as the crossing of a dangerous threshold.
This divide is real, stark, and, from an Israeli perspective, deeply troubling.