Published in the Jerusalem Post, 23 June 2025
The digital clock on display in Palestine Square, Tehran, counting down the days till Israel's destruction in 2040, as predicted by the Supreme Leader
It was almost exactly eight years ago, on June 26, 2017, that a huge digital clock was placed prominently in Tehran’s central Palestine Square. Beneath digital numerals, shown consecutively in Farsi, Arabic and English, it began the countdown, day by day, to Israel’s extinction according to Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In a speech in Tehran on September 9, 2015, he had predicted that Israel would cease to exist within the next quarter century.
“God willing, there will be no
such thing as a Zionist regime in 25 years,” he said.
In finalizing the original
nuclear deal with Iran, known
as the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), the permanent members
of the UN Security Council, joined by Germany, allowed hope to outweigh
commonsense. Signing it on July 14, 2015, they removed a tranche of
sanctions laid on the Iranian regime and handed it a huge cash bonus.
Meanwhile Iran, hand on heart, undertook to limit its nuclear program in the
future to exclusively peaceful purposes.
Of course the Iranian regime had no intention of curtailing its efforts to
acquire a nuclear weapons capability, an essential step towards achieving its
fundamental purpose – to destroy Western democracy, starting with Israel, and
to substitute a Shi’ite theocracy across the whole world. The founder of the
Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and those who followed him
into positions of power in Iran, never made any secret of this ultimate
objective. Khomeini identified Israel and the United States as his prime
targets, but included what was then the USSR.
“We wish to cause the corrupt roots of Zionism, Capitalism and Communism to wither throughout the world,” said Khomeini on February 1, 1979. “We wish, as does God almighty, to destroy the systems which are based on these three foundations, and to promote the Islamic order of the Prophet.” By this he meant his strict Shia interpretation of Islam, for elsewhere he had declared that the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, situated in the heart of Sunni Saudi Arabia, were in the hands of “a band of heretics”.
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It is no surprise, therefore, to learn that even before the JCPOA came into
effect, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was prophesying the
elimination of Israel. But since Israel was widely assumed to have its own
nuclear capability, a nuclear arsenal was clearly a prerequisite.
Khamenei obviously reckoned that Iran would have acquired its nuclear stockpile
well before 2040, by which time Iran would have achieved its objective.
The Iranian leadership decided to hallow his prediction by thrusting it into the forefront of the public’s consciousness. Plans were made to construct a digital clock, to be placed prominently in central Tehran, counting down the days until the date in 2040 when the Supreme Leader would be shown to have been touched with the divine gift of prophecy. Its unveiling was the highlight of the annual Quds (Jerusalem) rally in 2017.
Beneath the digital numerals appear Khamenei’s words in Farsi, Arabic and English: “The Zionist regime will not survive the next 25 years." The day may arrive – perhaps it already has – when leadership figures, including the Supreme Leader himself, may regret the hubris that induced them to erect the clock in the first place. It is doubtful if either of Iran’s Supreme Leaders envisaged fighting both the Little and the Great Satan, as they dubbed Israel and the US, at the same time. Yet on the night of Saturday, 21 June, US President Donald Trump sent B-2 stealth bombers with their 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs to obliterate what was left of Iran’s nuclear program, using the deep-penetrating weapon that Israel lacks.
Insiders said this military action was not a departure from his campaign pledge to steer clear of foreign entanglements, but a reminder that American power is based on the idea of “peace through strength”. He still puts deals ahead of military action, one former official is quoted as saying, but he recognizes that the best deals come when adversaries are negotiating from a weakened position.
“We have completed our very successful attack on the three nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan,” the president posted on social media. “All planes are now outside of Iran air space.”
Today Iran itself is close to collapse. Its proxies have been largely degraded and their leaders killed. In Syria, Iran’s puppet Assad has been swept from power and the country can no longer be used as a overland transit route to Lebanon. Only the Houthis in Yemen continue to follow Iran’s agenda by disrupting shipping in the Red Sea, but they have their own priorities – gaining power across Yemen – and may soon begin to put self-interest first.
Trump still envisages a
negotiated end to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. If the Iranian leadership
believe they cannot prevail against Israel and the US combined, they will
probably decide to sit down at the negotiating table. They will do so knowing
that the terms demanded of them will be so stringent, and the subsequent
inspection regime so intrusive, that they will be admitting they have lost
their current bid to acquire a nuclear arsenal. But the regime will still
be in power, and perhaps that consideration will outweigh all others.
Weakened across the board, and with their nuclear facilities under constant attack, Iran’s Supreme Leader and his acolytes may be viewing the huge countdown clock in the center of Tehran as an embarrassment of the first order. The longer it continues to mark down the days until Israel’s putative disappearance, the more of a humiliation it becomes. Yet to remove it would be mortifying, an acknowledgment that far from Israel disappearing from the scene by 2040, the more likely candidate for oblivion is the Iranian revolutionary regime itself.
Published in the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Post online titled: "Iran's countdown to erase Israel backfires", 23 June 2025:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-858544
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