Iranian political rivals trade accusations of ‘Israeli infiltrators’

Supporters of rival factions in Iran have taken to social media to make allegations of Israeli ‘infiltration’ and espionage against each other in the wake of Israel’s recent deadly operations.

Hardliners, reformists, and others, including many in the opposition, generally agree that Israel’s recent killings of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran and Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut could not have occurred without Israel infiltrating Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran's security forces at the highest levels.

“It seems that Israel’s infiltration in Iran has become the weak point for both Hamas and Hezbollah. The news suggests that Iranians were involved in both incidents,” a netizen posted on X, blaming the Islamic Republic for “years of poverty and corruption” and for using the security forces to suppress the people at home. “The result has been the significant expansion of Israel’s penetration into the country’s apparatus.”

Lebanese security sources have alleged that an Iranian informant tipped off Israel about Nasrallah’s whereabouts before his assassination in Beirut on Friday.

Ultra-hardliners have concentrated their attacks on Mohammad-Javad Zarif, President Masoud Pezeshkian’s deputy for Strategic Affairs. Either openly or through veiled references using parallels from early Islamic history such as the story of Bin Hajjaj, they accuse Zarif of having assisted Israel in some way in locating and killing Nasrallah and his companions.

Nasr Bin Hajjaj is alleged to have lured Imam Hussain ibn Ali, the third Imam of the Shiites, to Kufa under the guise of friendship, only to betray him and fight against him during the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD, where Hussain was ultimately killed.

"The enemies will dominate us, one after the other, if the roots of Zarif’s thinking are not dried in this country,” another tweet that referred to Nasrallah’s killing said.

Some religious radicals have even tried to justify the intelligence failures of Iran and its allies by claiming supernatural beings must have been involved in the operations.

Hojjat ol-Eslam Mostafa Karami, a Qom seminary teacher claimed in an interview with an online television channel that Israel has been using jinni to spy on Muslim leaders because they have “tamed the jinni” and they “have a long history in this”. A video of the interview was released by some Iranian media Monday and is being widely circulating on social media.

“This level of attacks on Zarif is neither related to caring for the [Iranian] people nor the Hezbollah and Seyed Hassan Nasrallah,” reformist journalist Davoud Heshmati argued in a tweet and claimed ultra-hardliners’ are making these allegations against Zarif because their leader Saeed Jalili lost in the recent presidential elections and they are angry.

Those who accuse ultra-hardliners of having ‘infiltrators’ amongst their ranks argue that the best way for an Israeli infiltrator to hide in plain sight in the Islamic Republic is to imitate the looks and behavior of radicals who vow absolute subservience to Khamenei.

“Spies have the mark of the prayer stone on their foreheads and pretend to love the system!” argued a netizen sympathetic to the opposition, responding to accusations that opposition supporters were spying for Israel to undermine the Islamic Republic. “Since when do enemy spies pose as the official opposition?” he questioned.

The footage of a 2021 interview on CNN Turk has re-emerged on social media, in which former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claims that an intelligence officer appointed to investigate how Israel stole a massive corpus of Iran's nuclear documents in 2018 was an Israeli mole himself.

Ahmadinejad’s supporters who are widely circulating the video on social media implicitly blame Khamenei for Israeli infiltration because, they claim, he refused control over the intelligence ministry to Ahmadinejad more than a decade ago who wanted to purge it of moles.