Madrid-West Asia’s geopolitical landscape rarely boils down to purely defensive issues. Above all, it is a story of power. Shaped by a history of local isolation and a forged identity in exceptionalism, Israel transformed security into a lens to interpret every opportunity and threat. But what happens when security becomes an obsession and central justification of all foreign policy?
Israeli doctrine has become a strategic tool to influence and ultimately fragment alliances with ethnic and religious minorities on their enemies. With its complex multi-ethnic composition, Iran has its position as an attractive target for this “division and conquest” policy. Promoting separatist narratives and secretly endorsing surrounding groups is not just a tactical move, but part of a broader vision. It involves weakening the internal cohesion of local rivals and restructuring the balance of regional power.
However, this security-driven approach is neither innocent nor neutral. By reducing the entire community to merely fragments in a geopolitical game, it removes these actors from their agency and justifies intervention under the pretext of protection. Security is no longer a universal right in this framework, but becomes a technology of control that justifies surveillance, manipulation and social fragmentation. This is a model that turns differences into battlefields, as various important voices have pointed out.
But there’s more. Analysts such as Sahar Ghumkhor urge us to look beyond the surface. When security logic is imposed, the history of exclusion, resistance and negotiation within affected communities becomes invisible. The instrumentalization of minorities does not reflect true concerns about their rights, but rather their situational utility within external power agendas. Thus, justification requirements for justice and recognition have little to do with self-determination and are subordinate to strategy.
Within this context, Israel’s policy towards Iran reveals the limitations and dangers of an extremely taken securitized vision. It not only perpetuates local instability, but also strengthens colonial hierarchies and replicates the logic of exceptions that justify almost all actions under the banner of security.
The purpose of this article is to explain Israel’s political desire to Balkanize Iran and how this policy overlooks resistance from various ethnic groups within the Islamic Republic against these attempts to promote these inner cleavages.
The role of the Defence Foundation for Democracy
One of the most active stakeholders of this Balkanization strategy is the Washington-based New Conservative Foundation for Democracy Defense (FDD). FDD’s Brenda Shaffer argues that Iran’s multi-ethnic composition constitutes a vulnerability that could be exploited. Her stance coincides with a recent editorial in the Jerusalem post following the first Israeli attacks in the recent war with Iran, and has openly called on President Trump to help dismantle the country.
The editor proposed to form a “Middle Eastern Union for the Dividend of Iran” and grant “security guarantees that seek to separate into Sunni, Kurdish and Baroque regions.” The Jerusalem post explicitly argued that Israel and the United States support the separation of what they call “South Azerbaijan.”
These ideas are not isolated statements. They reflect a strategic approach to dismantling Iran’s political unity by using ethnic diversity as an exploitation to create instability.
Where did the Vulcanization come from?
From a theoretical perspective, the end of the 20th century marked the rise of nationalism in international politics. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and fragmentation of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia highlighted the central role of ethnic conflict in global politics, attracting the attention of scholars and strategists.
The dispersal of ethnic religious groups across different states and the shift to positive fault lines threatened territorial integrity with ethnic diversity and national social cohesion. As a result, identity claims were seen not only as challenges but as opportunities for foreign policy in particular countries.
As a result, many authority began to support the group to gain influence and power across their borders, leveraging the internal tensions of others to strengthen local status.
When Israel began to look to Balkanization
All security doctrines arise from a combination of historical, structural and subjective factors. In Israel, the so-called peripheral doctrine – a strategy of forming alliances with non-Arab or surrounding parties in the region to counter its isolation – comes from an existential reading of threats based on exceptionalism and doubt and political identity.
This doctrine was formulated by David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, after the Suese crisis in 1956. as a way to break Arab lockdowns by seeking support from Arab regional countries (such as Turkey and pre-revolutionary Iran) and neighboring minorities facing Arab pressure.
The colonial and exclusive nature of the Zionist Project, along with local isolation, nurtured a security mindset in which all differences are threatened and neighbors perceived as potential enemies.
Beyond the nation, Israel cultivates secret ties with ethnic and religious minorities in Arab and Muslim countries, making them unstable. Support for minorities from Kurdish to Druze is a key factor in fragmenting the Arab bloc and maintaining its strategic advantage.
Israeli theorists have made this policy openly public. Arie Ornstein proposed disbanding Arab countries to tribal groups as an opportunity for Israel, but Jabotinsky advocated for helping Kurds weaken Arab countries. These ideas reflect intentional projects to promote sectarianism and divide neighbouring states.
After the war in 1967 and the rise of Israel’s military, the strategy was strengthened and formalized as part of a regional control project.
The reality of Iran
Israel and its Western users often overlook important distinctions. Iran’s historical continuity sets it apart from many other countries in West Asia. While some historians have characterized other regional countries as “artificial” due to their relatively recent formation, Iran boasts thousands of years of history and claims its status as the world’s oldest nation.
For example, the Soviet Union was previously made up of diverse countries and territories under different sovereignty. In contrast, Iran has maintained a continuing national identity for thousands of years, maintaining a population identified as Iranians throughout its history. Iran is a country of significant ethnic and linguistic diversity, but this diversity exists within the ever-present framework of political and territorial unity and is now maintained by the Islamic Republic.
From a geographical perspective, Iran is divided into a more uniform central part and heterogeneous peripheral units. However, throughout its history, these parts have demonstrated complementary and coordinated actions within the state, ensuring robust political, territorial and national continuity.
An example of this continuity was the invasion of Iraq’s Khhzestan region during the Iran-Iraq war in 1980. The Iraqi attacks were accompanied by slogans of Arab national unity and divisive propaganda based on ethnic differences. Although the western part of Huzestan is primarily Arab, the invasion met important local and local resistance.
Iran is neither a fragile nation nor an ethnic mosaic on the brink of collapse. It is a country of approximately 90 million residents with a deep historical and cultural identity that transcends its diverse elements. Those promoting Balkanization are obsessed with multiple ethnic groups, such as Azeris, Kurds, Baroques and Arabs, who underestimate the strength of integration exerted by the Islamic Republic.
The most paradigmatic case of this misacy is the Iranian Azeri population, second largest after the Persians. Azeris lives primarily in the northwest, and is located in the provinces of West and East Azerbaijan, Aldabil, Zanjan and Kazbin, and has expanded to Hamadan and West Gilan. Furthermore, the important Azeri community is fully integrated into major urban centres such as Tehran, QOM and Arak. It is important to note that Azeris holds a prominent social and political position in Iran, and that intellectual, religious, scientific and cultural elites play important roles locally and nationally.
In this respect, key figures within the Iranian system, such as the current president Masoud Pezeshkian and the leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei, belong to this minority.
Furthermore, studies like Rasmus Elling and Kevan Harris, based on extensive social studies conducted in 2016, show that many Iranians do not identify only as a single ethnic group, but they acknowledge that they belong to multiple identities.
Therefore, hypotheses shared by think tanks such as the Israeli and the Democratic Defense Foundation (FDD) have proven to rise against the central government, as in the recent escalation between Iran and Israel. The effects observed after the Israeli attack were exactly the opposite. It is the strengthening of the unification of the people within Iran and social unity.
In reality, Iranian national unity far outweighs external attempts of fragmentation or destabilization. Under the leadership of the Islamic Republic’s company and sovereignty, Iran has integrated a strong identity that integrates its diverse communities into a shared project of resistance and self-determination. This unity not only reflects the country’s historical and cultural strength, but it also reflects its ability to face and neutralize threats aimed at undermining its territorial and political integrity.
The recent war between Iran and Israel has led to some of the most intense expressions of mourning and patriotism in Iran in recent years. The massive gathering of mourning is characterized by elegy and poetry filled with references to Iran drawn from classic Persian literature and popular songs of modern times, nationalist poetry and patriotic hymns. These cultural and social acts reflect a deep sense of collective identity that appears strongly in response to external attacks, demonstrating the solidity and resilience of the Iranian national project. So far from fragmenting society, the attempts to Balkanize helped strengthen internal unity and Iran’s ability to resist as a nation-state.