Anyone wondering why, for Jews, the post-Oct. 7 conflict doesn’t seem to ebb and flow with “cease-fires” and other “pauses” should look no further than this weekend’s revelation of a foiled plot to assassinate a Jewish community leader in Azerbaijan.
Israel is obviously the epicenter of Iran’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people, surrounded as it is by Iranian terror proxies who have the UN and much of Western Europe running interference for them. But Tehran’s war on the Jews is global in nature, and nobody is negotiating for its end.
Readers will remember that in November, the Chabad emissary in Dubai, Rabbi Zvi Kogan, was abducted and murdered by Uzbek nationals reportedly connected to an Iranian assassination cell. (Iranian assassinations abroad are common; two Russians were convicted two weeks ago in New York in a murder-for-hire plot allegedly financed by Iran.) A week ago, the UAE sentenced to death three men convicted of Kogan’s killing.
In 2012, Hezbollah hired guns blew up a bus full of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, killing five and the bus driver. The most notorious of such attacks was the 1994 bombing of the Jewish center in Buenos Aires, directed by the Iranians and carried out, once again, by Hezbollah; 85 were killed.
So it isn’t terribly shocking to read the opening of the Washington Post’s account of another apparent such attempt:
“In the fall, an officer from Iran’s Quds Force met with Agil Aslanov, a drug trafficker from Georgia, according to Western and Middle Eastern security officials.
“The officer handed Aslanov a photo of a prominent Jewish figure in Azerbaijan and detailed instructions on how to kill him, the officials said. Aslanov agreed to kill Rabbi Shneor Segal for a price tag of $200,000, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.”
The attack reportedly also targeted an education center. It was disrupted by state security agents, the Post reports, and Segal was unaware he was the prime target until the plot was broken up. The Post brings up a couple of other recent Iranian plots, arguing that there has been an increase in such attempted attacks since Oct. 7, 2023: “German prosecutors have accused Iran of using criminal proxies to attack synagogues and a school in 2023. In March 2024, police in Peru arrested an Iranian man alleged to be a Quds Force member and two local accomplices over a plot to attack an Israeli national living in the South American country.”
In the spring of 2023, Iran had been suspected in a similar attack on an Azerbaijani lawmaker critical of Tehran, Fazil Mustafa. Mustafa was shot but survived. In 2024, five men were convicted of the attack.
When it comes to the Jews, however, Iran appears not only to attack dissidents or public figures. And that is equally true of Iran and its proxies’ long war of eradication toward Israel. Oct. 7 was a pogrom, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. A document recovered by the IDF in Gaza, Israel’s defense minister revealed recently, shows Hamas requesting $500 million from Iran for the purpose of destroying Israel, and Iran responding that even through difficult economic times Tehran will fund Hamas’s war.
As has been proved over and over again, there is no such thing as a peacetime Hamas, and therefore there is no such thing as a peacetime Iranian regime. The war on the Jews continues unabated no matter what else is going on. And why would that be any different from every other expression of Jew-hatred? When the pro-Hamas marchers get their cease-fire, they still march—they just find a new excuse to rant about the Jewish state.
All this talk of “permanent cease-fires” misses an important caveat: Cease-fires only apply to some.
