The Brief:
"I think, unequivocally, the elimination of Khamenei, the father, was a mistake, not because he didn’t deserve to die, only because it doesn’t serve the interests of the State of Israel," Golan said.
Khamenei was assassinated alongside members of his family, including a grandchild, and several senior Iranian officials, in the opening strikes of the US-Israeli war, and was succeeded by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei.
Golan also dismissed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated goal of toppling the Islamic Republic as "unrealistic."
The elder Khamenei had issued a religious ruling in 2003 prohibiting nuclear weapons, arguing that they violated Islamic principles.
The Analysis:
When Revenge Dressed as Strategy: The Khamenei Assassination and the Logic of Strategic Blindness
Strategic blindness rarely announces itself. It arrives disguised as strength — as decisive action, as righteous punishment, as the settling of old scores. The assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening US-Israeli strikes on 28 February has prompted one Israeli politician, Yair Golan, to name the disguise for what it is. His assessment — that killing Khamenei "doesn't serve the interests of the State of Israel" — cuts through the moral posturing surrounding the strike to ask the only question strategy ultimately answers: what did this actually accomplish?
The answer, by Golan's account, appears to be remarkably little. Khamenei's son now holds the office. The Islamic Republic stands. And a man who in 2003 issued a religious ruling prohibiting nuclear weapons on Islamic grounds is gone, replaced by a successor with no such publicly stated restraint. If the goal of an assassination is to weaken, deter, or transform an adversary, this one achieved the opposite on nearly every axis.
The Revenge Trap
Revenge and strategy pull in fundamentally different directions. Strategy is forward-looking: it asks what future you want to create and what moves get you there. Revenge is backward-looking: it asks what past wrong must be answered, regardless of consequence. When a state lets the latter masquerade as the former, it begins to treat the neutralization of an enemy — rather than the achievement of a desired outcome — as the objective itself. The target becomes the goal. That is the moment blindness sets in.
Killing a leader is emotionally satisfying in a way that negotiating with his successors never will be. But emotional satisfaction is not a geopolitical outcome. The killing of Khamenei alongside family members, including a grandchild, reads less like a precision strategic operation and more like a punitive strike — one that martyred a figure, consolidated succession around his son, and foreclosed whatever diplomatic architecture the elder's nuclear prohibition had quietly sustained.
Supremacism as Fog
Supremacism compounds the blindness by distorting the adversary's actual nature. If you believe your enemy's system is inherently fragile, illegitimate, and one decapitation strike away from collapse, then decapitation always looks rational. Netanyahu's stated aim of toppling the Islamic Republic — dismissed by Golan as "unrealistic" — rests precisely on this fantasy: that the regime is a hollow shell awaiting the right blow. Forty-plus years of survival through war, sanctions, and internal crisis suggests otherwise. A strategist who cannot see the enemy clearly cannot strike the enemy usefully.
Golan's phrase "not because he didn't deserve to die, only because it doesn't serve the interests of the State of Israel" is revealing in both directions. It concedes the moral case for the strike while insisting that morality is not strategy — and that conflating the two is how states squander their power. Assassinating a leader because he "deserved it" is a courtroom instinct, not a strategic one. And it is immoral built on the idea that you are valued any other people and all is acceptable as long as it achieves own interensts. That in the long, fails, always.
The Lesson
The bitter irony is that acts undertaken to display strength often reveal its limits. A power confident in its position does not need to decapitate its adversary's leadership; it can outmaneuver it. The rush to strike, the disregard for international law, the targeting of a religious figure and his family — these are the signatures of a politics governed by hubris rather than interest. Golan's public break with that politics suggests at least some in Israel are now performing the painful arithmetic the operation's planners declined to do. The question is whether the lesson arrives in time to matter, or only as the autopsy of a strategic failure.
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