Eli Lebowicz

The killing of Ali Larijani, like that of Ali Khamenei before him, is best understood as an instance of strategic martyrdom, a dynamic that exposes the fundamental irrationality of Israel’s and the US’ continued reliance on decapitation strategies, especially given their repeated historical failure. The decapitation-attrition-invasion playbook that the US and Israel keep drawing from reveals systems locked into a familiar repertoire of counterproductive violence that have consistently failed to adapt to reality. This failure is so glaring that even Trump acknowledged it, when he recently admitted that the US attacked Iran "out of habit." The underlying premise is that by removing senior leaders, the system they sustain will weaken and/or fragment. Yet this assumption reflects a narrow instrumentalist rationality in which leadership survival is treated as the paramount strategic objective and the threat of death is presumed to function as an effective form of coercion. But Iran operates from a value-strategic rationality whereby martyrdom itself can perform important political work and generate strategic effects that not merely resist but reverse the intended consequences of assassination. That Larijani attended the mass rally and made statements openly embracing the possibility of martyrdom before his death only underscores how consciously this logic is adopted by those who bear its consequences, a logic articulated most clearly by Khamenei himself, who declared that “either we are martyred on this path, whose honour is eternal, or we achieve victory; both are victories for us.” By transforming assassinated figures into sacred symbols of justice and resistance, in the tradition of Imam Hussein at Karbala, martyrdom converts the intended effects of decapitation into a strategy that successfully mobilises collective resolve, legitimises the political order, and regenerates both the system's continuity and its societal resilience. In short, strategic martyrdom ultimately contributes to deterrence by regeneration, whereby repeated attempts at decapitation are subject to a law of diminishing returns as adversaries discover that killing leaders neither fractures the system nor compels submission but instead contributes to its consolidation.

Books written by Iranian security chief Ali Larijani who was killed in US-Israeli airstrike yesterday.

Kupat Ha’ir email: There’s a yasom in the ICU that needs your help.

Kupat Ha’ir email: There’s a yasom in the ICU that needs your help.