PM says too early to say if Iranian people will topple the regime; won’t detail a potential ‘ground component’ of the campaign

Asked about the future of Iran’s leadership in the event of regime change, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu makes plain that Israel would not want to see one hardline clerical ruler replaced by another of similar nature.

“You want a transitional leader that will have a transition. You don’t want to replace one ayatollah with another. You don’t want to replace Hitler with Himmler,” he says, comparing the late supreme leader Ali Khamenei to Adolf Hitler.

Addressing the likelihood of regime change, Netanyahu says, “It’s too early to say,” adding that, “It’s up to the Iranian people… to rise to the moment. We can create the conditions, but they have to, you know, they have to exploit those conditions at a certain point.”

“It is often said that you can’t win, you can’t do revolutions from the air. That is true,” he goes on. “You can’t do it only from the air. You can do a lot of things from the air, and we are doing, but there has to be a ground component as well. There are many possibilities for this ground component, and I take the liberty of not sharing with you all those possibilities.”

He says Reza Pahlavi has been “a force for good. He’s been trying to get the people to unite for a transitional government, a democratic transitional government, or a moderate transitional government. I hope that one comes to being, I think it’s too early to say.”