| HILLEL NEUER: “Mr. President, I confess that I hesitated before agreeing to debate this evening. To do so risks dignifying a proposition so disconnected from basic facts that it verges on the satirical: that Israel, of all states, poses a greater threat to regional stability than the Islamic Republic of Iran.
But we now live in an age where people will believe almost anything. Nearly one in four people in this country aged 18 to 34 believe that the 7/7 terrorist attacks were ‘probably a hoax.’
And here in this Oxford Union, we saw just three weeks ago that no less than 501 members believe it is right to vote in support of the incoming president, after he had publicly celebrated the killing of Charlie Kirk.
So I decided it was necessary to attend and lay out a few essential facts proving that tonight’s proposition is not merely wrong, but the inversion of reality.
Regional stability is measured by who starts wars, not by who stops them. Israel does not arm terror proxies in five Arab countries; Iran does. The entire Middle East knows this, which is why Arab states quietly depend on Israel for their own survival….
Alliance of Moderate Arab States With Israel
Fact: The moderate Sunni Arab countries are part of a strategic alliance with Israel, going back decades. Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979. Jordan did so in 1994. In 2020, under the historic Abraham Accords, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan signed peace and normalization agreements with Israel. The accords recognize that the Arab and Jewish peoples are descendants of a common ancestor, Abraham — indigenous to the region — and they articulate a vision of advancing a culture of peace, security and prosperity.
Fact: Saudi Arabia, custodian of the two holy mosques, has also developed a significant rappochement with Israel. Indeed, captured minutes of Hamas leadership meetings show that this was a key factor in their decision to invade Israel and launch the war and massacre on October 7, 2023. Hamas wrote: “There is no doubt that the Saudi-Zionist normalization agreement is progressing significantly.” So they decided on “an extraordinary action” to try and torpedo it.
Fact: this regional alliance between Israel and the moderate Arab countries was resilient enough to survive the war of the past two years. Last year, neighboring Egypt and Jordan imported a record amount of natural gas from Israel. Israel provides parched Jordan with 100 million cubic meters of water a year. How is Israel “a threat to regional stability”? The opposite is true.
One of the most powerful illustrations of this regional alliance came last year, on April 13, 2024, when the Islamic regime in Iran launched an unprecedented attack on the people of Israel — with 170 drones, over 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles.
Those who helped shoot down the incoming weapons included the air forces of the US, the UK, France, and Jordan, while Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates contributed intelligence, including radar tracking information.
This wasn’t a one-off. When Iran attacked Israel again in June 2025, Jordan shot down Iranian missiles and drones crossing overhead, and Saudi Arabia reportedly allowed Israel to use its airspace to do so.
The fact that Sunni Arab states provided a combination of air force interceptions, radar and intelligence is a a real-world vote on tonight’s motion. They know that for their people, Israel is a partner in survival; and the Islamic Regime in Iran is an existential threat.
You don’t intercept missiles heading toward a ‘threat to regional stability’. You intercept missiles from one.
The Islamic Republic of Iran
Now let us address the true driver of instability: the Islamic Regime in Iran. Revolutionary Jihad is their raison d’etre.
Compare and contrast. Israel, at the very moment of its birth on May 14, 1948, in its Declaration of Independence, reached out to its neighbors with a simple message: “We extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace.”
With the Islamic Regime in Iran, it was the exact opposite. On the first anniversary of his regime, February 11, 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini declared: “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry, ‘There is no God but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.”
And that is what they do — in the region and beyond. Iran, through its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, exports terrorism and war. The regime and its proxies ruined Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Gaza…
My Iranian Opponent Must Renounce His Crimes
Mr. President, I would be remiss not to mention that a human rights lawyer from this university, from Oxford, has filed a complaint and legal dossier with the police against my opponent in this debate, Mr. Ataollah Mohajerani, for his role in the assassination of dissidents.
As described in The Guardian, on January 30, 2023, the founder of the Oxford University Public Interest Law program, Kaveh Moussavi, has alleged complicity by Mr. Mohajerani, who was a senior Iranian regime official between 1989 and 1997, ‘during a period when hundreds of assassinations of dissidents in Europe were attempted and committed on the orders of the Iranian regime.’
Moreover, the complaint points to Mr. Mohajerani’s 1989 book, ‘A Critique of the Satanic Verses Conspiracy,’ in which he endorses and justifies the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1999 against the famed novelist Salman Rushdie, who was stabbed 15 times in 2022 — as a result, presumably, of this Fatwa. And in the book, Mr. Mohajani writes in his book that Rushdie is, ‘an absolute apostate, and the punishment of an apostate is execution.’
And so, Mr. Mohajarani, tonight you say you stand for regional stability, but you have once blessed the idea that an author, a citizen of this country, should be killed for writing a book. So please tell this house: Do you still believe that writers deserve death, or will you finally retract and renounce your support for that Fatwa?
Tehran Regime is Engine of Hate
Mr. President, the greatest threat to regional stability is a regime that murders its own people, hunts its critics across Europe and America, arms terror proxies, and exports terror on four continents.
The Islamic Regime in Iran has killed hundreds of thousands in Syria, shattered Yemen through the Houthis, bankrupted Lebanon through Hezbollah, hijacked Iraq through militias, and turned Gaza into a launching pad for the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
At home, they shoots women in the streets, blind teenagers, torture dissidents, and execute protesters. Abroad, they sends terrorists and assassins to murder innocents in New York, London, and Buenos Aires.
This is not a government seeking stability; it is a revolutionary engine of hate, terror, and chaos. Israel, by contrast, is the firewall that prevents Iran’s imperial project from engulfing the region.
To claim Israel is the greater threat to stability is not merely wrong — it is an inversion of reality itself. |
