Leadership Quote by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

A neat little promise of democracy that smuggles in a demographic endgame. Rafsanjani’s line sounds, at first blush, like procedural fairness: return, referendum, majority rule. But the sequence is the message. “All the Palestinians back” is not merely a humanitarian gesture; it’s the premise that makes the referendum outcome legible in advance. A vote after a mass return would almost certainly reshape the electorate and, by extension, the state itself. The rhetoric launders a maximal political objective through the language of ballots.

The subtext leans on a familiar international norm: self-determination. By invoking a “fair referendum,” Rafsanjani tries to occupy the moral high ground of popular sovereignty while bypassing the messy, combustible questions that actually decide fairness: which territory votes, who qualifies as “Palestinian,” what happens to current residents, what constitutional guarantees exist for minorities, and whether “whoever gets the majority can rule” means liberal democracy or majoritarian supremacy. That last clause is doing quiet work, reducing legitimacy to arithmetic and treating rights as downstream of numbers.

Context matters: Rafsanjani was a senior architect of the Islamic Republic’s pragmatic wing, often packaging hardline positions in managerial, internationally legible terms. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran’s leaders have frequently preferred strategies that delegitimize Israel’s permanence without sounding openly annihilationist. This formulation is calibrated for that: it frames a dissolution-by-demographics as the natural outcome of “fairness,” turning a revolutionary aim into a civic procedure. The sentence sells inevitability, not compromise.