Why does the government of Iran see Israel as illegitimate state?

Answer 1

Like 32 other countries (most of them Muslim-majority), Iran views Israel as an illegitimate state due to it being created out of land that was, for times prior to the British mandate, ruled by the Ottoman empire (a nominally Muslim-majority empire). That a non-Muslim state was created out of land that had once been under Muslim rule irks the religious Muslims in these countries, since the religion dictates that such land as Israel's is, in perpetuity, part of the Dar-ul Islam ("Land of Islam"), a similar concept to the term "Christendom" (or the land in which Christianity is or was the majority religious belief). Thus, since Iran's government is one that is dominated by the laws of the mullahs who hold jurisprudential supremacy (an "Islamic republic"), it makes sense for Iran to follow along this party line in classifying Israel as an illegitimate state and supporting Palestinian and Lebanese Islamists who also don't recognize the state for ethnoreligious reasons. In addition, Islam views Jerusalem as a holy city due to the Dome of the Rock and other Islamic structures on the Temple Mount; this is compounded by the fact that a number of religious Israeli Jews support any measure to take over the Temple Mount and rebuild the Jewish Temple (which was last destroyed by the Romans in AD 70) that once stood where the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque once stood. Thus, the Dome of the Rock figures as a frontispiece on many Palestinian Islamist organizations' flags, and Iran has long declared its wish for the restoration of the region that is now Israel to Muslim rule; this was an avowed goal of the Ayatollah Khomeini when Iran tried to take over Iraq in the latter part of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s. At best, its another form of religious territorial chauvinism and irredentism, similar to the Christendom concept.

Of course, this reason, shared to lesser extremes by other non-Arab majority-Muslim states, differs from both the reasons of opposition from majority Arab-Muslim states (who see it as both a religious and ethnocultural issue) and the reasons of opposition from non-Arab non-Muslim states: countries like Taiwan and Cuba (a Stalinist state which maintains a dogma of anti-Zionism) may point to further errata such as the assertion that Israel has continually and repeatedly failed to uphold its obligations under the United Nations Charter as it declared it would do in UN resolution 273 which officially invited Israel to become a member of the UN. These obligations include ending illegal settlements and allowing refugees to return or be compensated for their losses; however, Israel abstained from doing the former for the nationalist sake of accomplishing a Jewish-majoritarian state and abstained from the latter due to the view that an Arab-majority state carved out of the envisioned Eretz Israel would be the most pertinent obligation to be fulfilled by Israel to former Arab residents of the region (compared to an "incomplete" approach of merely paying off refugees for land attained).