Of course it's no real controversy that the Islamic Republic is radical, it is a Revolution which always had radical aims and its power has always been founded

Of course it's no real controversy that the Islamic Republic is radical, it is a Revolution which always had radical aims and its power has always been founded on violence. Bearing in mind that Hezbollah is a terrorist group according to the US State Department because it is engaged in military conflict with Israel, the Islamic Republic has many reasons to maintain its patronage of Hezbollah, most of which relate to Hezbollah's ability to make war whether or not we consider that terrorist. Iranian national interest is not to try to cozy up to the US or Israel. Iranians legitimately fear reprises of the traumatic Iran-Iraq war. They have defense interests in the region. The US is not offering to defend Iran. The US can't defend anyone in the region even if it wanted to - look at what happened to poor Georgia and now Ukraine, which are not even majority Muslim countries. So we are asking Iran to cut off Hezbollah, but not replace it - there are no established alternatives. Who can offer them reliable allegiance, the bones of PLO? The political class needs to maintain popular focus on external enemies to maintain the internal cohesion of Iran itself in spite of relatively brutal restrictions enforced with secret police and gulags. They need to feed their religious base, after all their whole legitimacy is based on religion. They also need concessions to Iranian nationalists who like to see Iran being a regional power. It also buys a certain amount of goodwill in the Ummah to make noise about helping Palestine fight Israel. When the majority of the Ummah is Sunni and a very large and important segment is Arab, that kind of goodwill is a little harder to buy for a Shiite theocracy dominated by ethnic Persians. Anyway, Iran is so entrenched in its proxy war with Israel that it can't really back out. So it needs Hezbollah. If you are worried for Israel and you want Iran's threat to Israel to end, then Israel has to make good with Palestine with significant concessions, and then the Islamic Republic's position will be correspondingly eroded. Unfortunately it looks like Israel's political class has become dominated by an intransigent ultranationalist wing which decided to intentionally and permanently cut off any possible basis for conciliation by fragmenting any possible territory into a completely indivisible foam, which ultimately just feeds the Islamic Republic.