Will Ahmadinejad's Israel bashing backfire in Iran itself?

Roya Hakakian, writing in the Washington Post (“A Demonizing Call“), seems to think it might.

For the first time in decades, opposition leaders, no longer afraid of taking an unpopular position, are challenging the assumption that Iran’s official anti-Israel stance is sound foreign policy. There’s some momentum behind the idea that in a region dominated by Sunni Arabs, Israel is Iran’s most natural strategic ally. Writing about a recent trip to Iran in the New York Review of Books, historian Timothy Garton Ash pointed to developments like these as evidence of the Iranians’ “friendly curiosity about Israel.”