Twenty-four years ago, in July 2002, a photograph captured me at the scene of one of the many terror attacks I responded to as a healthcare professional in Israel. The image is more than a memory. It is a wound that never fully healed.
I remember the urgency, the noise, the confusion, and above all the human cost. Victims were not statistics or headlines. They were fathers, mothers, children, neighbors.
For those of us who worked in emergency response, terrorism was never an abstract geopolitical term. It was something we touched with our own hands and carried home in silence long after the sirens stopped.
For decades, the Islamic Republic of Iran, largely through its network of proxies, has exported terror across borders, targeting communities far beyond its own region.
From the Middle East to Latin America and beyond, Tehran’s playbook has been painfully consistent: arm militias, finance extremist groups, and destabilize societies while maintaining a thin veneer of distance.
Each attack has left indelible scars. Each family shattered by violence becomes part of a long chain of human suffering that rarely makes it into strategic analyses or diplomatic talking points.
Nevertheless, for those of us who have stood in the aftermath, the pattern is unmistakable.
That is why the current conflict with Iran, may represent a historic inflection point. Not simply another escalation in a long-running confrontation, but potentially the beginning of the end of a cycle of terror that has defined an era.
For too long, the Iranian regime has operated under the assumption that it could export violence while avoiding meaningful consequences. Its proxies have fired rockets at civilian populations, carried out bombings, and fueled regional instability, all while Tehran positioned itself as a distant actor.
That model should finally be moribund.
At the Combat Antisemitism Movement, and particularly through our Spanish-language outreach, we have repeatedly warned that antisemitism, extremism, and state-sponsored terror are deeply interconnected. The same ideological infrastructure that demonizes Israel and Jews globally is often intertwined with broader campaigns of repression and radicalization.
What is often overlooked in international discourse is the suffering of the Iranian people themselves. While the regime projected power abroad, it ruled at home through fear and coercion. The wave of protests that erupted in December 2025 and continued into early 2026 demonstrated once again that many Iranians are not aligned with the regime’s extremist agenda.
They are demanding dignity, opportunity, and freedom.
Their courage should not be forgotten in the current moment.
Indeed, one of the great moral failures of the international community in recent decades has been the tendency to separate Iran’s external aggression from its internal repression. In reality, these are two sides of the same coin. A regime that brutalizes its own citizens is rarely a force for stability beyond its borders.
This is why the present moment carries such weight. If handled wisely, it could mark the beginning of a strategic and moral shift, one that finally holds state sponsors of terror accountable while opening space for a different future for the Iranian people and the broader region.
However, hope must be tempered with realism. The coming weeks and months will likely be complex and volatile. Escalation always carries risks, and no serious observer should underestimate the potential for further instability. At the same time, moments of geopolitical rupture sometimes create opportunities that years of diplomacy cannot.
Standing today with the memory of that July 2002 attack in Tel Aviv still vivid in my mind, I find myself holding cautious hope alongside sober awareness. Hope that the long era in which Iranian-backed terror networks operated with relative freedom may be drawing to a close.
Hope that the victims, past and present, will not have suffered in vain.
We must hope that this confrontation, painful as it is, may help open a new chapter defined less by fear and more by accountability, security, and the possibility of genuine peace, in Iran, the region, and beyond.
For those of us who have lived through the consequences of terror up close, that would indeed be a historic turning point, and one the world can no longer afford to miss.
The writer is the Combat Antisemitism Movement's executive director of Hispanic affairs.