In its justified attack countering Iran’s genocidal threats, terrorist manipulations, and 500 rockets including the largest ballistic missile attack in history on October 1, 2024, Israel is redefining “asymmetrical warfare.”
It’s not fair. With 92 million people, Iran is almost 10 times Israel’s size. This “energy superpower” has 10% of the world’s oil reserves and 15% of gas reserves. Yet Israel “the bully” is walloping “poor” Iran, dominating the skies of the vast country 2,250 km. (1,400 miles) away.
Israel is decapitating Iranian leadership – unnerving successors – defanging defenses, crushing nuclear and ballistic missile sites, torching economic infrastructure. In return, Iran brazenly targets Israeli civilians – with street celebrations delighting in Israeli deaths, including Israeli Arabs’. Imagine how lethal the mullahs and Revolutionary Guards would be if they possessed nuclear weapons!
Iran’s regime is antisemitic anti-Zionism incarnate. Demonizing “the Jews” half a continent away, it overinvests in trying to obliterate them, then absorbs so many losses, just to kill a few more Jews.
It’s a textbook case, illustrating anti-Zionism’s inherent antisemitism, Jew-haters’ obsessiveness, and how self-destructive that hatred is. The mullahs are the jihadi version of the self-defeating post-October 7 feminists who essentially said “#MeToo... unless you’re a Jew,” sacrificing their credibility on the poisoned altar of Jew-hatred.
Still, how could Israel be humiliating a country so large, so rich, so far away? Israel’s air force did in two days what Russia’s air force couldn’t do in three years.
What’s Israel’s secret?
Follow the truth by understanding the lies – meaning, the stunning number of Iranian insiders betraying the dictatorship.
Clearly, the Israel Air Force is performing magnificently. One TV analyst regretted that the rest of Israel doesn’t operate like the air force. Imagine if our sloppy, demagogic, crony-based, back-scratching, seat-of-your pants government instead cultivated a crisp, merit-based culture of planning ahead and anticipating problems, of looking back self-critically, learning from mistakes, and always doing better.
Nevertheless, the inside information guiding our pilots and intelligence analysts tells a broader story. The Iranian informants express proud Persians’ most resonant no-confidence vote in that oppressive, corrupt Islamist Republic. Each Mossad marvel, from knowing whom to hit, where they’re meeting, what they’ve hidden, and where it’s hidden, shows how Iranians prefer democratic Israel to their theocratic dictatorship.
Wouldn’t you, too? They oppress their own; we protect our own. They target civilians; we target legitimate military targets and infrastructure. They endanger the world, threatening “Big Satan,” America, especially; we risk our lives protecting the world and our sacred ally, America. They want to make the Jewish state unlivable; we just want to live!
Watch this war. See what a democracy in action looks like. Then see how pure hate perverts the haters. Watching Islamists and Palestinians celebrating the long-distance missile murder of civilians, you wonder: Who would want to join their side, and how could they fool so many Western dupes, including some Jews?
Looking out for one another
If you’re Israeli, reach out to friends worldwide. Thank those actively supporting us, and mobilize the fence-sitters, the silenced majority. They should pressure US President Donald Trump, America, and the West to help Israel win decisively, for everyone’s sake.
If you’re not Israeli, take a stand. Liberals should remind their friends that liberals traditionally opposed nuclear proliferation, until Iran’s Islamist dictators suddenly needed nukes to threaten the Jewish state. Conservatives should challenge their friends to realize the price Israel is paying so we can all be the isolationists they want – if and when the Axis of Evil is neutralized rather than threatening us.
From near and far, watch the Israeli miracle in action, knowing we still face terrors ahead. We will need more resolve, especially if Iran ratchets up the evil and launches its superspeed, hard-to-detect cruise missiles or its superstrong, 1-ton-plus ultraheavy ballistic missiles.
Still, whatever they launch, we will keep looking out for one another, supporting this justified, long-overdue, war and lengthening our already impressive list of Zionist heroes.
We salute our soldiers, pilots, intelligence analysts, ground crews, and spies, on all battlefronts – and their spouses, children, and parents. Now, with the home front besieged, also honor our kids, their parents, the elderly – everyday warriors smiling as much as possible whenever possible while facing another impossible situation. They’ve bounced from COVID to Hamas’s May 2021 bombardments to October 7 to this week’s fusillades. They and their parents deserve extra hugs.
Also toast this year’s new recruits and their heroic parents. Joining the army post-October 7, they know how high the stakes are, proving how casually courageous so many Israelis are.
At this moment, Zionists and Israel-supporters are once again passing the “history test” – standing on the right side of history. Forty-four years ago, in June 1981, Israel defied the West and destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor. President Ronald Reagan was so furious, America supported a Security Council resolution “strongly condemning” Israel’s “military attack.”
Ten years later, during the Persian Gulf War countering Saddam Hussein’s aggressive Iraq, defense secretary Dick Cheney gave David Ivry, the former IAF commander, a satellite photo of Iraq’s nuclear ruins, writing: “With thanks and appreciation for the outstanding job you did on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981, which made our job much easier in Desert Storm!”
Historians shouldn’t predict. But it’s hard not to believe that many of those still naively trusting diplomacy with the dastardly mullahs won’t soon join millions in Iran and the Arab world in at least looking to Israel with gratitude, even if they can’t quite say “Thank you.”
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest books are To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath.