Over the decades, it became a cliché that, after a terrorist attack, an Israeli spokesman would come on television and say, in the tone of someone who means business, “Israel will know very well how to respond.” Usually, this was true.
After the Hamas atrocities of October 7 2023, it was not true. The shock of the sheer evil of the massacres was compounded by the shock of Israel’s failure to foresee them. That failure made it harder for Israel to react appropriately and fast.
But the other effect of October 7 was to teach Israel no end of a lesson. Ever since its foundation in 1948, it had always said it faced existential threat; yet here was that threat proved in the most bestial way, and it had not been ready.
Israel’s repeated, wide-ranging and successful attacks on Iran’s installations and key military leaders in the small hours of Friday morning and again on Friday night follow the logic of the lesson Israel has re-learnt. In particular, the Israeli air force has displayed the greatest effectiveness since its heroic Operation Focus in the 1967 Six-Day War. Israel knew very well how to respond.
The phrase “existential threat” is bandied about. In a vague sense, the entire world faces existential threats, from nuclear weapons and, some say, from climate catastrophe. But targeted, active existential threat – an enemy trying to wipe you out – is much less universal. In the world just now, only two UN-recognised nations face it. They are Ukraine and Israel.
Vladimir Putin denies that Ukraine is a nation at all. His imperial version of history proves this to his satisfaction, so he feels free to use any amount of violence to return Ukraine to “the Russian world”. It is not racist: after all, he thinks Ukrainians are Russians. But it is ravenously tyrannical: obliterate the Ukrainian state and subjugate its people.
The violent opponents of Israel go one better – or rather, worse. They want not only to destroy the state of Israel, but also to kill all the Jews who inhabit it. In living memory, Jews learnt about that. I was about to call it “lived experience”, but the phrase froze on my lips: most died.
Here in Britain, when the militant Gaza marches, so indulged by our police, surge through our streets, opinions vary. A minority, chiefly Muslim, supports them. Most people find them irksome, disruptive, aggressive. For Jews, it is much more serious than that. When the marchers shout about a free Palestine, “From the river to the sea”, Jews know which river, and which sea. The slogan offers the people of the Jewish state no nation, no room, no life.
Ever since its revolution of 1978-9, Iran has put this destruction at its heart. “Death to Israel” is the constant cry from the ayatollahs’ pulpit, and because Iran is a theocracy, that is not just the aspiration of perverted religion, but a policy. It is why Iran wants the nuclear bomb.
So whereas Western powers undoubtedly do not want a nuclear Iran, seeing it as a menace to regional peace, they regard this as just one of the trickier questions of international relations. It is even, from a diplomatic view, rather exciting. Officials preen themselves on dealing with difficult people: how clever they felt when they concocted with Iran the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), now deceased. For them, the question is not existential. For Israel, it is.
For a long time now, Iran has been the principal orchestrator of global and regional attacks on Israel. Even for Hamas, which is Sunni not Shia, it has been a key backer. With Hezbollah, it has been, in effect, the commander, as it is for the Houthis in Yemen and numerous militias in Iraq.
For just as long, and especially under the premiership of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel identified Iran as its greatest external threat, but the difficulty was to inspire in friends of Israel the necessary sense of urgency. Especially with the administrations of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the United States could always find a reason to stall Israeli efforts to stop the Iranian nuclear programme dead.
But the after-effects of October 7 changed everything. In April last year, by which time it had at last made progress against Hamas in Gaza, Israel decided to hit back at Hezbollah’s attacks as well and killed two Iranian generals in their country’s embassy in Damascus.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Council (IRGC) and Hezbollah then launched Iran’s first ever direct attack on Israel. It was called Operation True Promise, but its results were feeble. Virtually all Iranian drones were interdicted and there were scarcely any casualties. A second Iranian attack in October was a bit more successful but still, overall, a failure.
In July, Israel was able to kill the Hamas political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, when he was the honoured guest of the Iranian regime in Tehran. In September, with its famous blowing up of their pagers, Israeli killed dozens of Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon and Syria; shortly afterwards, it assassinated the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut. It was also helpful that, before Christmas, president Bashir Assad had fallen in Syria.
The hits were the result not only of prodigious technological precision, but also of the most careful, long-term Mossad penetration of Iran, whose IRGC and wider regime have become more corrupt. The fact that Israel’s attacks succeeded showed that Iran, far from being invincible, had become decadent.
Why not leave it there, then? Why not let Iran stew in its own juice until its people finally muster the courage to overthrow it? Here again, the issue is existential threat. Israeli intelligence recently reported a new Iranian sprint to get the bomb while negotiations were in progress. The International Atomic Energy Authority, usually so reticent, this week announced that Iran had achieved new nuclear capacity in breach of its commitments. Iran itself boasted of its advances. The situation is a bit like Germany’s development of V2 rockets in 1944: it was losing the war, but its power to attempt a desperate last throw made it deadly dangerous.
Historians will debate – indeed they are already debating – how exactly we reached this point. Did Iran deduce that Donald Trump, under the influence of anti-Israel Maga types, was being less hawkish than it had expected? Did it therefore judge that he would block an Israeli attack, and conclude it could get away with proliferation? Did Netanyahu, with a similar worry the other way round, feel the need to force the hand of a hesitating White House? Or was Trump’s recent show of reluctance a coordinated feint which gave Israel the advantage of surprise? It is not clear, though we do know that he was aware of Israel’s intentions.
But what does seem clear is that Israel is winning by prosecuting its long-term existential aims rather than seeking an unavailable peace process. Coverage in the West is obsessed by the idea that Israeli behaviour is the product of Netanyahu’s cynical selfishness in clinging to power. He is certainly intensely controversial within his own country, but not in relation to Iran.
It is that existential point again. Most Israelis agree who their greatest enemy is. Who are we to say they are wrong? For decades, Iran has been their Goliath. Netanyahu, aged 75, is no David. But he must by now have some claims to be their Churchill. He has seized the moment to insist on national survival.
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