Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Tuesday’s launch of 181 ballistic missiles by the Islamic Republic of Iran against Israel should not have come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention the Middle East of late.
Since October 7th, Israel has been thoroughly and embarrassingly thrashing the Iranian regime — defanging its proxies across the Middle East, degrading its reputation among said proxies, and proving to the world just how flimsy of a spiderweb is its Islamist dictatorship.
The first major blow came on April 1st at a so-called “Iranian consulate building” in the Syrian capital of Damascus, where Israel allegedly killed several Iranian commanders, including two generals (one of whom was considered an architect of the October 7th Hamas-led massacres and kidnappings).
That same month, in a speech marking the 100th day of the Israel-Hamas-Hezbollah war, then-Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi declared: “The Zionist regime and its supporters have been defeated. The resistance of the Iranian nation has paid off.”
Approximately one month later, a helicopter carrying Raisi (as well as Iran’s then-foreign minister and others) crashed and killed everyone aboard. Iran’s “official investigation” into the incident haphazardly determined that it was caused by “bad weather” — but a senior Iranian official later admitted that Tehran was involved in purchasing the pagers held by Hezbollah terrorists, hinting that such a device could have been responsible for the helicopter crash that downed the helicopter.
On July 31st, a bomb exploded in Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh’s room in the official and well-protected residence belonging to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The compound, called Neshat, is in an affluent north Tehran neighborhood and used for retreats, secret meetings, and “housing prominent guests” such as Haniyeh. Middle Eastern officials said the bomb was planted there roughly two months prior, detonated remotely by Mossad operatives who were on Iranian soil after receiving intelligence that Haniyeh was indeed in the room.
And two weeks ago, dozens of Hezbollah operatives were killed and thousands more seriously wounded across Lebanon and even in Syria when the aforementioned pagers they used to communicate exploded. The Iranian ambassador to Lebanon was reportedly injured in the explosions as well.
According to a report, the Mossad set up two shell companies as part of a wide-scale operation to manufacture pagers that contained explosive material known as PETN — and then sold them to Hezbollah.1
The devices first began to reach Lebanon in 2022, with production ramping up as longtime Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah denounced the use of cellphones due to concerns they could be tracked by Israel, saying: “The phone in your hands, in your wife’s hands, and in your children’s hands is the agent. Bury it. Put it in an iron box and lock it. Israeli intelligence officials saw an opportunity.”
That was not the only opportunity that Israeli intelligence officials saw. Last Friday, as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in New York for a speech at the United Nations, the Israeli Air Force carried out massive targeted airstrikes in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, striking Hezbollah’s main headquarters, flattening six buildings and, most importantly, assassinating Nasrallah. French newspaper Le Parisien, citing a Lebanese source, reported that Israel was tipped off about the Hezbollah leader’s location by an Iranian mole.
Nasrallah was closely aligned with Iran, and although he did not found Hezbollah himself in the early 1980s, he shaped the terrorist organization in his image since taking over its leadership in 1992. The move automatically signaled a “change in the rules of engagement” in Israel’s fight against the Islamic Republic of Iran’s axis of evil.
Iran, for its part, has tried time and again to strike back at Israel in a variety of ways. According to the Mossad, the Iranian regime has plotted at least 50 terror attacks against Jews around the world since October 7th — all of which have been thwarted by the Israeli foreign intelligence agency.2
In recent weeks, Israel has detected a significant rise in Iran’s efforts to advance assassinations against targets in Israel by attempting to recruit Israeli civilians to harm senior officials in the country. Moti Maman, a 73-year-old Israeli man from the coastal city of Ashkelon, was smuggled into Iran twice and tasked with helping to assassinate the prime minister, defense minister, or the head of the Shin Bet, before his arrest in Israel last month.
During the last several years, killings, reported suicides, and deaths in mysterious circumstances have put an end to important Iranian “personalities” — including prominent space scientist Ayoub Entezari, who was said to have been poisoned in circumstances similar to those of nuclear scientist Kamran Mollapour at the Natanz facility (approximately 300 kilometers south of Tehran).
In 2020, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, considered the mastermind behind Iran’s nuclear program, was killed in an ambush near Tehran. A remote-controlled machine gun mounted on a vehicle was apparently used in the attack, equipped with a camera that utilized artificial intelligence and facial recognition to target Fakhrizadeh. The automatic gun reportedly controlled by satellite struck him 13 times from a distance of 150 meters. The gun was so accurate that not a single bullet struck his wife, who was seated next to him.
The murder of Fakhrizadeh was preceded by the attacks on other officials earlier that same year, executed within 20 minutes of each other. The first was killed, and the second was injured. Those strikes were followed by the assassinations of a senior general in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and a senior engineer at an Iranian nuclear facility. The list goes on.
Iran has become so fed up with Israel’s successful operations that it set up a secret service unit to target Mossad agents working in the Islamic Republic. The only problem is that the head of this unit turned out to be an Israeli agent himself, according to an interview that former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gave this week.3 Ahmadinejad added that another 20 agents on the Iranian intelligence team tasked with monitoring Israeli spying activities also turned against Tehran, providing Israel with sensitive information on the Iranian nuclear program.
If you have been keeping score up until this point, Israel is overwhelmingly whipping Iran in the same way that a heavyweight boxer would handle a strawweight opponent. The Israelis, with one-two-hundredth (1/200th) of the landmass across the Middle East and about one-fiftieth (1/50th) of the region’s total population, are the heavyweight.
And when Iran fired 181 ballistic missiles at Israel on Tuesday, the Iranian regime knew that such a barrage would do minimal damage on Israeli soil. It also knew that it had no choice but to manufacture the aesthetic that Iran is “hitting back” at Israel, not so much as a show of force to the Israelis, but as a demonstration to its proxies across the region, as well as its adversaries within Iran.
In Iraq and especially in Lebanon, there have already been statements about Iran’s inability to protect its proxies — and that it only knows how to hide behind them. The Islamic Republic’s credibility as a leader of revolutionary Shia Islam is on the line, and its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei seems caught like a deer in the headlights, worried that if he goes all in to save Hezbollah by attacking Israel, he and Iran will be the next target for massive retaliation, or worse.
If he does nothing, Israel, the Arab and Muslim worlds, and the rest of Iran’s axis of evil would see that the supreme leader has no clothes. The Iranian regime needed to save face somehow, but on all sides of the equation the risks of catastrophe are high and the rewards are low.
In an atmosphere of alarm and concern that the Middle East was suddenly becoming very dangerous for the regime after a year in which the Islamic Republic enjoyed a rather comfortable war, the rules of the games have been changing quickly and undermining the network of proxies they had built across the region. Their two largest ones — Hezbollah and Hamas — are now a tiny fraction of what they were prior to October 7th, thanks to Israel’s astronomically superior military and intelligence, as well as its unwavering courage and resilience.
Domestically, Iranians’ outrage over economic collapse and mismanagement, frustration with strict social restrictions, and growing anger toward Khamenei and the clerical establishment (who have shown little regard for the people’s needs) have all converged into a full-blown legitimacy crisis for the Islamic Republic. The regime’s legitimacy is at its lowest point since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, marked by the historically lowest voter turnout in March and May of this year.4
Israel also has domestic politics at play, and the Netanyahu-led government will need to respond forcefully to Iran’s latest attack. Even a member of Yesh Atid, the political party that leads the Opposition in Israel’s legislature, said that Israel must take advantage of its successful defense and “full legitimacy” in order to launch a “painful” response against strategic Iranian assets, possibly its nuclear facilities, in order to deal Iran a “critical blow” and strengthen the anti-Iranian international alliance.
To sweeten the deal for Israel, the Iranians cannot afford an escalation in a direct conflict with the Jewish state. A severe economic crisis has persisted since the U.S. withdrew from the Iranian nuclear agreement in 2018, with Iran’s economy contracting significantly, national debt reaching 30 percent of GDP, and the currency losing 80 percent of its value in less than two years. Inflation currently stands at 49.5 percent and unemployment is nearing 10 percent.5
As such, sustaining a war against Israel would require a strong economy, and given the depth of Iran’s current economic crisis, the Ayatollah’s regime would struggle to afford such a conflict.
Hence Israel’s historic opportunity: By escalating the conflict with Iran, unprecedented strategic opportunities are emerging to reshape the Middle East in favor of not just the Jewish state, but of Western allies including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia.
If the West’s leaders were smart, they would pause their endless demands for Israel to continue engaging in unfruitful ceasefire negotiations. Instead, they would embrace an Israeli escalation against Iran’s increasingly feeble condition — because the best way to deal with the nefarious Iranian regime is to defeat it.
“How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers.” The New York Times.
“Mossad has stopped over 50 Iranian-backed terror attacks on Jews since Oct. 7 - sources.” The Jerusalem Post.
CNN Turk
“Iran’s calculated inaction: Why Tehran stands by as Hezbollah falters.” The Jerusalem Post.
“Iran’s calculated inaction: Why Tehran stands by as Hezbollah falters.” The Jerusalem Post.
Israel has been superb in its reactions over the last few weeks. As you say it is a perfect storm at this time, for Israel to go further. The rhetoric from the US , is absolutely pathetic. I pray Israel will make a truly decisive strike against evil Iran. You can do it!
Great summary, and I agree that the West would do best to let Israel do its thing and stop calling for de-escalation.
That said, I was thinking today about the millions of faithful in Gaza, the West Bank, southern Lebanon, Syria, the list goes on and on, who literally live to kill Israelis or at least make them suffer. I was thinking that the Third Intifada has already started. I was thinking about those two kids in Jaffa who killed more people than the Iranian missiles. Today I am wondering, let's pretend Iran were suddenly out of the picture, no longer providing the hateful with money, training and munitions. Would there then be peace in the Middle East? I actually don't think so, I think we'd be back to stone throwers and suicide vests and no abatement at all of the international idiots who want Israel wiped off the face of the earth, as well as the rest of the Jews.
Thoughts?