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.
This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
When Israel goes to war with the Islamic Republic of Iran, it targets military infrastructure: nuclear facilities, missile launchers, Revolutionary Guard commanders, intelligence networks, and command centers.
When the Islamic Republic of Iran goes to war with Israel, it targets Jews. Not only Israelis. Jews. This distinction is one of the most important — and least discussed — moral differences in the conflict.
Israel’s campaign against the Iranian regime, known as Operation Roaring Lion, is directed at the machinery of a hostile state: the infrastructure that threatens Israel with missiles, nuclear weapons, and terrorism. Iran’s campaign, by contrast, is global. It is diffuse. And it is aimed not at Israeli military targets, but at Jewish people wherever they live.
In recent days, Israel’s National Security Council issued a stark warning to Israelis abroad following the escalation of the war. According to the council, intelligence services have detected “a surge in motivation and an increase in terrorist activity and threats” by Iranian security bodies and affiliated groups targeting Israelis and Jews worldwide since the start of Operation Roaring Lion.
The warning extended far beyond Israel’s borders. Iranian-linked actors have attempted or explored kinetic attacks in multiple countries across the region, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Jordan. Israeli authorities are particularly concerned that Jewish institutions abroad — synagogues, schools, community centers, and Israeli-linked businesses — are becoming targets.
This is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition.
The Islamic Republic has spent decades building a global network of proxies, operatives, and criminal intermediaries designed to carry out attacks far from the Middle East.
And today, according to Israeli intelligence officials, that network is becoming more aggressive. A senior National Security Council official warned that the Islamic Republic has engaged in an “unprecedented removal of restraints” in its terror operations abroad. The regime is no longer relying solely on disciplined proxy groups like Hezbollah, which carried out the Iranian plot to attack a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 85 people and injuring over 300.
Now, the Islamic Republic is casting a wide net. Anyone willing to do the job will do: criminal syndicates, mercenaries, Afghan fighters, Azerbaijani recruits. “Anyone who is available and ready to work,” the official said. The goal is simple: Make Jews feel unsafe everywhere.
The consequences of this strategy are already being felt across the Jewish world.
In the past week alone, three synagogues in the greater Toronto area were attacked. Two of them, Shaarei Shomayim and the BAYT, had recently been listed by an online publication that alleged connections between Jewish community institutions and the Israel Defense Forces. In other words, synagogues were effectively marked.
Across Europe, authorities have disrupted Iranian-linked surveillance operations targeting Jewish communities. In Britain, counterterrorism police recently arrested four men suspected of working for Iranian intelligence and conducting surveillance of Jewish targets in London. In Azerbaijan, security services uncovered a plot involving Iranian operatives planning attacks on an Israeli embassy and a synagogue using explosives. Last week, Israel quietly evacuated part of its diplomatic staff from the United Arab Emirates after two Iranian attempts to attack Israeli envoys were thwarted.
Around the world, Jewish institutions are increasing security. Governments are increasing patrols. Synagogues are reviewing evacuation plans. Parents are wondering whether it is safe to send their children to Jewish schools. None of these people are soldiers. None of them are combatants. They are civilians whose connection to Israel is that they are Jews.
And if you think this is simply in response to the current Israel–Iran war, don’t be so sure. Last year, leading up to the Chanukah massacre at Australia’s Bondi Beach that left 15 people dead, Israel’s foreign intelligence service provided Australian authorities with several concrete warnings of Iranian-directed terror activity operating inside Australia — Iranian efforts to establish terror networks designed to target Jewish sites and communities.1
And here’s the scarier part: Australia, the official emphasized, is far from unique. Israeli intelligence has identified or disrupted similar Iranian-linked terror activity across Europe, Africa, and Asia, as well as alleged plots in South America, India, and Thailand.
“If you knew how many terror attacks the Mossad has prevented,” the Israeli official added, “you would drop your jaw.” That’s because Israel has long taken responsibility for protecting Jewish communities around the world, with the Mossad maintaining entire units dedicated to preventing attacks against Jewish targets abroad.
These efforts include intelligence cooperation with foreign governments, monitoring Iranian and Hezbollah terror networks, providing security guidance to Jewish institutions, disrupting planned attacks before they occur, and identifying and neutralizing operatives planning overseas operations.
According to Israeli officials, some of the individuals recently killed in Iran during Operation Roaring Lion were directly involved in planning terrorist attacks against Israelis and Jews abroad. “When they were eliminated,” an official explained, “the command and control capability of those operations was disrupted.”2
This is a reminder that many of the targets Israel strikes inside Iran are not merely military planners. They are architects of global terrorism.
Yet many Jews in the diaspora like to believe that they are separate from Israel. That what happens in the Middle East has nothing to do with them. That they are Canadians, Americans, French, British, Mexicans, or Australians first and foremost.
But Iran does not see it that way. For the Islamic Republic, the distinction between Israelis and Jews is irrelevant. Both are legitimate targets. That is why synagogues are attacked when Israel launches military operations. That is why Jewish schools receive bomb threats when tensions rise in the Middle East. And that is why Iranian intelligence networks monitor Jewish communities thousands of miles away from Jerusalem.
Our enemies do not distinguish.
Now imagine the opposite scenario. Imagine Israeli intelligence agencies recruiting criminal gangs in Europe to attack Persian cultural centers. Imagine Israeli operatives targeting Iranian mosques in Canada. Imagine Israeli networks planning assassinations of Iranian civilians across the world.
The global reaction would be immediate and explosive. The headlines would speak of terrible state terrorism. There would be emergency sessions of the United Nations. Governments would impose sanctions. And commentators everywhere would ask how such behavior could possibly be justified.
Yet when Iran does it — when Jewish schools are attacked, when synagogues are surveilled, when global terror networks are mobilized — the reaction is often muted. Or ignored.
This global campaign against Jews is one of the reasons many observers compare the Islamic Republic’s ideology to that of the Nazis. The regime does not merely oppose Israel. It speaks openly about eliminating the “Zionist entity.” Its leaders regularly invoke antisemitic conspiracies about global Jewish power. They deny the Holocaust in one breath and speak of their desire to repeat it in the next. And its operational strategy reflects that worldview: Jews everywhere are considered part of the enemy.
This is why Israelis take the Islamic Republic at its word. For decades, Iran’s leaders have openly spoken about eliminating Israel. Now-assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei called Israel “a cancerous tumor and it will undoubtedly be uprooted and destroyed.” One of its presidents declared that Israel “must be wiped off the map,” echoing revolutionary slogans that have circulated across the Islamic Republic since the Islamist takeover of Iran in 1979. Last week a former Iranian “diplomat” said Israel “must be erased.” Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders have similarly said that destroying Israel is not merely a dream but an “achievable goal.”
The Islamic Republic is modern-day Nazi Germany. Like the Nazis before them, their greatest danger lies not only in the weapons they build, but in the ideology they promote. Their regime, rooted in a radical form of Shi’a messianism, envisions a world-shaking confrontation that clears the path for divine redemption. A regime which sees catastrophe as a gateway to salvation cannot be deterred in the normal ways that states deter one another.
And for Jews, the difference between then and now is paramount: The Nazis persecuted Jews who were stateless and defenseless, but the Islamic Republic encountered something very different: a sovereign Jewish state — armed, vigilant, and ready for battle.
When a regime repeatedly calls for your destruction, builds the weapons to carry it out, and deceitfully pursues nuclear capabilities that could make it possible, it would be reckless not to take those threats seriously and act preemptively. Israelis understand this instinctively. Jewish history has taught them that when enemies openly promise to destroy the Jewish People or our state, those promises should not be dismissed as rhetoric or propaganda. They should be treated as clear and present dangers.
And the lesson should not be limited to Israelis alone. Jews everywhere should hear these threats with the same clarity. The Islamic Republic does not hide its intentions. It announces them. When someone tells us they want to destroy us, believe them.
Even leaders in the Arab world have recognized the threat. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince once described Ali Khamenei as “the new Hitler of the Middle East” in an interview on the American TV show 60 Minutes, warning that the regime’s expansionist ideology threatens the entire region.
So, while the war between Israel and Iran is often framed as a geopolitical conflict between two states, that framing misses a crucial truth. Israel’s war is with the Iranian regime, while the Islamic Republic of Iran’s war is with the entire Jewish People.
One side targets nuclear facilities, weapons depots, military bases, intelligence operatives, and regime assets. The other side targets Jews wherever they can. One side fights a conventional war between states. The other wages an indiscriminate global campaign against a people. And until more folks begin to understand this massive difference, they will continue to misunderstand the nature of this conflict.
“Intelligence warned Australia of Iranian-linked terror activity months before Bondi attack, officials say.” Fox News.
“Iran unleashing unprecedented terror campaign against Israelis abroad, senior official warns.” The Jerusalem Post.
As an American Jew I have a deep respect and appreciation for Israeli vigilance. And I have never forgotten
I stand with ISRAEL and her family EVERY WHERE 🇮🇱I’m American 🇺🇸 and I stand with USA! I don’t fear the EVIL regime of Iran-they want to destroy us also but this is a JUST war and TOGETHER WE WILL NEVER FORGET and we will WIN 🏆 The hater’s will never stop but the LORD is our King and our shield, will not be dismayed ‼️💥🫶❤️✝️🇮🇱🇺🇸🙏😺