For years, Israel held its fire. Despite Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dramatic red line at the UN in 2012 and the stark warnings delivered to the U.S. administration in 2015, the option of a preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear program was always a last resort, a line the country chose not to cross. Israel’s leaders, for all their vocal objections, operated on the belief that a full-scale military conflict could be avoided, that diplomacy, pressure, and covert operations would be enough to contain the threat.
But two seismic shifts changed everything.
The first was the accelerating pace of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Iran had not only accumulated enough highly enriched uranium to produce fissile material for at least ten bombs but had also ramped up production and started preparations for weaponization. The regime was also aggressively expanding its long-range ballistic missile program. Even the notoriously cautious International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) finally declared Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations. The fuse was shortening, and the bomb was becoming more real.
The second, and perhaps more profound, change was the paradigm shift in Israel’s national security thinking following the brutal attacks of October 7, 2023. The notion of living with a manageable, if dangerous, threat was shattered. After facing two direct missile attacks from Iran in 2024 and enduring nearly two years of relentless assaults from its proxies—Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis—Israel felt the Islamic Republic was actively working to fulfill its stated mission of wiping the country off the map. The old deterrence model was broken, replaced by a new, more aggressive doctrine.
Still reeling from the trauma of October 7 and with a clear and present nuclear danger on the horizon, Israel was no longer willing to accept Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs as a given. The time for conditional concessions was over.
The Incongruity of Values
This new posture brought to light the deep-seated ideological conflict at the heart of the standoff. The foundational values of Judaism and Islam, as practiced by the governments of Israel and Iran, were fundamentally incompatible. From this perspective, the hostility would never be truly resolved. Yet, the world’s great powers had always managed to find a way to coexist through pragmatic, even cynical, concessions. For example, while the values of Islam in Iran and Russian Orthodoxy in Russia were poles apart, the two nations had forged a powerful strategic partnership. They made military and economic concessions to each other, engaging in a transactional relationship that superseded their religious differences. This was a choice to live and to operate within the realm of realpolitik.
Israel, too, had long navigated this complex web of alliances and rivalries. But after October 7, the country’s leaders felt that Iran had abandoned the pretense of conditional coexistence. In their eyes, Iran’s actions, both through its proxies and in its nuclear escalation, were a direct assault on the very existence of the Jewish state.
The new paradigm led to a new course of action. In a series of strikes codenamed Operation Rising Lion, Israel, with some reported U.S. support, targeted key Iranian nuclear facilities. Initial assessments suggest these attacks severely damaged Iran’s centrifuge enrichment program and set back its nuclear ambitions significantly. The strikes also targeted Iranian ballistic missile facilities, hindering their ability to launch large-scale retaliatory attacks.
However, a new intelligence report from the DIA and other sources suggests that while the strikes were effective, Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium and its centrifuge manufacturing capabilities may be more intact than initially reported. Some analysts also believe that a significant amount of the enriched uranium may have been moved before the attacks. This leaves a lingering question: Has Israel truly eradicated the threat, or has it simply bought itself more time in a conflict that, at its root, may be unsolvable?
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