Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, March 06, 2026

03/05 Links Pt2: Hamas's Oct. 7 Attack Launched a Historic Reordering in the Middle East; Trump kicks Tucker Carlson out of MAGA movement; Israel’s Unfinished Business in Lebanon

From Ian:

Palestine’s draft constitution is a manifesto for permanent war

In a sane world, human-rights organisations would be incandescent. A constitution that makes Sharia a primary legislative source, sidelines women’s genuine equality, erases gay rights and rewards terrorism ought to trigger every alarm bell. But these NGOs have long ago abandoned moral principles in favour of a hierarchy of oppression. To them, Palestinians are sacred victims and Israel is the eternal villain. They are blind to the authoritarianism and festering anti-Semitism of Palestinian society, reserving their outrage instead for the Jewish State, which dares to defend itself against this. Peace and human dignity come secondary to the goal of seeing the Middle East’s only democracy dismantled.

Put simply, the PA’s constitution is a manifesto for permanent war. By codifying the total rejection of Israeli legitimacy, it has ensured that a peace deal based on mutual recognition is an impossibility. For any future Palestinian leader, recognising Israel would now be, quite literally, a violation of the state’s supreme law.

The silence from the British government following the release of this document is a tacit endorsement of its principles. If Starmer is so determined to recognise Palestine, he should at least have the courage to tell the public what kind of state he is backing. Why is he prepared to endorse a framework that prioritises Sharia over secular rights, canonises martyrdom, erases Jewish history and perpetuates the conflict by legal means? Is this really the ‘better future’ he was hoping for in the Middle East?

If Britain continues to recognise Palestinian statehood without demanding fundamental constitutional change, it can no longer do so under the pretence of advancing peace. The PA does not care about peace. For the UK to endorse it is not diplomacy, but a moral abdication.

Hamas's Oct. 7 Attack Launched a Historic Reordering in the Middle East

In 2023, from a tunnel beneath Gaza, Yahya Sinwar gave an order that sent thousands of Hamas fighters through the fence separating the territory from Israel. That green light has reordered the Middle East on a scale comparable to the Arab Spring or the carving up of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century - but not remotely in the ways Sinwar had in mind. 29 months later, the Middle East is almost unrecognizable. Israel stands indisputably as the military hegemon, its enemies demolished or decapitated. Sinwar is dead and the network he hoped would ride to his rescue is in ruins.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was blown up in a joint U.S.-Israeli airstrike on Saturday. The regime that bankrolled and armed the "axis of resistance" for four decades is on the edge of collapse - perhaps taking with it Hamas, Hizbullah and the Houthis. Tehran is making enemies of the entire region - firing drones and missiles haphazardly, and often including civilian targets.

On Oct. 6, 2023, it was all different. Iran's proxy network was at the peak of its power. Hamas governed Gaza. Hizbullah held Lebanon hostage with 100,000 rockets. Assad sat in Damascus, reintegrating into the Arab League after years of isolation. The Houthis controlled the Yemeni coast and menaced shipping lanes with near-impunity.

Behind them all stood Iran, with a nuclear program viewed as an imminent threat in Jerusalem and the West, backed by a missile arsenal regarded as a strong deterrent against direct Israeli or American attack. Gulf nations were quietly reestablishing ties with the Islamic republic. "Two years later, none of those pillars are standing, and the Islamic republic is never going to be the same," said Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group.

What Sinwar set off was an unraveling of everything he and his sponsors yearned for - a defeated Israel, Palestinian hopes for statehood, a Middle East rid of Western influence. "Talk about a colossal miscalculation leading to catastrophic consequences," said Bilal Saab, a Chatham House fellow and former Pentagon official. "That cataclysmic event single-handedly changed the face of the Middle East."

Since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel has neutralized every major threat on its borders. A former senior Israel Defense Forces official said, "There is still war, but I can tell you that no one but the biggest dreamers ever thought we would be in the position we are in now. Israel is not untouchable, but we have made it very expensive to touch us."

AIJAC welcomes decision to list Hizb ut-Tahrir as a prohibited hate group

The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) welcomes the decision to list Hizb ut-Tahrir as a prohibited hate group under the new legislation introduced following the Bondi terror attack. AIJAC has long called for Hizb ut-Tahrir to be formally proscribed, given its well-documented record of extreme Islamist ideology, antisemitic incitement and hostility to Australia’s democratic values.

This designation, the first of its kind under the new hate group legislation, is an important and necessary step in confronting the spread of extremist ideology that threatens social cohesion, public safety and the fundamental values of Australian society. Under the listing, individuals who are members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, recruit for it, or provide training, funding or material support to the organisation, will now be in breach of the law.

By formally designating Hizb ut-Tahrir as a prohibited hate group, authorities are sending a clear message that organisations which promote intolerance, division and extremism have no place in Australia.

AIJAC commends the Government and law-enforcement authorities for taking this important step and urges continued vigilance to ensure that extremist groups and those who support them are held fully accountable under the law.

Actress asks 'where are the college campuses' protesting Iranian regime

British Iranian actress Nazanin Boniadi called out progressive activists for their lack of outrage over the regime's human rights violations before President Donald Trump conducted military strikes against the nation.

The "Rings of Power" actress appeared on CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper" Wednesday to discuss the ongoing war against Iran and concerns over the vacuum of leadership in the nation after the U.S. eliminated its leaders.

She agreed with concerns that an ISIS-level threat could take over the country but noted that several human rights activists and organizations did not acknowledge civilian deaths until after the U.S. targeted Iran.

"For people who care about international law as I do, I'm getting plenty of messages from colleagues in entertainment and saying, ‘I’m so sorry in this moment, what's happening to your people.' Thank you, but where were you a few weeks ago, when tens of thousands of Iranians were being killed by their own regime?" Boniadi asked. "This is a regime that has been violating international law for decades."

Tapper remarked that he also hadn't "really heard a ton" from international progressive activists regarding Iran's human rights violations, even after the nation launched hundreds of missile and drone strikes against other Muslim-majority countries in retaliation.

"I mean, if any other country did that, I think there'd be a huge hue and cry and huge marches in the streets. Iran does it, and there really isn't that result in the progressive community. What do you make of that?" Tapper asked.

"Look, in 1979, progressives world over, including in Iran, were all too willing to sacrifice women‘s rights, LGBTQ+ rights and every other basic human rights at the altar of anti-imperialism. Are we going to do the same in this moment? Are we really caring more about whose hands are on the trigger, or are we going to care about human lives, civilian lives?" Boniadi answered.

"This is a regime that has violated human rights," she continued. "International law has wreaked havoc on the region, domestic oppression, transnational repression, hostage diplomacy, destabilizing the region. And now, it's killing fellow Muslims in neighboring countries. Where is your outrage? Where are the college campuses?"

Boniadi, whose family fled Tehran for England following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, has been a longtime supporter of Iranian protesters and has previously used her career to highlight atrocities conducted by the Iranian regime.

03/05 Links Pt1: Who Wants This War?; The New Israeli Rules of Engagement; Iran ‘catastrophically’ miscalculated in striking Arab countries; Israel eases wartime restrictions, offices to reopen

From Ian:

Lee Smith: Who Wants This War?

The name given to the Iran campaign, Operation Epic Fury, suggests that Donald Trump’s political trajectory may have begun with the 1979 embassy takeover. It was plain proof that America was losing, and it inspired him to turn things around. America’s defeat in Vietnam, left-wing political violence, and rampant drug use left our country sucking wind during the ’70s. But the embassy siege was a public humiliation that lasted 444 days, during which the revolutionary cadres ground our faces in excrement: “The United States has made threats and raised a great deal of noise,” said Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “America can’t do a damn thing.” And because America didn’t do a damn thing, it acclimated itself to losing to Iran and its regional allies.

President Reagan rolled back the Soviet empire but blinked after the Iranians directed Hezbollah to kill U.S. armed forces, spies, and diplomats in Beirut. Bill Clinton admitted he was a loser. After the U.S. president spent political capital and personal prestige to bully Israel into giving up land to create a state under the Iranian revolutionaries’ old friend Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian terror master told Clinton no. “I’m a colossal failure,” Clinton told Arafat. “And you made me one.”

George W. Bush’s global war on terror turned Iran into a regional hegemon, presiding over what was for a time known as the Shiite crescent, reaching from the Persian Gulf to the eastern Mediterranean. Democratizing Iraq meant ensuring power would rest with the country’s Shiite majority, whose political leaders, with few exceptions, were controlled by Tehran. Even though the administration had been warned that elections in the Palestinian territories would lead to a Hamas victory, Bush’s Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pushed for elections, which the Iranian-backed terror group won, leading to Hamas’ eventual takeover of Gaza. As if the freedom agenda hadn’t done enough harm to American regional interests, Bush stopped Israel’s 2006 war against Hezbollah to protect a Lebanese government the administration saw as a beacon of democracy, even if it was controlled by Hezbollah.

By withdrawing from Obama’s nuclear deal and from guarantees to protect Iran’s bomb against Israeli attacks, Trump started to roll back the losing. In January 2020, he helped initiate the terror regime’s eventual death spiral by liquidating Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, Iran’s expeditionary terror unit. “Soleimani has been perpetrating acts of terror to destabilize the Middle East for the last 20 years,” said Trump. And what the United States did “should have been done long ago,” Trump said. “A lot of lives would have been saved.”

That is, because America had gotten used to losing, because previous presidents had neglected the normal business of protecting U.S. citizens, Americans died. Trump promised victory. “I will not hesitate to deploy military force when there is no alternative. But if America fights, it must only fight to win,” Trump said in an April 2016 speech. “I will never send our finest into battle unless necessary, and I mean absolutely necessary, and will only do so if we have a plan for victory with a capital V.”

So why didn’t the influencers opposed to Trump’s Iran campaign hear that part, that what distinguished him from his predecessors wasn’t that he renounced violence against our enemies—far from it—but that he swore to win? Further, here’s a president who means not only to dismantle Iran’s threat to Americans but also to avenge the many thousands of Americans kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the Iranians in the past five decades. That’s epic fury revising in fire and steel 47 years of American defeat at the hands of an anti-American regime that no U.S. president dared to challenge until Trump.

For normal Americans, it’s inspiring to see a commander in chief picking up the gauntlet for the purpose of killing terrorists who target Americans. More than 80% of the president’s party thinks so. And thus there’s no question that the campaign run by Carlson, Kelly, Walsh, and the others is designed to demoralize Americans. The tell isn’t that they don’t know the history but that their accounts are congested with lies. Maybe they’re lying for clicks and views; maybe they’re being paid by foreign parties. In the end, the external drivers are irrelevant because the crucial factor is that the demoralizers are themselves demoralized.

Winning is hard and losing is easy. Now, after embracing the ethos of losing, and elevating it as a sign of personal virtue, the demoralizers find themselves very clearly on the losing end—on the side of the ayatollahs and at odds with the White House and the Pentagon’s display of military dominance in the skies over Iran. The lesson is that losers love company, even if that company wears clerical robes stained with the blood of thousands of Americans and many hundreds of thousands of innocent people throughout the Middle East. As the history of the American hard left shows, there is no way out of that kind of ugly bitterness, in part because that’s where history’s most determined losers feel most comfortable. For the rest of us, winning is preferable.

Amit Segal: The New Israeli Rules of Engagement

On Oct. 6, 2023, the Israeli defense establishment realized something was stirring in Gaza but failed to act. Officials were paralyzed by the fear of a miscalculation. Decades of containment, restraint and forbearance had made Israel slow to stir and vulnerable in appearance. Two and a half years later, Israel stands at the pinnacle of its power in the Middle East - a transformation that occurred only after it shed rules it had adopted in recent decades.

There are new rules of the game. For years, Israel shied away from targeted killings, granting terror leaders and Iranian officials the time and peace of mind to plot against the Jewish state. The IDF's new mindset is the exact opposite: If terrorists are running for their lives, they can't make plans to take ours.

Another rule is: when enemies announce their intention to destroy you, believe them. "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" aren't lip service or empty words. They are mission statements.

Ignoring small security problems invites larger ones. Israel fled Gaza to avoid improvised explosive devices and shooting attacks, only to be attacked by two commando divisions with the world's largest tunnel network at their disposal. It withdrew from Lebanon because it couldn't stomach 20 fallen soldiers a year; in exchange, Hizbullah entrenched itself on the border with a missile arsenal rivaled by few global powers.

For years, the enemy fired rockets and Israel replied with "proportional" force. This normalized the firing on civilians, kidnapping and invasion. But this changed after Oct. 7. Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah thought he was still playing by the old rules, launching a few rockets daily. It ended with his elimination, the decapitation of his organization, and the destruction of 80% of their missile stockpile.

The new rules are in effect in the operation launched on Saturday. The Jewish state can't accept the existence in Iran of production facilities and thousands of ballistic missiles, with every launch sending half of Israel into shelters and threatening mass casualties. It can't tolerate a regime that continues to fund its greatest enemies with more than a billion dollars annually.

President Trump understood that Iran is a danger to regional and world peace. Iran's attacks on peaceful Gulf states and Cyprus show what they would have done had they been allowed to develop nuclear weapons. This war will save us from the necessity of many others.

A Weakened Iran Is Already a Victory

In the war against Iran, something major has already happened. An evil and powerful regime that has destabilized the world for nearly half a century has been significantly weakened.

Aware that its fearsome reputation has crumbled and it is now in survival mode, Iran is hoping that the hundreds of missiles and drones it is launching against Israel, American bases and Gulf countries will regain some of its honor and help it survive.

But no matter what happens, something earth-shattering has already happened in the Middle East. The world's biggest sponsor of terror has lost its power to terrorize the world.

A nation that for decades has proudly trumpeted "Death to America" and "Death to Israel" is now worried about its own death.

A nation that threatened to destroy Israel with nuclear weapons is now worried about its own destruction.

Since 1979, the arrogant mullahs of Iran have been spreading their toxic poison and getting away with it.

This week, as we commemorate the failure of another Persian named Haman to destroy the Jews 2,500 years ago, these arrogant mullahs are getting a taste of their own medicine.

Pakistan Alarmed That India May Deploy Non-Open-Sewer Technology (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Islamabad, March 5 - Defense officials and planners in the Islamic republic of Pakistan voiced increased anxiety this week amid reports that the country's chief regional rival has mastered and will soon make operational a system that Pakistan has long feared: plumbing and waster-disposal systems that run in closed conduits that do not pose health and safety hazards.

Sources within the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) described the development as a potential “game-changer in the subcontinental sanitation deterrence equation.” Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior planner at General Headquarters in Rawalpindi noted that open-sewer networks have historically provided Pakistan with certain asymmetric advantages. “For generations,” the official explained, “our drainage infrastructure has maintained a level of strategic transparency. Effluent remains visible, accessible, and — crucially — public. This openness serves as both a deterrent and a confidence-building measure. Closed systems introduce unacceptable ambiguity.”

Intelligence assessments circulating in defense circles suggest India’s new closed-conduit technology, reportedly rolled out in phases across major urban centers under the Swachh Bharat Mission’s extended infrastructure phase, could render traditional fall-in incidents obsolete. Analysts warn that without exposed channels, the risk calculus shifts dramatically: pedestrians and livestock would no longer enjoy the same predictable interaction with municipal waste streams, potentially reducing accidental immersion rates by as much as 40–60 percent in border-adjacent districts.

The concern extends beyond tactical considerations. “If India achieves full sewer enclosure,” one retired brigadier remarked during a closed-door seminar in Islamabad, “it gains not only public-health superiority but also psychological dominance. Our citizens have grown accustomed to navigating open nullahs as part of daily life — a shared national experience. A rival that conceals its waste behind concrete and pipe is, frankly, playing hide-and-seek with destiny.”

Ministry of Defence spokespersons declined to confirm whether contingency planning now includes simulated “covered-drain wargames,” though unverified leaks indicate tabletop exercises have begun incorporating variables such as manhole-cover integrity and odor-containment efficacy. One simulation allegedly modeled a scenario in which Indian closed sewers enable faster troop movements during monsoon seasons by eliminating the need for frequent de-silting halts.

Critics within Pakistan’s strategic community argue the anxiety may be overstated. “Closed does not mean invincible,” countered a Lahore-based defense commentator. “Pipes can burst. Manholes can still be pried open. The spirit of open defiance endures.” Still, the prevailing mood in planning rooms remains one of guarded alarm. The competence and concern for citizenry smacks suspiciously of Zionism. As one anonymous colonel put it: “We have always believed in facing our problems head-on — literally. The prospect of an enemy that no longer requires its citizens to do the same is profoundly unsettling.”

Officials stressed that Pakistan remains committed to its time-tested model of visible, participatory sanitation. No immediate countermeasures, such as accelerated open-drain expansion, have been announced.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

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What seems to have really happened at the girl's school in MInab

The New York Times reports:

Top Trump administration officials said on Wednesday that they were still investigating whether it was a U.S. airstrike that hit a girls elementary school in Iran on the opening day of the war.

The strike was one of the deadliest attacks of the American-Israeli campaign against Iran so far, killing at least 175 people, most of whom were likely children, according to state media and health officials.

It is not clear why the school was hit, or which country’s forces fired at it.

This is an astounding story because it doesn't mention the proximity of the school to a major IRGC naval compound, which was also hit, multiple times, in the same raid.

The girls' school was originally within the IRGC compound; it was separated around 2016. Even today you can see the wall around the entire complex. The school is in the upper left of this image (my Google Earth screenshot.).

NPR and Planet Labs catalogued all the airstrikes - seven, by their count - based on satellite image analysis:

Seven identified strikes. One hit the school.

From everything we can tell, this was a mistake based on outdated intelligence thinking the school building was still part of the complex. In fact, the school was primarily built to provide education to children of IRGC members who work in the complex, according to Al Jazeera.

But Al Jazeera is not willing to give the Americans a pass. They say:

What had been a single unified military complex became three independent sectors, clearly distinguishable in satellite imagery: The Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school, separated since 2016 with its own walls and gates; the Martyr Absalan Specialised Clinic, separated since early 2025 with an independent civilian entrance; and the Sayyid al-Shuhada military complex, which remained a closed and active site.

When the US-Israeli attack began on the morning of February 28, 2026, analysis of the strike locations revealed an odd pattern: Missiles hit the military base and the school, but bypassed the specialised clinic complex located between the two without touching it.

This exclusion cannot be explained as a coincidence; it strongly indicates that the executing party was operating with coordinates and maps that distinguished between the complex’s different facilities.

Here lies the fundamental contradiction exposed by this investigation: If the intelligence was up to date enough to spare a clinic that had been open for only one year, how did it fail to identify an elementary school that had been separated from the military complex and had become a clearly defined civilian institution for more than 10 years?

There is only one problem with this analysis: the Planet Labs image clearly shows that the clinic suffered a direct hit as well (the lower yellow L-shaped polygon.) You can see the black hole in the Planet Labs image that was clearly not there in the Google Earth image above it.

And this Planet Labs high resolution image makes it even clearer that the clinic suffered a direct hit.

If both the clinic and the school were hit, then that indicates that the attackers were tragically working with outdated intelligence. (My guess is that this was the US, since Israel's main focus on the first day was Iranian leaders, anti-aircraft defenses and ballistic missile launchers.)

But publicizing the clinic would be problematic for Iran; photos would have almost certainly shown the damage to the other IRGC buildings surrounding it which would weaken the claim of an intentional attack on schoolchildren.

This could be why Iran didn't trumpet a US hit on a medical clinic. In this case, it would hurt the propaganda effort, not help it.

This could also account for the high death toll that Iran attributes to the airstrike at the school. Chances seem high to me that Iran counted all the casualties - from the clinic, school and the military complex - and said they were all at the school. This way the hospitals and morgues really were filled up, but not with students, but with a mix of victims of seven airstrikes. A death toll of 175 people from a single airstrike is plausible but would be quite high (although satellite images show that more than half the school is rubble.)

Iran was careful to show photos of the school and pretend that this was the only target, and the media filled in the rest with the presumption that all the deaths Iran blamed on the school strike really were from there.

From all evidence, this was not a false flag Iranian operation. It was not a misfired Iranian rocket, as some claimed. And neither the school nor the clinic were hit by collateral damage from the IRGC building strikes.

The entire compound remains primarily IRGC. The school and clinic, even though later separated, were built for IRGC personnel and their families. This does not make them legitimate targets, but when you look at the entire picture, it seems clear that this was an intelligence failure based on outdated information.

Because 100% of the buildings hit were IRGC buildings in the not-too-distant past.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

In Part 1 we identified the structural mismatch between how the Western world treats war and how revolutionary movements do.

To the West, as codified in the UN Charter and elsewhere, war it treated as an episode with a beginning and an end. But revolutionary movements treat it as a permanent condition that merely changes form.

If that analysis is correct, it should be visible in the historical record. And it It is, with a consistency that is difficult to explain any other way. And understanding this makes us understand that the revolutionary mentality is a challenge not just to Western societies but to the entire rules based international order.

Consider the conflicts that define the modern era of asymmetric warfare.

The Israeli-Arab conflict stated before Israel with the desire of Arab states to stop or destroy the Jewish state. On a national level, it was obviously a threat to Israel's existence, but the national character of Israel's enemies allowed them to have a measure of pragmatism, seen in the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, and more recently in the Abraham Accords. Before the Six Day War, however, the Palestinian leadership adopted a revolutionary model, where the war would continue until Israel is destroyed - whether by military, legal or demographic means.

So Oslo was not a peace treaty in the way the Camp David accords were. It was a means towards the same goal that Yasir Arafat defines int he 1970s - destroying Israel in stages. This is why the Second Intifada followed Palestinian rejection of a state - it was a new tactic in the same war. The war - which is still called a revolution by the PLO and Fatah - never ended, and there is no prospect for it ever ending. Fatah and Hamas disagree on tactics but they agree on the goal.

Afghanistan consumed a Soviet empire and then an American one. The Taliban were removed from power in 2001 with startling speed. They spent the next twenty years doing what Mao prescribed: organizing, propagandizing, and waiting. When the occupying force finally exhausted its patience and left, the Taliban returned within weeks. The episode ended; the movement hadn't.

Hezbollah has been at war with Israel since 1982. Even after Israel withdrew from Southern Lebanon behind UN-certified borders, Hezbollah did not disband - it continued to use Lebanon as a military launching pad against Israel, it continued to build a massive military, it continued to threaten war and terror. After the 2006 war, including UN resolutions on how to maintain peace and with a UN force overseeing it, Hezbollah patiently rebuilt its arsenal from tens of thousands of rockets to hundreds of thousands, embedding them in civilian infrastructure across southern Lebanon. The international framework produced exactly one outcome: time for Hezbollah to prepare the next round. Which is what revolutionary theory demands.

Iran has been at war with the West since 1979 — through hostage crises, through proxy networks spanning four continents, through nuclear negotiations, through the JCPOA and its collapse, through missile strikes on American bases, through the funding and arming of every significant anti-Western terror organization in the Middle East. Each confrontation was treated by the West as a discrete incident to be managed. Iran treated each one as a phase in a continuous revolutionary struggle to build a Shiite Crescent - an "axis of resistance" - way beyond its borders.

This is how revolutionary continuous-war conflicts work. Which makes defeating them extraordinarily difficult. And one example from recent history shows this starkly.

The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam - the Tamil Tigers - had waged one of the most sophisticated and brutal insurgencies in modern history for over twenty-six years. They invented the suicide belt. They operated a navy and an air force. They controlled significant territory. They were, by any measure, a formidable revolutionary movement with deep ideological roots and genuine popular support among Tamil civilians.

In May 2009, the Sri Lankan military cornered the last remnants of the LTTE in a tiny coastal strip in the north of the country. And then it destroyed them in a matter of weeks.

It did so by ignoring virtually everything the international community demanded. They were ruthless, they did not care about civilian casualties, they didn't care about humanitarian corridors or feeding the enemy. The military advanced regardless of UN condemnation and international pressure. It killed or captured the entire LTTE leadership. It destroyed the movement's military capacity completely.

The civilian death toll in those final months was catastrophic. Estimates range from ten thousand to forty thousand. The Sri Lankan government has never been fully held accountable. International human rights organizations documented what they described as war crimes.

And the war ended. Permanently. There was no pause, no ceasefire, no temporary de-escalation to allow hostage swaps. The LTTE has not reconstituted. The revolutionary engine was destroyed completely and it has not restarted.

The lesson is brutal and unavoidable: the only successful termination of a genuine revolutionary continuous-war conflict in recent history required doing exactly what the international framework prohibits - pursuing total destruction of the movement without pause, without negotiation, without regard for international legal norms, until the engine that generated the conflict could no longer function.

I'm not condoning the atrocities that Sri Lanka are said to have done. But the West has not considered the downside of the alternative - allowing a terror group to continuously regroup and keep murdering until it reaches its goal. International law means to protect the innocent but it also protects the non-state actors who attack the innocent and plan to keep doing so. It is a broken mechanism - because it still thinks of wars as episodic and not continuous.

As we have mentioned, international law requires an imminent threat before starting a war. But modern revolutionary wars do not start neatly and they weaponize the episodic war assumptions of international law. This can be seen in a brilliant analogy given Israeli analyst Shany Mor:

Israel is supposed to accept the presence of armed militias dedicated to its destruction either because Israel is so strong that it could meet any threat or because meeting the threat now would be too costly. It means that the deterrence Israel is supposed to exercise over its enemies is purely theoretical. I call this the avocado model of deterrence. The conditions for Israeli military action are always not ripe, not ripe, not ripe, and then way too late.

Avocado deterrence was the rule with Hizballah in Lebanon after 2006 just as it was the rule with Arafat and Hamas in the West Bank in the 1990s and 2000s. And nowhere was the avocado principle more dearly held to than in Gaza. Hamas rockets were something Israel needed to learn to tolerate or even accept that it deserved. ...Any Israeli preventive action against the growing arsenal of rockets and tunnels was, as it was always asserted, an overreaction to an exaggerated threat.

Until the threat is too big and a response would incur unacceptable costs. Which is what happened with Hamas and Hezbollah and Iran.

The imminence doctrine doesn't just fail against this strategy. It actively serves it. By requiring a moment of clear and present danger before action is legally justified, it hands the adversary a precise target to stay below. The legal framework becomes a roadmap for how to build threat without triggering response.

But earlier response to possible enemies brings its own set of problems, Any loosening of moral standards can be used by malign states to suppress legitimate dissent. These problems are genuinely hard, but we need to be clear-eyed about what morality demands and the tradeoffs involved — because refusing to grapple with them honestly hands a decisive advantage to those who would destroy the liberal democratic model entirely.

The historical record is grim - except for one model that seemingly violates international law, yet avoided the horrors of Sri Lanka.

In June 1981, Israeli jets destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor outside Baghdad. The entire world condemned it. The UN Security Council passed a unanimous resolution censuring Israel. Legal scholars called it a flagrant violation of international law. Iraq was years away from a nuclear weapon. The threat was not ripe.

Thirty years later, after the Gulf War revealed what Saddam Hussein had actually intended, Dick Cheney sent Israeli General David Ivri ,who planned the Osirak raid, a note thanking him for preventing the US from facing a nuclear armed Iraq.

Osirak didn't end a forever war. It prevented one. And the price Israel paid for that prevention was universal condemnation for acting before the threat was - in the view of international law - ripe.

Every mechanism the West designed to end wars - ceasefires, negotiations, international pressure, legal constraints - has been used by revolutionary movements as a tool for continuing them. They were designed for adversaries who share the goal of ending conflicts, not to continue them forever.

The mismatch between episodic and continuous war theory isn't an accident of history or a failure of imagination by well-meaning institution builders. Revolutionary doctrine, from Mao through Gramsci through its Islamist inheritors, explicitly studied Western liberal democracy's moral commitments and built a strategy around exploiting them.

Liberal democracies cannot easily strike first without overwhelming evidence of a direct and imminent threat. They cannot sustain long wars because their electoral cycles demand results. They cannot ignore civilian casualties because their values demand restraint. They cannot dismiss legal criticism because their legitimacy depends partly on institutional standing. Every one of these constraints, genuine and honorable in origin, becomes a weapon in the hands of an adversary who shares none of them and has no intention of being bound by them.

This is why every exit from these conflicts accepted in the West degrades the liberal democratic side somehow. Strike early and you're the aggressor. Strike late and you've absorbed catastrophic damage. Negotiate and you've handed them time and legitimacy. Accept deterrence and you've accepted permanent attrition.

The revolutionary side doesn't need to win today. It needs you to have no good options. And it has spent decades making sure you don't.

We need to rethink the entire theory of war and then build a framework that can prioritize protecting one's own people over those of the enemy. Because that is what real morality demands. And Osirak gives a hint of how such a theory should be built.

That is what we will attempt to tackle next.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/04 Links Pt2: Iran’s shadow in Australia’s antisemitism debate; 5 Reasons Why Paraguay Matters to Israel and the Jewish People; Newsom’s Bright Idea: Defund Allies in Wartime

From Ian:

Iran’s shadow in Australia’s antisemitism debate

The political response in Canberra over the past week found a predictable reaction from the Australian Greens, led by Senator Larissa Waters. She focused squarely on condemning the military strike itself. Waters said: “The Greens condemn these illegal, abhorrent and unilateral attacks. Australians do not want to be dragged into another US-Israeli war.” She added: “Australia’s support of Trump and Netanyahu’s illegal attack last night was disgraceful. We cannot bomb our way to peace.”

In a climate of heightened sensitivity, such statements by Larissa Waters are adding fuel to the fire of a political debate already saturated with anxiety about antisemitism, extremism and foreign influence.

For Australian Jews, this convergence of events creates a uniquely complex terrain to navigate.

On one hand, many in the Jewish community view Khamenei’s leadership as synonymous with a regime that has called for Israel’s destruction, funded armed proxies targeting Jewish civilians, and, according to Australian reporting, been linked to antisemitic criminal activity domestically. On the other hand, public mourning gatherings in Australia are being defended by organisers as religious observances rooted in Shi’a tradition rather than explicit political endorsements. I see this as a thinly veiled platform to further criticise Israel and call for Australians to “globalise the Intifada”.

Layered onto that is a polarised political environment in which anti-war rhetoric, foreign policy debates, and diaspora identities intersect in unpredictable ways. The result is not a simple story of opposing camps, but a dense and emotionally charged national moment. Expressions of grief in one community are interpreted as ideological alignment by another. Political denunciations of military action are heard by some as moral consistency, and by others as insufficiently attuned to the security fears of Jewish Australians.

As the Royal Commission gathers evidence and tests the boundaries between free expression, foreign alignment, and hate, this episode illustrates the difficulty of drawing clean lines. In an era where overseas conflicts are instantly absorbed into Australia’s domestic discourse, symbols carry weight far beyond their immediate setting. For Australian Jews, the landscape is therefore not defined by a single event but by the cumulative effect of rising incident data, geopolitical reverberations, and the knowledge that narratives formed abroad can reshape the social climate at home.

In the meantime, Australia finds itself needing to balance principles of pluralism and freedom with a pressing need for security and cohesion. For many Jewish Australians, that balance feels more delicate than it has in decades. My prayers are with the most pro-Jewish US president of my lifetime, Donald Trump, as he attempts to rid the world of the most dangerous and evil regime in the history of the world in Iran.

Seth Mandel: A 2028 Contender Bets on the Nazi Tattoo Guy

Gallego’s move was important because he is testing the waters for a possible presidential run in 2028. He’s betting that the Nazi tattoo guy is where the country’s headed.

And how does Gallego himself talk about Israel? Not great. After backing Platner, he had this to say on the Iran conflict: “So Netanyahu now decides when we go to war? So much for America First.” A Democratic senator with national ambitions sounding indistinguishable from woke-right podcasters is a bad sign of what’s to come.

If the party’s officeholders engage in an Israel-bashing arms race, the distinction they think they are making between anti-Semitism and spirited criticism of Israel’s government becomes functionally meaningless. Moreover, what kind of atmosphere does this create for Jews who consider themselves part of the Democratic coalition? If the party’s prominent electeds egg on the post-tentifada atmosphere in which synagogues are mobbed by violent Hamas apologists calling for an intifada, does Ruben Gallego get to wash his hands of the repercussions of his actions simply because he didn’t say “Jews have horns”?

Now imagine Ruben Gallego and Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest assuring Jewish Democrats that they oppose hatred in all its forms including antisemitismandislamophobia. Feel better? Of course not. Recently, Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen publicly suggested AIPAC is anti-American. What’s he accomplishing besides further encouraging the anti-Semites? Nothing. They hear every dog whistle loud and clear.

What’s happening here is the creation of an environment in which anti-Semitism will grow and prosper with almost nothing to slow it down. There will be less and less room for non-closeted supporters of Israel. And that will continue until the electoral incentives in the Democratic Party change. Ruben Gallego is betting they won’t.

Students for the ayatollah

You do not have to support the US intervention in Iran to be alarmed by the students shedding tears for the ayatollah. Under his rule, Iranian authorities violently suppressed dissent. They arrested, tortured and executed those who spoke out against the Islamic Republic. Mandatory hijab-wearing is imposed by law, with security forces routinely capturing and punishing women for dress-code violations. In 2022, 22-year-old Kurd Mahsa Amini died after being detained by Iran’s morality police, sparking the Woman, Life, Freedom protests across the country. Amini had just been admitted to a university in Urmia to study biology. Yet in 2026, students at a top London university openly celebrate the regime that killed her.

When it comes to the keffiyeh-wearing tote-bag-resistance class, many of whom grew up in Kent or Surrey and know nothing of Iran, Islamism or anything else, it is easy to dismiss such ayatollah apologism as ignorance, stupidity or naivety. Indeed, the bizarre notion that Islamic extremists – from Hamas and Hezbollah to the ayatollahs – are a part of some ‘global left alliance’ has a long, shameful history among post-class ‘progressives’. Meanwhile, Britain’s Islamists, who are legion on modern campuses, understand perfectly well what they are supporting and why when they express grief for Khamenei.

Since the student vigils started garnering attention in the press, the MSC has hit back, accusing the media of trying to ‘smear Shia Muslim students’. It also claims that accusations of ‘extremism’ are ‘Islamophobic’ for focussing on a ‘fake issue’ that ‘does not exist in the UK’.

The trouble is, the embrace of Islamist fanaticism is sadly nothing new for British universities. We saw it in October 2023, when students at Oxford chanted ‘Long live the intifada’ on campus. We saw it last year, when a ‘feminist’ society at Goldsmiths held a ‘night of remembrance’ for the butchers and rapists of the 7 October pogrom. No doubt we shall see more of it tonight, when the University of Manchester holds its candlelit vigil in honour of the supreme leader’s memory.

These campus celebrations of Islamic tyranny can no longer be dismissed as simple naivety or youthful radicalism. It is now a fixture of British universities and beyond. Those weeping for the ayatollah know they are on the side of barbarism.

03/04 Links Pt1: With Iran attacking the region, Israel has the chance to step out of the villain role; The US and Israel are fighting the same war — in opposite political realities

From Ian:

JPost Editorial: With Iran attacking the region, Israel has the chance to step out of the villain role

While much of the Jewish world marked Purim yesterday, Jerusalem is celebrating it today. The reason rests within Jewish law and memory. In antiquity, Jerusalem was a walled city, so it observes Purim on Adar 15, a day later than most communities in what Jews call Shushan Purim (Purim in walled cities).

Per the Book of Esther, Jews in Persia’s capital, Shushan, fought one more day, thus celebrated one day later. Jerusalem keeps that tradition alive, as if the city insists on living within the tale’s original rhythm.

One phrase from Purim captures the holiday’s spirit better than any military briefing. It is the term v’nahafoch hu, which suggests that all on this day is the opposite, all on this day is flipped upside down.

In the megillah, the plot reverses: The threatened become the defenders, the confident become the anxious, and the power dynamics turn upside down. Jerusalem reads that line in the scroll today with costumes in the street and, this year, with a war in the background.

The war has already delivered its own v’nahafoch hu.

A War Too Logical to Explain By Abe Greenwald
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The amnesiacs are forgetting America’s case for war on Iran not because the regime’s crimes directly caused them trauma. They’re discarding it, rather, because what’s traumatic for them is to accept that Israel, the U.S., and Donald Trump are doing the right, moral, and necessary thing—after so many administrations allowed the threat to grow.

This problem, like most of our current maladies, manifests in different versions on the left and right. To many on the left, American action abroad is by definition criminal. So, too, are the existence of Israel and Trump’s exercise of presidential power. Only the enemies of the U.S. and the Jewish state are righteous in the use of deadly force.

A smaller contingent on the right shares the left’s hostility to Israel and sees any shared goals between it and the U.S. as the deceptive product of Jewish manipulation. Alliances in general are a zero-sum trap for an America that must always shoulder the burden. Indeed, these populist right-wingers have anathematized a whole range of concepts and terms that would otherwise explain Trump’s decision to strike. Preemptive war is immediately suspect and specifically unacceptable absent an imminent threat. American military intervention becomes morally tainted if a byproduct of its success is the protection or liberation of non-Americans. And regime change is the language of madmen and fools.

For years, Trump helped to promote these anti-historical attitudes. They now permeate different parts of MAGA to varying degrees. As a result, he and his administration are at a loss to explain what they clearly now understand: that strong alliances based on shared values are the guarantors of civilization, and that the U.S.-Israel alliance is the strongest of all; that it’s better to strike one’s enemies before they pose an imminent threat; that liberation from tyranny is a rare miracle that the United States alone can facilitate in foreign lands; and that, except in wars over land, regime change is the only way that wars end.

Administration figures have instead offered thin, sometimes contradictory, justifications for Operation Epic Fury. These attempts at assuaging right-wing skeptics only stoke the populist suspicion that they’re being lied to. And they are, only not in the way they think. Trump isn’t protecting the secret agenda of an all-powerful cabal. He’s hiding the fact that he took his base for a wild ride only to return to the boring but valuable realities of establishment statecraft.

Spoiled by Peace, Again By Abe Greenwald
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When the U.S. went to war with Iran, more Americans disapproved than approved of the decision. But two new polls, one by Fox News and the other by Politico, show the country is now split almost evenly on the question. The change isn’t surprising. American and Israeli forces have done an incredible job of targeting the regime and its weapons, and success is a sure path to popularity. But when support for a war hangs on day-to-day military fortunes, that war is only as popular as the latest developments.

If Americans were down on the war from the start, and if that’s their baseline attitude, I suspect it has a lot less to do with the logical reasons for skepticism that pundits cite and more to do with feelings toward Donald Trump and ideas about America’s general safety.

There are, of course, many Americans who are unable to support anything that Trump does. Given that the president’s popularity has taken a big hit over the past year, I doubt he’d have made much headway with the public regarding Iran even if he and his administration hadn’t offered a confusing account of its war aims and painted a very blurry portrait of victory.

But beyond the public’s feelings about Trump, there’s the matter of how Americans think about threats to the country. The fact is, it’s very hard for many of us to believe that foreign actors or countries pose a threat to the United States so great as to require military action.

There are multiple reasons for this. One is that a massive majority of living Americans have enjoyed some or all of what’s called the Long Peace—the period from the end of World War II to the present. When your life coincides with a stretch of history during which there has been no great-power conflict, you can begin to believe that’s the norm. And if your own country—the United States—is the chief cause and guarantor of that peace, you’re even more likely to believe in it.

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the author, weekly Judean Rose columnist Varda Meyers Epstein. Trigger warning for descriptions of violence.

The West’s political left can’t seem to decide what it stands for. Is it for gay rights and “love is love,” or is it for Hamas torturing gays? When leftist activists chant “from the river to the sea,” does this mean they want the entirety of the territory to be ruled by a government that suspends gays by their hands from the ceiling for hours?

It cannot be that this really is the left’s preferred option when the other one is Israel—the only country in the region where gays have full rights and protections by law. But never say this out loud, lest you be accused of “pinkwashing,” a term coined to describe those who would exonerate Israel from all crimes because the Israeli government is “nice” to gays. In fact, having a handy-dandy term like “pinkwashing” is what allows anti-Israel activists to look away from the cruel treatment gays receive at the hands of Hamas even as the LGBTQ crowd continues to demonize the Jewish State.

By the same token, Democrats and leftist activists are horrified by Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion, and by the decimation of the fanatic, repressive Iranian regime—even as Iranians take to the streets to celebrate, singing “Bibi Joon” (Bibi Dear) and doing Trump’s YMCA dance.

And it’s not just the men. Iranian women, too, are celebrating their freedom, gifted to them at great cost by Israel and the United States. They openly dance in the streets, burn their hijabs, and mark the end of a tyrannical regime and its ruler, going so far as to light posters of Khamenei on fire with lit cigarettes—the cigarette a symbol of the freedom they had finally gained to do as they wished.

Why, then, do leftist activists and Democrats not celebrate with the people in the streets of Tehran? Why don’t they take pride in the part their country played in granting them freedom from tyranny?

You would think that the socialists, at least, would be for the average Iranian Joe on the street. But no—New York City’s controversial socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, condemned the war and said that the “military strikes on Iran—carried out by the United States and Israel—mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians.”

Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war. Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit…
— Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@NYCMayor) February 28, 2026

In actuality, the war of aggression was that of the Iranian regime against its own people.

In other words, Islamist movements like Hamas and the Islamic Republic adhere to a religious code that criminalizes the very people Western activists claim to defend. Which begs the question: if your political identity is built around protecting sexual minorities, why are you marching for a movement that hangs them? If your political identity is all about empowering women, why do you support a regime that rules through repression? Under Khamenei, women were compelled by law to wear the hijab. Anyone who disagreed with the regime—men or women—disappeared into prisons. Protesters were shot in the streets. And worse.

The world saw this repression play out in our own time when Mahsa Amini died in custody after being arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s dress code. Her death ignited nationwide protests. Iranian women burned their hijabs. Crowds filled the streets shouting “Death to the Dictator.”

Yet when pressure mounts against the regime—when Israel and the United States confront Iran with military might—the motley mix of Western progressive groups suddenly mobilizes in defense of the regime’s sovereignty. Coalitions of activist organizations march under banners declaring “Hands Off Iran.”

What is it they mean to say here? Hands off a regime that arrests women who show their hair? Hands off a tyrannical regime that executes dissidents and crushes the very protesters Western activists claim to support?

Why do they turn away from the Iranians who have risked their lives for decades protesting against the regime and telling the world, out loud, that they want freedom? Shouldn’t this matter to any feeling human being? Why does the left look away?

Why did Barack Obama refuse to help the Iranian protesters in 2009? They were begging for the most basic human rights. Yet Obama turned away from them, afraid to make waves. He just let them twist in the wind.

As for the days leading up to this war? Protesters were slaughtered in the tens of thousands—some estimate as many as 30,000 or more. Do the survivors not deserve the same support given to Ukraine by the very same people who now denounce the offing of Khamenei?

Apparently not—at least not according to aficionados of Western progressive groups, who suddenly mobilize in support of Khamenei when the US and Israel take action against him. Or the media, which featured loving obituaries like the one in the Washington Post that spoke of Khamenei’s “bushy white beard and easy smile,” and described him as cutting a “more avuncular figure in public” than his predecessor, Khomeini. They portrayed Khamenei as human. He liked Persian poetry and Les Misérables.

It made me think of Love Story: “What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant? That she loved Mozart and Bach, the Beatles, and me?”

What will the protesters' banners say one year from now? Who will be deemed favorable or unfavorable in their eyes? Who really decides what causes are acceptable?

Is everything that Trump does bad—even when it involves freeing the Iranian people to take charge of their own destiny?

Is everything the Jewish State of Israel does bad? Even when it comes to preventing Islamic fanatics from offing the Great and Little Satans? This is difficult to understand.

Are they for a peaceful world, safe from nuclear war? Or do they prefer being nuked to appearing grateful to Bibi for his efforts to save them—and the entire free world?

Women’s rights and LGBTQ rights “matter,” unless those who persecute women and gays happen to be associated with a cause that is intersectional with the political left. Then they are abandoned

Sometimes I wonder what an onlooker—someone neutral, perhaps from an alternate world—would say about these seeming hypocrisies. They might see them as immature, even childish.

For myself, I see the left as so many lemmings jumping off a cliff. They espouse whatever cause is popular at the moment because all the cool kids are doing it. But of course they don’t actually believe in anything. Their beliefs are predicated on the moment, neither meaningful, moral, nor firm.

You can sense this truth about their character the minute they parrot their peers. They’d rather be with the in-crowd than have their own thoughts—something that can be achieved only by dint of thinking—a tedious, and inconvenient task. There’s no value in it unless you don’t want to have friends and prefer to be shunned by the class you hope you belong to.

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IDF on the ground in Southern Lebanon to uproot Hezbollah

Naharnet/AFP reports:

Lebanese state media reported on Wednesday that the Israeli army entered the southern Lebanese town of Khiam, about six kilometers from the Lebanon-Israel border.

"The town of Khiam is witnessing continuous artillery shelling, while the Israeli enemy army penetrated into the town," state media said.

A Lebanese military source told AFP on Tuesday that Israel had launched a ground incursion into a border area in southern Lebanon, in parallel with its campaign of airstrikes.

Khiam has been traditionally a Hezbollah stronghold, and Israel bombed it repeatedly in the previous war.

Google Earth shows that Khiam is on relatively high ground and it overlooks northern Israeli towns like Metula. It is definitely strategic and important for the IDF to keep Hezbollah out of that area.

So far, Israel has been largely successful in stopping Hezbollah rockets and drones. The USS Gerald Ford is nearby but I have not seen it doing anything yet, and if its purpose was deterrence against Hezbollah it clearly has not done that. It will be interesting to see if it gets involved in any level.

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The War That Never Ends

The current war with Iran has prompted me to think more deeply about how we think of war. And I think that the West has been using a definition of war that has not been accurate for at least a century.

Clausewitz famously wrote "War is the continuation of politics by other means" in the early nineteenth century, after the Napoleonic Wars. It was accurate for its time: states fought, achieved or failed to achieve political objectives, and then politics continued.

The West took that insight and built a binary on it: either a nation is at war or at peace. War is the exception: it is violent, costly, and abnormal. The default is peace and stability, what all rational states prefer. Everything in the modern international order flows from that binary.

The UN Charter treats war as a discrete event with defined triggers and legal constraints on how it may begin. The Geneva Conventions regulate its conduct. The Rome Statute criminalizes its abuses. Wars are declared. Beneath all of it lies the same foundational assumption: wars start, wars end, and the rules exist to manage the transition between the two.

Revolutionary theory looked at that definition and saw a target.

Marx began it by reframing all of history as continuous class struggle: a single unbroken struggle expressed through different means at different moments. Lenin extended it: bourgeois peace was merely armed struggle conducted by other means. Then Mao formalized it into explicit military doctrine. "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun," he wrote in 1938. In "On Protracted War" the same year, he engaged Clausewitz directly, accepting that war and politics are continuous with each other, but drawing the opposite conclusion. For Mao, that continuity meant the struggle never ends. When military conditions favor fighting, you fight. When they don't, you organize, propagandize, negotiate - and wait. The underlying war continues regardless of which instrument is currently in use.

How seriously did Mao mean this? In 1957, speaking in Moscow, he said: "I'm not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn't matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left." The cause, for Mao, simply outweighed any calculation of lives.

Western theories of war could not even consider the willingness of a leader to sacrifice his people for the cause.

Gramsci, writing from a fascist prison in the 1930s, had already identified the next move: Western institutions themselves, like legal systems, cultural frameworks, and civil society, were battlefields. Capture them and you wage war without firing a shot.

Together these thinkers built a complete inversion of Clausewitz. War is not the continuation of politics, but politics is the continuation of war that never ends until victory is achieved. The struggle is permanent. It changes form — military, diplomatic, legal, cultural — but it never ends until final victory. The West's binary of war and not-war simply does not exist in this framework. What the West reads as not-war, the revolutionary reads as war by other means.

And crucially: the institutions the West built to manage conflict could be turned into weapons against it.

An organization that embeds fighters in hospitals or under schools isn't violating the spirit of Geneva - it's exploiting its architecture. A regime that uses UN agencies for political warfare isn't abusing the international system: it's operating it as another front. Lawfare, the manipulation of humanitarian and legal language to constrain an adversary's military response, isn't a corruption of the rules-based order. It's a precise understanding of how that order works and who it works against.

Islamist revolutionary movements absorbed this doctrine and adapted it to their own ideological framework. The continuous war became jihad - not merely military, but political, legal, cultural, and demographic, conducted across all available fronts simultaneously until final victory. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Republic of Iran are not conventional actors pursuing bounded political objectives. They are revolutionary movements operating under an explicit continuous-war doctrine. We see this language all the time. When people say that "the war didn't start on October 7" or "the genocide is ongoing" even after a ceasefire, they are saying explicitly that the war is permanent no matter what the facts on the ground are.

The Cold War détente is the exception that proves the rule. The Soviet leaders of the 1950s and onwards were no longer revolutionaries; they has become a bureaucratic class with material interests in survival and privilege. Khrushchev's "peaceful coexistence" doctrine was a significant ideological retreat — an implicit acknowledgment that survival mattered more than victory. Mutually Assure Destruction worked because the Soviets had become, functionally, a conventional great power with conventional survival instincts. The ideology had become costume.

But to Mao, the revolution was still happening, which is why he didn't worry about a nuclear war that would destroy half his people.

MAD is a powerful disincentive - but only for actors who want to remain alive and in power more than they want victory. For movements where the ideology remains genuinely operative, that calculation changes entirely. Martyrdom isn't a cost to be absorbed. It is a contribution to inevitable historical triumph. The cause continues regardless of who dies for it. You cannot deter an actor for whom sacrifice is not a loss but a weapon.

The West mistook the Soviet exception for the rule and built its post-Cold War confidence on that mistake.

The consequences are structural and far-reaching. When the West says it wants peace, it actually means it wants stability - the absence of visible conflict. Inside the war/not-war binary those are the same thing: not-war is the goal achieved.

Revolutionary doctrine exploits that equivalence with precision. It offers stability - a ceasefire, a negotiation, a temporary de-escalation - and the West accepts it as progress because its own framework provides no tools for distinguishing tactical pause from genuine resolution and it regards a pause in hostilities not as a means to continue them but as a step towards permanent peace. . Meanwhile the revolutionary side is executing the next phase of the continuous war: rebuilding, rearming, repositioning, waiting.

The trap is deliberate. Under episodic war theory, not-war is peace and peace is victory. Under continuous war theory, tactical stability is war by other means — the strategy advancing, the next round being prepared.

This is why ceasefires so reliably produce the next war. This is why negotiations so consistently reward the side that started the fighting. This is why international pressure so predictably falls hardest on the party that actually wants resolution. This is the system working exactly as revolutionary doctrine predicted it would.

When a liberal democracy faces a revolutionary adversary, it enters the conflict already operating under a definition of war its enemy has rejected. It fights to restore deterrence, achieve defined objectives, and return to stability - which it will call peace, and which its enemy will call an opportunity.

This is what the West gets wrong about Iran. The Islamic Republic still operates under a genuine revolutionary war doctrine, built on the idea of continuous revolution. Its goal is to become a superpower representing Islam. Its nuclear weapons program, its ballistic missile program, its drone production is all geared towards spreading its revolution, usually using proxies to avoid direct accusations of violence, but expanding its political and military power using terror and violence. The West does not have tools to recognize this for what it is - a war against the West that has not stopped since 1979.

In such a revolutionary mindset, a military defeat is always temporary. As long as there is a political leadership still in place that can compel its people to do what it demands, it can never lose. And the West needs to realize that victory against revolutionary movements cannot mean restoring stability. It must mean ending the revolutionary regime itself.

As long as the regime remains in power, the war has not ended. It has merely changed form.

If our current concept of war is not accurate, then we need to grapple with what war actually is, what victory entails, and what the laws of armed conflict should look like against adversaries that deliberately subvert those rules themselves. These are difficult questions, but avoiding them carries its own moral risk. If we mistake temporary stability for peace, the result may not be fewer deaths but more.

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