Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Thursday, March 12, 2026

Regime Supporters: Iran Has Weapons So Secret, Their Effects Are Undetectable (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

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Tehran, March 12 - As the US-Israel alliance continues its methodical dismantling of Iran's military infrastructure in Operations Epic Fury and Roaring Lion, a peculiar strain of denial has gripped certain corners of the internet. Observers report that what was once mere anti-Israel rhetoric has mutated into fervent belief in "super-secret" Iranian superweapons – armaments so stealthy, so advanced, that their deployment results in precisely zero detectable casualties, explosions, or even mild inconveniences for the intended targets.

Proponents of these phantom arsenals argue that the lack of evidence is, in fact, the smoking gun. "Iran's got these invisible hypersonic missiles that phase through defenses like ghosts," proclaimed one forum poster, citing "deep sources" that suspiciously resemble fanfiction from a 2020s sci-fi subreddit. "You don't see casualties because they're so secret they erase themselves from reality after impact. That's why Israel and the US keep pretending nothing happened – they're covering up the total devastation!" This logic conveniently overlooks the barrage of very visible, very conventional Iranian missiles that have been intercepted or fallen short since the conflict escalated in June 2025, post-Khamenei's elimination.

It does, however, dovetail with inline claims that Tel Aviv has become an uninhabitable hellhole of smoke and ruin, invisible behind the real-time video feeds showing no such thing.

When pressed on why Iran's proxies like Hezbollah have suffered verifiable losses, the response pivots to "decoy operations" meant to lure the West into false security. "That's the magic working – everyone's too bewitched to notice they're defeated," explained a self-styled analyst on a podcast that boasts more ads for survival gear than listeners.

Experts attribute this epidemic to cognitive whiplash from Iran's rapid setbacks. "When your regime's vaunted missile factories go boom under precision strikes, you invent weapons that don't need to exist to win," noted Dr. Ima Skeptic of the Institute for Rational Thought. "It's desperation dialed to eleven, where invisibility equals invincibility."

"Of course you can't be too careful," she cautioned. "Disbelieving the claims would also be Islamophobic."

The same activists and self-styled journalists make similar claims about Israeli "false flag" attacks that somehow hoodwink Turkish, Azerbaijni, Qatari, Emirati, Saudi, Bahraini, and Omani radar operators into thinking Iran has launched missiles and drones at those countries, while in fact, according to the claim, Israel has blown up the buildings and installations in those countries without anyone noticing all the preparation necessary for operations on such a scale - echoing "Israel did 9/11" tropes popular among the same crowd.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

On the night of March 11, Israeli drones descended on security checkpoints across Tehran, killing scores of Basij militiamen within minutes. Iran's state-affiliated Fars news agency confirmed the attack, acknowledging at least ten security personnel dead — other sources put the toll far higher. The message was unmistakable: Israel can now reach inside Iran's capital, pick its targets at will, and strike at the very apparatus the regime uses to repress its own people.

This is something qualitatively different from the thunderous opening of Operation Roaring Lion. These weren't F-35s screaming in from the west. These were drones — patient, cheap, and expendable — doing the work that once required a pilot to strap in and fly a thousand miles.

Israeli officials have signaled explicitly that this escalation is deliberate and will intensify. On March 5, Israeli officials announced a shift to the "next stage" of the campaign, moving beyond the initial goals of air superiority and missile degradation toward targeting what they described as the "foundations" of the Iranian regime — its internal security apparatus, its command structures, the instruments of domestic repression. The Basij checkpoints fit that template precisely.

This new stage of the war, with heavy reliance of drones, can be seen as part of the larger strategy.

The opening days of Operation Roaring Lion were a feat of almost superhuman intensity. Israeli fighter pilots flew to Iran and back three times a day — a sortie tempo that stunned military observers worldwide, triple the usual rate. The trick, as pilots eventually disclosed, was pharmaceutical: modafinil, a wakefulness-promoting drug already authorized by the U.S. Air Force for long-duration operations, allowed crews to sustain the punishing schedule. Besides overwhelming Iran's launch capabilities before it could adapt, the initial attacks were meant to make the skies of Iran safe for slower but more numerous drones.

Stimulants can only push the human body so far, but drones can stay in the air for many hours. The math shows that drones are a far more effective platform once air defenses are defeated. Israel's active drone inventory stands at roughly 1,015 platforms — nearly four times its fleet of approximately 284 manned combat aircraft. During last June's Operation Rising Lion, 70% of all IAF flight hours were already being flown by UAVs rather than manned aircraft.

The flagship platform is the Hermes 900 "Kochav" (Star), built by Elbit Systems: over 30 hours of endurance, operational ceiling of 30,000 feet, payload capacity of around 300 kg, operational range exceeding 1,000 km. At roughly $6.8 million per unit — a fraction of an F-35's cost — losing one is an accounting entry, not a national tragedy. In the current campaign, Hermes 900s have been flying around the clock over Iran, with AI-driven algorithms fusing data from electro-optical, infrared, synthetic aperture radar, and hyperspectral sensors to locate missile launchers, radar systems, and mobile air-defense batteries. Wreckage recovered in Iran has confirmed they are also carrying combat payloads — twin or quad pods of air-dropped munitions. They are not merely watching.

Most of a drone's mission time is transit; any single platform may loiter over Iran for only six hours or so before heading home. But with over a thousand drones and a centralized AI-targeting architecture, Israel can sustain continuous coverage over Iranian territory through coordinated rotation — launching platforms in waves so that each drone arriving on station relieves one departing. What looks like a constraint on individual platforms becomes, at fleet scale, something close to a permanent presence. Crucially, because the targeting data is shared and continuously updated across the network, each incoming drone doesn't start blind. It inherits an accumulated intelligence file from its predecessor: known positions, movement patterns, the behavioral signatures of specific units. The individual drones may only be watching for several hours, but the network never sleeps.

For strike missions that don't require recovery, Israel also fields loitering munitions — kamikaze drones that solve the range problem by simply not returning. The Harop, with operational figures suggesting up to 1,000 km range in some configurations, can be air-launched from a fighter that carries it most of the distance and releases it well clear of dangerous airspace. The pilot turns around; the drone completes the mission autonomously.

This is all assuming Israeli drones are being launched exclusively from Israel. This may or may not be true. What we already know about US-Israeli cooperation during this operation is striking enough on its own. American F-22s were deployed at Israeli Air Force bases; American refueling aircraft operated from Israeli airfields serving both nations' planes; Israeli pilots shared real-time targeting data with US command at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, integrated into a single AI-driven kill chain in which the nearest available asset — US or Israeli — received automatic engagement authorization. The two forces were not merely coordinating. They were merged.

US aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Oman sit far closer to Iran than Israeli airfields do, cutting transit time dramatically. Gulf states, whatever their public statements about not hosting offensive operations, have powerful reasons to see the Iranian regime destabilized and have been operating in deep intelligence partnership with both Israel and the United States. Azerbaijan — which has long-standing defense ties with Israel and was itself struck by Iranian drones during the conflict, likely as punishment for suspected cooperation — remains an intriguing possibility for forward drone staging, though that remains unconfirmed. The operational incentive to use closer launch points is obvious; the diplomatic incentive to deny it publicly is equally obvious. So while it is operationally possible that Israel's drone fleet is operating exclusively from Israeli soil, it very possibly has a considerably shorter route.

If anyone believed that Israel's opening surge represented its maximum sustainable effort — that once the pilots came down from their modafinil-fueled sprint the campaign would necessarily slow — they were wrong. The initial phase was designed to create the conditions for the phase we are now entering, one that requires no stimulants, no heroic sortie rates, and no pilots at risk. A drone fleet of over a thousand platforms, rotating continuously, inheriting an ever-richer intelligence picture, striking when and where it chooses against a degraded and demoralized adversary — this is not a lesser form of air campaign than what came before. It may be a more effective one.

When Israeli officials say the attacks will accelerate, it is not hyperbole. It was always part of the plan.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

If Britain Owes an Apology for Palestine, Start With the White Paper That Condemned Hundreds of Thousands of Jews to Death

Forty-five British MPs and peers have signed an open letter demanding that Prime Minister Keir Starmer apologize for the Balfour Declaration — the 1917 statement in which Britain expressed support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The letter argues that Britain had "no right" to make such a promise and that it bears "historical responsibility" for the creation of Israel.

This is quite a moral accounting. But if Parliament is in the business of confronting Britain's historical role in Palestine, there is a far more specific, far more deadly act of British policy that deserves an apology first — one whose consequences can be measured in hundreds of thousands of Jewish corpses.

It is the White Paper of 1939.

In May of that year, with Nazi Germany already in full persecution mode and war weeks away, Neville Chamberlain's government issued a policy document that capped Jewish immigration to Palestine at just 75,000 people over five years — after which further immigration would require Arab consent. The explicit rationale, stated openly in cabinet discussions, was to preserve Arab goodwill. Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald, who drafted the policy, told his colleagues that Britain "could not afford to forfeit the confidence and friendship of such a large part of the Muslim world." Chamberlain himself put it even more bluntly: "If we must offend one side, let us offend the Jews rather than the Arabs."

The timing was catastrophic.

At the very moment the gates of Europe were slamming shut on Jewish life, Britain deliberately locked the one door through which hundreds of thousands might have escaped. Palestine was not merely a desirable destination: for Jews trapped in Poland, Romania, Hungary, and Germany, it was the only realistic option. The United States had its own restrictive quotas. Most of the world had already demonstrated at the 1938 Évian Conference that it was unwilling to absorb Jewish refugees. Palestine, under British administration, was the escape hatch, and Britain sealed it.

The decision was immediately and loudly condemned as a moral catastrophe by the most credible voices in British public life. Winston Churchill, then in the political wilderness, rose in the House of Commons on May 23, 1939, to denounce the policy as a betrayal of solemn commitments. Former Prime Minister Lloyd George called it "an act of perfidy." The Liberal MP James Rothschild warned his colleagues during the debate itself that for the majority of Jews seeking to reach Palestine, the choice was "migration or physical extinction." The League of Nations' Permanent Mandates Commission unanimously concluded the White Paper transgressed Britain's mandatory obligations - it was a violation of international law.

They were right. And the consequences were exactly what they predicted.

The SS Struma is perhaps the starkest symbol of what the White Paper meant in practice. In December 1941, nearly 800 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Romania boarded a barely seaworthy converted cattle barge, hoping to reach Palestine. Their engine failed in Istanbul harbor. For weeks, Britain and Turkey negotiated their fate. Britain's position was unambiguous: the refugees could not go to Palestine. After two months in squalid, suffocating conditions, Turkey towed the ship into the Black Sea. It sank, almost certainly torpedoed. Of 791 people on board, one survived. U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. characterized British refugee policy in this period as "a sentence of death" for Jews trying to escape.

And Britain wasn't done. Even after the war, as Holocaust survivors attempted to reach Palestine, the British government intercepted ships, imprisoned refugees in detention camps on Cyprus, and continued enforcing the White Paper until 1948. The very people who had survived the death camps found themselves imprisoned again — by Britain.

Now, in 2026, British parliamentarians wish to apologize for the Balfour Declaration, which pledged support for a Jewish homeland. They wish, in other words, to apologize for being too pro-Jewish — while the document that condemned Jews to extermination passes without mention.

The selective moral memory on display here is staggering. The Balfour Declaration did not kill anyone. The White Paper did. If Britain is serious about confronting its history in Palestine, it should start with the policy whose victims were not abstract political categories but real human beings — men, women, and children who died in gas chambers and cattle barges because a British government decided their lives were worth less than the naive hope for Arab political goodwill that never materialized.

That apology has never been issued. It is long overdue.

It would be great if a UK based organization would spearhead this to be submitted to the UK Parliament Petitions site. If it gets enough signatures, the UK must respond. Here's a sample petition:

03/11 Links Pt2: Zionism for Everyone; Documentary: How the Bondi Beach terror attack unfolded; IDF Military Funeral in Golan Druze Town Signals Historic Shift

From Ian:

Alana Newhouse: Zionism for Everyone

How do people change?

Some change involves things that happen to us, which isn’t what interests me. I’m curious about what happens, individually and to societies, when people face an unhappy reality—however it came to be—and decide to change what looks, at least at that moment, to be their fate.

In his 2015 novel, Submission, Michel Houellebecq sketches a portrait of a near-future France, in which an Islamic party allies with the Socialists to take over the country. The story follows a literature professor faced with a decision to convert to Islam for career advancement, as the country’s social and political landscape is transformed by Sharia law. His own disillusionment is heightened by his Jewish girlfriend’s decision to escape the Islamization of France by moving to the Jewish state. He almost goes with her but then doesn’t, uttering the book’s now-famous line: “There is no Israel for me.”

I remember snagging on that sentiment the first time I read it. I could see why a disgruntled non-Jewish academic might hesitate to make aliyah, but to the extent that Houellebecq’s fictional portrayal contained a commentary on the real world, the conclusion felt wrong. There quite clearly is, or could be, an Israel for this person. It’s France, if it could just get off the course it’s on.

This is hardly impossible. In fact, throughout history, humans have changed the way they organized or conceived of themselves in order to take advantage of new opportunities or to address new challenges or threats. Such moments of inflection are often brought about by advances in technology, from the invention of the wheel, to the building of roads, to the invention of the printing press, to time- and space-shrinking inventions like the telegraph and the radio, which in turn bring about large changes in the way human beings see themselves and envision their relationship to some large community—and which also introduce new dangers.

We are in one such moment.

The robots are coming, people. There are artificial wombs. We are genetically editing out diseases that have terrorized humanity throughout recorded history, heading to Mars, fighting wars with drones, rewilding parts of nature, and raising extinct animals from the dead (or something).

Are these developments good or bad? Who knows! That’s the thing about new inventions; their effects are—always, entirely—dictated by how humans interact with them.

In our case, the alterations happening to the shape of human life are already dwarfing those brought about by any other transformative age. The digital technologies emerging today are incredibly powerful; like unbacked stallions, they’ll be able to be used, for pleasure and profit, by secure, skilled, intentional humans. But they will also require weak ones to run on. (“This is definitely not a technology where everyone wins,” in the words of Palantir’s Alex Karp.) Whether or not we’re conscious of it, we’re all facing a future in which some people will enjoy the possibility of safe, ambitious, beautiful human lives, and others will become robot fuel and zombie food. It’s scary and confusing, and every day gets more so.

At just this wild moment, filled with questions so incredible they’re effectively spiritual—at what point does a genetically edited person become equivalent to a machine? are rocks animate?!—the world suddenly entered a vortex where, instead of engaging on these many phenomenally interesting and challenging topics, all anyone can talk about is … Zionism.

In Tehran he fooled the regime, in Israel he built an empire. Now he prays for a new Iran

Like all young men in Iran, when Roni Aynsaz graduated from high school, he was required to serve in the military.

That’s when Aynsaz’s story took its first Hollywood-esque turn.

Today, he’s a successful 52-year-old businessman and the co-owner of the SCOOP shoe chain with dozens of stores across Israel. But before his conscription, young Aynsaz was a member of Tehran’s small Jewish community and, as such, destined for low-level positions, either in the military or in the civil service.

Instead, Aynsaz made a decision that would change the course of his life and many others’: When presented with the form to declare his religion, he circled “Muslim” instead of “Jewish.”

He soon found himself working in the Islamic Republic’s legal system under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, often helping fellow Jews under investigation by removing their files.

Eventually, he was discovered and fled the country to establish himself in Israel, founding SCOOP and additional businesses.

His early experience in subterfuge recently came in handy. Aynsaz has become a sort of Israeli celebrity as the winner of the Israeli version of the reality TV series “The Traitors,” which aired on Channel 12 last spring.

More than 30 years after fleeing Iran, he continues to maintain close ties with its people, including family and friends, he told The Times of Israel in a phone interview against the backdrop of the war in Iran.

“For the people in Iran, the war is very difficult,” Aynsaz said. “On the one hand, they are happy that the government might fall; on the other, people are sad for those who are getting killed in the war, because there are also innocents who are dying.”

“I will also tell you that people are angry at [US President Donald] Trump, because he said he wants someone from within Iran [to lead the country] and not Reza Pahlavi,” he added, referring to the exiled son of the last shah, who is a popular figure among many Iranians who oppose the regime.

IDF Military Funeral in Golan Druze Town Signals Historic Shift

For decades, the community center in Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights was covered with a huge Syrian flag. This week, that flag was nowhere to be seen. The hundreds who filled the community center came to console the family of Master Sgt. Maher Khatar, a native of the town and an IDF combat soldier, who was killed in Lebanon.

In the 1980s, those few Golan Druze with Israeli ID cards were victims of a religious and social boycott, considered to have betrayed the Syrian nation. Dr. Ramzi Halabi, from the Israeli Druze town of Daliat al-Carmel, said this moment symbolizes the breaking of the last barriers between the residents of the Druze villages in the Golan and the State of Israel. "The Druze in Israel...have long since defined ourselves first of all as Israelis, and hope that in the next stage the identification with Israel will reach the Golan Heights."

Dr. Salim Barik, a political scientist who studies the Druze, said the process of the Israelization of the Druze in the Golan began with the outbreak of the civil war in Syria. "It started in 2011 when people said, 'Syria is falling apart, so it's clear we won't return to Syria and it won't be able to liberate the Golan Heights. The story is over - we're Israelis, let's become part of Israel.'"

"What strengthened this trend most was the massacre in Sweida.... About 800 Druze were slaughtered there, thousands were wounded and displaced, and villages were torched. Today there's a genuine fear of Muslims."

Sheikh Zahir al-Din said, "Israel stood by our side in Sweida when accursed people massacred our brothers, and we'll never forget that. I asked someone here who was pro-Syrian how he agreed to let his son enlist in the IDF. He replied: 'At the time, we had children and relatives in the Syrian army. Now there aren't any, and if my son enlists he'll fight ISIS, and I'm very pleased about that.'"

03/11 Links Pt1: Iran’s threats of military destruction have proven utterly hollow; Iran’s missile fire rate has collapsed by 92%

From Ian:

Jake Wallis Simons: Iran’s threats of military destruction have proven utterly hollow

When it comes to the rest of the regime’s performance, the kindest interpretation is that they are focussing on attritional endurance rather than decisive retaliation, hoping that political and economic pressure, combined with the structural resilience that the regime has developed since the 12-day war last June, will force the American president to curtail the war with the new leader still standing. The most likely interpretation, however, is that amid the shock and awe of the American-Israeli campaign, they have been reduced to reacting defensively rather than strategically. Panicking, in other words.

Of the 2,000 Iranian drones and more than 500 ballistic and cruise missiles fired into neighbouring countries since the start of the war, the overwhelming majority have been intercepted. The few that sneaked through have caused a handful of deaths and injuries and destroyed some military equipment, but no major base has been disabled. In recent days, the launch cadence has dropped by as much as 90 per cent, suggesting a collapse in stockpiles, launchers and command and control. And as for the second pillar of Iranian belligerence, its foreign proxies, they have been equally unimpressive.

After a hesitant start, the most important of these, Hezbollah, has in recent days swung into action, raining hundreds of missiles into Israel’s north (some of which have fallen short). But Jerusalem’s response has been aggressive; the lesson of the aftermath of October 7, which saw hundreds of thousands of Israelis displaced within their own country as a result of Hezbollah fire, has been well learnt. Today, the IDF’s doctrine is simple: attack us and you will be the one forced to flee, not us.

The Israeli incursion into Lebanon, which has so far cost the lives of a small number of soldiers, should be seen in this context. Analysts believe that Hezbollah may be rationing its rockets to avoid a suicidal total war and preserve its options for the future. But after the pager operation and subsequent battering it sustained in September 2024, the fanatical militia is also in a degree of disarray.

The other big question mark hangs over Iran’s nuclear programme, much of which lay in ruins even before this war began. Buried deep underground near the city of Isfahan, 270 miles south of Tehran, lies the regime’s bloody crown jewels, about 400kg of uranium that has been enriched to 60 per cent. This material, which in certain contexts could be weaponised in a matter of weeks, is the regime’s buried treasure; if allied boots do hit the ground during this war, they will likely belong to commandos sent to secure the site, excavate the uranium and spirit it safely out of the country.

The overwhelming likelihood is that defeat, and not just a cosmetic one, lies ahead for the worst regime on the planet. If I was a betting man, I would not give much for Ali Larijani’s chances of surviving the month, or indeed for those of the regime’s new leader. Nobody knows what kind of a country will emerge after the dust has settled. Nobody knows if we will see chaos or peace. But given Trump’s resolute posture and the vast firepower at his disposal, the president will likely be having his shoes polished in the Oval Office long after Larijani is dead.

Bernard-Henri Levy: Netanyahu Is Pulling Trump's Strings? Antisemites Will Believe Anything

Some experts say the U.S. war with Iran was inspired by Israel and imposed by Israel, and that the U.S. is merely the executor of "Israel's war." I don't deny that the two countries have converging interests, or that their military and intelligence agencies are operating in close coordination. But that is called an alliance.

Would anyone have said that Franklin D. Roosevelt was being manipulated by Charles de Gaulle? Or that Winston Churchill - who in 1919 said Bolshevism should be strangled in its cradle - became Stalin's puppet 22 years later?

In this case, Israel has one concern: neutralizing a threat that it rightly considers existential. The U.S. has its own concerns: defending its allies (Arab countries as well as Israel), weakening a strategic axis that runs from Tehran to Moscow and Beijing, and washing away the humiliation that has remained for 47 years - the invasion of the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and holding of American hostages for more than a year.

To believe that a country the size of New Jersey could twist the arm of a country of 350 million, equipped with the most powerful military and the most sophisticated network of bases in history, and governed by a president of unrivaled egotism? To imagine that Donald Trump would have given any foreign prime minister the gift of a war of this magnitude? It is simply grotesque.

But the more serious problem is that this fable revives a very old and toxic lie. This is how people thought in the 1930s - those who saw in "the Jews" a community of conspirators pushing nations toward war, pulling the strings of catastrophe, and scheming to provoke conflicts from which they expected to profit.

The Forgotten 444 Days in Tehran

In 1979 Iranians held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year. From 1979 to 1981, the captives seized from the American Embassy were humiliated, paraded around blindfolded for cameras and jeering crowds and threatened.

Diplomatic immunity is a concept that goes back to ancient times. It evolved over centuries to an accepted standard between governments. Even Adolf Hitler respected diplomatic immunity.

The Iranians used diplomatic immunity when it was in their murderous interest. They used diplomatic immunity to bring in the bomb material used in the car bomb detonated outside a Jewish center in Buenos Aires on July 18, 1994, killing 85 and wounding another 300.

Tens of thousands of human beings would be alive today, and the entire Middle East wouldn't have been destabilized for half a century, had the Iranian theocracy been stopped at the start.

Dr. Houman David Hammati: On Iran, We Stand with Israel and America

47 years ago, I stood at a window in Tehran as a 3-year-old boy, smelling burning tires and hearing the chants that would steal my country. I do not celebrate war. No decent person does. What I celebrate - what millions of Iranians inside the country and in the diaspora have prayed for in secret for decades - is the possibility that a regime which has no right to exist may finally be forced to go.

This is the same regime that armed and cheered the Oct. 7 massacre against Israel for no reason other than pure genocidal hatred; murdered tens of thousands of its own sons and daughters who dared to walk peacefully in the streets demanding the most basic freedoms; gouges out the eyes of young women for the "crime" of wearing makeup; hangs teenagers from cranes for posting a tweet; exports terror, poverty, and darkness to every corner it can reach including the U.S.

No nation, no people, should have to live under that. Not Israelis. Not Americans. And certainly not Iranians. I am a son of Iran who has spent his life mourning a stolen homeland. What we are witnessing is not aggression - it is necessary surgery to remove a tumor that has metastasized for 47 years. The tumor is the Islamic Republic that has hijacked Iran.

To the brave pilots of the Israel Air Force and the men and women of the U.S. military now carrying out this mission: You are not invaders. You are the answer to the prayers of millions who have whispered "enough" in the dark since 1979. Thank you, Israel. Thank you, America. The Iranian people - the real Iran - will never forget.

Arab Israelis in Israel’s war for survival (Forest Rain)

By Forest Rain

Shia missiles don’t differentiate between Sunni and Jew

Even the best safe room cannot save you from a direct hit by a missile carrying half a ton of explosives.

On the night the Iranian missile changed his life forever, Raja Khatib, a prominent Israeli-Arab attorney, was pulling up to his house.

The air-raid sirens were already blaring as he rushed to get to his family. And then the missile hit.

It feels almost obscene to write about that horrific night now, when Iran is once again launching missiles intended to destroy Israeli lives.

It was June 14^th, 2025, one day into the twelve-day war, when Israel and America severely damaged Iran’s almost-operational nuclear facilities and destroyed a large portion of its ballistic missile capability. But the 12 days of “Operation Rising Lion” did not remove the threat posed by the Iranian regime—to Israel, to the Middle East, or even to its own people.

The war was stopped early in the hope that a diplomatic deal could be reached. Many Israelis understood from experience that stopping too soon would necessitate returning later to finish the job.

Because there is no deal with an entity whose central goal is your destruction. Ideologues do not compromise on their ideology. To do so would be to reject their own identity.

At the time, the battle in Gaza was raging, and hostages still needed to be rescued.

And Iranian missiles did not differentiate between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs.

What do you say to a man who lost his wife, two of his three daughters, and his home in an instant? A man who built a house like a castle—strong and beautiful—but not strong enough to protect his family. His brother’s wife was killed in the attack as well.

We went to see the missile impact site and pay our respects to the Khatib family. We did not know them personally, but that does not matter. When something awful happens, showing up is the right thing to do.

Jews observe shivah—seven days of mourning after the burial. Muslims traditionally observe three days. Because Raja is so well known, he received visitors for four.

We saw no formal notice about where condolences were being received. The town they live in is large, but we knew it would not be too difficult to find the family.

At first, we were directed to Raja’s parents’ home. Inside, I found the women from his side of the family sitting together. They all turned to stare at me—the only Jew in the room—before pointing me toward his mother.

She hugged me twice. Everyone in the room showed pleasure at my expression of empathy for their sorrow.

One woman asked what they were probably all thinking.

“Why did you come? Did you come because of your position… or…?”

She wanted to understand how to place me—what role I occupied. Was I one of the many politicians coming to demonstrate that Jewish politicians care about Arabs too? A peacenik virtue signaling?

Jews and Arabs live side by side in Israel, and Raja works with many Jewish colleagues. But genuine friendships and deep mutual understanding between the sectors are not common. Our cultures, desires, and goals overlap in some places—but they are not identical.

And there is a significant difference between friendship between individuals and peace between Jews and Arabs as collective groups.

I told her simply that what happened was terrible, and coming was the right thing to do.

She seemed satisfied with that answer. But she appeared to assume I was a Jew dreaming of peace, so she began saying what Arabs often say in these situations:

“We just need to end all the wars. We all just want to live.”

Many Jews respond warmly to statements like this, hearing what they want to hear rather than what is actually being said.

It is not possible to “just end” a war with Hamas or Iran—both of which are openly committed to exterminating the Jews. The only way to “just end the war” would be to surrender. That was not, is not, an acceptable solution.

I smiled and replied: “Iranian missiles—Shia missiles—don’t differentiate between Sunnis and Jews. Israel will win this war and bring safety to all of us. You and me. Then we will be able to live well.”

My response startled her into silence. No one else in the room spoke.

Someone offered me a drink and suggested I sit with them, as is customary. I thanked them but declined, explaining that my husband was waiting outside and that we wanted to go pay our respects to Raja.

They directed us to where the men were receiving visitors, in the municipal building—a common arrangement when large crowds are expected.

We found the gathering easily and were received graciously.

Raja made a point of telling us how many Jews had come to offer condolences—colleagues, politicians, peaceniks, and activists (hoping the Arab population might vote in ways that could bring them political power).

I do not think he realized the full spectrum of motivations behind those visits. But the sheer mass of Jews who came comforted him, and that is a good thing.

Many of the Jewish visitors probably had little awareness of how hostile much of the town’s population is toward the Jewish state, how many residents participated in the riots of May 2021, or knew anything about the almost lynching of a Jewish driver stopped by the bloodthirsty mob. Only the intervention of a respected elder prevented the crowd from tearing him apart.

Did any of those visitors wonder how many Arab Israelis would come to comfort Jewish families torn apart by the war?

Probably not.

Some do, of course, when the victims are colleagues or long-time neighbors. But they do not arrive in large numbers to comfort strangers the way Jews often do.

And they generally do not assume that suffering under the same enemy will naturally produce bonds of peace.

Shared danger does not automatically create shared loyalty.

The divide between Sunni and Shia Islam began as a dispute over who should lead the Muslim world after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 CE. The disagreement hardened into a religious and political rivalry that still shapes the Middle East today.

Nearly 1,400 years is a long time to hold a grudge.

Sunni Muslims form the majority across the Muslim world, including Israel’s Arab population. Iran, however, is overwhelmingly Shia. Iran’s desire to assert dominance over the world by first destroying the Jewish State led it to cultivate a Sunni proxy in Gaza – Hamas.

That does not mean Shia and Sunni have suddenly become allies. It means they have temporarily cooperated to pursue a shared objective: destroying Israel.

Israeli Arabs and Israeli Jews now face the same missile threat from Iran and from Iran’s Shia proxy in Lebanon—Hezbollah.

But that does not make Arabs and Jews allies. It simply means we share the same danger.

One of the most dangerous mistakes made about the Middle East is assuming that everyone thinks the same way.

Projecting our own motivations onto others—without taking the time to understand their worldview, goals, and ideology—is naïve at best. Often, it reflects arrogance. Worst of all, it leads to deadly miscalculations.

In Hebrew, there is a saying: “A person is shaped by the landscape of the place he comes from.”

The Middle Eastern mindset was shaped long before Islam, from the experiences of desert tribal life. The Western mindset emerged from the fusion of Jerusalem and Athens: biblical morality, justice, democracy, individual responsibility, and the pursuit of knowledge.

Two very different psychological frameworks.

The sands of the desert shift constantly, and yet the desert itself remains unchanged.

How can those focused on the here and now fully grasp a worldview built around eternity?

The people of the desert outwardly resemble people of the here and now—urban professionals with nice cars, Instagram accounts, and TikTok videos. That surface similarity tempts outsiders to assume that the internal motivations are the same.

They are not.

And today, in societies where many have attempted to replace God with secular ideologies—capitalism, communism, progressivism—the mindset of the desert people doesn’t register.

Without understanding that mindset, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to navigate the region—much less to win a war.

Israeli Jews knew it would be necessary to go back to Iran to finish the job. Israeli Arabs are still talking about their desire to stop the war to attain “quiet”.

But quiet is not victory. In the Middle East, quiet is the time to prepare for the next war.

To survive a conflict, you must understand what the fight is truly about. If you do not understand what your enemy actually believes and desires, you cannot defeat him. And if you try to build peace on comforting assumptions instead of reality, you will only guarantee the next war.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Jordan complains Al Aqsa is closed for the war. But the Kotel is closed, too.

The Jordanian Foreign Ministry issued a press release condemning Israel for closing Al Aqsa Mosque during the war, calling it " a clear violation of international law and international humanitarian law."

The official spokesman on behalf of the Ministry, Ambassador Fouad Al-Majali, confirmed that the absolute kingdom rejected and denial of this illegal and unjustified action, and for the Israeli authorities to continue its provocative actions in the Holy Al-Aqsa Mosque / Holy Holy Haram and towards the worshippers, stressing that Israel has no sovereignty over the occupied city of Jerusalem and its Islamic and Christian sanctities.

This is a lie. Even if you consider Israel to be an occupier of Jerusalem, it is responsible for to "ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety," under international law as codified in the Hague Regulations article 43.

Arab media is falsely claiming that Israel has no restrictions on Jews in Jerusalem. Palestine Today says "Jerusalemites confirm that these measures are applied only to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, while life continues normally in the rest of the city, including markets and public areas."

Again, a lie. Here is a screenshot of what the Kotel looks like today from its live camera.

Israel restricts all gatherings of more than 50 people unless they can easily reach a shelter quickly.

As much as the Jordanians and Palestinians pretend that Israel is discriminating against Muslims and Christians, the facts always show them to be liars.

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Erdogan pretends to be against antisemitism. Turkish media disagrees.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan condemned antisemitism and Islamophobia in remarks at an interfaith iftar dinner in Ankara.

“Just as Islamophobia is a crime against humanity, antisemitism is also a crime. It is an evil that cannot be considered reasonable or legitimate, ” he said.

Really? Because as I've noted many times, Turkish media is rabidly antisemitic, and I have never seen anyone complaining about it outside Turkish Jewish newspaprs.

Here are examples from just the past week:

Yeni Ankara on the history of the Jews:

In our previous article , we partially described the injustices and persecutions perpetrated by the Zionist Jews, who are cursed by Almighty God, throughout their 3600-year history , and the exiles they deserved .

TOO MUCH COMPASSION IS A DISEASE.

The Ottoman Empire took in Jews expelled from their countries , settling them in Thessaloniki , Vlora , Edirne , Izmir , and Istanbul . Of the 165,000 Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal , 90,000 were settled in Turkish lands .

Of course , this cursed people didn't stay quiet . The scourge of Sabbateanism was our price for our hospitality .

Until 1948 , Jews lived scattered across many parts of the world, primarily in European countries, Ottoman territories, North African countries, Russia , and Iran . However , due to their inherent disruptive nature and tendency to stir up trouble wherever they settled, they were constantly expelled .

Akit:

Milli Gazete:

Jews, despite being one of the oldest peoples in history, are not even as numerous as the Spanish Romani. Why is that?

Could it be that they don't consider anyone other than themselves to be human beings, and that they are driven by insatiable greed and a penchant for violence?

Today, the Jews who leave no stone unturned, no head on shoulders in Palestine, who oppress, destroy homes, leave children orphaned, women widowed, and condemn people to starvation, look at what they experienced in the past;

Haber7 published a list of the 40 richest Jews in the world, saying that they are the ones who keep Israel afloat.

Antisemitism is seen daily in major Turkish media. Erdogan doesn't say a word about that.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

03/10 Links Pt2: Forget ‘Islamophobia’ – it’s Islamism the West should be fighting; Is ISIS now part of the ‘progressive’ alliance?; Pro-Iran Al-Quds Day march in London CANCELLED

From Ian:

Brendan O'Neill: Forget ‘Islamophobia’ – it’s Islamism the West should be fighting

The word ‘Islamophobia’ might be gone, but the tyrannical impulse is the same: to keep a beady eye on commentary about Islam. To ensure the masses’ rude blather on that religion is not too ‘intimidating’, too ‘stereotyping’, too far beyond the government-decreed bounds of ‘the public interest’. This is a blasphemy law by the backdoor. Once more, it is the policing of irreligious speech in the drag of anti-racism. For all the lip service the new definition pays to freedom of speech, the entire point of singling out Islam as uniquely deserving of government pity and attention is to circumscribe discussion. As shadow justice minister Nick Timothy says, this latest effort to lavish special protections on Islam is yet another ‘attack [on] our freedom to criticise, satirise and scrutinise ideas’.

The announcement of a bureaucratic offensive on ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ would be worrying at the best of times. That it has come now, at the outset of the Iran War, as we are witnessing explosions of Islamist intolerance, is mindblowingly reckless. The evidence of our eyes is that Britain and the West are afflicted with Islamism. With large numbers of people who feel a greater affinity with the anti-Semitic tyrants of Tehran than they do with the nations in which they live. Where’s the tsar for that, Keir Starmer?

Forget ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ – who will protect us from the anti-Western hosility of the Islamist mob? To weep showy tears over the ‘rise of hatred’ without mentioning the hatred for our own civilisation that courses through the veins of the Islamist movement and its suicidal allies on the bourgeois left is nothing short of insane. That we only ever hear chattering-class bleating about ‘hatred’ when the targets are Muslims is so striking. It confirms how catastrophically blind these people are to the hatred for our society. The hatred for our values. The hatred for our citizens, almost a hundred of whom have been slain by Islamists these past 20 years. The hatred for our working-class girls, who were raped by gangs disproportionately made up of Pakistani men, who called them ‘white slags’, as officialdom looked the other way. And the hatred for our Jewish compatriots, who remain the key victims of religious hate crime, many carried out by Islamists.

The Iran crisis has shone a harsh light on our moral troubles on the home front. In the US, the UK, Europe and Australia, people have openly wept for the ayatollah and prayed for the defeat of America and destruction of Israel. Now that is hatred. That is hostility. This week there was an explosion outside a synagogue in Liege, Belgium. We saw the allegedly ISIS-inspired hurling of a homemade bomb in New York City. The Iranians suspected of spying on Jewish institutions in London remain in custody. And you want us to fret over some muppet on the internet making a joke about the burqa? This is something worse than fiddling while Rome burns. It’s the throwing of petrol on to Rome’s flames. For in sanctifying Islam as the most put-upon religion, the ideology most deserving of special protection, the UK government risks inflaming the very cult of grievance that powers the Islamist mindset. They think they’re tackling hatred when in truth they’re inflaming it, giving ever greater licence to the anti-civilisational self-pity of the West’s Islamists.

What a betrayal this is of the good people of Iran who thirst for freedom. There they are praying for the demise of their Islamist oppressors while we shake our heads over mockery of Islam. There they are tearing off their hijabs while we worry about ‘hijabophobia’. So long as we fear ‘offending Islam’, we will be incapable of standing up for our own values or offering solidarity to those valiant warriors for liberty in the Islamic Republic.

Seth Mandel: Blaming Jews for Global Sadness

There are two primary points to consider here. The first is the subject of O’Neill’s column, which is that the cause of “Palestine” is not about helping Palestinians but about helping Sally Rooney—and the legions of likeminded bored-to-death Europeans—get out of bed in the morning.

Indeed, Rooney asked in her speech: “What else can make our lives endurable in times as dark as these? What else, in the face of such horror, can give us a reason to go on, to fend off despair, to live with ourselves.”

To some people, the permanent war against the Jewish state is all there is.

But there’s a second point here, in addition to Sally Rooney’s personal cry for help. And that is the unbelievable irresponsibility of public figures portraying the war against the Jews as a war to rescue humanity and save the earth.

In addition to Rooney and Albanese, the conference included—according to its website—the notorious anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn and Omar Barghouti, the founder of the main BDS movement which seeks the destruction of Israel.

It was, in other words, a conference devoted to drumming up enthusiasm for globalizing the intifada. There have been such rallies against Jews throughout history—many of them, in fact—and not a single one has been about making the world a better place.

Although the conference bills itself as progressive, one can hear in Rooney’s spiel an echo of America’s right-wing “lost boys,” drifting into white nationalism as a demented form of group therapy.

Throughout history, Jews have been blamed for a very long list of maladies. Ennui is a new one, I think. Yet in an era rife with the self-pathologizing of emotional duress, it makes a certain kind of sense that we’re somehow now being blamed for sadness, boredom, restlessness, loneliness, and the guilt of the privileged.

All these things are real and, to judge by the public discourse, on the rise. But scapegoating Jews is not the cure. One can imagine a television ad in which hand-drawn clouds morph into words describing the symptoms of depression, as a voiceover recommends one consult one’s physician before taking anti-Semitism. The civilizational side effects, after all, are pretty rough.

And those civilizational side effects are precisely what the superstars of the People’s Congress for the Hague Group are threatening to bring down on everyone’s head. Rooney’s assertion that Israel is the great enemy of all the earth is the reason for the war in the Middle East in the first place. It is a battle cry that brings death and destruction to innocent people all over the world. And bored literary poster children have no right to make it their coping mechanism.

Seth Mandel: On Coexisting with Supporters of October 7

Essentially, October 7 became the kind of dividing line that made a lot of Jews understand history.

So it’s a useful question to ponder: How should we act? After all, not only must we maintain precisely the values we did before, but we also should work toward returning society to a place in which support for October 7 is brings public shame. What follows are a few guidelines.

First, Jews must not permit our own beliefs to be diluted by a society that makes excuses for pogroms. Nor should it temper our own criticism of October 7. Fact is, October 7 should be a red line for all civilizations, and it must remain a red line for us. We should not hesitate to state and restate that fact—that unqualified condemnation of that day is a basic human litmus test—even in front of those who justify Nazi barbarism. Especially in their presence, perhaps. We do not accommodate, out of misguided politesse, those who think our children deserved to be burned alive.

Second, and this goes for non-Jews just as much as for Jews: Use October 7 as a barometer for political, ideological and moral hypocrisy. Not because we’re looking for “gotcha” moments, but because it is impractical to remain unaware of who can be trusted in public life. We know, for example, that people who travel in the same circles as Duwaji and her husband Zohran Mamdani are not interested in protecting women from sexual assault, and that when they sign on to such campaigns it is because they are lying. We know that when they falsely accuse Israel of child murder it is because they support the murder of the children of Israel. Another example: The war began with Hamas carrying out the largest massacre at a music festival in recorded history. Musicians and artists who ignore this and instead parrot the propaganda of those who carried out the massacre do not believe in artistic expression; they only believe in dogmatic political expression. Indeed, they support regimes that would abolish the arts entirely.

Third, do not “trade” for condemnation of October 7. Do not dignify someone’s attempt to say “if you want me to condemn October 7, will you condemn [some random perceived crime they want you to falsely equate with October 7]?” October 7 is not something to be bartered away to some bad-faith ideological actor. October 7 is not an opening bid in some negotiation. Take it or leave it.

Finally: Punish people politically for their refusal to recognize the barbarousness of October 7. Just add it to any public figure’s civic record. This isn’t holding a grudge, it’s just more practical politics. People on the wrong side of October 7 are expecting to benefit from some sort of statute of limitations—or the limitations of human memory. Instead, let’s help them remember.

Is ISIS now part of the ‘progressive’ alliance?

In case anyone out there might still be under the impression that the violent fanaticism of the lefty culture warriors is abating, Saturday’s events should lay that to rest. Lang’s stunt was undoubtedly designed to cause maximum offence, but the cognitive dissonance of the counter-protesters and the media was truly something to behold. It was the most clear example yet of the theory that ‘words I don’t like’ are literally violence, but literal violence from ‘people I like’ is not violent at all.

One counter-protester, Walter Masterson, was in the middle of delivering a Kumbaya, we-love-everyone speech when one of the two attackers threw the first bomb. ‘We want everyone here to stay in New York. You don’t get to come from outside, and then tell everyone else…’, he was saying as Emir Balat – who had indeed come from outside New York – appeared behind him and, with a facial expression filled with rage and hate, appeared to hurl the nail bomb just above Masterson’s head, before running away.

Another video posted to X showed the attack from Lang’s perspective. As he stood there, annoying the counter-protesters, the bomb landed near him, prompting him and his supporters to run away. ‘Somebody threw a fucking bomb, bro!’, says one man. ‘That was a nail bomb!’, says another. Voices are heard thanking Jesus that the nail bomb did not go off. Eventually, someone calls out, ‘Somebody’s gotta get the goat’, and a female voice is heard saying, ‘Oh the goat!’.

The mayor’s immediate reaction was to condemn the ‘vile protest rooted in white supremacy’. New York governor Kathy Hochul blamed ‘both’ sides. Never mind that one side came armed only with a goat and a bad attitude, the other with multiple bombs and gave a statement to police that read in part: ‘I pledge allegiance to the Islamic State. Die in your rage you kufar.’ (sic)

Masterson, the now famous counterprotester, posted on X earlier this week: ‘I stand by [my speech]. As a born and raised New Yorker, everyone is welcome. Everyone except chief goat-fucker Jake Lang.’

So according to these truly thick white liberals with precisely zero self-preservation skills, coming to New York to chuck bombs at non-Muslims is just part of life in an open, tolerant city. If anything, it should be celebrated! However, coming to New York to loudly complain about Muslims wanting to bomb non-Muslims is an outrage of the highest order and will not be tolerated.

Good luck with that, ya dumb bastards!

03/10 Links Pt1: Fall of Iran an opportunity to uproot ‘Palestinianism’; The Iranian footballers show what real courage looks like

From Ian:

Missiles Over Levinsky

Every Iranian Israeli merchant I interviewed on Levinsky Street told of carrying pleasant associations of their or their parents’ homeland. Each expressed hope that the regime would fall. All looked forward to flying to a free Iran to visit.

Simnian told of living as a teenager with relatives in Los Angeles in the 1970s. He made friends with Iranian Jewish émigrés but spoke even more fondly of the Muslim, Christian, and Bahai Iranians he labored with.

“They’d tell me they loved the Jews and Israel,” he said. “I worked with them, sold to them. We ate together.” Asked how he sees Iranians’ revolt against the regime, which this winter has killed more than 30,000 of its citizens, Simnian said, “Set them free.”

“I think the population wants to be liberated from the dictatorial regime there,” he said. “The country has resources but gives money to its [anti-Israel] proxies, and people don’t have water. Why should such a country be in need?”

On the next street, Bijan Barchordari sat at a table outside his restaurant, Gourmet Sabzi, which he bills as serving “authentic Persian” meals.

Barchordari cited social factors—and a lack of weapons—to explain Iranians’ inability to depose the regime, despite their massive protests in January that resulted in the massacres of civilians. (Aghajani said 15,000 Jews still live in Iran, nearly all in Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan.)

“Iranians are the most normal people: very cultured, learned, with self-respect. That’s why they haven’t succeeded in overthrowing the regime. They’re not animals,” said Barchordari, a Tehran native who visited Israel as a backpacker in 1977 and stayed on when his parents reported the deteriorating situation back home.

Ninety minutes after the siren sounded, Levinsky Street seemed suddenly to have filled with pedestrians, and Barchordari would last 10 minutes in the interview before excusing himself to assist behind the counter as diners lined up. Two young Haredi men set up a folding table and asked passing males if they’d yet donned tefillin. Lovers held hands. Parents pushed baby carriages; in one woman’s carriage sat not an infant, but a puppy.

In Barchordari’s place at the table soon sat Hezi Fanian, born in Israel to parents who’d come in the 1950s from Yazd and Borujerd. He’s a singer, specializing in Persian, and some of the songs he’s written and recorded mean to bridge the divide between his ancestral lands. One such song is “Salaam” (Peace). Another is “From Tel Aviv to Tehran.”

He and two men in Iran—a composer and a singer—are collaborating on a love song they’ll be recording. They’ve spoken a lot in the past year, but Fanian said that their connection, and the recording, is in limbo, perhaps temporarily, following the regime’s cutting of internet access.

“I hope they’re both okay,” he said.

The song, he said, will be issued in the open. Fanian thinks that collaborating musically “could be a point of pride for them, because we’ve become a superpower.”

He added, “If [the regime in] Iran falls, it’ll be because of Israel and the United States.”

That’s a point each of the Iranian Israelis raised in my conversations with them. They said it not haughtily, but matter-of-factly: We are pounding the regime to eliminate its plans to destroy Israel with ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons, and, even better, we’d simultaneously be freeing the Iranian people from tyranny.

Fanian reached back 2,500 years to state that modern-day Jews are making good on an ancient debt from when the Persian king, Cyrus II, facilitated exiled Jews’ return to the land of Israel and the building of the Second Temple following the Babylonians’ destruction of the First Temple.

“I’m proud, as an Iranian and as a Jew,” he said, “that in my generation, we’re honored to repay the Iranians’ good deed that Cyrus did for us.”

Melanie Phillips: We Must Eliminate the Islamist Threat

In Israel, the public are having to run repeatedly into the shelters day and night under barrages of missiles and drones, including banned cluster bombs, from Iran and more barrages from its proxy army in Lebanon, Hizbullah. Most missiles are being intercepted, but the fragments that hurtle down from the sky can be as big as a bus, destroying houses and killing people.

The Gulf states, whose defenses are less sophisticated than Israel's, have been attacked by even heavier barrages of missiles from Iran. Despite this, both the Israelis and the Gulf rulers want the war waged by America and Israel to continue until the Iranian regime has been destroyed. The Gulf states - including Iran's erstwhile ally, Qatar - are astounded and outraged that Iran has turned on them.

The Israelis - who for more than four decades have been attacked by Iranian proxy terrorism and rockets, and have shuddered at the regime's steady advance towards nuclear capacity and mass-production of missiles designed to wipe them off the face of the earth - are united in support of the war.

There is little understanding in the West of the Tehran regime's particular kind of fanaticism. Its dominant members are Shia "Twelvers," who believe that an apocalypse will bring to earth the Shia messiah, the "Twelfth Imam." Anyone who thinks there can ever be any compromise with such fanatics is on a different planet.

The Iranian threat can never be totally neutralized unless the regime itself is brought down. This war could be seen as utterly reckless - unless the alternative is fully understood. Then it becomes utterly imperative, and essential that it is pursued until the Iranian Islamic regime is no more.

WSJ Editorial: Iran Isn't Winning This War

The reality inside Iran is that the U.S. and Israel continue to make progress. The regime loses more of its military each day, along with the ability to hurt its neighbors. At 10 days in, the war can hardly be considered prolonged.

The regime for now thinks it can outlast the U.S. News reports say Russian intelligence is helping Iran target U.S. forces and radars. That reinforces the point that the U.S. is fighting a larger axis.

The spike in oil prices due to the traffic stoppage in the Strait of Hormuz wasn't unexpected. While it will be costly for Iran, which relies on oil exports for its financing, the U.S. has ample oil and gas supplies. Mr. Trump is right that the disruption is a "small price to pay" for major security advances.

For now, the regime still has capabilities to destroy. It would make no sense to leave so many loose ends, from missiles and production facilities to nuclear sites at Pickaxe Mountain and the Isfahan tunnels. There is also little reason to leave standing any IRGC or Basij bases. Stopping now amid some short-term economic discomfort would be a victory for the mullahs. They can't be allowed to conclude that shutting down oil flows is their passport to survival now and in the future.

How the Iran War Ends

So far, air supremacy hasn't prevented Iran from putting massive political and economic pressure on Washington by choking off the Middle East's oil flow to the world. There are no signs yet of a popular rebellion capable of toppling the regime. And waves of attacks against Iran's strongholds and assets haven't yet enabled any surviving pragmatists to steer the regime away from its radical approach.

Yet the pessimism is likely premature. The lesson so far is that Iran's threat to America is both greater than many Iran doves understood and more difficult to address than many Iran hawks hoped.

Since World War II, U.S. presidents of both parties believed that preventing any hostile country from blackmailing the rest of the world by blocking exports from the Gulf was a vital national interest. This reality, not Israeli lobbying, has been the driving force behind American Middle East policy.

If Iran pressures the U.S. to end the war before it can break the blockade and cripple Tehran's ability to impose new blockades down the road, the mullahs will hold an acknowledged veto power over the ability of their Gulf neighbors to trade with the world. The Iranian regime could then threaten a global economic crisis at will and would build up the weapons and war chests that will make its position unassailable.

Something unusual is happening in Yemen. The Houthis — a movement whose official slogan includes "Death to America, Death to Israel, Damn the Jews" — are watching Iran take its heaviest blows in history and doing essentially nothing about it.

Why not?

At first I thought it was self-preservation. But Hezbollah, which has the same instinct, went all in, no doubt at Iran's behest.

The Houthis are saying that they are waiting for the right moment. On March 9th, speaking during his Ramadan lectures, Abdul Malik al-Houthi explained, "Regarding military escalation and action, our fingers are on the trigger, ready to respond at any moment should developments warrant it."

What is the right moment? For that, we need to understand a basic fact: for Iran, survival is victory.

Iran's strategic objective right now is not to defeat the United States militarily. It is to survive the campaign with enough institutional continuity, territorial control, and proxy infrastructure to reconstitute its threat posture over time — and to create enough economic and political pressure on the coalition to force a ceasefire before that threat posture is fully dismantled.

The oil weapon is central to that strategy.

The Strait of Hormuz closure has removed approximately 20 million barrels per day from global markets, roughly one-fifth of global oil consumption. There are partial mitigations available to make up some of this shortfall. Saudi Arabia's East-West Pipeline to Yanbu and the UAE's Habshan-Fujairah pipeline to the Gulf of Oman can together bypass the strait for perhaps 6-9 million bpd under optimal conditions, though drone strikes have already targeted Fujairah infrastructure and a Saudi oil field has been hit. Global spare production capacity outside the Gulf adds perhaps 1.5-3 million bpd. Strategic petroleum reserve draws from the U.S. and IEA members provide perhaps 2-4 million bpd of cushion measured in weeks, not months. U.S.-led naval escorts could restore another 0.5-2 million bpd through carefully batched convoys, but commercial operators won't return at scale until the route is genuinely safe, not merely escorted, and insurers remain unwilling to write policies. Venezuela can only add about half a million bpd.

Add all of it up generously, and the world can cover perhaps 10-14 million bpd of the shortfall. The remaining 6-10 million bpd, sustained over weeks and months, will do what oil shocks have always done: drive inflation, strain supply chains, and create political pressure on governments whose populations feel it at the pump. Asia absorbs over 80% of Hormuz oil flows. South Korea, Japan, and India are not parties to this conflict. Their governments will not remain silent indefinitely. And in the United States, Brent crude at $90-100 per barrel will eventually be measured in polling numbers.

This is Iran's path to survival: economic attrition with the world pressuring the US to end the war as soon as possible.

Yet even the partial mitigation from the Saudi pipeline depends almost entirely on one assumption: that the Red Sea bypass route stays open.

The Houthis control the Bab-el-Mandeb strait at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. They have already demonstrated, over two years of operations, that they can make that corridor effectively impassable to commercial shipping through a sustained campaign of ballistic missiles, anti-ship cruise missiles, and one-way attack drones. During their previous campaign, the Houthis attacked 178 vessels, sinking four ships and killing nine sailors, forcing hundreds of commercial vessels to reroute around South Africa.

Right now, ships going across the Red Sea to the Suez Canal are still unimpeded. The Saudi pipeline is safe for now. But the Houthis can make the entire Red Sea too dangerous for shipping; insurers would bail as soon as there is one ballistic missile aimed at the Yanbu port that the Saudis use.

This is Iran's ace in the hole. Closing both the Straits of Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb, and harassing the ships already in the Red Sea, is an oil shock that the world cannot absorb now.

If the Houthis enter now, they do so at the moment of maximum U.S. military attention and maximum carrier strike group presence. They would be struck hard, potentially decisively, while the political and military infrastructure to do so is fully in place. That is a bad trade, not just for the Houthis, but for Iran, which needs them intact for exactly the scenario described above.

The Houthis, kept intact and in reserve, are the instrument designed to execute the most important part of Iran's survival strategy at the critical moment.

The only question is timing. And here is where strategy must be considered more importantly than a literal interpretation of international law. Because there is no reason to wage the war in Iran's timetable.

The Houthi threat should be addressed now, while the carriers are in place, while the military and political infrastructure to address it is mobilized. Waiting until they shoot their first missile or drone is exactly what Iran wants the US to do - because Iran controls the timing to stay in power.

Airstrikes against Houthi military infrastructure — launch sites, missile and drone storage, command and control — conducted now, as part of the broader campaign posture, carry a fraction of the political and operational cost they would carry in four or six weeks, when justifying renewed escalation becomes exponentially harder. The targeting intelligence accumulated during Operation Prosperity Guardian and the August 2025 strikes is there. The assets are in the region. The narrative logic — these are Iran's proxies, this is a single integrated threat network — is defensible and accurate.

The Houthis have already demonstrated their willingness to act against global shipping when Iran requests it. That is not a theoretical future threat — it is an established behavioral pattern with a two-year track record. The question is not whether they will do it, but when Iran decides the moment is optimal.

The Houthis are not acting out of self preservation. Like Hezbollah, they are doing exactly what their Iranian masters tell them to do. Iran needed Hezbollah to open up a second front to Israel at the outset of the war, but they need the Houthis to be wait and maintain their full capabilities.

Waiting for that moment give Iran control of the most important single variable in the war's political sustainability: the oil price, and with it, the patience of every government in Asia and every voter in America watching their energy bills.

The Houthis are not standing down out of principle. They are being held in reserve as a weapon. The time to address a weapon is before it is fired, not after.

We know they would use it on request. They already did.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)