Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, June 16, 2025

06/16 Links Pt1: Eight Israelis killed in five Iranian missile strikes; The Ultimate Deception: How Trump and Bibi Outfoxed Iran; IAEA: All centrifuges at Iran main's enrichment plant severely damaged

From Ian:

Eight Israelis killed in five Iranian missile strikes

Eight Israelis were killed by Iranian missile strikes in five locations that occurred Sunday night and early Monday morning.

In the central Israeli city of Petach Tikva, five people were killed in a residential building, and in adjacent Bnei Brak, an 80-year-old man was found dead at the site of a missile strike.

Two of the people killed in Petach Tikva were inside their safe room, which was directly hit by a missile. Israel’s Home Front Command explained that safe rooms are built to protect from shrapnel, shards and shock waves, but not a direct hit, which is a rare occurrence. The Home Front Command emphasized that everyone else in the building who was in a safe room was not even injured. Petach Tikva Mayor Rami Grinberg said that the residence was struck by a ballistic missile carrying hundreds of kilograms of explosives.

Tel Aviv sustained two direct missile strikes, one of which lightly damaged the U.S. Embassy Branch Office. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee clarified that “the minor damage to the property were from the shock waves … from the nearby blast … No injuries, thank God!”

Among the residents evacuated from buildings in Tel Aviv was a six-day-old baby, whose mother was found minutes later.

In Haifa, three people were found dead under the rubble of a burning building where a missile hit, and about 300 people were evacuated. The Israel Electric Corporation said that the strike damaged its power grid, and that “teams are working on the ground to neutralize safety hazards, in particular the risk of electrocution.” Maritime risk assessment company Ambrey reported a fire at the Haifa Port.

Israel continued to intercept Iranian and Houthi drones heading to Israel’s north on Monday morning.

About 50 Israeli fighter jets and aircraft struck some 100 military targets in Isfahan in central Iran overnight, the IDF Spokesperson’s Office said on Monday.

Among those targets were missile storage sites, surface-to-surface missile launchers and command centers. Israel has destroyed over 120 missile launchers since the beginning of the operation, about a third of Iran’s total launchers. In one strike overnight, the IAF identified an attempt to launch missiles towards Israel in real time and destroyed the cell and missiles.

The IDF confirmed on Monday that it killed the head of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps intelligence Mohammad Kazemi and his deputy, Hassan Mohaqiq, on Sunday.

The IDF also struck a command center of the Quds Force, part of the IRGC, for the first time, according to the IDF spokesperson. The Quds Force “planned acts of terror against Israel through the Iranian regime’s proxies in the Middle East.”

Israel also reportedly struck near nuclear sites in Fordow. The Wall Street Journal reported that parts of the underground nuclear enrichment site in Natanz collapsed as a result of Israeli strikes.

The IAF struck Mashhad, in eastern Iran, on Sunday afternoon, destroying an Iranian refueling aircraft. Mashhad, some 2300 km (1429 mi) away from Israel, is the farthest Israeli fighter jets have flown in Iran, and, according to some experts, the farthest in any Israeli operation, ever.

The Israeli Navy used a new air defense system called Thunder Shield and LRAD long-range interceptors on Sa’ar 6 ships to intercept eight Iranian drones overnight. The seaborne systems, which have intercepted some 25 projectiles since the beginning of Operation Rising Lion on Thursday night, are able to intercept UAVs, cruise missiles, sea-to-land missiles and more.

Seth Mandel: The World Had 30 Years of Israeli Restraint and Failed to Stop Iran

Notice a pattern? Israeli leaders take steps for peace and then ask one thing of the West: to help prevent Iran from sabotaging the process before it can go any further.

In 2012, Shimon Peres—Israel’s “dreamer,” the only person as closely associated with the peace process as Rabin—was asked by CNN about Israel’s willingness to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program, even taking lethal action against those responsible for the program. Peres responded: “If you have enough information about a certain person which is a ticking clock that can explode a bomb that can endanger civilian life, clearly you have to prevent him from doing so.”

Meanwhile, plans for Iran’s nuclear program began back in the 1980s. These plans were put into action in the 1990s as Iran sought to build nuclear bombs within about a decade. Before that time was up, however, it’s illicit facilities were revealed and efforts were made to try to freeze the project. Iran ignored its diplomatic obligations and in 2005 was found to be noncompliant by the International Atomic Energy Agency. This happened again mere days ago. President Obama’s JCPOA was intended to delay Iran’s nuclear breakout beyond his presidency, but the deal itself foreclosed the possibility of reliable verification so mostly what it did was give Tehran relief from sanctions and enable it to set the Middle East on fire while still pursuing nuclear weapons.

In all those years, presidents of both parties engaged Iran diplomatically over its nuclear program. Such an offer of diplomacy remains on the table.

It is self-discrediting to ask “Why didn’t they try diplomacy?” It is self-discrediting to claim that this war is a result of Benjamin Netanyahu’s “obsession.” The record is crystal clear: Thirty years of restraint were rewarded with violence and subterfuge. And so those 30 years of restraint have come to a close.

Seth Mandel: Israel-Iran Conflict Has Already Proved the Necessity of ‘Operation Rising Lion’

We don’t know how many missiles have been shot or how many have been intercepted, and some appeared to have failed to make the trip all the way to Israel and landed somewhere along the way. But as of Sunday there were 17 sites of impact, the New York Times reported. The missiles are being fired at population centers—while Israel is hitting military targets, the Iranians are simply launching war crime after war crime. The regime in Tehran has the advantage here of not coming under international pressure to avoid crimes against humanity, because their victims are Jews. Kenneth Roth, a preposterously cretinous anti-Zionist who used to run a pretend “human rights” organization and now teaches at Princeton, has even been out there justifying Iran’s strikes like the totalitarian regime mouthpiece he strives to be.

And missiles are hitting densely populated neighborhoods, the Times notes, just the shockwaves alone are damaging. One expert told the paper that Iran had fired one kind of missile at Israel for the first time: the Shahed Haj Qassem. It is a solid-fuel medium-range ballistic missile that the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control identifies as one of the newer types that Iran likely intends to outfit with a nuclear warhead if the regime ever crosses that goal line.

To simplify: Iran is practicing nuking Tel Aviv.

Iranian firepower isn’t only a threat to Israel. Russia has relied on Iranian-made drones and ballistic and cruise missiles in its war on Ukraine. As CSIS notes, both Russia and China—Iran’s benefactors—have so-called firepower-strike strategies in their respective war doctrines. Every Iranian missile benefits all three, giving our European allies plenty of reason to stop complaining about Israel’s preemptive actions.

An Iranian nuclear umbrella would put the world at risk, and for that reason alone Israel deserves the full support of the West. But from Israel’s perspective, the buildup of a large-enough ballistic-missile stockpile to overwhelm Israeli defenses is absolutely a threat that must be eliminated, and soon.

John Spencer: Redefining Shock and Awe: What We Can Learn from Israel’s Opening of Operation Rising Lion

Imagine if Operation Overlord in World War II began with the elimination of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the German High Command; Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS; Field Marshal Erwin Rommel; numerous other senior generals; and the destruction of all of Germany’s air defenses, before a single Allied soldier landed on the beaches of Normandy. That’s not an exaggerated hypothetical. It’s a near-parallel to what Israel just did to Iran.

Israel’s war against Iran is still ongoing. But what has already unfolded will be studied for decades.

Israel's current military operation against Iran is officially called Operation Rising Lion, launched on June 13, 2025, with a sweeping and precise preemptive strike. The operation was not just historic. It was transformational. It redefined what shock and awe can look like in the 21st century.

This was not merely a strike. It was a campaign—a layered, synchronized demonstration of modern operational art, built on deep intelligence, strategic deception, and the innovative fusion of old and new tools of war. Here's what it teaches us.

1. Surprise as a Core Element of Operational Art
Israel’s campaign against Iran is a textbook case in modern operational art. It wasn’t just an airstrike. It was a synchronized, multi-domain offensive that combined cyber, human intelligence, electronic warfare, airpower, special operations, and psychological operations.

Israel achieved surprise at the highest level. It launched a campaign that disrupted Iranian defenses before the first fighter jet even crossed the border. This is not warfare of the past. This is what large-scale, intelligence-driven combat looks like in 2025. The decisive moment in war often arrives long before the first bomb drops.

2. Deep Intelligence Penetration and Human Terrain Dominance
Perhaps the most stunning revelation is the depth to which Mossad and Israeli intelligence had penetrated Iran’s inner military and nuclear circles. They not only knew where nuclear scientists and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders were located. They manipulated meeting schedules and lured multiple top generals into the same underground facility to be eliminated simultaneously.

Confirmed kills include:
Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Mohammad Hossein Bagheri
IRGC Commander Maj. Gen. Hossein Salami
Khatam al-Anbia HQ Commander Maj. Gen. Gholam Ali Rashid
IRGC Aerospace Force Commander Maj. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh
Nine nuclear scientists

These were not replaceable figures. Many had served for decades and had no peer backups. Their loss was not just symbolic. It decapitated Iran’s ability to coordinate large-scale retaliation.

Additionally, Quds Force Commander Esmail Qaani was struck, along with over 20 senior commanders targeted and eliminated in the first night alone. This wasn’t just a blow. It was a beheading of Iran’s strategic brain trust.

Today, Israel gave specific warning for Iranians to evacuate areas that were going to be attacked, including Iran's IRIB broadcaster.

But Iran also gives warnings, sort of.

Iranian Armed Forces spokesman Reza Sayyad called on all Israelis to leave the country altogether, "because [the territories] will soon be uninhabitable," claiming that Israeli aggression will be met with a shocking response that includes all of the "occupied territories. "

There you go! They warned everyone to leave!

The former head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Rezaei, said that Iran used missiles yesterday and today carrying warheads weighing "one and a half tons," and that it has not yet used warheads with heavier weight and power. He added, "It is still too early to reveal many of Iran's weapons, because we are preparing ourselves for a scenario of expanding aggression against us. If the war continues, the world will see something from us that it has never seen before."

Additionally, Mohsen Rezaei, a current member of the Expediency Discernment Council, emphasized that "Iran continues to exercise restraint and has not utilized all its capabilities to avoid disrupting the global order."

Earlier this month, Iran said it was testing 2 ton warheads. It is not clear that they were operationalized. A two ton warhead, all else being equal, would have about a 21% greater blast radius than a 1.5 ton warhead.

Interestingly, Iran never said that they would offer measured responses to aggression. Their rhetoric has always been that if anyone lifts up a hand against them, the response would be "swift and devastating." It is interesting that they now are claiming that they are exercising restraint.

Missile expert Tal Inbar says that the missiles Israel has seen so far had payloads of either 500 kg or 750 kg, not the 1,500 kg that Rezaei claimed they used already. But he does warn there there is indeed one highly dangerous missile in their inventory that they have not yet shot to Israel:

“There is one missile Iran has not yet used against Israel: the Khorramshahr,” he revealed. Based on North Korea’s Hwasong-10, Khorramshahr is Iran’s heaviest and fastest missile, boasting a range close to 2,000 km, a 1,500 kg warhead, and a top speed around Mach 14. Although currently within the interception envelope of Israel’s enhanced air defence network, a single successful penetration could inflict catastrophic damage.
The Khorramshahr also features a navigation system that corrects its course outside the atmosphere, making it resistant to jamming from electronic warfare. It is considered highly accurate—capable of precision strikes—and has exceptional manoeuvrability compared to its peers, with a warhead built to withstand extreme heat.

It appears that Iran considers its most effective weapon to be threats. And up until this war, those threats have spooked the West successfully.

No doubt Israel is very aware of the types of missiles Iran has, and it has prioritized destroying the biggest ones. But there is no reason to be complacent. Iran's claims might be exaggerated, but it still has plenty of deadly missiles.

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Israel's legal right to defend itself (Daled Amos)

By Daled Amos

Last month, Alan Dershowitz came out with his latest book, The Preventive State: The Challenge of Preventing Serious Harms While Preserving Essential Liberties. One of the theoretical scenarios he covers is a pre-emptive Israeli attack on Iran:

Today's Persia, now called Iran, poses a contemporary threat of genocide against the nation-state of the Jewish people, Israel. If Iran were to develop a nuclear arsenal and the capacity of deploying it against Israel, which the mullahs have called a "one-bomb state" capable of being destroyed forever by one successful nuclear attack, it could kill millions of Jews and Arabs. So, the issue very much in the forefront is whether Israel and/or the United States should engage in preventive military action to destroy, or at least set back, Iran's nuclear arsenal program (as it did with Iraq and Syria in the past). [p.82]

Not surprisingly, not everyone agrees that Israel has the right to attack Iran and dismantle its nuclear program. Even those with a background in international law are opposed to the attack. Here's one such opinion on X from a professor of international law and security at the University of Copenhagen:

The argument is that Iran's nuclear threat is not imminent, and that changes Israel's attack from pre-emptive to preventive.

So, first of all, was Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons imminent or not? Elder of Ziyon writes about the indications that Iran was just weeks away from a fully functional nuclear bomb.

But Dershowitz offers a different response to the question of imminence: it doesn't matter. He quotes from a previous book of his, The Case Against the Iran Deal: How Can We Stop Iran Getting Nukes?

No democracy can afford to wait until such a threat against its civilian population is imminent. Both Israel and the United States should have the right under international law to protect their civilians and soldiers from a threatened nuclear holocaust, and that right must include--if that is the only realistic option--preemptive military action. [p. 83]

Tom Nichols, writing for The Atlantic, quotes John F. Kennedy to the same effect: a country cannot afford to wait until an attack is imminent. In 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy said:

We no longer live in a world where only the actual firing of weapons represents a sufficient challenge to a nation’s security to constitute maximum peril.

Not everyone will agree with that, and that leads to the question of whether Israel's attack was preemptive or preventive.

What difference does preventive vs preemptive make?

Tom Nichols writes that a preventive attack means the attacking country is "removing the source of a threat by surprise, on their own timetable and on terms they find favorable. They may be justified in doing so." On the other hand, preemptive attacks "are spoiling attacks, meant to thwart an imminent attack. In both tradition and law, this form of self-defense is perfectly defensible." The intended victim does not have to wait to be shot; he can fight back and kill his attacker first.

The key difference is that while preemptive attacks are accepted as legal,

Preventive attacks, however, have long been viewed in the international community as both illegal and immoral.

It may not be enough that Israel declares its attack to be preemptive.

Kyle Orton, who writes about terrorism and national security issues, will not take Netanyahu's word for it:

Yet it seems more likely that Israel is speaking of its actions as pre-emptive for political purposes. Framing the attack in these terms allows Netanyahu to claim the right to “anticipatory self-defence”, minimising interference and condemnation from the perennially anti-Israel international law establishment.

All this talk about preemptive wars leads back to the fact that Israel wrote the book on preemption. Nichols writes:

The Israelis, ironically, are in the case books as the clearest example of a legitimate preemptive attack. In 1967, Israel got the jump on an Arab coalition that had been so obvious in its march to war that it was literally broadcasting its intention to destroy Israel while its troops massed for an offensive. Indeed, international-law experts have noted that the 1967 war is so clear that it is not much use as a precedent, because most enemies are not blockheaded enough to assemble an army and declare their intention to invade.

Ironically, not only does Israel provide the perfect example of a preemptive war, but it is too perfect.

But then, Nichols adds parenthetically:

(Of course, the Israelis could argue that they are already at war with Iran, a country that has launched many missiles at them and directed years of proxy attacks on their people and their military, which would be a far stronger case.)

Orton makes the same point with greater emphasis:

The clerical regime is publicly pledged to Israel’s destruction and has carried out numerous attacks in pursuit of this goal, including the 7 October massacre that started the current war in Gaza. This is a permanent threat Israel has every right to counter. It just means “preventive”, a more difficult legal-political category, is the more precise term for what is happening now.

Dershowitz goes further, arguing that the Six Day War still provides a solid justification for Israel's attacking Iran because it contains both aspects. He notes the argument that Egypt and Syria were bluffing and would not have attacked, removing the justification of Israel's preemptive attack. To this, he responds:

But Israel had a dual justification for its military action against Egypt, which had blocked the Strait of Tiran from Israeli shipping. That constituted a casus belli-an act of war-that justifies a reactive military response. [p. 84]

So too in regards to Iran, the nuclear threat is not the only justification for Israel's attack, because, similar to Egypt,

Iran has also engaged in acts that constitute a casus belli against Israel, both directly and indirectly, through its surrogates Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, and the Houthis in Yemen. Israel would be justified in reactively attacking Iran for these and other attacks, but its justification is enhanced by its legitimate need to prevent Iran from securing and deploying--as it promised (and also denied) it would do--a nuclear arsenal. [p. 85]

Some world leaders are already issuing the usual calls for Israel and Iran to dial down the violence, like parents telling their kids to stop fighting--not because they care who’s right, but because they’re trying to get some sleep.

In the media, The New York Times wants you to believe these are "the most direct and prolonged attacks between the rivals ever," just one more spin in that "cycle of violence" where everyone is to blame. It is not. It is a question of survival.

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

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Arabic media in disarray on how to react to this war

It often takes a little time for Arabic language media to reach consensus on which anti-Israel theme to invoke in response to new events. (Think of the "genocide" theme for Gaza.)

Right now Arab media is throwing whatever it can think of to the wall to see what sticks.

Dr. Mazen Mansour Krishan in Jordanian site Al Bosala ignores the war altogether and says that all indications are that the Zionist project is crumbling, using cherry picked outdated statistics and buttressing it with Quranic quotes on how evil Jews are and how Allah will punish them.

Tahseen Ahmad al-Tal says in Al Qalah News (also Jordan) that this war is great news, because it allows Iran to legally attack Israel under the guise of self-defense. He is also encouraged by Israelis saying that this is a battle for existence and survival, which means that the Jews believe that their existence is temporary, and that their state will disappear sooner or later.

Ghassan Jaber in Palestinian site Wattan says Netanyahu is "a modern-day Hitler leading Israel to the abyss." He says, "We are not seeking superficial comparisons here, but rather a profound historical and political reading that reveals the terrifying similarity between Nazism, which set the world ablaze, and extremist Zionism, which spreads death and destruction in Palestine and burns away what remains of international and human values."

Egypt 2030 says that Iran attacking medical research laboratories at the Weizmann Institute is really an attack on Israel's nuclear weapons program.

The only theme, as always, is that Jews are evil. How to turn that into a narrative that fits the facts is the challenge,

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Syrians happy to see Israel bombing Iran

Here's a poster going around Syrian social media showing Syria enjoying watching Iran get bombed:

According to Lebanon's L'Orient L'Jour, the Syrian people might not be enamored of Israel, but they really hate Iran:

From Damascus to Aleppo, and from Deraa to Idlib, Syrians are rejoicing at this "heavy blow" against Iran, which they "loathe," due to the Iranian regime having sided with that of Bashar al-Assad in crushing the Syrian uprising of 2011. For the first time in its modern history, Damascus did not condemn Israeli strikes, unlike its Lebanese, Turkish, Jordanian, and Iraqi neighbors.

That is nothing short of astonishing.

On social media, many mock Iran's apparently weak defense capabilities. "The Kowsar fighter jet, a flagship of Iranian manufacturing, is invisible on radars because no means have been found to make it fly," jokes one poster with an accompanying photo of the plane.

Abou Adam, a former rebel fighter who became a guardian of the al-Noqta mosque, located near the former Iranian consulate in Aleppo, "rejoices at the assassination of Iranian military leaders," including the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hossein Salami. Tehran had deployed the latter in Syria to maintain its ally in power and to consolidate 'Axis of Resistance' against Israel and American influence in the Middle East.

"They were one of the main causes of the deaths of many innocent people in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen," Abou Adam says. "They destroyed our cities but also attempted to spread their ideology to ensure lasting control over these countries." In December, during the liberation of Aleppo, Abou Adam discovered the extent of Iran's "limitless" propaganda at the cultural center next to the mosque.

Abou Jaafar, 33, a member of the security forces in Deraa, says he's happy that the Iranian regime is weakened, "not because we support the Israelis," but so it is punished "after all the destruction, massacres, and illicit trafficking, committed everywhere in Syria, but especially in the South."

The only people supporting Iran are dyed in the wool, antisemitic Israel haters.

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06/15 Links: Sharansky: We're Witnessing a Historic Test of Assumptions about Israel; 11 killed, 200 injured, 3 missing as Iranian missiles pound Israel

From Ian:

Yair Rosenberg: The War Israel Was Ready to Fight

On October 7, 2023, Israel suffered the most catastrophic assault in its history when Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,000 people and took hundreds of others hostage. Almost a year later, Israel assassinated Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the most powerful militia in the world, along with the entire leadership of his organization. Last night, it did the same to the rulers of Iran, eliminating the heads of the regime’s armed forces, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and regional proxies.

How could the same country that was bested by a ragtag militia in its own backyard turn around and ravage multiple regional powers with devastating decapitation strikes? The dissonance between these events has fomented confusion and conspiracy theories. But Israel’s successes and failures in the past 20 months stem from a single source. A very specific plan to stop Iran led to both the disaster of October 7 and the triumphs since.

For decades, Iran’s theocratic leaders have called for Israel’s destruction, denying the Nazi Holocaust while urging another one. The regime funneled millions of dollars and thousands of missiles to proxies on Israel’s borders and beyond: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen. Iran’s authorities constructed monuments to their predicted victory, displaying missiles emblazoned with the words Death to Israel and even erecting a countdown clock to Israel’s end.

Israel, a nation born out of the ashes of an attempted Jewish genocide, took these threats seriously. Just as Iran labeled America “the Great Satan” and Israel “the Little Satan,” Israel’s security establishment conceived of its adversaries in tiers: Iran was the biggest threat, its fearsome proxy Hezbollah ranked next, and the smaller Hamas posed the least danger. The Israelis prioritized their resources accordingly. Their best people—and best exploding beepers—were put to work countering Iran and Hezbollah, which had formidable arsenals of advanced weapons. Hamas, by contrast, was treated as an afterthought, contained behind a blockade of Gaza that was maintained less by manpower than by advanced security technology.

October 7 exposed this folly, as Hamas and its allies disabled that technology and stormed across the border on land, meeting little resistance as they rampaged through civilian communities. This was a war Israel did not expect and was not prepared to fight. That fact was evident not only in the casualties and hostage-taking during the massacre, but in the grinding, brutal, and haphazard war in Gaza that has followed. Simply put, Israel was flying without radar. It did not know Hamas’s capabilities, had not infiltrated its leadership, did not have widespread intelligence sources on the ground, and was largely ignorant of the group’s sprawling underground infrastructure in Gaza. This operational ignorance has resulted in a horrific meat grinder of a war with thousands of civilian casualties and still no end in sight. It’s also why Israel’s military took more than a year after October 7 to find and kill the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

By the time that happened, Israel had already taken out Hezbollah’s Nasrallah, a far more protected and high-value target, after neutralizing many of his elite forces via exploding beepers and walkie-talkies and blowing up many of the group’s missiles while they were still in storage. The very resources that had not been brought to bear on Hamas, thus enabling the disaster of October 7, achieved the neutralization of Hezbollah within weeks.

Hezbollah had joined in the attacks on Israel after the assault on October 7, apparently believing that Israel was too hobbled to respond beyond token tit-for-tat strikes. Likewise, the group’s patrons in Iran may have misread the events of October 7 as evidence of fundamental Israeli weakness, rather than a terrible but isolated error. For months, Tehran continued to supply its proxies in Lebanon and Yemen with advanced missiles to fire at Israel, seemingly under the belief that it would be immune from similar incoming in response. That mistake, like Israel’s on October 7, proved costly.

Natan Sharansky: We're Witnessing a Historic Test of Assumptions about Israel

The Israeli government has launched a targeted military assault against the Islamic Republic of Iran, striking its military facilities, nuclear sites and top military leadership. We are witnessing the historic test of the assumption that Israel cannot eliminate the Iranian nuclear threat without active U.S. involvement.

As successive U.S. governments chose the path of diplomacy, Tehran inched closer and closer to obtaining nuclear weapons. And so, after decades of failed international negotiations, Israel decided to wage its battle without America's direct participation. The Jewish state's very existence hangs in the balance.

In conversations I had with Iranians over the past few months, two narratives emerged. Those closer to the government predicted that a war would rally citizens around the regime and thereby strengthen its grip. Dissidents, on the other hand, insisted that an attack limited to nuclear and military targets, and even extending to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps but sparing civilians and ordinary soldiers, would help their cause by exposing and deepening the regime's fragility.

Iran’s Target Isn’t Just Israel. It’s Us

Israel has struck a blow to prevent Iran from developing nuclear bombs - weapons that it might credibly use toward its stated goal of removing Israel from the planet. This is not simply a matter of regional security. This conflict is a central front in a global contest in which the forces of tyranny and violence in recent years have been gaining ground against the forces of freedom, which too often are demoralized and divided.

In a world full of bad actors, Iran is the most aggressive and dangerous totalitarian force of our time. Its leaders seek to weaken and destroy free society, democracy and human rights with Russian and Chinese support. In Iran, women are systematically oppressed and abused. Homosexuals are murdered. Those who think differently are imprisoned and tortured. According to official state doctrine, the primary goal of the mullahs in Tehran is the annihilation of the State of Israel. Clocks in the streets of Tehran count down to the "destruction of Israel." But Israel is only the first target. Once Israel falls, Europe and America will be the focus. Radical Sunni and Shiite Islamism has been preparing for this for decades. Their attacks are directed against our values, our way of life.

It is therefore surprising that Israel is not being celebrated worldwide for its historic, extremely precise and necessary strike against Iranian nuclear weapons facilities and for the targeted killing of leading terrorists. America and Europe, in their own interests alone, must stand united with Israel.

Jake Wallis Simons: Israel Can See what Europe Can't: the Devil

Ayatollah Khamenei's pet theology lusts after the apocalypse. Triggered by the obliteration of Israel, this cataclysm will supposedly herald the arrival of the "Mahdi" to lead Shia forces to global victory. These are the convictions that drive actual Iranian foreign policy. When Jerusalem was forced to act, you'd have thought the West would rally. But no. Israel was the bad guy.

We have seen this movie before. When Jerusalem destroyed Saddam Hussein's nuclear program in 1981, the world was appalled. Two decades later, the White House quietly acknowledged that the Jews had done everybody a favor.

The countries that will thrive will be those with conviction in their values and the courage and resilience to defend them. As Menachem Begin observed, "The world may not necessarily like the fighting Jew, but the world will have to take account of him." The Devil exists. It makes no sense to appease him.

Israel has a free press, filled with people who love to passionately debate each other, and as transparent a government as possible for a nation always under attack.

As a result, Israel haters have tons of sources for their assertions that Israel is on the brink, that Israelis are turning against each other, and that it cannot survive.

They've been saying this consistently for 77 years, even as Israel has built itself up from nothing int a regional superpower with an economy that has been growing at rates that most countries can only dream of.

Israel's enemies, on the other hand, see self-criticism as a weakness - it is a source of shame to have anyone publicly contradict what the government says. So their confident assertions of strength and unity are rarely challenged.

Antisemites naturally love hearing that Israel's enemies are strong, steadfast and solid, while Israel is fractious and weak,

But it is precisely Israel's willingness to self-criticize that makes it strong. It shows a willingness to debate ideas that are frightening, to imagine nightmare scenarios and make contingency plans on top of other contingency plans.

And too often, Israel's neighbors believe their own lies.

Everyone was shocked at the rapid fall of Bashar Assad's regime in Syria. That is because Syria would not let anyone from the West see anything but how powerful the regime was.

Hezbollah's strength was concentrated on the brilliance and charisma of Hassan Nasrallah. Once he was eliminated, the entire organization - which was reeling but still largely whole after the pager attacks - unraveled.

Iran is no different. It is somewhat more willing to admit setbacks than Hamas, for example, but as we are seeing, it cannot defend itself from a nation that is a thousand miles away. Perhaps its army is still effective, but it is sidelined.

More importantly, the constant emphasis that Iran was invincible and Israel was weak and that has the "curse of the eighth decade" has been believed by their own leadership. Since they do not allow dissent, they cannot have serious debate - and debate and self-criticism is what makes a nation strong.

There are reports that rich Iranians are chartering private jets and leaving despite commercial aviation being shut down. This is what happened in the "nakba" - prominent Palestinian Arabs left first, leaving the rest without role models and leaders and collapsing self-confidence. It also happened very quickly in Syria as soldiers abandoned their posts rather than face a real enemy, Israel's incredible military gains in so short a time is having a profound psychological effect.

But the psychological effect is twofold. It is more than a simple military setback - it is a realization that the belief system that propped up the regime was all an illusion. When that happens, self-preservation starts to trump patriotism.

When Iran accuses Israel of being weaker than a spider's web, they were really projecting their own deep fears about themselves. Their responses to Israel's attacks - claiming shooting down planes and capturing pilots and that apartment buildings in Israel are military targets - show that their main remaining weapons are lies.

Iranians are seeing that their leaders couldn't even protect themselves. How can they be expected to take care of their own people?

Maybe I'm wrong, but unless the West successfully pressures Israel to stop the campaign before it is done, and if the people of Iran start to organize and protest, I think that regime change can happen sooner than people think.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The difficulty of Israel destroying the underground Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow and Natanz is well known.

But perhaps for the purposes of the war, complete destruction is not necessary.

Every underground enrichment facility requires ventilation, both for workers to breathe and to air-condition the sensitive centrifuges. Ventilation must have access to outside air.

The ventilation shafts might be hidden and difficult to find, but by now Israel probably knows exactly where they are. If they are heavily damaged, it would take months to repair, and no enrichment can take place until they are fixed.

But Israel has total air dominance over Iranian airspace. Which means that the facilities can be monitored, and any repair equipment could be bombed relatively easily. The idea of Iran digging a new secret ventilation shaft seems highly unlikely while Israeli planes and satellites are monitoring the facilities.

So in theory, Israel can keep these facilities inactive for a very long time - perhaps until regime change.

It might not be as good as a 30,000 lb. GBU-57A/B MOP, but the effect can be almost as good, at least for a significant amount of time.

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From journalist Doron Kadosh (translated):

We published in this morning's journal on Galei Tzahal with @efitriger:

Intelligence assessment presented to the political echelon: Iran is weeks away from a bomb if it decides to do so - this is the "golden intelligence" that was received before the outbreak of the attack

Intelligence assessment presented to the political echelon before launching the operation: Iran is one decision away from a bomb - and if it decides - it might be able to assemble a first nuclear bomb within weeks only.

In recent months, "golden [irrefutable] intelligence" was compiled, as security sources define it to us - this was a warning of war. And this is the intelligence: a covert operation that Iran led to develop one of the critical components for a nuclear bomb - what is called the "weapons group." And here it needs to be explained: to reach a nuclear bomb, several components are required:

The first is the enriched uranium known to us, which Iran has enriched at an accelerated pace in recent years, and has reached a level where it holds enough enriched uranium for 15 bombs, days away from enrichment to a high military level.

And the additional component, the weapons group, is the components that supposedly the Iranians did not develop in a declared manner - because it necessarily indicates a desire for nuclear weapons. The IDF succeeded in uncovering the covert Iranian program, which was at a high classification level - and its purpose was to develop the components of the weapons group.

The Iranians recruited the best scientists for the covert program - whom they divided into several working groups. Each working group received a different project to work on, which is one of the components of the weapons group. These are scientific, technological projects, whose engagement leaves no doubt: whoever deals with these specific subjects - is not looking for anything other than nuclear weapons.

The scientists' working groups began working about a year and a half ago - at the end of 2023-beginning of 2024, meaning: after October 7th. The conclusion reached in Israel: the Iranians made the decision to reach nuclear bomb components after Hamas's attack in the Gaza envelope.

In recent months, there was a significant development in the covert program, which was exposed throughout to Israeli intelligence sources. The scientists reached the testing phase and began conducting successful experiments on the components they were entrusted with. In Israel they understood: reaching the testing phase is critical, and the fact that the tests are defined as successful - brings the Iranians significantly closer to the point where they are one decision away from the ability to assemble a bomb.

Intelligence sources clarified to the political echelon: we are entering the dangerous space where Iran is one breakthrough away from a bomb. If it decides - there is a probability that it will succeed in reaching a bomb within weeks only, and another warning that was voiced in closed rooms: it's possible that we don't know everything, and Iran is in an even more advanced state than we think.

This was the intelligence that the State of Israel could not live with peacefully - and the decision was made: launching a preemptive attack.

Almost certainly the "weapons group" referred to here are the components needed to weaponize a nuclear device that have absolutely no civilian purpose. These are:

The implosion system - precisely timed explosive charges that compress the fissile material to achieve critical mass

Detonators and timing mechanisms - the complex electronics needed to trigger the explosives simultaneously

Engineering components - the mechanical design that holds everything together and ensures proper function

These are often considered the most technically challenging aspects of nuclear weapons development, requiring sophisticated expertise in explosives, timing, and precision engineering.

Iran looked at October 7 as the incentive to finally fulfill its promises to destroy Israel.

Israel didn't have merely the "right" to attack Iran. It had the moral obligation to do so, now.

UPDATE: Also read this:

[IAEA chief] Grossi started warning everyone that Iran would soon become a nuclear power, one ruled by religious fanatics pursuing the Shi’a vendetta against the world’s Sunnis for killing the last descendant of Muhammad at Karbala back in 680 AD, and for whom the destruction of Israel is key to supremacy over the entire Middle East.

When the Israelis realised that European leaders — but also Russia and China, and indeed the Biden administration — ignored Grossi’s increasingly alarmed warnings that a nuclear Iran was only months away, they waited for Trump to intervene. In this, they were immediately reassured when the US sent B2 bombers to its Diego Garcia base, each capable of destroying even Natanz.

But then Trump met resistance from the isolationists in his own administration, while he himself evidently did not want to begin his tenure with a war. Instead, he appointed a New York lawyer with no Iran or nuclear expertise to negotiate with the Islamic Republic. Unfortunately, Steve Witkoff was so poorly informed that he immediately accepted the enrichment level that Obama had negotiated, and which Trump had vehemently attacked as much too dangerous.

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06/14 Links: The Return of Peace Through Strength; IDF: We control the sky over Tehran and western Iran; Five Arab Christians killed, at least 23 wounded Haifa

From Ian:

The Return of Peace Through Strength

This uniparty of Obama administration veterans, other left-wingers, and self-proclaimed MAGA leaders shrieked in horror at the blow Israel administered to the "death to America" crowd. Tucker Carlson whined that Trump was "complicit in the act of war." Failed vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz plaintively hoped on Friday that "it might be the Chinese" who could "negotiate some type of agreement … and hold the moral authority."

This smooth-brained bigotry masquerading as strategic analysis led the United States into a dilemma where its biggest enemy in the region, which has attacked Americans at home and abroad continuously for nearly half a century, was within days of getting the bomb.

Trump is not nearly such a fool. Unlike those ideologues, he is a shrewd judge of power and knows that his base loves allies who fight their own battles and defeat America’s enemies. "I told Iran they should settle," he told the Washington Free Beacon Friday. "If I were them, I would want to settle." In the past few weeks, Trump and Netanyahu initiated a textbook deception campaign that caught Iran’s leadership completely by surprise. "I always knew the date," Trump assured the New York Post, "because I know everything."

Most of Iran’s senior leaders did not survive long enough to discover their blunder, and the initial Iranian attempt at retaliation was a pathetic failure: Israel crippled the ayatollah’s ballistic missile force while Iran’s Lebanese lackey, Hezbollah, practically begged Israel to let it stay out of the fight. As of this writing, another wave of Israeli aircraft is above Iran again.

This is but the latest battle in the war that Iran began on Oct. 7, and the going could get tougher as Iranian forces reorganize. Israel has reportedly sent many of Iran’s top nuclear scientists to their eternal reward, but the nuclear facilities are still intact.

"Let me be clear," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Thursday night. "Iran should not target U.S. interests or personnel." Two American destroyers that can intercept Iranian missiles sailed toward Israel on Friday. These are good first steps. He and his subordinates should give the Israelis the time they need to finish the job. Encouraging British prime minister Keir Starmer to borrow a spine from French president Emmanuel Macron would be good.

Removing Iran’s nuclear arsenal is also a priority. It is possible that Israel will not be able to reach some of the more fortified Iranian facilities using conventional explosives. Since this is an existential battle for Israel, it would be prudent to resolve that problem by either convincing what remains of Iran’s leadership to surrender its entire nuclear program or by offering Israel some of our much larger bunker busters.

"I think it's been excellent," Trump told ABC. "We gave them a chance [to negotiate] and they didn't take it. They got hit hard, very hard ... And there's more to come. A lot more." During Trump’s first campaign, many observed that the best way to understand the future president was to take him seriously, not literally. It turns out that when he said he wanted peace through strength, he meant it both ways.

How Israel’s Operation Rising Lion Dismantled Iran from Within: A Case Study in the Art of Deception

IV. Iran’s Response: Operational Weakness with Long-Term Costs
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed that Israel would face a “bitter and painful” fate. As part of its initial response, Tehran launched over 100 drones toward Israeli territory. Israel’s Home Front Command promptly issued a nationwide alert, instructing civilians to remain near bomb shelters. Yet within a few hours, Israel’s air defenses had neutralized Iran’s drone swarm.

The level of Israeli infiltration exposed during Operation Rising Lion has immediate and long-term consequences for the Iranian regime. Penetration of Iran’s air defense systems, intelligence networks, and internal military infrastructure indicates a loss of control at the core of the state. This not only compromises operational security but also undermines institutional trust within the IRGC, Quds Force, and the broader intelligence establishment. When command structures can no longer distinguish between internal loyalty and external manipulation, decision-making slows, risk tolerance narrows, and factionalism grows. Over time, this environment fosters paranoia, internal purges, and bureaucratic paralysis—conditions that steadily degrade the regime’s capacity to project power, manage crises, and maintain cohesion. First, despite its threats of a forceful response, Tehran has failed to impose meaningful costs on a technologically and operationally superior adversary. What was billed as a major reprisal has largely amounted to symbolic gestures aimed at domestic audiences rather than tangible battlefield outcomes.

Second, the limitations of Iran’s response are raising doubts among its regional partners—particularly the Houthis and Hezbollah—about Tehran’s reliability as the core of the anti-Israel axis. If Iran cannot effectively retaliate when directly targeted, its credibility as a deterrent umbrella weakens across the region.

Third, the growing disconnect between Khamenei’s rhetoric and Iran’s operational reality is eroding internal cohesion. In a regime where legitimacy depends heavily on projecting strength, visible failure—especially in the face of Israeli dominance—risks deepening public skepticism and unsettling elite consensus.

If these trends continue, a deeper strategic unraveling is possible. The erosion of deterrence abroad and legitimacy at home could trigger fragmentation within Iran’s security institutions, elite defection, and increased pressure from peripheral regions. What begins as a military failure may evolve into political instability—and, over time, the disintegration of the centralized system that has held the Islamic Republic together for over four decades.

Israel, by contrast, has demonstrated control over both the military and psychological dimensions of the conflict. It has absorbed Iranian strikes with minimal disruption, maintained national composure, and reinforced its dominance in both the air and information domains. The broader message is unmistakable: Israel sets the tempo and terms. Iran is reacting—and falling behind.

V. Lessons for the United States
As the US continues to lead diplomatic efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Operation Rising Lion provides a concrete demonstration of what effective counterproliferation requires. The operation serves as a reminder that diplomacy needs to be backed by credible power, intelligence superiority, and close coordination with trusted partners. Below are seven lessons the operation offers on counterproliferation, escalation control, and the enduring value of US–Israel cooperation.

1. Counterproliferation requires covert penetration, not just monitoring.
Israel did not rely on external enforcement bodies or treaty frameworks. Instead, it embedded operatives, pre-positioned strike assets, and built a parallel intelligence architecture capable of degrading Iran’s nuclear infrastructure from within. This highlights (a) the limitations of verification regimes for dealing with a regime committed to concealment and (b) the importance of backing passive oversight with the threat of active disruption.

2. Eliminating strategic human capital halts weaponization at its source.
Rather than only targeting facilities, Israel removed the intellectual and operational drivers of Iran’s nuclear program. Scientists, engineers, and senior planners with years of accumulated expertise were taken out of the equation. This approach addresses the roots of the problem in a way that no air strike on a centrifuge site could.

3. Strategic surprise prevents escalatory cascades.
The strike achieved total surprise—Iran received no warnings, distributed no alerts, and had no time for defensive repositioning. This prevented Tehran from activating contingency plans or engaging in calibrated escalation. Adversaries often expect a slow, bureaucratic Western response. But Israel showed that speed and surprise can shift the initiative and contain conflict escalation.

4. Hard power enforcement is essential when norms break down.
Israel acted while international institutions faltered. The Islamic Republic had repeatedly breached enrichment thresholds and obstructed inspections. Rather than wait for diplomatic consensus, Israel imposed a hard ceiling on Iran’s capabilities. This demonstrates that in certain cases, decisive action is not an alternative to diplomacy—it is a necessary mechanism to enforce negotiated terms.

5. Israel functions as a regional nonproliferation anchor.
Multilateral efforts often collapse under political pressure. Israel has proven willing and able to act when others are not. By destroying components of Iran’s nuclear and military infrastructure, Israel preserved regional stability and enforced red lines that others had only articulated. This establishes Israel as a frontline actor in global nonproliferation.

6. Negotiation leverage is built on the battlefield, not at the table.
The US entered nuclear talks with Iran hoping to restrain enrichment through diplomacy. Israel countered by altering the facts on the ground. By eliminating Iran’s top nuclear scientists and strategic planners, it dramatically weakened Tehran’s position in negotiations. The lesson: diplomatic strength is a function of prior operational advantage.

7. Intelligence without enforcement undermines deterrence.
US intelligence has long tracked Iran’s violations. But it has rarely translated that into meaningful action. Israel showed what happens when intelligence is fused with political will. Washington should recognize that delaying enforcement for fear of escalation undermines the credibility of US commitments.

VI. The Triumph of Strategic Vision
Operation Rising Lion demonstrated how modern warfare is shaped by perception, disruption, and initiative. Israel dismantled core elements of Iran’s command structure, eliminated key personnel tied to nuclear development, and exposed the gaps in Iran’s internal defenses. More critically, it disrupted the strategic logic that underpins Iran’s regional posture. Tehran had assumed that escalation could be delayed, that its territorial depth provided insulation, and that Israel would remain constrained by political and diplomatic pressures. On June 13 those assumptions collapsed.

The consequences extend beyond Iran’s borders. The regime’s ability to coordinate and direct its regional proxy network—Hezbollah, the Houthis, and various Iraqi and Syrian militias—relies on centralized guidance and perceived strength. By targeting senior IRGC figures and degrading logistical hubs, Israel introduced friction and fragmentation across this network. What appeared to be an integrated deterrence structure now faces a leadership vacuum and a credibility crisis.

For policymakers in Washington, the operation underscores a broader reality: dominance in modern conflict depends on the ability to preempt, conceal, and control tempo. Israel acted without delay, executed with precision, and achieved its objectives before Iran could respond. In this environment, military advantage is no longer defined by scale, but by the capacity to identify vulnerabilities and exploit them without warning.

This Is What ‘Never Again’ Means By Abe Greenwald

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None of it ultimately was enough. As of 2x4 hours ago, Iran was months away from having a nuclear weapon. So Operation Rising Lion was a necessity. What we saw last night, and what will continue in the coming weeks, is what “never again” means. It doesn’t mean convincing the masses that Israel is a nice country full of nice people. It doesn’t mean “winning the PR war.” It doesn’t mean showing bottomless restraint against enemies. And it doesn’t mean pleading for protection from others. It means Jews destroying those who are trying to kill them.

Golda Meir described Israel’s nuclear capacity as varenye, a fruit preserve that Eastern European Jews had kept close at hand in the event of a pogrom. The pogrom came to Israel on October 7, 2023. It turns out, Israel didn’t need to respond with nuclear weapons. Rather, it launched a fierce military campaign and multiple ingenious operations to destroy the surrounding Iran-backed armies that sought to snuff out the Jewish people.

Almost two years after Hamas’s attack, October 7 is starting to look a lot like December 7. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor set in motion a war that would level imperial Japan like no country has been leveled in the history of man. Similarly, it seems that Iran and its terrorist proxies sealed their own fate when they decided to wage a multifront war on Israel.

Jew-hatred has swelled into a popular global campaign since October 7. But despite the pro-terrorist mobs and shootings and fire bombings and international bullying of Jews and Israel, I’ve looked on at events with a sense of equipoise. I’ve been enraged and saddened and perplexed like every other Jew during this period. But there has always been something counterbalancing the negative. This was my faith—my certainty—that Israel understood with exquisite clarity what “never again” means, and it would go to any length required to ensure the survival of Am Yisrael. It does, and it is. And that’s all that matters.

06/13 Links Pt2: Walking Through a Supernova; Douglas Murray on death cults, Joe Rogan, and profoundly unserious people; Macron's conference touting Palestinian statehood postponed

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: Walking Through a Supernova

In the weeks after Palestinian terrorists killed nearly 400 people at an Israeli music festival on Oct. 7, 2023, a growing corps of citizen-volunteers trekked to the site of the massacre to collect the personal items left behind. The group warehoused the items and organized and tagged them so survivors and the relatives of victims could retrieve them. The police saw the effort as helpful to their investigation: Once they’d studied and recorded the scene, the items could bring forward witnesses or others with information.

When I saw some of these items on display in Washington DC on Thursday, at a pre-opening walkthrough of the Nova Exhibition at Gallery Place, where it will be open to the public from June 14 through July 6, they conjured a different image entirely. I found myself staring at a pile of shoes collected from the site of the massacre and thought of the only place I’d seen its kind before: at a Holocaust memorial.

It also helped me understand why the survivors of the Nova massacre who serve as guides to the exhibition kept asking me how I felt about what I was seeing and experiencing. That these various scenes would hit people differently was taken for granted.

However it hits you, it does so immediately. The first staging area is a recreated Nova campground. The twist is that almost everything you see was actually at the 2023 Nova festival. These tents aren’t replicas. Only the people who lived in them for the weekend are missing.

In and around the tents are people’s clothing, shoes, board games, even a burned up cigarette butt and the occasional can of deodorant. Cellphones are plugged into wall chargers and strewn throughout the campground; they are playing loops of videos from Oct. 7—some survivors’ videos, some taken by Hamas terrorists themselves. The campsites attest to the joyful atmosphere of the festival—one has a tree sign hanging next to it that says “HAPPY PLACE”; another has a simple pair of wings hanging from a pole.

The dark irony of the scene is that the Nova festival itself isn’t seen merely as a music event but also as a healing one. The setting—breathtaking open fields in the desert—combined with the trance music that dominates the festival draws many who are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, for example. As survivor Maya Izoutcheev pointed out, concertgoers dance through the night and don’t see their fellow dancers around them until the sun rises, giving them a sense of privacy and of a close-knit shared experience at the same time.

The Right Way to Sanction the Muslim Brotherhood

While the Iranian regime’s ideology is Shiite, its founders were inspired by the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood. The original Islamist group, the Brotherhood is the root from which Hamas, al-Qaeda, and Islamic State sprang; its motto declares that “jihad is our way and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope” and anti-Semitism is a cornerstone of its ideology. At the same time, it is not a single organization, but consists of disparate groups in countries across the globe—some actively engaged in terrorism, others dedicated to spreading their hateful ideology peacefully. This reality is a complication for the Trump administration, which is considering sanctions on the Brotherhood.

Jonathan Schanzer explains that rather than simply issue an executive order that the next administration could appeal, the White House should instruct the Treasury Department to level anti-terrorism sanctions against specific branches of the Brotherhood as the evidence dictates:

The Brotherhood in Yemen (the Islah Party, which partners with the Houthis) and Jordan (where a violent Brotherhood plot was recently broken up by the government) are very likely to meet [Treasury Department] criteria. From there, the Treasury could begin to expand the network to other affiliates that meet [these] criteria.

The Treasury Department’s process offers the opportunity, over time, to designate the entire Muslim Brotherhood. When evidence points to certain branches or individuals from the Brotherhood’s disparate branches providing financial, technical, or material support to groups already under sanctions, they themselves become targets for designation.

Macron-backed U.N. conference touting Palestinian statehood postponed

French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Friday that his upcoming United Nations conference with Saudi Arabia promoting international recognition of a Palestinian state has been postponed following Israel’s attack on Iran.

Speaking to reporters from Paris, Macron said that the conference would need to be rescheduled for logistical purposes, citing the inability of Palestinian Authority officials to travel to U.N. headquarters in New York next week to participate.

The Trump administration was opposed to the conference, titled “The High Level International Conference for the Peaceful Settlement of the Question of Palestine and the Implementation of the Two-State Solution,” and urged U.N. member states against participating. Pro-Israel Republicans on Capitol Hill also criticized the gathering, which was scheduled to take place June 17-20, as a distraction from U.S. efforts to secure peace in the region.

Despite his campaign for Palestinian statehood recognition, Macron was quick to defend Israel’s strikes on Iran, releasing a statement early Friday criticizing Tehran for its nuclear program and supporting Israel’s right to self-defense. At his press conference later Friday, he argued that Iran was heavily responsible for the current unrest in the Middle East by building its nuclear program against the requests of the West and other actors in the region.

06/13 Links Pt1: Zionism Has Been Vindicated; A surgical strike against Islamist tyranny; Israeli woman killed in Iranian missile strike

From Ian:

John Podhoretz: Zionism Has Been Vindicated

Twenty-four years ago, Iran’s president, the Ayatollah Rafsanjani—a supposed “moderate”—spoke these words only months after September 11 made the world aware of the mass-murdering nature of the Islamist threat to the West: “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world.” In other words, damage might be done outside Israel if there were to be a nuclear exchange, but that would be worth it, because Israel would cease to exist.

In 2005, Rafsanjani was succeeded by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who began to make even more explicit what Rafsanjani had implied: “Thanks to people’s wishes and God’s will, the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards….The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon.” For decades, Iranian mullahs and leaders had chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” but this was something different. Iran’s nuclear ambitions were real and the purpose of going nuclear was millenarian and apocalyptic and aimed at the Jews.

In the days, weeks, months, and years to come, we will learn some, if not all, of what Israel determined it needed to do to slow down, halt, and destroy Iran’s apocalyptic ambitions. The nature of the operation, or operations, is likely to dwarf any such military/intelligence effort ever before seen on this earth. And it happened because it had to happen. Because Israel is real. Because Israel is a nation of 9 million and was not going to allow itself to be destroyed.

More important, the execution of this plan followed Israel’s greatest military and intelligence failure—the failure to keep track of Hamas’s evildoing, under the assumption that Israel had had Hamas contained and without the ability to strike catastrophically. Perhaps we can surmise that Israel’s desire to believe it had neutralized the Hamas threat using missile and rocket defenses had something to do with the depth of focus and the amount of energy its leaders were expending to watch and plan and develop weaponry and countermeasures against Iran. Perhaps they just didn’t have (as we say these days) enough “bandwidth” for both.

But the catastrophe of October 7 also revealed just how determined Iran was to put its plan to destroy Israel into action, and thereby triggered Israel’s own ultimate countermeasures—the war in Gaza, the destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the elimination of Iran’s air defenses, and now the determination to rid the world of Iran’s nuclear sites, its ambitions for nuclearization, and perhaps even the destruction of the Iranian regime.

One stands mute at the audacity of the planning and the magnificence (thus far) of the execution. And one wonders, yet again, if what is happening here is once more a sign not just of Israel finding its own salvation in Jewish self-rule–but of God’s providence.

Melanie Phillips: The nightmare scenario arrives

The final chapter in the Iran nuclear crisis may now be upon us.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress that there were “plenty of indications” that Iran was actively moving toward a nuclear weapon.

There have been numerous reports that Israel is preparing to strike Iran’s nuclear sites in the coming days. Washington has withdrawn non-essential staff from its Baghdad embassy and has approved a voluntary evacuation from U.S. embassies and locations throughout the region.

The expectation of imminent attack may or may not be premature. We may be watching another episode of brinkmanship as yet another negotiating ploy.

What does seem certain is that Iran has now reached the nightmare point that has been feared for so long—that it is about to assemble a nuclear weapon.

Israel can’t tolerate that. If President Donald Trump decides that the United States won’t join an attack on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, then Israel is preparing to go it alone, even though that would restrict it to damaging the nuclear sites rather than totally destroying them.

Since the Hamas-led atrocities in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the West has refused to acknowledge that Israel has been subjected to a seven-front war of extermination waged by Iran and its proxies.

This denial goes back decades. Even though the Iranian regime declared war against America and the West from the moment it came to power in 1979, political and media discussion of the Iranian issue has remained wholly inadequate and infested by disinformation spread by the regime through all-too gullible policy elites.

The fact that Iran insists that it won’t abandon its right to uranium enrichment, or that the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog has now declared Iran in breach of its non-proliferation obligations for the first time in 20 years, will probably make precious little difference to such people.

This is because the narrative upon which the West is fixated holds that Israel is the driver of events in the Middle East, and that its war against the Palestinian Arabs is the principal cause of instability and violence in the region.

Why Israeli Strikes on Iran Make America Safer

Noah Rothman provides a worthwhile reminder of why a nuclear Iran is a threat not just to Israel, but to the United States:
For one, Iran is the foremost state sponsor of terrorism on earth. It exports terrorists and arms throughout the region and beyond, and there are no guarantees that it won’t play a similarly reckless game with nuclear material. At minimum, the terrorist elements in Iran’s orbit would be emboldened by Iran’s new nuclear might. Their numbers would surely grow, as would their willingness to court risk.

Iran maintains the largest arsenal of ballistic missiles in the region. It can certainly deliver a warhead to targets inside the Middle East, and it’s fast-tracking the development of space-launch vehicles that can threaten the U.S. mainland. Even if Tehran were a rational actor that could be reliably deterred, an acknowledged Iranian bomb would kick-start a race toward nuclear proliferation in the region. The Saudis, the Turks, the Egyptians, and others would probably be compelled to seek their own nuclear deterrents, leading to an infinitely more complex security environment.

In the meantime, Iran would be able to blackmail the West, allowing it occasionally to choke off the trade and energy exports that transit the Persian Gulf and to engage in far more reckless acts of international terrorism.

As for the possible consequences, Rothman observes:
Iranian retaliation might be measured with the understanding that if it’s not properly calibrated, the U.S. and Israel could begin taking out Iranian command-and-control targets next. If the symbols of the regime begin crumbling, the oppressed Iranian people might find the courage to finish the job. If there’s anything the mullahs fear more than the U.S. military, it’s their own citizens.

Examining how PressTV twists the truth shows how mainstream journalists do the same

Here's a fun exercise. Find the lies in this PressTV report:

Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces Major General Mohammad Bagheri and commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Major General Hossein Salami have been martyred in Israeli aggression that also targeted scientists and civilians.

Videos circulating on social media show widespread destruction in residential areas of Tehran and other regions, the result of what has been described as indiscriminate Israeli aggression.

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, in a statement, condemned the aggression and vowed Iran's severe retaliation against the Tel Aviv regime.

“In the early hours of today, the Zionist regime once again revealed its evil and bloodstained hand by committing a crime on our beloved soil, further exposing its malicious nature through attacks on residential areas. The regime must now await a harsh punishment,” read the statement.

There aren't any in the article itself, except for the word "martyred."

The scientists working on a nuclear weapon probably were technically civilians. The article doesn't say the attacks were indiscriminate - just that they were described that way. And the Khamenei quote is accurate, even if he is lying - but the article quotes him.

There was no violation of journalistic standards while giving an altogether false impression.

Similarly, this headline: "Israeli ‘barbaric’ aggression against Iran draws global condemnation."

The article quotes a Turkish official as calling it "barbaric" and the condemnations were around the world.

This shows how Iranian journalists can lie while adhering to journalistic standards. But it also shows how supposedly Western media can do the same thing.

Quote people selectively. Frame facts selectively. Couch the reporter's opinion as an "expert" opinion. Omit any facts that contradict the thesis. Make implications without directly making accusations.

It is obvious when it is done by PressTV. But the exact same thing is done by the New York Times using the same methods. (Although the NYT will pretend to quote the Israeli side, but bury it way down in the story and then have a friendly anti-Israel voice counter it immediately.)

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

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

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)