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.Melanie Phillips: We Must Eliminate the Islamist Threat
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.”
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.WSJ Editorial: Iran Isn't Winning This War
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.
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.How the Iran War Ends
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.
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.





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