In Palestine Square in Tehran, a large screen keeps track of the number of days left until the destruction of Israel. The calculus is based on a 2015 prophesy by Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, that within 25 years, the Jewish state would disappear. Ever since Khamenei’s prediction, a digital clock has maintained the countdown.
The purpose of the war Israel is fighting on multiple fronts is to beat Iran’s doomsday clock.
The Hamas massacre of Oct. 7, 2023, gave new credibility to Khamenei’s prophesy. On that day, Israel’s military deterrence — essential for a besieged state surrounded by enemies aligned with Iran — collapsed. The shock of Oct. 7 went far deeper than Hamas’ atrocities. The most devastating blow in Israel’s history was delivered by its weakest enemy. Israel’s high-tech, state-of-the-art border was overrun by terrorists on tractors.
The Hamas massacre was a pre-enactment in microcosm of the destruction of Israel: the Israel Defense Forces in disarray, the government AWOL, civilians left to fend for themselves with pistols.
The strategic goal of Israel’s counteroffensive was to restore its shattered deterrence. Israelis across the political spectrum agreed that the first step was destroying Hamas’ ability to govern. Allowing the regime responsible for Oct. 7 to remain on Israel’s border would undermine Israelis’ belief in their ability to defend themselves while emboldening their enemies to commit further atrocities.
Destroying the Hamas regime meant denying it immunity. Terrorists would not be allowed to massacre Israeli civilians, cross back into Gaza and hide behind Palestinian civilians. Destroying Hamas’ capacity to govern required pursuing terrorists wherever they operated, including inside hospitals and mosques. It meant entering homes, many of them booby-trapped, and Hamas’ vast network of tunnels. The result was Israel’s most brutal — and most necessary — war.
But the war that began in Gaza was never about Gaza alone. Defeating Hamas was only the first stage of a regional conflict between Israel and the Iranian-led axis of radical Islamism. Now that the fighting has largely shifted from Gaza to Lebanon, the true dimensions of this conflict are clear. Israel’s stunning success against Hezbollah — from the mass but pinpointed beeper attack on its operatives to the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and most of his senior staff — has gone a long way to restoring our military credibility.
Still, Iran’s massive ballistic missile strike against Israel last week proves that Israel’s enemies are hardly deterred. Tens of thousands of missiles and rockets are aimed at Israeli cities. If Iran and its proxies unleash their full arsenal, Israel’s much-vaunted Iron Dome anti-missile system will be overwhelmed.
In its war against the Jewish state, Iran achieved two historic victories. The first was to surround Israel with terrorist enclaves. The second was to outwit the Israeli campaign — which included sabotaging nuclear installations and assassinating Iranian scientists — to prevent Iran from nuclear breakout. Today, Iran sits at the nuclear threshold.
No country, including the United States, is likely to use force to prevent the Iranian regime from developing a nuclear bomb. No country, that is, except Israel. The Jewish state, founded on the promise of providing a safe refuge for the Jewish people, cannot allow the ayatollahs to attain the means to fulfill Khamenei’s genocidal prophesy.
The culminating moment of this war to restore Israeli deterrence against existential threat will be preventing Iran’s nuclear breakout.
Denying terrorists immunity applies most of all to the Iranian regime. For decades the ayatollahs have hidden behind terrorist proxies. Time and again, Israel has fought Hamas and Hezbollah, while avoiding direct conflict with the source of regional terrorism. On Oct. 7, the era of Iranian immunity ended.
Far from sabotaging chances for regional peace, Israel’s determination to prevent a nuclear Iran is precisely what has attracted Sunni Muslim states to seek normalization with the Jewish state. Arab leaders are terrified not of Israel but of an imperial Iran, which has spread its influence over at least four Arab nations — Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen — and seeks hegemony over the rest of the region.
It is hardly coincidence that those Sunni nations dominated by Iran are all failed states. By contrast, Arab nations seeking an alliance with Israel — the Gulf states, Morocco, Saudi Arabia — are keen to modernize. The real divide in the Middle East is between those living in the past and those committed to the future.
The worst-kept secret in the Middle East is that Arab leaders are quietly hoping for an Israeli victory over Hamas and Hezbollah and most of all Iran.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was always part of a larger war. In Israel’s formative decades, it faced a united Sunni front seeking its destruction. Beginning with the Egyptian-Israeli peace of the late 1970s and culminating in the 2020 Abraham Accords between Israel and four Arab nations, the Sunni war against Israel has been gradually replaced by the Shiite-Israeli conflict.
Solving the Palestinian tragedy can only happen in the context of a wider peace agreement. The last remaining hope for a two-state solution is for Israel and its new Arab allies to work together to gradually end the occupation and create a demilitarized Palestinian state in the West Bank that would not become another Gaza, destabilizing the region.
Unlike Israeli governments in the past, which sought reconciliation with a recalcitrant Palestinian leadership, the hard-right coalition led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot make the necessary compromises to enable regional peace.
But this government will not last forever. Since Oct. 7, polls have consistently shown the Israeli opposition winning the next election.
Meanwhile, even Israelis who loathe the Netanyahu government agree that we must defeat the Iranian axis. Winning this regional war is the first step to creating a regional peace.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. He is writing a book on the meaning of Jewish survival.
