JERUSALEM — The war is five days old, and, like most Israelis, we are getting about as much sleep as the parents of a newborn, roused twice a night and running to our shelter. There, our condo neighbors gather, bantering through the newscasts, damp and in doubt.
Living in Jerusalem half the year — the other half, I’m teaching at Dartmouth — this is hardly our first emergency. And our home is just a mile-and-a-half from the Al Aqsa mosque, so we don’t feel particularly vulnerable to a targeted attack by Islamists.
Yet high overhead, as sirens scramble us at 4 a.m., one can see the trailing flames of missiles headed west, to the coastal cities; and see flashes and hear the booms of anti-missile defenses. The danger for us is falling debris; it can penetrate two stories, nothing like the thousand-pound-plus warheads that have shredded multi-story apartments in Bat Yam and labs in Rehovot, but not to be toyed with.
On those newscasts, as on television nightly, panels of security pundits, themselves mostly former generals and Mossad agents, are good with numbers and not particularly so at hiding their pride. The planning, over many years, was inarguably meticulous; the execution, apparently faultless. Seventy percent of Israelis support the strike, only 16 percent are opposed. Even opposition politicians, long disdainful of Benjamin Netanyahu’s assaults on democratic norms, salute the air force, intelligence services, and, grudgingly, Bibi’s pluck, sequence and timing.
First, the radar was targeted, they say, then the anti-aircraft missile batteries, then the missile manufacturing centers, then the chain-of-command. These agents embedded on the ground, those drone components smuggled in; this adviser, this commander, these nuclear scientists “eliminated” — leaders of the Revolutionary Guard and other nuclear enablers are, presumably, fair game.
Now, we control the skies over Tehran, moreover, and refueling routes all the way to Iran. We’ve bombed even the regime’s television broadcast. We’re getting to nuclear facilities, too — at least those above ground, at Natanz and elsewhere, which unlike Fordo, 200 feet underground, can be reached without privileged American ordinance. And if we continue with such impressive success, will not Donald Trump be tempted to himself bust bunkers and, thus seal (and claim) victory?
For our part, we civilians are exhorted to Stoicism, “kor ruach,” “composure.” This, we are told, is what existential war feels like. “Jews know better than anyone,” an otherwise pokerfaced Channel Twelve correspondent declaims, “that when somebody says he means to kill you, you have to believe them — and relieve them of their means to do so.” As I write, I can hear squadrons of Israeli Air Force fighters in the skies, heading east in waves. Soon enough, new missiles will fly, and I’m preparing to be composed.
Indeed, those of us who’ve followed the diplomatic twists in the region since the 1960s feel mostly out of our depth. It has been our job to consider motivation on both sides: histories, ideologies, grievances.
For our security experts, in contrast, analysis may entail an assessment of, yes, an enemy’s motivation, but only in tandem with its military capability; and then, motivation boils down to military capability, because, “Jews know,” if enemies have the capability to hurt you, they will have the motivation to do so. The inference for action is preemption, deterrence, intimidation. Discussion of diplomatic alternatives to “kinetic action” is vaguely effete.
Perhaps this is my own failure of imagination, but I am not so sure that this is what existential war feels like. Anyway, I have questions — worse, I cannot see how, given our experts’ preemptive logic, this war ends.
Make no mistake, I would be delighted to see the Iranian regime fall to a liberal-democratic counter revolution. I have never been to Iran, but I have spoken with enough refugee officials over 40 years to be persuaded that a large majority of educated Iranians would share in that delight. By all means, let’s see our region’s Shiite-jihadist-theocrats discredited and defeated. That would leave only Sunni-jihadist-theocrats and Jewish Land-of-Israel-theocrats to be discredited and defeated.
But can the Israeli Air Force achieve that end? Doubtful. But if it did, what precedent assures us that the current regime would not be replaced by an authoritarian, militarized alternative, mobilized on wounded-nationalist rather than theocratic lines? And yet, has not Benjamin Netanyahu — whom, until the war, a vast majority of Israelis wanted gone — maneuvered us into a war of attrition in which we can presumably settle for nothing less than regime change?
Let us concede that, for Israel, an Iranian atomic bomb would be a disaster. Incidentally, Israel has a second strike capacity, 100 nuclear warheads of its own, many sitting on missiles in at least six submarines off the Mediterranean coast; so you have to concede, also, that the fine morning when the Supreme Leader decides to incinerate Tel Aviv (simultaneously irradiating most of Palestine) would be the same morning he decides to incinerate Tehran, Isfahan and Qom. But never mind.
Sensible people don’t want Iranian clerics to have the bomb, potentially giving it to terrorists; or enjoying a nuclear umbrella should they decide to push around weaker regimes, say, the Emirates across a narrow strait. And let’s assume, in addition, that the International Atomic Energy Agency was right to sound the alarm, namely, that Iran had amassed sufficient material for nine atomic bombs, awaiting further enrichment and weaponization.
Shame on me, but I always imagined that an attack to preempt Iran’s nuclear program would be a last resort after negotiations failed. That it would be more “surgically” focused on nuclear installations, and missiles that might be used to deliver an atomic bomb — not all missiles — and, anyway, undertaken with American military partnership and European diplomatic support. Then, one might hope to return to negotiations about the future. (Only a quarter of Israelis think, even now, that Israel can get safer without American support.)
Besides, a limited action would notionally have had a more limited military blowback, putting the burden of escalation on Iran, which would have just been proven comparatively helpless to prevent a foreign attack. True, the regime might then strike back against, say, Aramco assets as it did in 2019. But then, the Gulf states would all rally to the U.S. and, implicitly, Israel, and form an alliance much more menacing to Iran than Iran, Hezbollah and Houthis would be to them. Such an alliance, twinned with further economic strangulation, might well have prompted dissident Iranians to take back the streets.
What I did not imagine was that Israel would act alone, even assuming a “green light” from Washington. Isn’t Iran, even weakened, 10 times Israel’s population and 75 times the landmass; doesn’t it graduate five times the number of engineers a year? With the planet’s fourth largest reserves of oil, has it no staying power? This isn’t Hezbollah.
Nor did I imagine that the regime’s missile construction capacity itself, leadership, chain-of-command, scientists, oil facilities — all of these — would qualify as targeted infrastructure. Or, that in the course of a presumably preemptive war, Iranian missiles would themselves prove more seriously menacing than the atom bombs they would hypothetically (and almost certainly never) deliver. Now, given this inescapable conclusion, does not Israel have to “eliminate” Iranian leaders who control those missiles and whose hatred we have to “believe”?
What have we learned from the past four days, after all? Just from missiles, 24 people in Israel have died and 500 have been wounded. Israel’s cosmopolitan economy has been paralyzed; and all air travel and cargo to and from the country has been stopped. Every night, virtually the entire population, to bring things back to my shelter, lives in fear and disruption.
The big question, in other words, is whether Netanyahu has not set his sights on regime change. Whether his sights have not been blinkered by a new logic deriving from the manifest results of his own escalation — that Iran’s nuclear program and missile program are one; that given the danger to Israel merely from the missiles, leaving the Ayatollah’s regime in charge itself amounts to an existential threat.
“As we achieve our objective,” Netanyahu addressed Iranians on YouTube last Saturday, “we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your objective, your freedom.” On Monday, he told ABC News that killing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei would “not escalate the conflict but end the conflict.” How does one retreat from this logic any more than from the demand for total victory in Gaza?
Most vexing of all, why, under these circumstances, should the Iranian regime stop the war? It says it will be prepared to put enrichment back under international monitoring, as under the previous nuclear deal. But, for now, why capitulate?
Why not launch a dozen missiles every night, or every third night, keeping Israeli business depressed, our airspace closed, our sleep foiled — and watch us squirm? Why not tie up virtually the entire Israeli Air Force looking for missile development in a territory the size of Alaska and over four hours away? Why not deplete our reserves of anti-missile missiles that cost a couple of million dollars each?
True enough, the Israeli Air Force has destroyed a great many missile manufacturing sites. More damage will be inflicted. But destroy Iran’s very capacity to produce missiles? Does not the Iranian regime, too, see itself in a war for survival — a “war,” at any rate, according to the Supreme Leader — and does it not have the resources to sustain a war economy?
Finally, will Bibi, of all people, the leader in charge of Gazan carnage, bring Iranians to overthrow their government? Israel has now killed over 200 Iranian citizens by going after human “nuclear infrastructure” in various residential complexes. Just because ordinary people disdain the regime, that does not mean they welcome Israelis buzzing their neighborhoods, blowing up every economic asset from which the regime’s missile program could conceivably profit. Even some people who may “not agree with the Establishment,” the journalist Abas Aslani told CNN on Monday, agree that Israel must be answered with “a crushing response.”
All of this, I suppose, does indeed toss the ball to Donald Trump. But has he ever played this position before — is he able to see more than one move ahead, and doesn’t that move have to enhance his personal popularity? This week, Bibi, and the Israeli military more generally, are the winners he wants to take credit for. But next week? What if the Iranian regime just hangs tough and keeps the war going? Does Israel, in the long run, have “the cards”? Does all of MAGA want this?
Israel, in short, may have taken a five-foot leap over a six-foot pit. The country has always been good at surprise attacks, one former Israeli general put it, but less so at sustained resistance. And counting on Trump to help — say, by bombing Fordo, or trying to extract a “better deal,” or new sanctions, or all three — assumes, first, that he’ll be able to see how Israel has fallen into a trap set by its own audacious strike, and, second, that he’ll see an advantage in committing American forces, and risking oil infrastructure in the Gulf states, to release Israel from that trap.
Trump may help, if that’s the word. He is warning Iranians to “evacuate Tehran.” He is sending the Nimitz strike group to the region. I am no longer sure what to hope for, except for the madness to be, well, trumped by quick movement to the regional settlement that’s been dangled by the Saudis since the Gaza war began — a forlorn hope, perhaps.
In any case, questions, not just sirens, are enough to keep us up at night.
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