People look over the aftermath of a massive Israeli airstrike on June 13 in Tehran, Iran. Photo by Getty Images
Senior Columnist
Rob Eshman
June 13, 2025
Israel’s Thursday attack on Iran feels simultaneously shocking and inevitable.
Shocking, because President Donald Trump had for the past two months positioned himself as the dealmaker-in-chief when it comes to the two Middle Eastern countries.
“They would rather make a deal,” he told Fox News on May 31, just 12 days ago, “and I think that could happen in the not-too-distant future.”
Shocking, because even Iran hawks, who have been pushing for an American and Israeli attack for years, didn’t suspect this attack was truly imminent — even amid escalating warnings that a strike was being considered.
“I have to say, this Israeli campaign in Iran took me totally by surprise,” the Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran posted to X just after the attack began. “I did not see it coming.”
Shocking, because an Israeli military official told The New York Times that the attack, which wiped out Iran’s top military leadership and damaged nuclear facilities, was preemptive. The statement recalls Israel’s famous preemptive Six-Day War, which began 58 years ago this week, when the country’s two main enemies at the time, Egypt and Syria, positioned hundreds of thousands of troops on Israel’s southern and northern borders and choked off its main oil supply route.
As of yesterday, there was no public indication that an attack from Iran was imminent. Maybe preemption isn’t what it used to be.
But the shocking attack also felt foreordained. As the old Chekhovian theater saying goes, if the actors reveal a gun in Act I, they have to use it in Act III.
In this case, Act I lasted almost 30 years.
In 1996, then-newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Congress that a nuclear Iran posed a greater threat to Israel and the West than Soviet Russia did. Prevention, he said — not deterrence — was the only option.
“And ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “time is running out.”
I reported on the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America that year, which was held in Los Angeles. There, Netanyahu told 6,000 delegates that, when it came to Iran and nuclear weapons, “the year is 1939.”
Netanyahu has repeated those warnings every year since. When former President Barack Obama sought to stop Iran’s nuclear weapons development with a deal that would also see a phased lifting of sanctions, Netanyahu returned to Congress to inveigh against it. Diplomacy, he firmly believed, was not prevention.
Trump took up this cause, campaigning against the deal in 2016 and pulling America out of it in his first term. We’ll never know the counterfactual — if the deal would have led to economic prosperity that would have weakened the hardliners and created conditions for a better deal, a better future.
Once that deal was shredded, it was just a matter of time until a strike like this happened.
But not just because of Trump and Netanyahu.
The Iranian regime has conducted a relentless assault on Israel through proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen — who have launched hundreds of rockets, drones and missiles at Israel, backed by Tehran — as well as Hamas, in Gaza, which tormented Israel for years even before the devastating terror attack of Oct. 7, 2023.
But the regime has been similarly brutal elsewhere within the region — and within its own borders. It spent $50 billion propping up the since-deposed brutal Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, pouring 15,000 troops and special forces into the country to suppress a civil uprising that killed an estimated 580,000 people.
Inside Iran, “enforced disappearances and torture and other ill-treatment” have been “widespread and systematic,” wrote Amnesty International in a 2024 report. “Cruel and inhuman punishments, including flogging and amputation, were implemented.”
Women are tortured, imprisoned and executed for asserting their rights. The country hasn’t held a free and fair election in decades. Freedom House’s human rights score on Iran is a dismal 11 out of 100.
In this context, it’s understandable that Israelis did not want to wait forever to find out what Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei meant when, time after time, he posted, led or praised chants of “Death to Israel.”
But even if the attack that began last night wasn’t unexpected, it feels uniquely dangerous.
Based on the initial reports, the overnight strikes were wildly successful. They destroyed nuclear facilities, missile launchers and intelligence-gathering facilities. Senior military leaders and nuclear scientists were assassinated.
Now comes the aftermath, which will, inherently, be much less precise and predictable.
I worry for Israelis, who face the immediate threat of missiles and drones. And I worry for innocent Iranians. I worry for the 8,000-odd Jews who still live in Iran, along with Bahai, Azeri and other minorities, all of whom face the very real danger of retribution from a regime that will be desperate for scapegoats.
I worry for American soldiers who may find themselves drawn into this war, as well as for Jews worldwide who could very well be targeted by a regime that has killed hundreds of Jews abroad in terror attacks, as in the 1994 Jewish center bombing in Argentina.
We’re glued to our televisions and smartphone screens, watching the fireworks. But we are far, far from any celebration.
