One of Elie Wiesel’s best-known aphorisms remains among his most evergreen: “When someone says they want to kill you, believe them.”
Even since its revolutionary origins in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s ruling clerics have remained singularly hellbent on Israel’s annihilation. The rhetoric has not been ambiguous, nor has it been metaphorical. It has been unequivocally genocidal.
From former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s infamous statement in 2005 that Israel was a “disgraceful blot” that should be “wiped off the face of the earth” to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s prediction in 2015 that Israel would cease to exist within 25 years, the threats have been clear and consistent.
Anyone with an internet connection today can see that the Iranian regime’s appetite for Israel’s destruction has not abated. Search for Tehran’s “Palestine Square” on Google Maps, and you’ll find a massive digital clock ticking down with chilling precision to what the regime hopes will be Israel’s demise. It’s not underground. It’s a state-sanctioned, institutional source of pride.
However, the Islamic Republic didn’t simply fantasise about Israel’s destruction. It prepared for it. For years, Israel has watched on – often alone – as Tehran built a clandestine nuclear weapons program, enriched uranium to near weapons-grade levels, assembled a vast arsenal of ballistic missiles and led international nuclear inspectors down a path of opaque obfuscation.
At the same time, Tehran’s leadership cultivated a web of terrorist proxies — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza — that surrounded Israel from nearly every border.
What Iran-backed Hamas terrorists did on 7 October, 2023, as they butchered, raped, pillaged and kidnapped their way through southern Israel, was unspeakable. The deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and the bloodiest in Israel’s history. Imagine what the Islamic Republic would have done with a nuclear warhead.
But Israel did not have to imagine. Years of intelligence gathering revealed a concrete, imminent plan from Tehran to wage a war of extermination — another, more destructive 7 October emanating from all sides of Israel’s border. Faced with this existential threat, Israel launched Operation “Rising Lion”, a targeted, pre-emptive strike against key nuclear and military facilities across Iran. Unlike Israel’s surgical strikes, the Islamic Republic has responded in the past 48 hours by launching over a thousand missiles and suicide drones directly at major population centres in Israel, from Haifa to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Bat Yam.
Crucially, Israel’s operation was not an act of war against the Iranian people. The Iranian people are not Israel’s enemies. They have suffered unbearable repression at the hands of the same violent, kleptocratic theocracy that has threatened Israeli lives.
Jonathan Harounoff
For the past 46 years, the Islamic Republic has spent its time developing a dangerous, destructive foreign policy abroad while allocating tremendous resources back home to enforce draconian hijab-wearing regulations for women, imprison homosexuals and minorities and execute dissidents.
Brave Iranians I spoke to while writing my book “Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt” had been silenced, beaten, imprisoned, and tortured—and yet, they have risen again and again with unmatched bravery.
The Green Movement of 2009. The widespread economic protests of 2017 and 2018. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising was sparked by the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini in September 2022. And, most recently, nationwide trucker protests. The people of Iran have repeatedly declared that this regime does not speak for them or act in their interests.
The chants of “death to the dictator” were not coming from Jerusalem or Washington, D.C.—they echoed from the streets of Tehran, Isfahan and Mashhad.
Israel’s actions last week are not a rejection of the Iranian people but a defence of their future and ours.
For too long, the international community clung to the quixotic hope that the Islamic Republic could be reasoned with, negotiated with, or deterred by United Nations Security Council resolutions and inspections. While global institutions debated deadlines, Iran built missiles. While the UN issued reports expressing concern, Iran buried uranium enrichment sites deep beneath the earth.
Israel waited—for diplomacy, for inspections, for sanctions and for pressure to work. But when you are a nation born from the ashes of genocide, you do not wait until the missiles fly. You do not wait until a mushroom cloud appears over Tel Aviv. You do not ignore the Armageddon countdown clock in Tehran. You stop it.
- Jonathan Harounoff, Israel’s international spokesperson to the United Nations, is the forthcoming author of “Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt”.
