Why Israel had to act

Israel’s strikes on Iran have been condemned as ‘unprovoked’, ‘illegal’ and a reckless ‘escalation’. Judging by most Western commentary, you could be forgiven for forgetting that Iran started this war. That Hamas, an Iranian proxy, launched a bloody assault on Israel on 7 October 2023. And that Hezbollah and the Houthis, two other Iranian-backed groups, later joined in the violence. So why is Israel being framed as the aggressor?

Melanie Phillips – Times columnist and author of The Builders Stone – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss what is at stake in the Iran-Israel clashes. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. You can watch the whole episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: Had Israel’s strikes against Iran been a long time coming?

Melanie Phillips:: I’m not at all surprised that Israel attacked Iran. This wasn’t the 11th hour. This wasn’t even the 59th minute. This was midnight. Israel had very credible intelligence that two things were happening which meant it was in existential peril. It had to act and it did.

The first was that Iran was at the point of working out how to fit nuclear material on to its missiles. The second was that it had ramped up its ballistic missile production to produce 300 missiles per month. Each missile could take, apparently, one tonne of explosives. This was considered to be an immediate existential threat, which Israel had no choice but to confront.

This was a tremendous act of courage, because at that stage, all we knew was that Iran had thousands of extremely powerful missiles. They were much more powerful than the missiles that have been raining down on Israel from Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. These missiles were much more powerful, much more lethal, and could do much more harm.

The surprise was the stunning, unprecedented success of those initial attacks by the Israeli Air Force, which took out the entire Iranian military security leadership and a number of nuclear programme engineers. The intelligence work involved, in which Mossad agents had been embedded in Iran – I can’t even begin to imagine it.

O’Neill: What do you make of people claiming that Israel’s attack is illegal and unprovoked?

Phillips: It’s a complete lie. What people don’t want to understand is that 7 October 2023 was the opening salvo in an onslaught by Iran to exterminate Israel. Iran was largely working through its proxies in a seven-front war, involving Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and what is called the West Bank – all of them attacked Israel in various ways at the same time. This was part of Iran’s strategy to surround Israel with what it called a ‘ring of fire’, in which Israel would be suffocated, strangled and destroyed by the pressures of terrorism.

Israel has known for decades that Iran is the head of the snake. It’s the head of the Shia axis in the Middle East. It’s behind Hamas. It’s behind Hezbollah. It’s the ally of Qatar. It had militias in Iraq. It had militias in Syria. Its aim is, firstly, to exterminate Israel and murder every Jew it can find. Secondly, to attack the ‘big satan’, which is America. Iran thinks Britain, too, has a special place in Shia Islamic hell. Israel was never under any illusions that Iran had this genocidal aim. It also knew that, even though Iran is run by religious fanatics, they are strategically smart.

Unfortunately, the West chose to either ignore or dismiss this. It chose to deal with Iran through negotiation and compromise. This went on for years and years. When 7 October happened, one reads that Netanyahu, understanding that Iran was ultimately behind this, wanted to strike Iran back. By all accounts, Biden forbade him to do so.

There is no negotiation you can have with religious fanatics like the rulers of the Iranian regime, who believe that by bringing about the apocalypse, they will bring to Earth the Shia messiah. There is no negotiation with people who believe it is their God-given duty to wipe the Jews off the face of the Earth. Netanyahu waited until there was literally no alternative. He had to do it – but until then, he was prevented from doing so.

O’Neill: We’ve had ‘Queers for Palestine’. Now it seems we’re going to have Queers for Theocracy. How bad do you think this type of thinking is going to get in the coming days and weeks in the West?

Phillips: We’re already seeing open support for Iran on the streets. Western governments would have to be seriously insane to adopt this way of thinking – they should be well aware that Iran is a threat to the civilised world.

But on a societal level, it appears that truth, conscience and rationality have been abolished. Murderous hatred is now presented as moral. You have a situation in which the entire humanitarian establishment – the United Nations, Amnesty International and international courts – produces Hamas propaganda in order to demonise Israel. And because the humanitarian establishment is supposed to be the crucible of world peace and justice, evil is now promoted as conscience. People believe that they are just and right by promulgating genocidal lies and libels against Israel. They believe these things are true. That is the extent of what we’re living through. It’s more than dangerous. It is very difficult to see how the West can survive this.

O’Neill: What is life like in Israel now, under Iranian bombardment?

Phillips: At night, you’re woken up by your phone shrieking, which gives you a few minutes before the siren goes. You go down to the shelter and you listen to the faint sound of thuds and booms, and you wonder whether people are being hit, whether buildings are being hit, or whether this is the Iron Dome taking out the missiles.

When light dawns, you see the damage. As we’ve seen in the last few days, upwards of 24 Israelis have died. Hundreds have been injured. Buildings have been brought down. You hear bellicose noises from Iran, and you know that it has all sorts of stuff up its sleeve.

We don’t really know what’s going on, because it’s a war, and there is censorship. It’s frightening – and it’s very hard. This comes on top of 20 months of deep, deep trauma here, following the atrocities of 7 October, which has preyed upon people’s minds, to put it mildly. Israel’s bravest and best are fighting and dying. Young men and women go off to war, and too many of them are now dead, too many have come back without limbs. In a country of only 10million people, there’s not a single household which is not affected in some way. This is the collective trauma inflicted upon this nation of Holocaust survivors, and the level of grief and anxiety cannot be exaggerated.

At the same time, there is a sense of us all being all in this together – a sense of absolute certainty that whatever horrors lie ahead, we are going to win this, and we are going to defeat evil, because we are fighting the good fight. This highly traumatised, scapegoated nation is absolutely unbowed and undaunted. Its courage is absolutely off the scale. Its resilience is off the scale. Its optimism and its happiness are off the scale because it knows what it is. It loves what it is. It knows it wants to survive. It knows why it wants to survive. It believes that everyone – Jews, Arabs, Muslims, Christians, Druze – is in it together. And we’re all looking out for each other, and we all have each other’s backs.

You can’t say that about Britain. It is depressed. It is cynical. It believes the worst in everybody. Israel, by contrast, is full of optimism and courage and a will to live, and that is so inspiring. So if you were to ask me whether I feel safer here than in Britain, then yes, I do. I do even though I’m terrified.

Brendan O’Neill was talking to Melanie Phillips. Watch the full conversation here: