Zionism, under assault as never before since October 7 as an idea and a doctrine, legitimized itself as a crucial part of the history of the human race this day.
Not that it needed legitimizing, but let’s put it this way: The Zionist “experiment” is no longer an experiment. Israel is now a reality. It will endure, as the Jewish people have endured. The meaning of the attack on Iran is unmistakable. Israel will not allow itself to be wiped off the earth, and it will not allow the Jewish people to cower in terror at their future. And it will thrive, as successful nations that defend themselves from evil and prevail in the wake of it always thrive.
Consider: Israel has gone from being one of the poorest countries on this earth to one of the richest over the course of its nearly 80 years of existence. It is all but alone among the advanced societies to be replenishing and reproducing itself with a birthrate more than double that of Western Europe. Israel sees a future and is building that future, and one of the ways it is ensuring that future is by eliminating the threats to its future.
The Zionist visionaries of the 19th and early 20th centuries, from Herzl to Jabotinsky, had different understandings of what a Jewish state could be. But that the Jewish State would end up economically and militarily and culturally and existentially strong they did not doubt. In his utopian 1903 novel, Alteneueland—Old-New Land—Herzl’s characters disappear for 20 years on a sea journey from Haifa and then return to a Haifa in a newly constituted Jewish state, where they are told: “Jewish children used to be pale, weak, timid. Now look at them!…We took our children out of damp cellars and hovels, and brought them into the sunlight. Plants cannot thrive without sun. No more can human beings. Plants can be saved by transplantation into congenial soil. Human beings as well. This is how it happened!”
The Israel Herzl envisioned in Alteneueland bears no resemblance to the Israel that now exists or has ever existed—it is the dream of a secular European with Fabian tendencies—but the idea that Jews would thrive in sunlight has been borne out in spectacular fashion. “Our own people, the pariah nation, realized that its salvation lay within itself…and threw themselves into the national enterprise of restoration.” Its salvation lay within itself. The Jews, a people powerless and defenseless for nearly two millennia, spent their first two decades in their own country building up a military that came as a complete shock and surprise to the Arab nations determined to cause its demise. Brought into the sunlight, and faced with the necessity of finding their salvation in themselves, the Jews of Israel turned into a military power by sheer force of will and determination and triumphed in the Six Day War, which took place 58 years ago this week.
That was the work of a generation, the first generation of Sabras. The attack on Iran is also the work of a generation. This multi-pronged, multifaceted war of salvation is the result of two decades of planning and execution. We’ve seen bits and pieces of it along the way—the penetration of Iranian computer systems with the Stuxnet virus, the elimination of nuclear scientists designing the systems intended to destroy the Jewish people, and their daring seizure of the entirety of the Iranian nuclear program’s paper trail. But even with those signs of Israel’s startling ability to penetrate the Islamic Republic’s hard shell, the world was shocked and dazzled last year when Israel took out Iran’s air defenses using military means no one even knew existed before.
And even with that display of remarkable ingenuity, the sheer scale of the first night’s sorties and attacks leaves one breathless with wonder. The elimination of Iran’s senior military officials (through on-the-ground intelligence) coupled with attacks on ballistic missile platforms and factories and the evident destruction of the nuclear site at Natanz pretty much all at once not only reveals Israel’s complete penetration of Iran’s society at every level, but also the fact that it could only have happened with decades of preparation.
Twenty-four years ago, Iran’s president, the Ayatollah Rafsanjani—a supposed “moderate”—spoke these words only months after September 11 made the world aware of the mass-murdering nature of the Islamist threat to the West: “If one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world.” In other words, damage might be done outside Israel if there were to be a nuclear exchange, but that would be worth it, because Israel would cease to exist.
In 2005, Rafsanjani was succeeded by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who began to make even more explicit what Rafsanjani had implied: “Thanks to people’s wishes and God’s will, the trend for the existence of the Zionist regime is downwards….The Zionist regime will be wiped out soon.” For decades, Iranian mullahs and leaders had chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” but this was something different. Iran’s nuclear ambitions were real and the purpose of going nuclear was millenarian and apocalyptic and aimed at the Jews.
In the days, weeks, months, and years to come, we will learn some, if not all, of what Israel determined it needed to do to slow down, halt, and destroy Iran’s apocalyptic ambitions. The nature of the operation, or operations, is likely to dwarf any such military/intelligence effort ever before seen on this earth. And it happened because it had to happen. Because Israel is real. Because Israel is a nation of 9 million and was not going to allow itself to be destroyed.
More important, the execution of this plan followed Israel’s greatest military and intelligence failure—the failure to keep track of Hamas’s evildoing, under the assumption that Israel had had Hamas contained and without the ability to strike catastrophically. Perhaps we can surmise that Israel’s desire to believe it had neutralized the Hamas threat using missile and rocket defenses had something to do with the depth of focus and the amount of energy its leaders were expending to watch and plan and develop weaponry and countermeasures against Iran. Perhaps they just didn’t have (as we say these days) enough “bandwidth” for both.
But the catastrophe of October 7 also revealed just how determined Iran was to put its plan to destroy Israel into action, and thereby triggered Israel’s own ultimate countermeasures—the war in Gaza, the destruction of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the elimination of Iran’s air defenses, and now the determination to rid the world of Iran’s nuclear sites, its ambitions for nuclearization, and perhaps even the destruction of the Iranian regime.
One stands mute at the audacity of the planning and the magnificence (thus far) of the execution. And one wonders, yet again, if what is happening here is once more a sign not just of Israel finding its own salvation in Jewish self-rule–but of God’s providence.
