Iranian regime’s missile assault underlines that Israel, with US, must expedite its demise
Latest ballistic bombardment is grim reminder that the Islamic Republic is the center of the multi-front war to destroy Israel. Ultimately, it’s us or them
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
Iran’s 181-strong ballistic missile attack on Tuesday night — which forced the overwhelming majority of Israel’s 10 million population into bomb shelters — would have prompted vast and enduring panic in any normal country.
It did not do so because the public — certainly frightened and distraught when the sirens wailed, and especially if they were not in a safe place — knows that Israel has developed the most effective rocket and missile defenses of any nation on earth. Because we had been through something very similar in April, when Iran fired over 300 drones and missiles, and it didn’t do that much harm. Because decades of relentless war and terrorism have engendered a globally atypical resilience.
And because, Israel, since October 7, has not been a normal country, even by its own relative sense of the word.
Tuesday’s bombardment, a day before the start of the Jewish New Year, was just one more outrageous and intolerable assault in a year of multi-front attacks on our nation since Hamas’s monstrous invasion and slaughter last October 7.
The ballistic missile fire was, in fact, not even the most effective attempt on Israeli lives to be perpetrated yesterday. Far from it.
While Iran’s vast barrage of intended destruction appears to have killed one person — a Palestinian man in Jericho, who took a direct hit shortly before other Palestinians in nearby West Bank towns came out to celebrate Iran’s audacity — seven Israelis were murdered a short time earlier by two Palestinian terrorists who began their killing spree on the Tel Aviv light rail and continued it when they emerged in Jaffa.
And just before that multiple killing of Israelis in our own land, the IDF had released details of what was intended to be a yet more horrific massacre than October 7’s: The army revealed the specifics of Hezbollah’s planned invasion of the Galilee, including that some 3,000 terrorists, most of them highly trained members of Hezbollah’s Radwan Force, were hiding out in villages across southern Lebanon in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas invasion, waiting for the order to cross the northern border.
In contrast to the catastrophically neglected threat posed by Hamas, the IDF was responsibly deployed in the north, and, it also revealed yesterday, it began airstrikes and cross-border raids, forcing the Radwan terrorists back from the border area and ultimately preventing the invasion.
What is common to all these killings and attempted killings, and those attempted by the Houthis in Yemen and militias in Syria and Iraq, of course, is the calculating oversight of the regime in Tehran: The Islamic Republic is funding and arming and inciting the elimination of Israel from every point of the compass by air, land and sea, and via lawfare, diplomacy, traditional media and every possible social media platform.
Some analysts here have been arguing that Iran’s reliance on the same kind of attack that failed, relatively, in April is evidence of the regime’s weakness. For one thing, that leaves aside the fact that Tehran and its supporters are pumping Tuesday’s barrage as an immense success — with asserted widespread devastation at military targets, delight at the sight of Israelis rushing for cover, brightly colored clips and images of missile impacts — and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei tweeting that “victory” is close at hand.
نَصرٌ مِنَ الله و فَتحٌ قرِيب… pic.twitter.com/l53SfjEslF
— KHAMENEI.IR | فارسی ???????? (@Khamenei_fa) October 1, 2024
Iran has plainly been weakened, including by the vulnerability exposed when somebody eliminated Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, and especially by Israel’s extraordinarily successful assault on Hezbollah, culminating in Friday’s strike in Beirut that killed the cunning and, as it turned out, fatally overconfident Hassan Nasrallah.
And if the regime resorted to Tuesday night’s despicable missile attack because it felt bereft of other options — having hitherto not hit back for Haniyeh’s death and remained on the sidelines as Hezbollah has been substantively degraded — then that is a welcome development. But it’s a big if. And it doesn’t change Israel’s strategic obligation.
Ultimately, Iran had fashioned Hezbollah into one of the world’s most powerful armies so that it would constitute a strategic threat to Israel — as a mighty force to help attain Israel’s destruction come the day, and to deter Israel or invade and fire thousands of missiles a day into Israel should the Jewish state seriously contemplate an assault on the regime’s nuclear weapons program.
That Hezbollah capacity is currently being radically reduced by the Israeli army, though Hezbollah remains fatally potent.
While Israel’s fight back against the Hamas terror-army-government in Gaza, and even its pulverizing of the Hezbollah terror-army-government in Lebanon have been widely condemned internationally, and warily indulged by the United States, however, Iran’s Tuesday attack succeeded in drawing the US closer to Israel’s side, including with a public pledge from the White House to help Israel exact “severe consequences” from the regime.
In April, Israel responded to the first-ever direct Iranian attack with a relatively mild, tactical raid on elements of the missile defense system protecting Iran’s nuclear facility at Natanz. Speculative talk here in the past few hours has been of Israel, this time, striking anything from other Iranian air defense systems, to oil and other energy targets, to nuclear facilities.
But whatever Israel opts to do or not do in the short term, there must be no doubt about its core imperative. And that is, together with the United States, to accelerate the demise of the ideologically and territorially rapacious death-cult regime in Tehran that abuses its people, terrorizes the region and is working assiduously to destroy Israel.
If Tuesday’s strike was evidence of that regime’s relative weakness, so much the better. If not, then the need to root it out is still more acute.
