Israel’s epiphany could end in Iran’s destruction

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Earlier this year I shared a table with Jake Sullivan at a dinner in Paris. The White House national security adviser asked if I thought Iran would go nuclear. I said if Israel and the US failed to keep to their public pronouncements that all means necessary would be employed to prevent it from happening, the Iranians would proceed.

“It’s not what I think but what you already know that really answers the question,” I told him.

A year earlier I attended another dinner with Sullivan’s French counterpart, Emmanuel Bonne, at the home of a Saudi prince. I warned my host that regional war with Iran was coming due to the regime’s miscalculation in its use of proxies to encircle Israel.

A week before October 7, I made the case in Tel Aviv to senior Israeli military and intelligence authorities that Iran’s overreach made direct confrontation imminent. Alas, their preoccupation with an impending normalisation deal with Saudi Arabia crowded out my exhortations. My analysis that Israel and Iran could be headed towards the most catastrophic war in history was met with resistance.

No longer. October 7 altered Israel’s disposition towards its enemy as surely as Germany’s invasion of Poland and Japan’s strike on Pearl Harbor changed Britain’s and America’s.

Absent regime change or Tehran taking an off-ramp, the Islamic Republic’s imperial journey will end as Japan’s and Germany’s did – in unadulterated devastation for its axis.

Jake Sullivan

Nurtured by the saviour-like figure of Cyrus the Great, Jews have broadly regarded Persian civilisation as one of the world’s richest. The sheer hatred exhibited by Iran’s clerical regime was thus one-sided.

Among the myriad Iranian threats of extinguishing the “Israeli tumour” over decades, one always stood out – the 2014 warning to Israelis from Hossein Salami, then deputy commander and now commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps: “We will chase you from house to house, avenging every single drop of our martyrs’ blood in Palestine.” A year ago, Hamas carried out that threat in the kibbutzim of Kfar Aza and Be’eri.

Like those who dismissed Mein Kampf as mere bluster until it was too late, most Israelis were aware of this frenzied hostility but chose not to internalise its significance fully.

As the Russian proverb goes, “better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie”.

The paroxysm of hate and bloodthirstiness unleashed in southern Israel made Israelis comprehend that the Islamists meant their calls for extermination literally. Given hours to do as they pleased with Jewish innocents, Hamas’s terrorists exposed the savage ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Rather than stay quiet, Hezbollah opened hostilities in solidarity with Hamas. The mullahs and their proxies understood that – as the most horrific assault on Jews since the Holocaust – October 7 had seared the Israelis’ touchiest nerve. They seemed to derive pleasure from it, as demonstrated by the late president Ebrahim Raisi’s revolting remark last November: “We kiss the hands of Hamas for its resistance against Israel.”

At last Israelis woke up to the reality that Iran’s objective was what it had professed all along: encirclement followed by genocide. Overnight, a shadow war turned into mortal combat.

While the Jews had faced the Third Reich, times have changed – and “never again” isn’t only a slogan. What does that mean in practice? Simply put, Israel’s gruesome epiphany could ultimately lead to the obliteration of Iran.

Tehran’s unmooring from rationality was evinced by the launching of ballistic missiles against the forces of three nuclear-armed countries – the US (in Iraq last November), Pakistan (in January) and Israel (in April and again last week).

Mourners surround the bodies of people killed in Israeli airstrikes on el-Karak in Lebanon's eastern Bekaa Valley.

It was further exposed by the high-risk/no-reward proposition of allowing Hezbollah to continue striking northern Israel long after the area was evacuated and the militia’s attacks had no practical effect other than to provide the Israel Defence Forces with a justification to crush an avowed enemy.

If Iran is so reckless, how would it behave if it had nuclear weapons?

At least until recently, the regime subscribed to former president Hashemi Rafsanjani’s dismissive maxim that “Israel is a one-bomb country” – in other words, that a nuclear exchange with the Zionists was winnable.

This assessment was reinforced by Iran’s belief that the less eschatologically driven, more life-loving Jews wouldn’t go as far as to risk an “extinction level” counter-attack. Flattering as that perception of Jewish values may be, it must be disabused as plainly as America’s quandaries were about eliminating the Soviet Union.

Is the ideological fetish of destroying Israel worth losing tens of millions of people – and the concomitant eradication of thousands of years of patrimony? Such is the question before Tehran.

Having witnessed the daring and ruthless manner in which Israel executed in Lebanon the decapitation of Iran’s prize piece on the chessboard, not to mention the impressive long-range raids prosecuted on the Houthis in Yemen, Tehran should realise the continued pursuit of nuclear weapons – successful or not – could be a death sentence for the regime and the Iranian nation.

Thomas Kaplan is chairman and chief executive of The Electrum Group and co-founder with Bernard-Henri Levy of Justice for Kurds. This article was first published in The Wall Street Journal.