Opinion | Israel Roars, Iran Keeps Rattling

Israelis woke up on Friday, June 13, to breathtaking news. Some 200 Israeli fighter jets had flown 900 miles, spent more than two hours in Tehran’s airspace, and attacked dozens of targets in the Iranian capital. Weeks or even months earlier, Mossad commando teams had placed offensive strike systems and technologies deep within Iran itself, so they could not threaten the Israeli aircraft.    

Numerous sites at several nuclear facilities in Iran had been destroyed. Leading regime figures and key military leaders in Iran had been assassinated, along with some of Iran’s most prominent nuclear scientists.

“Unprecedented! Courageous!” military correspondents and politicians enthused alongside pictures of Israeli pilots, their faces carefully pixelated to protect their identities. Israeli brilliance, valor, chutzpah and derrring-do found solutions to the seemingly impossible problems of payload, trajectories and distances.

According to the Israeli military, within only a few days, Israel achieved full control over the skies of Tehran. The forces targeted missile launchers and storage sites, intending to restrain Iran’s ability to retaliate against Israel. But while its supply of conventional weapons has certainly been depleted, Iran is still sending over hundreds of missiles a day, causing unprecedented damage to the Israeli homefront. At the time of writing, Magen David Adom, Israel’s national emergency service, reports that it has treated 708 Israeli civilian casualties: 21 have been killed, 13 remain in serious condition, 37 have suffered moderate injuries, and 581 have suffered mild injuries. Countless buildings, including high rises in suburbs of Tel Aviv and in Haifa, have been destroyed. Thousands of people have been displaced. According to media reports, the government has been informed that there may be as many as 4,000 civilian casualties before this is over.

Bleary-eyed, Israelis go to bed at night knowing that they are likely to be woken by the jarring sounds of the alarms that send us scurrying to our safe rooms and shelters (if we are lucky enough to have them) in a desperate game of Iranian roulette.

The campaign has been dubbed “Rising Lion” based on a quote from Numbers 23:24:  “Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young lion: He shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the blood of the slain.” Indeed, Lion Rising has been an operational success, but that should never be the ultimate measure of a military operation. 

“The decision to attack was professional and to the point,” IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir told the Israeli public on national television.

Why would the chief of staff need to calm the public by telling us that? Sadly, the answer is obvious: Some 70 percent of Israelis don’t trust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or his motives for the decisions he makes. According to this survey, the vast majority of Israeli citizens believe that their elected leader places his political, legal and personal considerations above national security and humanitarian issues. Netanyahu is on trial for bribery, fraud and breach of trust. To stay out of jail, he must stay in power; to stay in power, he will do all that he can to keep his coalition and his power intact. These are the reasons behind his responses to the attack on October 7, the Gaza war and the plight of the hostages. And this, I fear, is the reason behind the timing of the Rising Lion campaign and its conduct.

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To be sure, there are good reasons for the timing. The most recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors Iran’s nuclear activity and was issued in May 2025, indicated that Iran could convert its current stock of 60 percent enriched uranium into 233 kg of weapon-grade uranium (WGU) in three weeks at its Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP), enough for nine nuclear weapons, taken as 25 kg of WGU per weapon. Iran, the report indicates, could produce its first quantity of 25 kg of WGU at Fordow in as little as two to three days. In front of the inspectors’ eyes, Iran is undertaking the near-final step of breaking out, now converting its 20 percent stock of enriched uranium into 60 percent enriched uranium at a greatly expanded rate, for which it has no civilian use or justification.

So this could be a “now or never” moment. Furthermore, it is also a militarily opportune one: Israel has taken out most of Iran’s proxies, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, while Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria has been toppled too. Iran is left with few powers that will act in its stead or do its bidding.

But the timing is also politically opportune for Netanyahu. After barely avoiding a no-confidence vote against him and his government, his political prowess and popularity have been at an all-time low. The campaign against Iran, for which he has taken full credit, has given him time and space to recoup.

The war has united the people against a common enemy and drawn attention away from the failures of October 7, for which Netanyahu has never taken any responsibility, the Haredi conscription crisis, and his deliberate, ongoing attempts to prolong the war in Gaza and his apparent lack of interest in returning the hostages. The war has mollified the extremists in his government, who are continuing to foment the judicial coup and deepen the violent occupation in the West Bank.  Even the opposition, along with the media, have fallen into line, unwilling to criticize the prime minister during war or to come out against the obvious operational successes.

Netanyahu went to war in Gaza without a clear endgame. Initially, he promised to rescue the hostages. Later, it was to ensure Israel’s security. Now, he says he will not end the war until Hamas is eradicated. After 20 months, it is clear that none of these goals can be achieved through war, yet Netanyahu refuses to consider real negotiations.

He is making similar claims with regard to the Rising Lion war.  As former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, writing in the liberal daily Haaretz noted, the attacks in Iran, as impressive as they are, “will not delay, by more than a few weeks, [Iran’s] ability to obtain nuclear weapons…It is possible to delay the progress of the nuclear plan, but Israel will struggle to destroy it.”

Only if Israel is able to take out Iran’s deeply buried and defended Fordow enrichment facility, Barak emphasizes, can this move be considered a “well-calculated strike that makes sense.”

But Israel does not have the capacity to take out the Fordow enrichment facility—just as it does not have the capacity to take out all of Hamas’s well-dug and well-hidden tunnels.

Yet Bibi is going even further. Asked by Fox News’s Bret Baier if regime change was part of Israel’s military effort, Netanyahu said: “[This] could certainly be the result because the Iran regime is very weak…We did act…not only [to] protect ourselves, but [to] protect the world from this incendiary regime. We can’t have the world’s most dangerous regime have the world’s most dangerous weapons.”

And then he called on the Iranian people to rise up against their leaders—just as he has called on the Gazans to rise up against Hamas. Does he not realize that this kind of behavior can be used, as it has been by Hamas, to unify the population around its flag, entrench their control, buy themselves even longer political survival and prolong the fighting?

Wars are supposed to end in negotiations, but Netanyahu has no vision of the future to bring to the negotiating table.  He has no plan for “the day after the war” in Gaza, and he has made it clear that he objects to U.S. President Donald Trump’s intent to end the war in Iran through a negotiated settlement that will, at the very least, postpone Iran’s enrichment.

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Bleary-eyed, Israelis go to bed at night knowing that they are likely to be woken by the jarring sounds of the alarms that send us scurrying to our safe rooms and shelters (if we are lucky enough to have them) in a desperate game of Iranian roulette. For his own reasons, Netanyahu wants this situation to persist, but I do not believe that the Israeli public can continue these wars of attrition much longer. We are exhausted and scarred, torn apart by internal divisions. For nearly two years, we have faced destruction and devastation, unable to heal until the hostages are brought back and our faith in our own humanity is restored. 

We are told that a campaign like Rising Lion takes at least a year, if not much more, to plan. Yet Netanyahu and his government have done nothing to reinforce our capacity to withstand what they must have known would be coming. Between October 8, 2023, and now, no positions have been added to district and regional health agencies, responsible for both physical and emotional community health, although these agencies have long been complaining about both a shortage of personnel and an increase in public demand for their services ever since the campaign against Iran began.

On Saturday, an Iranian missile struck a residential building in the Arab community of Tamra, killing four civilians. Nearly half—46 percent—of Arab citizens in Israel have no access to a protected space, whether it be a reinforced room or a communal shelter. In 60 percent of Arab municipalities, there are no public shelters whatsoever. The situation in schools is just as dire: 30 percent of state-run Arab schools lack adequate protection, compared to just 11 percent of Hebrew-speaking and religious Jewish state schools.

The situation is awful for many Jewish residents, too. In the larger cities, such as Tel Aviv and its environs, older buildings have neither safe rooms nor shelters, and even if they did, the elderly and the infirm cannot move fast enough to reach them before the missiles hit. A December 2023 study by the disability nonprofit Access Israel found that 42 percent of people with disabilities in Israel—hundreds of thousands of people—do not have access to bomb shelters or fortified rooms. 

If Netanyahu and his government cared about the people they are meant to serve, rather than the political and personal benefits they enjoy from this war, they would have used the long months of planning for the benefit of the population and not only for the operational achievements.

The war in Gaza continues, the hostages rot in Hamas captivity, the humanitarian crisis grows and increasing numbers of Iranians and Israelis are dying. And so even if we “win” this round against Iran–whatever that means—as long as this corrupt, malevolent government led by Netanyahu persists, all of us in this region continue to lose.

Top image: Ballistic missile and roulette wheel.