Time Runs Out after 23 Years: Israel attacks Iran’s Nuclear Sites

“Thus says Yahweh to his anointed one, to Cyrus whom, he says, I have grasped by his right hand, to make the nations bow before him and to disarm kings, to open gateways before him so that their gates be closed no more:

I myself shall go before you, I shall level the heights, I shall shatter the bronze gateways, I shall smash the iron bars.

I shall give you secret treasures and hidden hoards of wealth, so that you will know that I am Yahweh, who call you by your name, the God of Israel.”

Isaiah 45:1-3

This passage from the Book of Isaiah heaps lavish praise upon Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Empire (one of the several empires whose heartlands were the Iranian Plateau) because Cyrus allowed the Jews who had been held captive in Babylon to return to their homeland after he conquered the city. Cyrus may have been stirred by the monotheism of the Jewish captives, something he shared with them as a Zoroastrian. It is likely the grateful Jews felt a similar kinship towards the Persian King, given Isaiah records that God anoints him as his chosen ruler on earth. The Jews returned to their homeland, and the province of Yehud Medinata was established, which would remain under Persian rule until Alexander the Great swept the Achaemenid Empire away in his legendary conquests. The Empire would be gone, but the records of Jewish gratitude to Persian leaders would remain.

In the middle of the 20^th century, when Iran was ruled by the Shah, Israel and Iran again found common cause against the powers of Mesopotamia as both felt threatened by the hostile Arab countries around them. As the Wikipedia article on relations between the two countries records

“After the Six-Day War, Iran supplied Israel with a significant portion of its oil needs and Iranian oil was shipped to European markets via the joint Israeli-Iranian Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline. Trade between the countries was brisk, with Israeli construction firms and engineers active in Iran. El Al, the Israeli national airline, operated direct flights between Tel Aviv and Tehran.” 

Yet this close relationship between States masks the fact that the sympathies of the Iranian people were quite clearly with the Palestinians, and when the Shah was overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution the new theocratic regime wasted little time in performing a 180 degree turn. From being one of Israel’s few allies in the region, the Islamic Republic of Iran became Israel’s implacable arch-enemy, not recognising Israel’s right to exist and refusing to even say the name of the country, preferring other terms such as ‘the Zionist Regime’ and ‘the Little Satan’.

Two peoples with a long and entwined history that can be tracked back millennia stood facing each other across the checkerboard of the Middle East, and each decided that the region wasn’t big enough for the two of them.

Israel is America’s closest ally, the nation that is the recipient of the true special relationship. The Israel military and economy is subsidised by American taxpayers to the tune of several billion dollars per year. This has assisted Israel in building a developed economy and a world class military on a relatively small population base. In return, Israel forms a bridgehead for American and Western interests in the hugely strategic Middle Eastern region. It is a dominant, if isolated, regional superpower backed to the hilt by the most powerful nation on the planet.

In contrast, the Iranians have a very strong sense of their own history, which stretches back nearly three thousand years. Few nations can boast such a pedigree, and it contributes to the exceptionally strong sense of national identity that Iranians possess. From their perspective, the presence of American and Israeli forces in the region is nothing less than a usurpation of Iranian prerogatives, and the containment of Iran that the US has long sought a national insult. Many Iranians have also never forgiven the United States (and the United Kingdom) for their role in the 1953 coup which overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and led to a quarter century of autocratic rule by the Shah. By overthrowing the Shah in 1979 and committing itself to spreading the Islamic revolution to other Muslim states, by challenging the order the United States had sought to create in the Middle East, Iran found itself cast into the ranks of the rogue states, those states seen to be a threat to the presumed peace and harmony of the existing global order by the United States.

This brought about economic isolation via sanctions and a long campaign to degrade the military effectiveness of Iran with a long-term view to preparing the ground for regime change, should fortuitous circumstances arise for such an event.

In the cold war that emerged between Israel and Iran, asymmetry was the name of the game. Iran, despite having a vastly larger population than Israel, could not compete with Israeli economic and military superiority. Iran has therefore, over the past several decades, invested heavily in creating a ligature to slowly strangle Israel, a string of state and non-state actors aligned with Iran that could be used to slow attrit the Israeli state, limit its room for manoeuvre and bring about the ultimate collapse of Israel, should fortuitous circumstances arise for such an event. This ligature was the ‘Axis of Resistance’.

At its height, not TWO years ago, the Axis consisted of a friendly government in Iraq, the heavily armed Hamas movement in Gaza, the state within a state Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the government of Syria led by Bashar al-Assad which was now heavily dependant on their Iranian allies due to estrangement from the rest of the Arab world over the ongoing Syrian civil war. This was the tool that Iran plan to use to slowly degrade Israel and deter them.

But deter them from what?

Asymmetric containment of Israel was only one aspect of Iran’s grand plans, because Israel was only one of their enemies. The other enemy, the United States, was also a permanent threat. Should the United States choose to do so, should it commit the necessary blood and treasure to the task, it could destroy the Islamic Republic. Whilst not an easy task, it is well within its capabilities to do so.

The Iranian regime’s only method of preventing an American assault has been to raise the cost of such an endeavour to a level that the Americans would be deterred from even thinking about the prospect. And there is only one weapon in the world that seems to guarantee the survival of a regime from foreign interference, as North Korea has demonstrated through its own example.

Nuclear Weapons.

The crisis over Iran’s nuclear program has dragged on for nearly a quarter of a century since the United States first accused Iran of trying to build a nuclear weapon in 2002, in the run up to the Iraq War. Whilst the Iranians have consistently denied that they seek to create nuclear weapons, and regularly point to the fact that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the Islamic Republic possessing them, few outside Iran expect that prohibition to hold if a sufficiently convincing excuse comes up.

The calculations at play are simple. Iran almost certainly believes it needs the threat of nuclear weapons to secure their state from foreign interference and to credibly deter Israel from attacking with its own (undeclared) nuclear arsenal. Furthermore, possessing nuclear weapons tends to get you onto the big boy table of geopolitics, it makes other countries (particularly those that DON’T have nuclear weapons) take you a lot more seriously. With a nuclear weapons capability strengthening its hand in foreign affairs, and the ligature of the Axis of Resistance slowly strangling Israel, Iran would be well placed to play the long game and eject their enemies from the region.

The United States and Israel in contrast took a very different viewpoint. Leaving aside the hypocrisy of nuclear armed states condemning their enemies for seeking those self-same weapons, the arguments Israel and the US made are essentially that the Iranian regime is a bad faith actor that seeks to disrupt the global order to its own benefit, heedless of the cost to other states. Such a regime wielding nuclear weapons, able to threaten their neighbours at will, is unconscionable, particularly as it would likely lead to a nuclear arms race in the Middle East as states such as Saudi Arabia would seek nuclear weapons to deter Iran in turn. For Israel, the threat was existential, given the country’s small size and population, a nuclear weapon detonated in either of its major population centres (Tel Aviv and Jerusalem) could very likely lead to a national collapse.

The conclusion? Iran cannot have nuclear weapons.

And for nearly twenty-three years we have seen long drawn-out negotiations between the Western powers and Iran on how to resolve this issue. The West has used its non-military leverage to bring Iran to the table, a set of crushing sanctions that have devastated the Iranian economy over the past two decades.

The Iranians argue in public that their nuclear program is peaceful and that they seek to master nuclear technology so that they can avail of nuclear power. They argue that they have the right to do this as a sovereign nation state.

The West of course doesn’t trust the Iranians on this, but have taken their statements at face value in public to propose a variety of solutions that would allow Iran to benefit from nuclear power whilst restricting its enrichment capabilities. These negotiations ultimately culminated in the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action during the administration of Barack Obama which, it was hoped, would finally bring the long-running dispute to an end.

It did not. Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, and as with many aspects of his first term it seems he was partly driven by animus that it was a signature achievement of his bête noire Barack Obama and the belief that he could drive a better bargain (which as of 2025 he has failed to do). Trump’s Republican Party, increasingly aligned with the Israeli right wing, never accepted the deal and agitated strongly against it.

And as for the Israeli right wing, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to never accept a nuclear armed Iran and for years he sought an opportunity to deal with the issue the only way he believed it could be dealt with, by overwhelming military force. Israel has precedent on this of course, it launched Operation Opera in 1981 which destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor outside Baghdad and may have ensured the Saddam Hussein never achieved his ambition of acquiring nuclear weapons.

Rather than negotiate, Israel has waged a clandestine war against Iran’s nuclear program for years. From infecting the computers controlling the precious centrifuges with a worm that did enormous damage to critical enrichment infrastructure to the assassinations of scientists working on the nuclear program, Israel has done everything within its power to stymie the Iranian regime’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu’s dream of assaulting the nuclear sites directly was blocked by Iranian deterrence however. To reach the Iranian nuclear sites, Israeli jets would have to travel through airspace controlled by Iranian friendly and Israeli hostile regimes in Syria and Iraq. Furthermore, Iran had spent over a decade arming both Hezbollah and Hamas in Lebanon and Gaza with the intent that any assault on Iran’s nuclear sites would lead to both non-state actors unleashing fire and brimstone on Israeli cities in a revenge attack.

And so for nearly a quarter of a century, everything stood precariously balanced on the edge, all the while Iran slowly pushed forward towards nuclear weapon capability, maybe dreaming that like North Korea they could eventually present the world with a fait accompli and dare them to do anything about it.

And then October 7^th happened, and everything changed. Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza in retaliation for the atrocity of that day has dominated news screens for over a year and a half, but the strategic take away of it has been the decimation of Hamas as a military movement, degraded now to an army of untrained guerillas sniping at Israeli forces in the rubble of their homes.

A link in the ligature was snapped.

To save Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis began firing rockets at Israel, declaring that they would stop when Israel stopped its assault on the Palestinian enclave. Instead, the Houthis found themselves under attack by US and Israeli forces and Israel launched a decapitation strike on Hezbollah, wiping out its most effective and senior leadership and destroying a massive chunk of its arsenal.

Another link in the ligature was snapped.

On two occasions in 2024, Iran directly intervened against Israel by firing massive rocket barrages at the state. Both attacks were thwarted thanks to the assistance of Israel’s allies, doing at best minimal damage. The Israeli response in contrast severely degraded Iran’s anti-air defence capabilities, leaving their nuclear sites exposed.

And then at Christmas, the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad collapsed, and Iran’s ally fled into exile in Russia.

The Axis of Resistance was broken, decades of effort down the drain, and for Benjamin Netanyahu the gateway to Natanz was at last open. In spite of Trump’s efforts to talk him down in recent days as Trump insisted that he could still reach a deal with Iran, the die was probably cast the moment Assad fell and all Iran’s other deterrents lay broken around Israel. Having spent nearly two decades railing against the threat, there was probably no way Netanyahu was ever going to let the moment pass him by. In recent days, probably recognising the inevitability of what was coming, the United States warned Iran not to target American forces and began partially evacuating its embassy in Baghdad (an obvious target for retaliation from any Iran aligned militias).

Early this morning, after twenty three years in which it had been consistently raised as a possibility, in which analysts had gamed out the potentially terrible consequences, in which the great powers of the world have striven to do everything in their power to head off the eventuality, Israel launched a full scale attack on the nuclear facilities of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The attack is codenamed Operation Rising Lion.

Based upon reports, it looks like Israel has targeted Iran’s major enrichment facility at Natanz, residential areas of the capital city Tehran, targeting the homes of senior officials and several research and military facilities. Iran has claimed that children are among the casualties in these areas.

The damage has been severe. Israel has assassinated Iran’s most senior military commanders in an echo of what Israel did to Hezbollah late last year, including the head of the Revolutionary Guards and the Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces. Many scientists involved in Iran’s nuclear weapons program were also killed.

Netanyahu has vowed that they will fight Iran for as many days as it takes meaning that he hopes for a relatively quick campaign, but implying these strikes are not the traditional one-off punch-ups and then everyone calms down we have been used to. The fortifications around Iran’s nuclear sites strongly implies Israel intends to hit them again, and again and again in the coming days until something forces them to stop or they are satisfied they have dealt a fatal blow to Iran’s nuclear program.

Iran has vowed revenge, saying that “end of this story will be written by Iran’s hand” but its avenues to do so are limited given the devastation of the Axis of Resistance in the past eighteen months. An initial response of a hundred drones being sent towards Israel has already been, for the most part, intercepted. They may have other cards to play in the coming days and weeks.

And while Trump is probably seething that Netanyahu has defied him, he will certainly help to shield Israel from anything Iran can throw at it. How this war proceeds from here is anyone’s guess.

Because that is where we surely are now after an assault of this magnitude. Something we have all long dreaded.

Iran and Israel are at war.